Nate Silver Went Against the Grain for Some at The Times - <AUTHOR> http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/nate-silver-went-against-the-grain-for-some-at-the-times/

<comment><USER2> I feel like traditional pundits got pissed off because he kept wrecking their narratives. And he upset them further by turning political prognostication into something understandable by common readers -- instead of something only pointy-hatted political wizards could divine with the right amount of eye-of- newt and other secret ingredients.

Anyway: The New York Times should've worked harder to keep him. They should fire Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd and put those resources into the kind of analysis Nate Silver espoused. Y'know, the "actual journalism" kind.

<comment><USER3> >And he upset them further by turning political prognostication into something understandable by common readers -- instead of something only pointy-hatted political wizards could divine with the right amount of eye-of-newt and other secret ingredients.

How did he do that?

If anything, I would argue the opposite, because his model is proprietary and his explanations (presumably deliberately) vague. 538 is awash with numbers but the algorithms used to generate them are the very definition of "eye-of- newt and other secret ingredients".

<comment><USER4> He effectively gave us the equation and kept secret most of the coefficients (though he explained how to choose many of those coefficients). That wouldn't be acceptable for academic purposes, but it seems quite reasonable for journalistic purposes (and is certainly more than any typical political "analyst" provides). He also couldn't give out all the raw data that went into the analyses, because much of it was stuff he had to pay for. Getting past those paywalls and assembling a comprehensive database of polling information is almost certainly the bulk of the work necessary for reproducing his results.

<comment><USER5> If only the FICO score algorithm was available somewhere...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was skeptical when Nate Silver first got picked up by the NY Times; I was an avid follower of his site when it was independent (during campaign years).

But, the Times really did a great job of supporting his work. The infographics and visualizations and interactive graphs that they produced -- typically with D3.js, which was cool to see -- were really second-to-none. (Who can forget [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/02/us/politics/pa...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/02/us/politics/paths- to-the-white-house.html) ?)

Visualizations don't seem to be Nate Silver's bailiwick, so that leaves me feeling a little disappointed to see him leaving.

Nate's a clever fellow though, I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with ESPN.

<comment><USER7> He's been given the authority to do a lot of hiring, so I would honestly be surprised, if he didn't go on to hire some d3.js boffins.

<comment><USER8> Actually, Mike Bostock (creator of d3) has been employed by the Times for awhile now.

<comment><USER7> I know. Doesn't help Silver and ESPN, though. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Meta comment: the institutionalized role of the "public editor" as a kind of quasi-independent internal advocate for the interests of the public has fascinated me for a while. They generally have no real power, but are given a platform and considerable independence, and are supposed to help hold newspapers to their stated interest in informing the public, with an expectation that they will be critical to some degree. So they can write posts like this, which normally would only come from outside sniping, but with better internal access to sources, and an officially sanctioned platform.

I've on occasion wondered if it would be beneficial for companies in other fields to adopt such a role. Could Google regain some trust and goodwill if it appointed a "public editor" with a suitably credible background, a degree of independence, and a mandate to advocate for the public interest?

<comment><USER10> "Public editor" is basically a particular incarnation of ombudsman. One thing common to ombudsman roles is that they're powerless and routinely ignored. They're the equivalent of "We are taking this seriously.", a meaningless gesture designed to distract and obfuscate. The people who take such roles are simply pawns.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, but I have to call this out as blanket, misguided and uninformed criticism. I've been a frequent reader of the Times ombudsman in the 10 or so years since it was put in place after the Jayson Blair scandal. Sullivan has been the most incisive, most responsive of all the ombudsmen so far.

You're right that the position is toothless...she has no ability to fire people or allocate resources of her own. What she does have in terms of power is getting to say whatever she wants, about anyone at the Times, without fear of being fired. She's like an internal affairs cop (who themselves have limited direct power) but who is guaranteed a spot in print and on web in America's biggest paper.

What other companies have such a position? If you're thinking, "X tech company who got hacked and wrote a lovely apology letter about it"...well, then you thoroughly misunderstand the public editor's province. Her equivalent at tech company X would be someone who interviewed the engineers who fucked up and then put their names and quotes into print...not someone who does PR apologetics for the company.

