How to parent more predictably (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.jefftk.com/p/how-to-parent-more-predictably <comment><USER2> There are a few things which helped me get better at parenting:

* Timeouts rarely work. Try to respond with something which makes sense. Like if your kid throws around things, they need to clean up (with your help).

* If things get out of hand, I stay with or hold my kid until the situation gets better and then discuss/explain the current situation and how we will act next time.

* It's always good to figure out how your kid feels in a bad situation. Like: "I guess you're feeling <a>, because of <b>?" Sometimes kids do not understand their own feelings and telling them helps them cope better.

* Try to stay calm, always. Sometimes it's hard or even impossible. But getting loud or angry never helps. If I can keep control of myself I usually can control the situation and respond appropriately.

* Your job as a parent is to provide your kid with all necessities of life and with love. Everything else is extra, like toys, sweets, leisure activities. Sometimes it helps to tune down the extras if necessary.

* Admit your errors and say sorry if appropriate.

There's a youtube channel which I actually enjoyed while my youngest one was a bit smaller. It's a bit strange to look for help on parenting stuff on youtube, but a lot of his advice was actually quite good I tought: [https://www.youtube.com/user/LiveOnPurposeTV/featured](https://www.youtube.com/user/LiveOnPurposeTV/featured)

<comment><USER3> I don't think the two options you present in your first point are mutually exclusive. Cleaning up the mess is not a "consequence", it is simply the expected behavior. Failing to clean up the mess is what results in the timeout. We frequently use "timeout until you clean up the mess". The consequence ends as soon as the appropriate behavior starts.

A timeout can also a good way to allow emotions to cool (on both sides) and facilitate a better discussion. Each of my kids tends to "lose it" in a different direction (anxiety, sadness/crying, anger), and it's definitely important to support them as they work on getting their emotions back under control. This is going to look different for every kid though. My daughter needs space, one of my sons needs physical contact, the other needs a lot of verbal reassurance. It's important to help them find the ways they can work through their "big feelings" in a healthy way.

Your last point is critical. My father had a lot of strengths as a parent, but one thing I _never_ saw him do was apologize (not to me, not to my siblings, not to my mother). It's one thing I have really focused on "doing better" (something my father frequently encouraged me to do)

<comment><USER2> The way you describe a timeout makes sense. There can only be a meaningful interaction among both parties when emotions are under control. I also tell my kid to take a minute off and calm down first if necessary.

There was a german parenting TV show a few years ago where the host repeatedly made children of various parents sit somewhere alone until they cooled off. This is the first thing I thought of when cooldown was mentioned. It's somehow easier to be consistent that way: Yelling, hitting, swearing, whatever. The child will know what will happen next and hopefully avoid it.

But cooldown alone stops making sense, when it is used for everything. I think it's better to respond with a consequential task which makes sense according to the cause. Even though it is harder to find and follow through sometimes.

<comment><USER3> I think there are two major categories of situations where a correction is needed. Times when an excepted behavior is not taking place ("Clean up that mess") and times when an unacceptable behavior has already taken place (Sibling A hit Sibling B).

In the first case, emotions may not be that high to start out with (and my never get that high). The timeout is a "self-inflicted" punishment that lasts until they do what's expected of them. There are certainly times when the "Do a thing!"/"No!" loop has spiraled out of control, and in that case the timeout first serves as a cooldown, then a conversation can take place laying out the expectations more clearly.

In the second case, tempers have generally already flared. There is generally an action that needs to take place in the short term ("Apologize to your brother"), and there generally needs to be some sort of punitive consequence. In that case the timeout a) gives tempers a chance to cool, and b) serves the same self-inflicted punishment as before ("You're going to be in timeout until you apologize to your brother"). The other (major) benefit is that it buys time for me to decide on an appropriate punishment outside the heat of the moment.

> There was a german parenting TV show a few years ago where the host > repeatedly made children of various parents sit somewhere alone until they > cooled off.

I'm not a huge fan of being "alone" as a punishment. For me the concept of "timeout" and "alone" are two separate things. There may indeed be times when being alone is what the kid needs to cool down before they can talk (my daughter is absolutely this way), but I think it's important for that to be their choice (and it's equally important for them know it (can be) an acceptable and healthy choice). For other kids (like both of my boys) being alone is just going to work them up more. I generally spend the first few minutes of a timeout sitting right next to them (or with them on my lap) until they have been able to calm down and we can have a conversation.

It's probably also important to note that we're all just talking about the "ideal" here. I'm sure none of us meet our own ideals as consistently as we'd like...

<comment><USER4> I've always been bothered by the "Apologize to your brother" idea.

In general, it is totally fake, and everybody knows this. I'd rather not encourage dishonesty. Granted, dishonesty may be a useful skill, but I think kids can figure it out without parental encouragement.

<comment><USER3> It establishes the expected behavior. You're absolutely right that it doesn't teach sincerity, but that's not the point. It builds the habit, and it forces acknowledgement that another party was harmed (even if they lack the empathy to care about that yet, empathy starts with awareness).

Sincerity is largely learned by example. It's important for parents to model sincere apologies when they screw up. To each other, to their kids, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I think my parents did right was never telling me in the heat of the moment how I would be punished. I knew how I was supposed to behave, and they let me know when I was not living up to the standard, but if they decided to punish me, I wouldn't find out right away what my punishment would be. The only exception was trivial punishments like being sent to my room or having something taken away for a few hours, or if the behavior problem was ongoing and they had time away from me to talk between themselves and decide what would be appropriate to threaten me with.

This accomplished two things. First, they never had to back down on a punishment, because they were careful to only threaten me with things they could stand behind. That meant I never felt any urge to misbehave to call their bluff. Proving parents wrong is irresistible to kids, so if you threaten a punishment you can't follow through on, you've just given them a reason to do the thing you're told them not to. Even if you punish them in another way, it's worth it just to prove you wouldn't do what you said.

Second, it forced me to actively imagine what an appropriate punishment would be. To get into their heads and imagine how they would punish me, I had to think about why my behavior was wrong from their point of view. Kids spend a lot of time arguing _against_ their parents, in their heads as well as out loud, and I think many kids don't have enough occasion to go through the opposite process of thinking _with_ their parents to try to predict their behavior.

<comment><USER6> The cold, hard truth I came to realise about punishment is that it's inevitable. Even parents who 'don't punish' actually do punish: they withdraw emotionally.

But the corollary of this is that the closer and happier the family is, the lighter the punishments need ever be. For some children even the _idea_ that they're being officially punished is punishment enough.

<comment><USER7> I'm one of those parents that "don't punish". I do tell my child when he makes me angry or sad, and of course it is clear to him that I might not want to, say, play or read to him at that point. I still wouldn't call that punishing him, but rather a consequence of his actions.

<comment><USER8> > I still wouldn't call that punishing him, but rather a consequence of his > actions.

Weird aside, but sometimes when my wife and I have a conflict, I may go for a walk to clear my head, and I'm typically not interested in being intimate for a while after the conflict. She refers to this as "punishment", which seems like an odd way to describe me needing some space for a bit.

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't you class withdrawal of affection as punishment?

In psych terms it's a negative punishment (something was removed to seeks to reduce a behaviour). Your motivation might be different but the felt action is identical.

<comment><USER7> The motivation makes a difference. If my wife think I'm intentionally punishing her she'll react differently than if she thinks that I don't want to be affectionate because I feel hurt or angry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of my best tools with my toddler is "don't react, respond". My first thought is rarely my best thought, and my reactionary tone of voice is not my most loving and supportive. A kid doesn't need your immediate answer to everything. You can tell them, "let me think about that" and literally take the time to consider your options. Almost nothing is an emergency situation requiring your elevated tone of voice or physically rushing towards them.

Another tip is that if you see your kid either doing or about to do something you don't approve of, you can slowly close the physical distance so that you can intervene in a non-reactionary way.

Lastly, when it comes to predictability, I totally agree with the author. But don't be too hard on yourself. You're going to establish all sorts of bad patterns. Just establish the new pattern, suffer through the couple days of reaction to change, and move forward. My toddler is much better at adopting new normals than I am.

A lot of this I learned from being a classroom teacher and also from listening to Janet Lansbury's podcast ([https://www.janetlansbury.com/podcast- audio/](https://www.janetlansbury.com/podcast-audio/)).

<comment><USER11> Is there something fundamentally wrong with rushing towards them & elevating your voice? It's not an emergency per se, but when our toddler stands up & teeters unwittingly towards the edge of our bed, or ventures to stairs unallowed, or almost snares a knife or hot mug on the counter, etc, it seems appropriate. Those circumstances are of course best avoided ahead of time but no one is perfect.

<comment><USER12> When my little boy was a toddler (maybe 1.5?) he was curious about a pot of water I was boiling. I was holding him and he leaned over to put his finger in it. My first reaction was to pull him away and shout, "No". Instead I decided to calmly explain to him that it was hot and he shouldn't touch it. He still wanted to put his finger in it.

Well, it wasn't yet boiling and I was holding him and could pull him away, so I let him gingerly put a finger into the water. He cried, we washed his finger in cold water, and a few minutes later all was well. Since then I've never, ever had to worry about him near anything hot, even as a toddler. And more generally when I tell him something is dangerous he internalizes it well-- doesn't mean he won't refrain from something, though. Maybe the carefulness is more likely a coincidence or his nature, but the lesson about hot things burned into his consciousness.

It's obvious in retrospect, but I guess a parents job isn't to prevent their kid from hurting themselves, it's to make sure that when they hurt themselves only the lesson is lasting. More recently it's become evident to me that not only do they need to hurt themselves to learn, but it's important to make it a positive experience, the pain notwithstanding. For example, now whenever toddler #2 falls down on the pavement my refrain is "good fall!", and I imitate dusting my hands off. I'll keep my distance unless it looks like she needs help getting up or consoling, but try to do it calmly and positively. Now, a couple of months into it, whenever she falls she jumps up, smiles, and brushes her hands, even if she's scraped. I did something like this with her brother but never so deliberately and consistently.

Somewhat relatedly: I think it depends on the kid and the family, but neither of my kids respond well to loud voices, no matter if well meaning or urgent. It was frustrating for me to change my habits because when I was growing up elevated voices weren't negative, just a signal to pay attention. Maybe it's genetic or maybe just how their mother has habituated them, but if I elevate my voice they invariably take it negatively. They seem to pay attention better and react more positively if I modulate my voice. Being conscientious about my voice also causes me to think twice about how I respond, even in imminent situations like you describe. Unless there's a risk of permanent brain injury or mutilation (at home, at least, usually self-evident), I try to tell myself to stop and slow down and consider whether I should just let nature take its course. It's worth the risk. That is, most of the time it's worth the risk to wait a second to consider the situation rather than just reacting, and if you do react it's then easier to do it calmly.

Not preaching, just sharing. It all definitely depends on the parent and the kid and the situation, but I've learned a lot from people sharing their parental experiences and anecdotes on HN, even when I disagreed or didn't find it applicable.

<comment><USER13> One of the phrases I picked up watching younger family members be raised that I've tried to apply, when appropriate, as a parent: "They'll only do it once." Learning the why behind the "no" is an important of life. Obviously not every life lesson where "no" applies can be taught in this manner, but when it can be controlled...as the hot water was...it's an effective tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've read a lot of parenting advice and it all sounds good in theory, but in practice everything goes out the window. I'm in the throws of it now with a 9-month old and a 3-year old. It is hard to think about advice you read in an article when you have not slept and the kids are screaming and having a trantrum. Or you try to do what the article said and then it doesn't work at all and only makes things worse.

I think you just have to wing it and do your best. Just be intuitive and as empathetic as possible with your kids.

<comment><USER15> With three kids (or even two!), any advice from someone with one comes off as at least as grating as advice from people with no kids did when I only had one.

All the time-consuming "just hang out with them and talk to them like humans! Hug them for ten minutes! Make them complex, healthy dishes for every meal! I do it and it all works so well! I mean I also have a night nanny and cleaning service but I won't mention that..." goes out the window when one kid's about to kill themselves with furniture, somehow, you're not sure where another snuck off to but you suspect the worst, the third's making some god-awful noise in the other room that you're pretty sure will end up being expensive one way or another (oh no... did they make that sound or did the dog?) and meanwhile if you take your eyes of this sauce for one second it's gonna burn and it'll be pizza night... again.

Yes it's not constantly like that but it's always _kinda_ like that. I understand it gets better when they're older. And I've heard from multiple people with four or five that the difficulty levels off after three kids. Up to three it's certainly _non-linear_. When for some reason we're down to one it's about as easy as having zero, now. Yeah, I bet whatever crap you read about on the Internet works, one-kidder. F*cking anything would. One's nothing.

<comment><USER16> It looks like you're going through a tough period and lashing out on people who chose to have less than 3 kids.

<comment><USER15> Nah, not tough, totally normal. Newly-multi-childed parents deserve some Real Talk every now and then so they can get over trying to do (and feeling bad about failing miserably at) all the crap they now don't have time/energy/attention for from Internet parenting advice, and get on to counting any day that ends with no more than one bleeding injury per kid and $50 property damage as a _huge win_ , even if it took yelling a couple times and some punishment not accompanied by a bunch of hugging and a long talk about Right and Wrong here and there to achieve such great success. That stuff's fine but at some point you can't be two places at once, and there are more than two places you urgently need to be right this second, so something's gonna get neglected.

It's OK. Internet parenting advice (or any that comes from the latest trendy book) rarely survives contact with an enemy that outnumbers you. That's normal. Be nice and attentive when you can but don't beat yourself up for not taking 15min to calm your 4-year-old down then walk them through Plato's notion of Justice when they're hitting their brother for the 5th time in as many minutes. You have not failed when you have to choose between that stuff and getting the kids out the door to wherever you have to be, or dinner on the table, or clothes washed, or whatever. And when someone else tells you how some system or other they read about on some parenting blog works so great and is so gentle and nice and it's just crazy that anyone would ever yell at their kids for any reason, smile and nod and silently wish them smart, energetic, willful twins next time around.

[EDIT] and it's not the living hell that that read like, now that I look back over that, it's just that discipline problems tend to shoot up the more kids are around and they tend to cluster, and they tend to crop up when you're otherwise busy, for obvious reasons, so when you _need_ to bust out your strategy for dealing with bad behavior it's gotta be _fast_ and take _very little of your time_ or it ain't gonna last long. When things are bad, they're bad. Usually they're fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to spend time and energy collecting thoughts on how I could be a great parent.

Then one day my aunt told me she was mad at her father for being "too logical" when raising her because it gave her unrealistic expectations.

Then I started to question everything... If a parent never misbehaved is a kid going to be thrown for a loop when they meet emotional teachers? Did my own fathers weaknesses force me to develop greater strengths?

<comment><USER18> The whole identical twins separated at birth thing makes me believe environment is the only thing a parent can provide.

Children do not listen to their parents for very long.

A decent school, technology like a laptop, and maybe an awareness to dissuade bad friends. That seems like all you can do.

<comment><USER19> I've thought about this a lot. The evidence seems pretty strong that as long as you are a reasonably decent parent (IE, maybe anything short of child abuse) your kid will probably turn out as their genetics and the large-scale culture predetermine in a lot of important ways: IQ, income, educational achievement. However, good parenting can make the journey more pleasant for everyone involved, even if the destination is roughly the same. If I let my son watch a ton of TV instead of actively playing with him it might not affect his adult IQ much, but I do think it would make both of us worse off and less satisfied in ways that would be hard to quantify. Of course, that may just be how I justify doing what my culture tells me is good parenting even though there's not much data in support of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One of the easiest ways to be predictable is to tell children what is happening and what is about to happen soon—especially if it will cut short a game or a play session.

I have experienced so many tantrums of other people's children when they surprise their children with home time when the child is completely engrossed in playing. Children are constantly making their own plans and may have been expecting their turn with a toy or be only half-way through building something when they are told to pack up and leave. If it was me I'd be furious too.

I like to give a few warnings so that they can get a feel for how long they have left and I tell them to start thinking about packing up, to get to a checkpoint as soon as they can so they can save their game and if they are waiting their turn with something, now would be a good time to have a final swap over.

I can't recall a time when my kids had a tantrum at leaving time.

<comment><USER21> Agreed, My (almost) 3yr old responds really well to this technique. I'll give give her a 10 or 5 min heads up and reminders at each halving of the countdown. When we get to zero she's ready for action. I almost never have issues when I do this. But, if I forget, I'll often get pushback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's a pretty large body of twin study evidence that says as long as you don't abuse your kids, your parenting styles don't matter to their long term personality (or outcomes, when you adjust for parental income)

One such study here: [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0741882070186459...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418820701864599)

<comment><USER23> Even if parenting doesn't matter for long term outcomes very much, it certainly affects how parents and kids feel in the 20ish years that typically stay in the same household.

<comment><USER22> Also true!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We've found timeouts are very effective with our kids. Although one parent is more consistent about applying them than the other. One thing we've learned is that time out with an angry child is not especially effective. So as our kids have gotten older we will have them owe us a time out for when they're more calm and can actually get something from it.

We've also found devices are gold for discipline. Our routine is 20 min before bed on weekdays, 20 min after meals on weekends. Usually we just have to threaten losing screen time, ie if I ask them to pick up theirs shoes 5 times the sixth time will be "or else".

Generally consistency is key, and picking your battles as the author alludes to.

There is one downside to raising children in a consistent, predictable, and logical environment. That is; they're less prepared to deal with chaotic people and situations as adults.

<comment><USER25> They will start getting experience with arbitrary, petty, random and chaotic behavior as soon as you start sending them to public school.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. A thinly veiled insult perhaps?

<comment><USER3> That's not how I read it... Going to school means interacting with dozens/hundreds of other people (many of them peers who are still developing social interaction skills). Encountering those behaviors is inevitable in that setting.