She was among the first under the Times masthead to point out that their incoming CEO had some major problems and to say what many were privately thinking. No, she didn't get him fired or removed...but again, that's not her purview. Her role is to raise awareness and stir the pot in a way that most people internally will never do. She is most certainly not a "pawn"

<comment><USER12> > What she does have in terms of power is getting to say whatever she wants, > about anyone at the Times, without fear of being fired.

Do you really think a corporation would allow serious injury to come to its reputation especially when its reputation is critical to its business?

Do you think if the public editor starting leveling serious critique at the NYT in the vein of FAIR, Media Lens or Chomsky they would retain their position? Do you think the NYT would ever appoint members of those organizations as public editors?

<comment><USER11> The position is generally given to a veteran journalist...Sullivan was formerly the editor of the Buffalo News. So to answer your question, she, and others before her, aren't likely to launch bombs at the NYT because like most members of a group, you have enough experience to know that controversies are more complicated underneath the surface.

So no, they're not going to hire someone who is either actively bent on discrediting the newspaper...because that would imply the newspaper execs believe that the newspaper is something to be destroyed. The position is meant to be one that _improves_ the newspaper and its accountability to the readers. Many of her columns raise questions and doubts about Times' coverage, but the expectation is that this makes the newsroom a better place...similar to how transparency in government ostensibly makes it better in the long run.

But, on the other hand, if Sullivan became the David Souter of the Times...she would be for all intents and purposes, difficult to fire without creating a shitstorm. I'm not sure what's in the NYT's actual 4-year-contract with her, but barring her committing some journalistic crime (like plagiarism), it's not likely she can be removed for the content of her criticism.

<comment><USER12> The position is given to someone that is sympathetic to corporate journalism, it has nothing to do with being a "veteran". And the fact that "complicated" issues, as defined of course by someone employed by the NYT, are off-limits just serve to bolster my point. Notwithstanding the fact that nearly all of the important criticisms are dead simple. Why are the main issues raised by serious media critics, like systemic bias and corporate influence, never raised by the public editor?

The intent of _real_ criticism is to improve the actual role of the newspaper in relation to the public. The NYT doesn't hire people who do _real_ criticism because real accountability to the public isn't the main incentive of the NYT: revenue and power relations are. The illusion of accountability is necessary, which is why they have the public editor in the first place, because otherwise people wouldn't buy their products, be influenced by their messages and see their ads.

It is the height of absurdity to believe that someone who gets paid by an organization would be unbiased in its criticism of it or that they would act in the interests of a third party, in this case the public, from whom they receive no direct benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting that he would go to a sports network over the culture clash between statistics and narrative. Sports has traditionally been _extremely_ negative on "stats geeks", and favored narrative explanations, along with factors like "grit" and "determination" and that kind of thing. Silver's own former work in sabermetrics was a frequent target of pot-shots from ESPN commentators for years. There used to be a blog on that kind of anti- intellectualism in sports commentary (written by people who post-blog went on to write for the TV series _Parks and Recreation_ ): [http://www.firejoemorgan.com/](http://www.firejoemorgan.com/)

Sign of a more general change?

<comment><USER14> Traditionally, but not recently. Sports has been very focused on statistics for at least the last decade, probably longer. Most large sports organizations have dedicated statistics departments and make many of their decisions based on the same.

<comment><USER13> That's a good point. I was thinking more about sports _commentary_ , rather than what happens in the teams themselves, but it's true that teams have been all over statistics for years. I do think commentators, perhaps conscious of their role as public faces of an entertainment product, have been more resistant to statistics-driven commentary, and have instead played up horse- race type narratives.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, when you're watching the game, horse-race commentary is just straight up more fun to hear. I love hearing a radio announcer just get excited about what's happening. However, even live, they do throw in some statistics. Admittedly, these are the sort of post-hoc statistics that aren't good for anything (e.g. "they win 90% of their away games that fall on Friday").