<comment><USER25> That's about what I was getting at. You also get authority figures that are inconsistent and tyrannical, the wonders of bureaucracy, and extreme limitations of personal liberty. You get to learn how to deal with stupid and illogical people, bullies, and all the other elements of the vast canvas of personality types.

It's great training, and not to be discounted. But having a haven of stability in the home is an essential counterbalance.

<comment><USER27> But why do you stress the "public" bit?

<comment><USER25> It's what I know about. Also, public schools have to take everybody, so you are more likely to have to encounter people across the spectrum of abilities.

I've seen a lot of people that went to private schools really not understand just how stupid can be nor how such people think, because their world was chopped off at something like a 105 IQ floor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> We have some family friends that are decent people, but lousy parents.

After about 16 years of observation two of their kids have graduated (one with honors) and the older they get, the more decent they have become, very similar to their parents.

What I learned: Kids will turn out like their parents. And poorly skilled parents can still raise decent and well behaved kids.

Who you are and how you treat people is more important than technical skills to get your kids to behave.

<comment><USER29> Perhaps they're decent parents, and you're a lousy judge of parenting?

<comment><USER28> Sure, that's possible.

One issue they had was their kids stayed up too late, didn't get enough sleep and screamed a lot near the end of the day. They were late to school (in elementary level) because the parents were tired too.

I think this is objectively bad parenting... but I could be wrong.

Edit: since I got one down vote let me add > they scream at their kids regularly (daily, sometimes the normal tone), let them play video games endlessly without supervision, and many other odd things. Kept a dog in a crate permanently in the house where it crapped and screeched at everyone. The list is long... Look at my other comments, I don't want to keep piling things on, but do some pretty outlandish things as parents.

<comment><USER30> sounds like wrong because different

<comment><USER28> Well, I should probably not have said "objectively", but we were comparing against the article titled "how to parent more predictably"... so I felt that was a fair assessment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The author rightfully states that being rich(er) helps in being more predictable. Likewise, to be good at parenting it also helps a lot to have "nice kids". That's why I take a lot of advice with a big grain of salt.

My 4 year old is a really soft, sweet and sensitive boy. Just saying something like "it would be great if you cleaned up that mess of Duplo!" results in him immediately doing it. So is my tip to get kids to clean up "just suggest they do it?" No, because it will probably not work on most other kids who are more stubborn and less sensitive to maintaining a positive atmosphere.

<comment><USER32> What are you doing after he's cleaned up? I'm guessing you're doing something to reinforce his behavior, and that that is way more important than the initial suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you want to be better at parenting, get a dog first, and learn how to deal with dogs. Properly, using modern behavioral techniques. You will find that many rules apply both to dogs and kids (which shouldn't be surprising, really).

Things like consistency (try to set as few rules as possible, but if you do set them, enforce them without exceptions), deciding ahead of time and sticking to it assertively (do not change your decision based on pleading), calmness (dogs do not follow or listen to people who are agitated and nervous), avoiding too much control (do not issue too many commands), enforcing control (when you do issue a command, it needs to be obeyed, and not repeated), and punishment (calm, immediate, understandable, predictable and linked to the transgression) — you can learn all of those while properly raising a dog.

Also, never lie to your kid (or dog) and answer their every question seriously.

<comment><USER34> It also works to practice with coworkers, friends, and really anything with a modicum of intelligence and a limbic system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> A pattern that I see a lot in parks etc is parents wanting to leave and telling the little kids "5 more minutes!" then after 5 minutes "just one more minute!" or whatever. Pro-tip: kids are not aware of what 5 minutes looks like, make it a specific number of activities: "going down the slide 10 times more", you can count together and it looks initially like a large number. Not a magic wand but works way better than the time warnings.

<comment><USER36> Also in general the trick "I will count to three, and when I say 'three' you will have put that down and stand here. One..." is a far more successful method than it has any right to. I count to 10 for getting them dressed.

The trick is to _always_ let them be successful at reaching the goal, slow down as much as needed, say "two and half, two and three quarters......", they should never find out that I have absolutely nothing planned for the case when it finally fails.

<comment><USER37> I just started doing this last week, it has saved us from so many breakdowns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think it's better to be unpredictable.

Once or twice a year I like to throw my kids into a pit-maze, which I've been digging for the past several months, and fill it with various kinds of dangerous creatures and turn on strobe lights.

Do they hate it? Sure the ones who make it out definitely do, but that's life. I'm preparing them for life.

</comment><comment><USER39> Raising twins pushed me way over to the nature side of nature vs nurture. What works well for one child may be entirely counterproductive for another.

That said, one thing this article really gets right is the importance of not letting your emotions control your mouth and making threats/promises that you can't/won't keep. I also think it's very important that when you screw up while parenting (and you will screw up), that you be sure to take responsibility and apologize to your children. I think a lot of parents think apologizing will make them look weak or diminish their authority, when it's really the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER40> No child is the same. Timeouts ended up traumatizing our child. Anyway I came across this and started to experiment some of the principles from here [https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/6855333...](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/685533353/a-playful- way-to-teach-kids-to-control-their-anger)

</comment><comment><USER41> My advice to new parents is to ignore most people's advice & trust their instincts. The best response to the deluge of "you're parenting wrong" articles is to tell the authors of such articles, politely but firmly, to go pound sand.

Sure, read books and articles to learn _strategies_ you can try, tools for your toolbox, but ultimately, "relax–you'll figure it out!" is the best advice. Most parents care immensely about their children & this fact is more likely to lead them to parent well than any article or "tip."

Source: I've been a parent about my entire adult life (since 20), I have 4 kids, I've read a ton of stupid parenting articles, as a young parent everyone felt comfortable giving me parenting advice.

<comment><USER34> Your first paragraph contradicts your second paragraph.

</comment></comment><comment> J-dawg I bookmarked this article ages ago because the advice seems so sensible. This post just reminded me of it.

[https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-talk-to-human- beings/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-talk-to-human-beings/)

</comment><comment><USER42> This book changed how I parent: [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6162649-healing- stori...](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6162649-healing-stories-for- challenging-behaviour)

The ability to modify behavior by singing a couplet from a story I read -- no raising of voices, or wagging of fingers -- was revelatory.

It's from the waldorf educational tradition.

</comment><comment><USER43> My kid is a bit of a behavior problem.

The worst thing about some of this is these days so many of us are stuck leaving our kids with day care/school so much of the time, and plenty of these "professionals", don't get this stuff.

Day care here ran about $2k/month and the education level of the teachers was just not up to par for that amount of money. I always wondered where the money was going, they all had college degrees but got paid 1/2 or less what public teachers do in this area. There was a ton of bragging from management at the day care about how great the academic start was (this chain even brags about higher SAT scores!) and I think it was mostly hogwash. I was always thinking someone was making a lot of money on the day cares as it was not hard to figure out their approximate gross revenue/month. So often the day care was making things worse... take one step forward at home and 2 steps back at day care.

Thankfully my child is in public school now, we have a great school system, and the teachers are a million times better at dealing with this stuff in productive ways.

<comment><USER44> for a while I was on the board of a day care. We were not -for-profit, but charged only a little less than for-profit day care. Some things about cost: Running the building cost more than I thought, and we got free rent. Heat, insurance, repairs, etc, were all more than I expected. Plumbing & HVAC repairs alone were more than I would have thought for the whole building. We had only two teachers with benefits, but it cost about $10k per month _just for their benefits and statutory taxes_. That is, we spent $10k every month on labor before the teachers received dollar one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Advice from Alan Kazdin from Yale has influenced my parenting of my 4 young boys more than any other single source. His recommendations against punishment are based on the fact that research shows they are not effective for long-term behavior change in children. It is challenging to use the methods in heated moments, but even without perfect application, they have been helpful.

Here is an article that introduces the ideas:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/no- spanki...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/no-spanking-no- time-out-no-problems/475440/)

Here is his book, that has full details and many examples:

[https://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Parenting-Toolkit-Step- Step-...](https://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Parenting-Toolkit-Step-Step- ebook/dp/B008LQ1VU8/)

<comment><USER46> Thank you for recommending this. I'm going to try this method with my "less easy" kid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> My single greatest piece of advice:

Institute a safe word with your child. It goes both ways, no exceptions. When the safe word is issued, whatever was safeworded stops.

Typical rules of safe words, but my kid is 15 and we still use the safe word when things are going wayward (jokes, fights, annoyances, repetitions, references). Probably started it when he was 1 or 2.

Second favorite bit of advice:

Routines (brushing teeth, going to bed, leaving the house) should be as close to silent, w/r/t instructions, as possible. Talk to each other, but don't negotiate "whatever's next" or "c'mon" or "hurry up".

<comment><USER41> In our household the word "badingo" means "I recognize that you are doing a joke premised on being annoying or repetitive,* I acknowledge your joke, it is funny, now please stop."

I've never used a "safe word" for anything else but it's an interesting idea.

*for example an impression of a person who gives far too detailed explanations, or singing a repetitive song with no end

<comment><USER47> Ours has become very multi-use, but it's pretty righteously observed.

My girlfriend and I may be in the car with my son, and the conversation may steer into very adult territory, the kind of thing that makes my son uncomfortable, and after a bit of the talking, we'll hear a moderately voiced "baaaadingo..." from the backseat, which we know means he thinks we've gotten too far into adult-land and he's not feeling comfortable.

But sometimes when we lose our tempers, the safe word can be a gift. He's 15, his teenager-ness is kicking in just about now, and we can use the safe word to disrupt a self-esteem spiral. He'll stop whatever rant he's on, and sit down and wait it out. The safe word most often stops a behavior and introduces silence... everyone can use that gift regularly enough.

<comment><USER41> This seems useful. Is there a point at which you think it would be useful to phase out the use of a specialized safe-word & transition to a more widely understood form of signalling discomfort, or using other strategies such leaving the situation or reading book or putting on headphones etc.?

Have you had situations where this "safe-word" is used where you felt the situation wasn't severe enough to require shutting down, and asked your son to try to communicate his needs in plain language?

The safe-word sounds useful but I know that for my kids I would not be comfortable with them "pulling the fire alarm" merely because a discussion was uncomfortable for them, I'd ask them instead to find a way to make their request in plain English. My concern with overuse is the "safe-word" turning into a _substitute_ for expressing one's needs clearly.

Cool system tho! I might try it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I feel like if you don't do this stuff intuitively, you can't really learn it.

My only data point is my SO. No matter how many times I try to coach my SO on these very simple parenting rules, she just doesn't get it. She makes threats she cannot follow through with, she doesn't think of simple "if you do this then we'll do that" tricks, and doesn't use the simple 1-2-3 timeout method.

All that stuff seems very intuitive to me. But I think some people just don't get it and never will.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm glad the author here called out that being predictable via following through on "rules" isn't enough - rules need to comprehensible and reasonable in their own right to be understood. He's also got a good grasp on the importance of properly phrasing things for children to understand. His point here seemed spot on:

> Similarly, adults understand that you don't have authority over everyone > around you, but with kids phrasing like "Mama can read to you when we get > home" isn't as good as "I'll ask Mama if she'll read to you when we get > home." Or, even better, "when we get home you can ask Mama if she'll read to > you.

Reminds me of a piece I read here a while ago [1] about how Mr. Rogers would intentionally phrase things very carefully on his show in order to avoid ambiguity. He also emphasized phrasing things in a way that gave the child some insight into the reasoning and a sense of responsibility - so they could feel good about doing the right thing instead of just learning blind obedience.

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr- rogers...](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers- neighborhood-talking-to-kids/562352/)

</comment><comment><USER50> We've had a lot of success with praising desired behaviors rather than discipline of unwanted behaviors. Also, using 'think throughs' has been an effective teaching tool (ask the child to think through and say out loud what needs to be done etc)

Per: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14391149-calmer- easier-h...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14391149-calmer-easier- happier-parenting)

</comment><comment><USER51> One my most painful realizations as an adult was realizing that my parents were emotionally negligent and that I have long suffered from CPTSD as a result. They treated parenting as if it was just providing food and shelter and failed to realize that good parenting is actually about teaching your kids to be emotionally mature. I struggle with feelings of emptiness, depersonalization, and numbness in ways that make it hard to feel normal most days.

</comment><comment><USER52> Grunching in a way that I hope doesn't come off as santimomious. I grew up with foster kids and have acute awareness of how creatively foster parents can get around "no hitting" rules with medieval stuff like time outs barefoot in the dark in a winter garage. Ultimately feel that "no hitting" is striking at the branches, but not the root.

[https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Dog-Teaching- Training/dp/1...](https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Dog-Teaching- Training/dp/1860542387/) was a radically eye-opening book for me, particularly as it related to parenting. I don't believe that hitting, or yelling, or other forms of intimidation, or time outs, or the concept of punishment at all is either good or ultimately effective. And anecdatally that approach has worked out great for us and our kids.

</comment><comment><USER53> I really like these tips. My wife and I have followed a very similar approach, and I like to think we have two well-behaved, considerate, and appropriately responsible 5-year-olds.

We find timeouts to be quite effective, and we use the clear "you need to do X or it's a timeout" and then clearly counting to three. This is often after a few attempts to ask in a regular tone of voice and/or cajole. In fact I have found the number of timeouts we actually give has decreased dramatically, and just counting does the trick now when we need them to respond quickly.

My wife and I were both classroom teachers in the past, so we've both been able to use some of those tools with our kids. We do of course let them be kids, let them have their occasional freak-out moments, and we couch all of this in a lot of love, affection, and communication.

</comment><comment><USER54> Another thing I havent seen mentioned is rather than punish (by taking away things) for bad behavior, you should be rewarding for good behavior. Meaning every privilege has to be earned.

This is a subtle difference but works well. The default for most people is you get to play electronics. If you are bad we are taking them away. Instead, the default should be you do X, Y and Z, to earn the privilege to play with electronics. This is every single day.

Instead of you didnt clean your room, you dont get to play electronics. It would be, you cleaned your room, you earned some electronics time.

</comment><comment> happy-go-lucky Sometimes I pity myself for I'm currently not able to spend an adequate amount of time with our only child. Until a couple years ago we used to go play in a playground on a daily basis and this helped us properly bond with our child. Even my child's academic performance was better back then. Now that we are less outdoorsy thanks to being too busy to have fun, we have become weary of our monotony. It is my experiential learning: the less time we spend together, the more we lose in terms of our family bonding.

</comment><comment><USER55> You may also try Non-violent Communication, that's the way I would do with my kids.

</comment><comment><USER56> The book 1-2-3 Magic tames even the wildest kids if you are consistent. It feels humane to give kids a few chances to change their trajectory. Highly recommend.

</comment><comment><USER57> I hope my post ends up being helpful! Here are a few others I've written about parenting that might be interesting:

* [https://www.jefftk.com/p/equal-parenting-advice-for-dads](https://www.jefftk.com/p/equal-parenting-advice-for-dads)

* [https://www.jefftk.com/p/parenting-optional-vs-required](https://www.jefftk.com/p/parenting-optional-vs-required)

* [https://www.jefftk.com/p/street-training](https://www.jefftk.com/p/street-training)

</comment><comment><USER58> A good reading on mindful parenting is [0]:

>>> Mahatma Gandhi's son Manilal Gandhi moved to South Africa to carry on the work his father had left behind – fight against injustice and discrimination. One day, Manilal had a daylong meeting in Johannesburg and he asked his son, Arun Gandhi, to drive him there. Arun thought this would be a good opportunity to also get his car serviced. They left for the meeting in the morning. In Arun's words: I dropped my father off for his meeting and got the car to the garage by one. Since it was a long time until five o'clock, I figured I could go to the movies, which I did. That day there was a double feature being shown, and when I got out I checked my watch and realized that it was past five o'clock! I rushed to the corner where my father had said he would be waiting for me, and when I saw him there, standing in the rain, I tried to think of excuses I could make. I rushed up to him and said, 'Father, you must forgive me. It is taking them longer to repair the automobile than I thought it would take, but if you wait here I will go and get the car. It should be ready by now.' My father bowed his head and looked downward. He stood for a long moment and then he said, 'When you were not here at our meeting time I called the garage to see why you were late. They told me that the automobile was ready at three o'clock. Now I have to give some thought as to how I have failed, so as to have a son who would lie to his own father. I will have to think about this, so I am going to walk home and use the time during my walk to meditate on this question.' I followed my elderly father home that rainy, misty night, watching him stagger along the muddy road. I rode behind him with the headlights of the car flashing ahead of his steps. And as I watched him stumbling towards home, I beat on the steering wheel and said over and over, 'I will never lie again! I will never lie again! I will never lie again!' What struck me as particularly interesting in this story was how Manilal didn't shame his son, he didn't start shouting at him or telling him how Arun had failed him as a son. Instead, he seemed to have understood one thing clearly: children do love their parents. They may act or behave otherwise but deep down they love their parents and need their parents' love and presence in their lives. We can never inspire anyone to do anything by creating fear in their minds or by shaming them. We may force a child – or even an adult – to do something and they may do it well temporarily, but to instill in them a lifelong habit or to inspire them, love remains the only potent weapon. And no, by this I don't mean mollycoddling. I simply mean embracing a sense of acceptance.

0: [https://www.amazon.com/Children-Tomorrow-Monks-Mindful- Paren...](https://www.amazon.com/Children-Tomorrow-Monks-Mindful- Parenting/dp/9353029341)

</comment><comment><USER59> This article ignores large body of knowledge about parenting, unapplicable in most cultures and families in the world. I tried it personally. Techniques described serve no good purpose, just irritate everyone and ultimately destroys family from inside

</comment><comment><USER60> Apparently parenting is all about consistency in punishment.