Offline, fans of some sports are almost exclusively about statistics and numbers. Baseball is famous for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I still think it's funny that the Times framed him joining them as being a huge win for him, lending him credibility, etc. The benefit to Silver was certainly money, but it was really more about the Times joining Silver than vice versa, in terms of political analysis.

I'm not at all surprised he moved on - I suspect that they expected him to be grateful, when the reverse would have been more reasonable.

<comment><USER16> At the time it was a win for him. It gave him credibility, a steady paycheck and guaranteed lasting exposure at a time when he could have easily faded into obscurity after the 08 elections were over.

Back then he was just a novelty with a website it looked like his 15 year old cousin built for him one weekend. And one who was going to find it very challenging to remain relevant until the next election cycle.

Now he's arguably outgrown them, having become a household name to anybody who follows politics closely, become a TV personality etc - but lets not rewrite history. He definitely stood on their shoulders to get where he is today, at least for the first year or two.

And this is all coming from a pretty huge fan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nate's work was practically the definition of "disruptive" when he started and it's been a joy to follow him over the years. As far as papers go I happen to like the NY Times, so I'm a bit sad to see him go. But I'll gladly follow him no matter where he is. This is definitely much more of a loss for the Times than for Nate.

I'll be curious to see what he says about why he left. It's very easy to imagine several reasons the he found it hard to work for the Times. It was very interesting to me to see how hostile some folks were to him during the 2012 election cycle. He obviously threatened the viability of a great deal of the(mostly useless) political punditry that we see. I think it's hard to separate which parts of that hostility were conscious reactions to a perceived threat and which parts were an unconscious reaction to ideas of how the news should work.

I'm sure Nate will do a great job with ESPN and I hope he likes it more than his time with the Times.

</comment><comment><USER18> ESPN has a ton of money (about $4.69/month from every cable subscriber in the country whether they watch sports or not, $10b total revenue), a big audience, and they could put him on ABC. They made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

Sounds like the NYT did everything they could to keep him, but against money and mass audience, prestige only takes you so far, especially when a stodgy old guard is fighting a rear guard action against you.

[http://editors.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/07/whyd_n...](http://editors.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/07/whyd_nate_silver_leave_the_times.php)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2012/11/09/why-e...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2012/11/09/why- espn-is-the-worlds-most-valuable-media-property-and-worth-40-billion/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Not surprised that political journalists at the time were so threatened by his work, since it renders what they do utterly useless, and entirely about manufacturing drama and conflict and personality narratives when the numbers tell a more complete and more accurate story.

</comment><comment><USER20> The sports stats on ESPN / Politics on ABC angle is hard to argue against. I like to think though that corporate parent Disney is really looking at the bigger picture here; how Silver fits into its Marvel and Star Wars acquisitions.

Setting aside all creative considerations, the Avengers remains one of Hollywood's most impressive acts of longterm chutzpah, building individual franchises out of B-string characters helmed by way outta left-field director choices and bringing them all together in one film years down the line.

They could, of course, rest on their laurels and churn out a triptych of Avengers movies, each with their orbiting solo films. But Disney thinks bigger than that. Picture the scene in Avengers 3 (after the credits, natch) where Galactus looms into view over Mos Eisley, Hans Solo all wtf. Turns out the next three Star Wars films have all been building to an Avengers/Star Wars merger, dragging in its wake 15 tv series, 45 ancillary films and a trail of comics so large that collectors turn collectivists in order to purchase vast communal warehouses to store their collections.

As the credits roll on Star Wars/Avengers 3, we'd probably forgive Disney if the final card announced that they were following billg into philanthropy. They now account for 10% of US GDP and President Cory Booker is terrified that the gravy train is about to come off the rails and plunge the US economy into recession. BOOM. Audiences gasp. It's a post credits sequence. The camera tracks slowly through a darkened office, over a minimalist, uncluttered desk, towards a high-backed chair that's facing the wall. The phone rings. A hand reaches out to put it on speaker phone. We hear an efficient sounding secretary: "Connecting Mr Fett" and then a pause, the sound of breathing perhaps before Fett says "I'm sorry I failed you". The tension is palpable, as the chair slowly begins to rotate towards the camera. OMG. It's Nate Silver, wizard. "No no, Boba, it's all exactly as I planned it."