What about reward?</comment>


Ask HN: Hackers- How Would You Make America Great Again? - <AUTHOR> Not a political thread exactly, I am just curious about how the Hacker News community thinks American life can be improved upon. I have no horse in this race other than my own life and that of my family's. <comment><USER2> I had several thoughts recently about rejuvenating the Midwest and other areas affected by globalism and the government's indifference by turning it in a bigger version of Shenzhen. Basically bringing back industry by making sensors, micro-controllers, etc.

No idea how it would work in principle.</comment>


Slur, a decentralized, anonymous, Bitcoin-based marketplace for information - <AUTHOR> http://slur.io/ <comment><USER2> This is really disappointing and almost seems engineered to proliferate Bitcoin's reputation as a technology to service criminals.

I also think that they misunderstand the needs of their potential customers. They are trying to introduce a public, crowd-funded service to a market for covert information without any sense of irony. In broad strokes, a third of the value of a stolen secret is in knowing it; another third is having exclusive access; and the last third is that your competition does not know they've been robbed. When they realize that you have their IP, they will pour money into R&D. Since they are already familiar with their work -- and you are not yet -- they are likely to beat you to market.

For that reason I'm skeptical this venture can compete with existing black markets.

<comment><USER3> fabulist, I kind of agree with you that this tool has a low chance of success, but...

...all I see is a tool that allows secure communication and protects people's privacy. If we want to avoid living in a future where a police state monitors everything people do and say at all times, we have to somehow allow for people to maintain privacy and communicate privately.

Your attitude seems like a really slippery slope: If I write an email to someone and PGP encrypt it, as many people do today, would you similarly say that I'm being "covert" and "dark"? Where do we draw the line?

<comment><USER4> Have you read the linked page? "Trade secrets", "stolen databases", and "military intelligence relevant to real-time conflicts" are listed as examples of types of information they "expect to see on the Slur marketplace". I think "covert" and "dark" can safely be used to describe this service.

<comment><USER3> Shoot, I hate having to admit it, but I didn't see the list you're quoting from at the very end of the site- You are correct that they are explicitly targeting covert/dark applications, and I should have seen that before commenting.

<comment><USER2> I missed it at first, too; I saw comments referencing it, and checked the article again.

I'm all for having secure, private means of communication; it is essential for our liberty and a healthy democracy. Inevitably, these will be used to create black markets. Freedom is expensive, and that is just another cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How are they going to enforce the exclusive sale model?

I can think of three or four ways to defeat even a relatively sophisticated attempt to do so in an automated manner. And if you're going to make money off selling secrets, what could be better than selling the same thing to a dozen purchasers each of whom thinks that they have an exclusive on the deal.

<comment><USER6> They can't enforce it. It's impossible.

<comment><USER2> It would probably be more intelligent for them to give up, and focus on the crowd-funding aspect of their idea.

<comment><USER7> It looks to me like that's what they've done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Judging by their github, they have a _lot_ of work to do.

[https://github.com/u99/slur/](https://github.com/u99/slur/)

</comment><comment><USER9> How would you arbitrate unverifiable data? How about if I auction "I know who hacked Sony" and the "data" is simply a name and address, without (or with fickle) proof? Or "Identities of 5 CIA agents in $region"? In fact, most military secrets.

And - how would you arbitrate misleading data? "0-day Flash Exploit For Windows", "...NT4".

Maybe we're missing the irony.

edit: more ranting (won't dupe) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8795427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8795427)

</comment><comment><USER10> I see comments talking about protecting privacy and fighting the police state. Is it not immediately obvious that the whole point of this service is to facilitate blackmail? I mean, they named the thing "Slur."

 _" Zero day exploits. For the market defined value rather than a price determined by the corporations under the guise of a bounty with the veiled threat of legal action should the researcher choose to sell elsewhere."

"Stolen databases. Corporations will no longer be able to get away with an apology when they fail to secure their customers confidential data. They will have to pay the market value to suppress it."_

This isn't about exposing corrupt secrets for the public good. This is about giving data thieves a way to squeeze more money from their victims (deserving or not) by letting others bid against them. They're not trying to hide it, guys.

<comment><USER11> There will always be data thieves. The real criminals are the lazy developers that make apps without full client side encryption. This would claim to make that obvious.

If you put together an app that professes to send messages that are private to one other user, when in fact they are visible to anyone with access to your servers, you have sold your users down the river just because you are not a competent developer. This is widespread right now, but it doesn't mean it isn't true.

However, as other people have pointed out, this particular idea looks like BS. Even so, I think it will be implemented in some form in a few years. It's time to end the "fingers in the ears, la la la" approach to data security that your post exemplifies.

<comment><USER10> So your argument is that, if Bob scams you into buying an "unpickable" lock and Steve picks it easily and steals all your stuff, only Bob is at fault and Steve is innocent? You seem to think that there can only be one villain in any given situation. I'm perfectly comfortable assigning blame to both of them.

And none of this explains why you think a service that helps Steve get top dollar for your stolen stuff is a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They seem to believe they are more revolutionary and disruptive then perhaps they are.

We already have darknets and assassination markets and... and places to find scandalous celebrity photos and dox. The amount of ego they throw into their copy doesn't inspire a lot of confidence to me.

<comment><USER2> Rob Graham (@ErrataRob) gave a (joking) talk about the "fail-peen"; it is the measurement of how susceptible an organization is to compromise, and is calculated by taking the inverse of their epeen ("the ego of your online persona", for the initiated).

Edited to add:

The talk is linked below.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnqyxjtm9RA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnqyxjtm9RA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Starting a project like this in C seems like a dangerous proposition. Anonymity would be essential for all parties in the operation, and starting a project in a memory unsafe language doesn't seem like the strongest foundation to build on. It sounds like all of the people involved are experienced, but it still seems like unnecessary risk. Especially as I don't see which part of this would need to be so performant that C is the only option.

However the people behind this have been thinking about it far more than I have so I'm sure they have their reasons for doing it in C.

<comment><USER14> _It sounds like all of the people involved are experienced_

It says nothing about the people involved or their experience. It claims they are "9 cryptographers" and says nothing more. They also appear to be trying to raise money for this:

[http://coinmesh.io/](http://coinmesh.io/)

I agree that using C is a really dumb idea for anything security sensitive.

 _However the people behind this have been thinking about it far more than I have_

I see no evidence of this either.

In fact all I see is an attempt to grab money from people for a product that does not exist, has no prototype and quite possibly never will exist.

As to their identities, I suspect it's the same people (Amir Taaki and friends) who are doing Dark Wallet, given that they're the only people who use libbitcoin as far as I know, they explicitly recommend Dark Wallet although it has almost no users, and both sites very much match their writing style and general way of thinking. It's exactly the sort of thing that they'd think was a good idea.

<comment><USER15> _I agree that using C is a really dumb idea for anything security sensitive._

It's rather curious the website says it's written in C against the libbitcoin library, as libbitcoin is a C++ library that doesn't even export C headers.

 _As to their identities, I suspect it 's the same people (Amir Taaki and friends) who are doing Dark Wallet._

I rather doubt that as I haven't heard anything about Slur from that group - as Dark Wallet Chief Scientist they pretty much always run new ideas past me. Secondly they already have a better protocol for paying for information that that I and Amir Taaki developed: [https://github.com/unsystem/paypub](https://github.com/unsystem/paypub) PayPub uses a non-interactive revealing stage to avoid the need for the trusted escrow agents that Slur claims to use.

re: Dark Wallet, keep in mind it's still officially an alpha undergoing testing prior to release, but its CoinJoin mixer gets regular usage, mixing what seems to be in the region of a few thousand dollars worth of bitcoins every day on average. It is the only CoinJoin implementation I know of with any usage, other than the known to be badly broken blockchain.info one that doesn't provide any privacy. Recommending people use it to donate anonymously is quite reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not sure how the exclusive sale model would work with information. Some problems I see are:

1\. You can't prove a negative. The seller cannot prove that there's not a copy of the same information elsewhere.

2\. If you prevent the same data from being sold again, the exclusive owner is also prevented from selling. What if that person wants to sell bits and pieces of the information as an arbitrage play?

3\. Doesn't this obligate the police to bid for any child pornography whatever the cost?

</comment><comment><USER17> Also: Bitmarkets [http://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/](http://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/)

It uses Bitmessage and two party escrow Bitcoin transactions.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if the hardening of cyberspace requires concepts like this? In the absense of sensational threats pervasive vulnerabilities in areas like usb, wireless routers, HDD/SSD microcontrollers, etc. may remain unresolved. It would be nice if some of the same regulatory effort that goes into food and drug safety were apllied to commercial information security.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is slur really a good name for this type of thing? I generally want my information to be clearly spoken, not slurred speech.

<comment><USER20> There are a few different definitions for that word, so I presume they're going for the "to harm someone's reputation by criticizing them" definition, rather than "to pronounce the sounds of a word in a way that is wrong or not clear"

<comment><USER21> That was also my impression. One of my first thoughts was _" They may as well have just called it Libel"_.

Personally, I think it is a pretty stupid name given either interpretation. Slur does not denote reliability of information.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. Whichever meaning it invokes, it's not a good name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a good place to reference cypherpunk co-founder Tim May's email from 1992: [http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto- anarchy.html](http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html)

Took the world long enough to catch up.

<comment><USER23> It's a bit easier to imagine than create.

<comment><USER24> In a product or marketing sense?

Sounds like the product side has been figured out... the essay is pretty thorough.

<comment><USER9> Far from it; it is full of holes.

Various issues: C used (huge flag), little progress yet, arbitration can't help in subjective/unverifiable/misleading data situations, anynomity will drag in the trash-sellers by the dozens, entirely unsourced data -even when true- is not as useful as sourced stuff (which you'd call "actionable"), de- duping information is impossible, what's the arbiters' motivation to be honest and not attempt to contact either side for bribes (or vote against "truth" for lolz), etc.

But mostly: Just think of the Signal/Noise ratio. Everyone will be trying to abuse this.

Even the dumbest, shotgun, numbers-game approach would have returns: Keep listing seemingly interesting stuff that is actually misleading/incomplete/bad/resold/... and eventually some of your transactions will not be reverted by arbitration.

And this is anonymous crowd-funding, you say?

<comment><USER25> Yup, and does Slur take a fee from each transaction.. ?

<comment><USER2> Not according to their website, no. If they're looking to turn a profit, its probably by acting as sellers.

<comment><USER9> > If they're looking to turn a profit, its probably by ...

...anonymously crowdfunding this half-thought idea with bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> With so much skepticism in this thread I am inclined to bet on their success :) I am also very skeptical...but ideas like this rarely get any love until it's actively disrupting.

For what it's worth, the potential for the internet to even out the knowledge gap in the business world has barely grazed the surface of where it's headed.

I am not talking about getting cokes recipe but knowing the cost basis of vendors so they can't rip you off. Every industry will eventually have a winner that decided to be completely upfront and transparent accept smaller but healthy margins and eliminate the fear consumers have of looking foolish by getting a worse deal than their brother in law.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish this was "Slur, a decentralized, anonymous repository for information".

Incentivising leakers to leak to agents with the most power and wealth does not make much sense.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wish they hadn't used illegal example use cases (stealing trade secrets, etc). I would have donated :-/

<comment><USER29> What Snowden did was illegal, too. Illegal != immoral. Lawmakers do not have legitimate moral authority.

<comment><USER28> Completely agreed, hence wanting to donate. There are a lot of cool uses for what's essentially a kickstarter for digital goods... however by explicitly saying the illegal possibilities are a goal, all their funders are (I think / not a lawyer) committing a crime. It's illegal in most countries to knowingly help people break the law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Woa, when I visited the link Chrome downloaded a file called FQwWHM735zm and then prompted me "this site is trying to download multiple files". ???

</comment><comment><USER30> It seems completely wrong that arbitration requires revealing the content of the secret.

<comment><USER2> Well, the ones who purchased the secrets are the ones who can request arbitration; if they do, presumably the information is false and worthless, or they are attempting to cheat the system to have their cake and eat it too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How will anyone verify that the information being sold is valid?

</comment><comment><USER32> So there is an incentive for volunteers to decline the content?

</comment><comment><USER33> Downvote. This is a waste of energy/time that could be put to making the world a better place than tearing it down. I dont understand how people with technical talent want to do something so negative with their limited time on earth.

<comment><USER34> I'm not endorsing this project but I take exception with your response. This type of project belongs on Hacker News and if we are going to take the time to respond it might as well provide more feedback than telling someone they are wasting their limited time on earth.

Buyer/seller privacy would be a fantastic development but blackmailing people is definitely in scumbag territory. I would like to see this project change its name, messaging, and even reevaluate its motives. That said, I don't see anything wrong with the core principle which is a free market with privacy. Which shouldn't be interpreted as "go break the law!".

We need more people developing systems that emphasize privacy. Lets encourage those who are doing so by explaining what aspects we like/dislike.

<comment><USER33> So basically you're arguing it has merit by containing cryptography, but let's not forget that it was designed specifically for illicit use to VIOLATE people's privacy. And did you even read their bit about how this is geared towards PSYCHOPATHS?! That's their own word choice! I feel like it's hard to reason with anyone who is gearing their product towards the psychopath market!

However for arguments sake, let's strip away the reality of what they're encouraging and find merits in non-illicit contexts.

What can be productively sold in this way? Source code licensing, music and movies come to mind, but do they offer over iTunes or Shopify? I can only find cons.

Let's look at the core principals that they're advertising and see how they apply:

      "Sellers encrypt, upload and then list their data on the digital market with the ease a user might list an item on eBay. They do so with full anonymity and there are no restrictions on the content of the data."

So they let you upload to them, but most legitimate entities don't have storage costs as something that prevents them from entering the market. In fact they might be concerned about losing the control, not just in terms of proprietary nature but also being able to fine control the streaming quality, bandwidth, availability guarantees, etc.

Legitimate sales interests also rarely need to be anonymous. Having their own marketplace (iTunes store, etc) also let's them restrict the privacy in the way that best favors them. The exceptions -- journalists or people under repressive regimes -- could benefit from such a marketplace if it weren't for the fact that they can't prevent the enemy from buying the information (they're anonymous, too), let alone sell it to many news outfits or many rebels over time (data can only be sold once).

       "Exclusive bidders attempt to purchase the data for their own use and / or prevent other parties from acquiring a copy. Should an exclusive bidder win the auction they alone will receive the decryption keys. The same data cannot be auctioned a second time on the Slur marketplace."

Media companies and others that sell goods want to sell it in large numbers. This goal runs counter to exclusive bidders. Movies & music are out unless each copy has DRM watermarking which changes the binary enough, but that kind of stuff should probably be integrated into the market somehow (no small feat and runs counter to many "free software purist" ideals).

       "Crowd bidders pool their funds into a single bid. Should they win the auction the network will release the decryption keys to all users on the Slur marketplace and the information will therefore become public."

I'm not even sure I fully understand this -- is this then a kickstarter for information? I thought the marketplace was about keeping things private? What ends up in public? If anything they should better explain what stays private and what ever goes into the public better.

       "Arbitrators are randomly selected users who agree to weigh in on a dispute should the winner of an auction claim that the decrypted contents do not match the sellers description."

Or you could just phone visa and say hey can you remove this fraudulent charge please? Again good for journalists but what about everyday?

       "Public key cryptography ensures the data being sold can only be decrypted by the winner of the auction."

As does SSL and DRM watermarking.

\-----

Look, there might be some legitimate amazing use that I'm ignorant towards, but it has to fight a lot of restrictions with this premise. It seems really geared towards illicit use in both design and message. I also can't get behind advocating for psychopaths. YES THOSE WITHOUT CAPACITY FOR EMPATHY LETS PICK THEM.</comment></comment></comment>


Dear Mozilla, - <AUTHOR> http://helloform.com/blog/2010/05/dear-mozilla/

<comment><USER2> I also remember Pheonix. Where do people get the idea that it was fast and lightweight? All they did at first was stop showing the rest of the Mozilla suite, it was all still there in the code and the download.

People forget the userbase was mostly weirdos with strange ideas about an open internet in those days. I'm fairly certain anyone who was focused on speed would have been using IE or Opera. Having said that Firefox has been shrinking and speeding up ever since as success gave them the time to focus on those issues after fixing the basics like getting your bank website and other top100 websites to actually work.

They should have some early versions available to download and use just to shock the people who say stuff like this back to reality.

<comment><USER3> They do! <http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/phoenix/releases/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Firstly, every single screenshot that users have sent me over the past couple of months has been adorned with a persona. _You_ don't like it, but a lot of end users -- where Firefox needs to make inroads do.

As far as speed, well that's just more bullshit. Firefox has never been faster or lighter than it is now. The 3.7 beta includes plug-in isolation which is one of the critical missing features right now. Good on them.

Firefox will do better focusing on end consumers (a better bookmark manager, improvements to the awesome bar, and sadly support for h.264 because it isn't going away), because nerds with nerd rage will always look for some reason to pimp up their own imagined importance by telling you why they lost you.

And BTW - I spend half my day in Chrome, half in Firefox. Many of the recent changes to FF have been great.</comment>


Richard Stallman is the hero the internet needs - <AUTHOR> http://liminality.xyz/richard-stallman-is-the-hero-the-internet-needs/ <comment><USER2> I've always argued that RMS is an excellent counter-balancing influence. While the line for acceptable behavior keeps being pushed by corporate and state interests away from privacy, away from user and developer freedom, away from the notion that there are conversations that should be free of marketing, he holds the other end down, making the center fall somewhat closer to recognition of human dignity in digital matters.

That said, we need new voices and more voices, on that end of the spectrum. RMS has never been the ideal spokesperson for a movement, though his passion is beyond question, and his technical achievements impressive. The world of computing RMS represents is old-fashioned to the current generation. I fall in between the old generation and this new generation that has never known a time without the Internet dominating everything, and I can see where the language of RMS can seem to miss the point to a lot of younger folks. While he has always been prescient on these fronts, and I think he understands the world we live in better than most, I don't think he can be the voice of the current generation of hackers, the way he was the voice of prior generations.

The GNU project as a whole has the feel of a relic, and I worry every time I go to gnu.org and see the state of it. A few years ago, there were GNU projects for all sorts of modern things; there was Savannah to address the problems inherent in SourceForge (again, prescient...SF.net turned evil just as RMS assumed they would). But, GNU has nothing for github (there are Open Source github alternatives, but GNU is nowhere in the story).

Anyway, I don't know what needs to happen, but I know a few things: GNU is so much less relevant than when I started using Linux 20+ years ago. RMS speaks to an older generation of hackers; even though he _should_ be heeded by the young, I doubt he is. And, I can't think of any other voices for software freedom that are as consistent or as effective as RMS and GNU was 20 years ago.

<comment><USER3> I think part of the problem, at least that I've found, is how do you properly articulate to and galvanize a young crown on the concept of relinquishing convenience? To adopt Stallmanism is to sacrifice conveniences like the iPhone, and kids/teens/young adults are flocking to Apple/Google.

How can you get a kid to say no to an iPhone, when what you're asking him to do is extrapolate a vague and possibly non-existent threat of privacy loss? It's incredibly difficult and honestly without some real-world event to bring it home for these children I fear it can't really be done. Without an event, you'd be reliant on a cultural tidal shift -- it would have to be "cool" to be anti-Apple, or anti-tracking devices. It would have be cooler for kids to own burners than smartphones because they don't track you.

There will always be a subset of people who truly understand what Stallman is saying and will probably adopt his behaviors. But to actually appeal to younger audiences and disseminate that message effectively to a mass amount of them seems to be too difficult.

<comment><USER4> Forget about smartphones for a moment; with minimal exceptions, _he doesn 't use the web interactively_ ([https://stallman.org/stallman- computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)). That very much makes him a "relic", and detached from so much knowledge, the _Zeitgeist_ of the times.

Good luck getting people to adopt to this behavior, when we are so massively leveraged by what we can look up on the web. It works to an extent for him because of where he's been situated since 1970, but try telling a kid who's not in The Athens of America (the Boston area) that he should cut himself off from most of the world's useful, and cheaply obtained info, and you're not likely to get many sales.

<comment> vezzy-fnord I don't follow. How does supporting RMS' ideals imply you have to adopt his computing habits to the fullest? I don't recall him ever making such a claim. His is mostly to avoid profiling and non-free JavaScript, but not something he insists everyone advocating free software to do.

<comment><USER4> One point is that his take on the "technological vastness of the future" we now live in has become so circumscribed that his advice WRT to is is getting less and less relevant.

At another level it's making him more and more ignorant, since the price for him to do the research necessary to chart wise paths in things like FSF/GNU governance is so high.

To draw back from the weeds, how can he be "The Hero the Internet Needs" when he is so disconnected from it? Per the essay, his argument has no nuance, it is to not be a part of this thing which, at least to my paranoid mindset, is indeed just as dangerous as portrayed, but which offers vast benefits for being (a careful) part of. Especially for the vast majority of us who, aren't, you know, (any more) a part of the MIT community or the like.

ADDED: Maybe to draw back even further, he's not _wise_ ; that doesn't disqualify him from being _A_ Hero of the Internet, but it's a significant thing.

<comment> vezzy-fnord I still don't follow. Most noteworthy computer scientists, programmers and hackers have workflows that are totally heterodox or outside the norm. That doesn't make them any less authoritative or informed.

He definitely is informed on the subject, too. You can tell from his constant political notes and regularly updated boycotts or calls to action. He's active enough that he understands much of the web's giants from third-party sources or observation without having to directly use any services himself. Or are you suggesting that one cannot understand and criticize Facebook or Twitter without being a regular user? What a puerile and ludicrous assertion.

He's not disconnected from the Internet, nor the Web. He merely limits his exposure to it. Again, does one need to be intimately involved in their social media profiles to have the necessary prerequisites to speak against it?

I further do not understand how heterodox computing habits make the free software message any less relevant. What is so grand about the web that such a conclusion should be derived? SaaS? Non-free JavaScript? He voices out against those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord The polarization with regard to how Stallman should be interpreted is, I believe, one of the preliminary illustrations of the rift between the entrepreneurial hacker and MIT-style hacker subcultures, modulo OSI diehards such as Eric S. Raymond.

<comment><USER5> There was a funny discussion on an MIT mailing list this summer when an (apparently) tone-deaf email was sent out by MIT Professional Education entitled "4 Ways You May Be Enabling Hackers"... which warned about the dangers of cybersecurity-style hackers.

RMS's response was:

> These MIT professors ought to know better than to smear us hackers by using > the word "hacker" as synonymous with "security breaker".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article trivializes Stallman by labeling him an extremist. The author seems to say, hey, Stallman may have a point but is still a bit too weird to emulate. Hey, if RMS is right, then most of us are severely ethically compromised when it comes to our computing decisions. If he's wrong in part (maybe it's OK to enrich and empower Google / the Government through our choice of systems?) then why is he wrong, and what does that mean for computer users and hackers?

</comment><comment><USER7> He's an ideologue, not a hero. Heroism implies courage and noble qualities.

It doesn't detract from his authority on the subject, not in the least, but is he a hero? I don't think so.

He would likely scoff at being called a hero too.

In any event, the vast majority of people will know no privacy other than from each-other's affairs. Frankly I think the advent of cheap home delivery will push the privacy issue higher into the general consciousness, and people will be alarmed that _all_ of their purchases are now tracked and indexed.

The gap between online and offline purchasing will disappear over the next 18-36 months, and those on the forefront of this will be in a significant position of power. The synthesis of Big Data(TM) between related firms will reach new heights, and _that_ will actually scare people.

<comment><USER8> I have always considered his work on Lisp machines back in the early eighties heroic. When Symbolics stopped sharing their developments, he endeavoured to match them feature for feature, single-handedly, and give away the reimplementation for free. To quote Steven Levy, "RMS had single-handedly attempted to match the work of over a dozen world-class hackers [1], and managed to keep doing it during most of 1982 and almost all of 1983". He saw what Symbolics created, and then reimplemented it and gave it away.

Greenblatt noted that he was out-hacking the whole bunch of them. Gosper called it incredible.

When Stallman finally couldn't keep up, he set a new goal that he hoped would solve the problem permanently. GNU.

There is, of course, the other side of the story, although I find the dismissal of the complexity of the features RMS was matching a little disingenuous - how complex they were seems irrelevant compared to the fact that he was doing it alone and Symbolics was doing it with a bunch of world- class hackers: [https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb....](https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/rebuttal- to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi/)

[1] Some people on HN define "hacker" as "person who can code". The definition in use here is older.

<comment><USER4> The "dismissal", as you call it, is hardly unfair (note, I was an eyewitness to all this, the players were largely in my social circle and I worked for Lisp Machines Inc during that period, heck, we both gave up on Lisp Machines in general at the same time). As DLW relates, RMS didn't do the designs of the new features, he copied some of them. In part I believe this is because he's much more an improver than an innovator when it comes to code and systems. This can have massive qualitative results, like after he took over ITS EMACS, but it deprives him of the cachet of "inventor", for what that's worth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Damn I was not aware of that toe thing.. Still, the man is a necessary figure in my mind, he's our "Dark Knight"

<comment><USER10> A more apt reference would probably be Rorschach from Watchmen. At least this sort of stuff should deter Hollywood from any plan of a RMS biopic, so all in all it may be good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean they are out to get you. I wouldn't use the word _hero_ , but he did found the Free Software stuff while being intermittently homeless. He didn't sleep on the street. He slept in a hacker space where he worked. He finally got to exercise his right to vote when an article in a national publication validated that he was homeless and sleeping at his job. This convinced the Registrar's office to issue him his voter registration card.

So he certainly made significant sacrifices for what he believed in. I would not call him a _hero_ because I think that cheapens the word. We typically apply that word to people who put themselves in harm's way for the greater good and my father, my ex, my ex's father and grandfather all served in the military. So I would not personally write a piece describing him with that term

But he did make personal sacrifices for a cause he believed in and to which he devoted himself while being crapped on and disrespected and managed to make a real difference in the world in spite of how much hostility he was met with. Props to him.

<comment><USER4> _but he did found the Free Software stuff while being intermittently homeless._

Do you mean the FSF, or the preceding GNU project? Because we were roommates when he founded the latter, and he most assuredly wan't homeless then. His willingness to be "homeless" later might in part be an artifact of a couple of kids playing with matches and kerosene burning that building down (in a not so good part of Cambridge, MA) and his losing his worldly possessions. Not that he was, to my observation, very materialistic.

As for " _being crapped on and disrespected_ ", well, if you've spent enough time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a difficult person, and is proud of ignoring a number of social norms, including ones that tend to keep a person and their friends alive.

But a lot of it after the GNU/FSF started was due to his extreme abrasiveness towards many people who didn't entirely buy into his mission. We were, for example, called "Software Hoarders" (this, while working for for Unipress, the legal licensee of the version of Emacs he stole to start Gnu Emacs, and we ran on a "gated open source" model, if the licencor of a piece of software agreed, you got a copy of the source, you just couldn't distribute it, but you could share patches with other customers). His regular imputation of ill will when there is none (well, to start with), his gross distortions of the historical record (especially as seen in Levy's _Hackers_ , but also see GNU/Linux) ... they lose him a lot of support he might otherwise get.

<comment><USER11> _Do you mean the FSF, or the preceding GNU project?_

I read his biography, but I don't follow his work or life very closely. So I used a vague, hand-wavy term because I have a vague, hand-wavy understanding of it all. Therefore, I cannot clarify.

 _As for "being crapped on and disrespected", well, if you've spent enough time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a difficult person_

Yeah, I get called "difficult" all the time. I have a life threatening, incurable medical condition. I am pretty laid back, inclined to _go along, to get along_ , and a conflict avoider. But, unfortunately, in order to be socially acceptable, I would need to politely die a slow gruesome death. Failing to go along with that plan for me has caused me shitloads of social problems.

Thus, I am inclined to be sympathetic to rms. Many of his predictions have come true. There is no telling how much more problematic things would be had he not stuck to his guns.

"Difficult" sometimes just means you aren't going along with social norms. If you firmly believe those social norms to be a very serious problem, it is foolish to go along with them. In my experience, no matter how politely you decline to go along with them, and no matter how compelling your reasons for politely declining, simply declining will get you a fuck ton of backwash.

<comment><USER4> "... difficult" was my trying to be minimally polite, I'm quite sure from even our short interactions over the last few days that there's at least an order of magnitude difference. E.g. his baseline does not include "pretty laid back, inclined to _go along, to get along_ ".

More like "Do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like, without regards for consequences, including lethal harm to bystanders." The latter lost him more than a few friends/acquaintances.

Which biography would you be referring to?

<comment><USER11> I don't recall which biography off the top of my head. I kind of am under the weather this weekend, so the brain is not in gear.

Sorry, I don't mean to dismiss your observation that he is difficult. But I see it as more complicated than "he is just difficult."

My oldest son is genuinely difficult, but I get along well with him. One of the reasons I get along well with him is that I recognize that his IQ is higher than mine, so unless I have a specific objection, I have a tendency to go along with what he wants because it tends to get better results, even though my default personality is risk averse and his default personality is risk seeking, so he really makes me crazy at times. I have long experience with dealing with difficult people and doing so in a manner that makes them easier to deal with rather than making them more intractable. Most of the time, difficult people are dealt with in a manner that causes them to dig in their heels.

So while I don't doubt that Stallman can be genuinely difficult, I also don't doubt that the degree to which he has been given crap while being repeatedly proven correct most likely only makes his bad habits intractable when they didn't necessarily have to become so. My son gets real respect from me on things where he is more knowledgeable than I am and he gives me real respect and defers to me on subjects where my knowledge is superior. If I just crapped on him all the time, there would not be a two way street of respect.

It gets really difficult to put a stop to a negative social dynamic once it gets going. At this point, it is probably impossible to break rms of his bad habits because, from his perspective, it probably never seems to matter if he is right, if he is polite, etc. It does bad things to someone's personality to be consistently right and get no respect because people do not like what you are saying. I have had a taste of that, so I have sympathy for his side.

I'm sorry that probably makes no sense to you.

<comment><USER4> Part of the problem is that RMS is an all or nothing proposition. Look at some of the major things he rails at, like closed source and DRM. He's got _lots_ of company (and it's near universal when it comes to DRM), but if you don't buy into his "copyleft is more important than software quality or uptake in the real world" approach, you're not just wrong, you're evil. GCC, one of the two biggest crown jewels of the GNU project, is in dire straits and being replaced by the non-copyleft LLVM, not so much because of the different licenses, but because of his totally inflexible ideological stewardship that is not allowing GCC to do some things that are now expected of compilers but that would make it easier for Software Horders to use GCC in ways anathema to him. (As a steward of software development projects, he's really, _really_ , REALLY bad, large parts of which are due to those "bad habits" discussed below.)

Your eldest son may be a risk taker, but does that go so far as (truly futilely) hitting on a gangster's moll while eating with a group of innocents who didn't sign up for that level of danger when they went for a normally routine run to the favorite late night Cantonese restaurant?

As for his "intractable" "bad habits", they were set in stone long before GNU/FSF, and as for respect ... hmmm, I don't know, he's weird about that. But not very flexible (I'm not the best person judge all that, seeing as how you grant me a degree of respect or else, and he did that).

<comment><USER11> Stallman sounds really socially clueless. My son doesn't hit on gangster's molls, in part because he identifies as asexual so he doesn't hit on anyone. He was born really socially deficient and still gets reactions like people would like to strip search him for using his debit card to pay for pizza in the presence of his mother.

My son probably qualifies as ASD, though he has no formal diagnosis.

I am sure I wouldn't want to be within 30 feet of Stallman. I did not watch the video of him eating something off his foot, but I have a compromised immune system. For me, cleanliness is extremely important and I will end relationships over people being unable to abide by my (necessary) standards of cleanliness.

There is probably little point in me trying to convince you of my view of how social dynamics work. Perhaps we should leave this for now.

:-)

<comment><USER4> Heh. I have no trouble with your view of social dynamics, I just don't see its relevance WRT to RMS, and that's probably why you think you're not getting that part of your message across.

You can safely assume it's accepted and that I'd be happy to, e.g., share a meal with you at a restaurant with high levels of cleanliness (assuming they even exist, or do you e.g. depend on cuisines where they do a good enough job of killing the food dead?).

<comment><USER11> Oh, well, I see it as relevant because I was briefly Director of Community Life for The TAG Project while homeschooling my profoundly gifted sons. I have no official recognition anywhere of my expertise in the social and emotional challenges of gifted individuals, but I have reason to suspect that I understand the unfortunate interplay between group dynamics and the problems of highly gifted individuals far better than average. So, to me, Stallman's difficult personality traits are well established as a side effect of being genuinely smarter than most people around you and routinely crapped on because of it. Plus, traits like OCD, ASD, and ADHD are so commonly associated with high IQ that some people refer to them as "co-morbidities" for lack of a better term.

I think the social problems typical of high IQ can be significantly ameliorated, but my private parenting blog only has two subscribers and life has gotten in the way of me updating it this past month. So my views are unlikely to start changing things anytime soon, if ever.

Best.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I see what you're saying, and, yeah, there are most assuredly pathologies that crop up the "profoundly gifted".

And, yeah, I have no idea what things were socially for him before he attended Harvard, and that can be an ... unusual place for the really intelligent, very possibly one reason he gravitated to MIT, although MIT being one of the world's top 4 CS schools, and the world's #1 engineering school, and Harvard being ... not so good in those two areas is almost certainly a bigger part. I only know of RMS as of when he showed up to MIT ... and there, he was an outlier amongst a whole bunch of outliers. But no apparent co-morbidities (is high intelligence a morbidity? I sometimes wonder :-) besides perhaps ASD, which really wasn't a "thing" back then and which I have essentially no knowledge of.

But certainly his fairly fixed by then personality is consistent with your hypothesis. He certainly fits into the Sigma category in this fascinating socio-sexual hierarchy essay: [http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual- hiera...](http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual- hierarchy.html) and you don't get there without ... well, as the essay mentions at the end, " _Sigmas usually acquired their outsider status the hard way; one seldom becomes immune to the social hierarchy by virtue of mass popularity in one 's childhood._"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra We prove Stallman was right time after time. Which is almost as humiliating as proving Kafka was right. That we do too.

</comment><comment><USER12> Stallman has been a bit hard on me in one interaction but I think that is just the way he is if you don't totally match his views.

I very much respect him and I think he has done enormous service with the FSF and arguing for privacy. I also like using the cloud and think a lot about this: secure and private personal and small group clouds. Not too difficult to set up for storage, email, web apps - but conveniences like Google Now are an imposibility unless a very large developer community contributed.

</comment><comment><USER13> At risk of down votes I prefer my heroes to be a bit more sanitary :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ)

<comment><USER14> Why the fuck is this relevant to what he is saying? Why is it trotted out every single time his name is mentioned on HN?

<comment><USER13> Hitler liked dogs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Richard Stallman is paranoid.

I don't know in what world he lives, but it's not real. Like most people here, he values privacy way too much and doesn't seem to realize that we need as much information as possible about everything (including people) to make educated decisions as a society.

He's socially inept, and in no way a hero.

<comment><USER16> And yet a remarkable number of his predictions have come true, in particular about abuses.

<comment><USER15> None of his predictions are surprising or unexpected. I mean, it's clear to all of us that no data is truly safe.

What I meant by paranoid is that he refuses for the world to have access to information about himself for who knows what reasons.

In retrospect, I should have used "insane" or "selfish".

<comment><USER16> So your opinion is that the sane choice is to give up?

<comment><USER15> Not give up.

Give it away.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>