Cue the incorporation of 538 into the Star Wars/Avengers franchise, a development freighted so subtly in the accumulated oeuvre to date that only Nate Silver's super algorithm can track and maintain a consistent canon, further fuelling a blog empire.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure if people understand that Nate Silver likes sports. Under the tweed blazer and spectacles, the guy loves baseball. There are very few topics of study with more data points than baseball. Besides, there are sports 100% of the time during the year, and a US national election once every 4 (Senate and house races are boring).

Seriously, it may not have been about money or fit. If someone came along and said that you could continue to code software and get paid to do it, but didn't have to work for CrushSoul, Inc., anymore AND it was in something you found insanely fun and interesting, wouldn't you do it?

</comment><comment><USER22> I just read Silver's book "The Signal and the Noise" and I think this makes a lot of sense. Silver never was a political junkie, as all the NYT political journalists are. He was drawn into political statistical analysis almost by accident: he saw how "noisy" the political analysis were and knew that he could do something about it. In the book he clearly shows that baseball and poker are a lot more interesting subjects for him.

<comment><USER23> Fivethirtyeight has its origins on the very-political DailyKos, where he wrote political statistical analysis under the name "poblano".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> On the data journalism mailing list, we've had a small discussion about how Nate could be replaced by any of the other data-minded journalists...it's not because his work was simple, but Silver himself has said that his analysis is straightforward and the math is accessible...the difference is that Silver gives a damn about context and analysis In a methodological way.

He definitely brings in good writing talents and a possibly unmatched inquisitiveness...but his methods and predictive analysis aren't irreplaceable. And yes, part of the draw is the brand that he's worked tirelessly to build...but this is a brand built on verifying results...I.e. being conclusively _right_....if the Times were to bring in another blogger who predicts the 2014 Congressional race to a T, and explains his/her methods and shows a real love for it, I'll subscribe to that blog and not give a whit about how many years of blogging they've done.

Contrast this with the irreplaceable Roger Ebert. He was incomparable as a writer, but his brand was built on something very subjective...and thus, once he's gone, it's hard to justify going back to RogerEbert.com, no matter how great of critics there are to replace him. Roger's brand is based more on long-built loyalty...Silver's brand is more based on making verifiable hypotheses and being correct...time and time again.

<comment><USER24> Which mailing list? There seem to be several on this topic.

Also, you're probably right, there are at least three other prominent electoral college forecasters who write well, were as accurate as Nate, and who could possibly be contracted to provide the same analysis and commentary: Andrew Tannenbaum [1], Drew Linzer [2], and Sam Wang [3].

Unlike Nate, forecasting is not their primary career, but it's clearly a labor of love for them and who knows what could be worked out with the right offer. If I were in charge at the NYT I'd be starting up conversations with these and any others doing similar work, stat.

[1]: [http://electoral-vote.com/](http://electoral-vote.com/)

[2]: [http://votamatic.org/](http://votamatic.org/)

[3]: [http://election.princeton.edu/](http://election.princeton.edu/)

<comment><USER11> National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting

[http://www.ire.org/resource-center/listservs/subscribe- nicar...](http://www.ire.org/resource-center/listservs/subscribe-nicar-l/)

<comment><USER24> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nate Silver is unique because he's more rational than most people. This is why he can effectively use data to see things that the data revealed all along.

So it's no surprise to me that he'd find it difficult to work for an organization like the NY Times... The NY Times was not only complicit in the Iraq war, but came out strongly against Julian Assange through a series of horrible articles.

The purpose of the NY Times is to serve powerful interests and to prevent the embarrassment of powerful people.

Just skimming many of the regular op-ed contributors and editorial writing gives a window into the mentality of the paper. It's coasting on past glories and continually offering a message to readers that the world is full of illegitimacy and suffering outside the US.

</comment><comment><USER26> There are so many more inputs and outcomes to model in sports than in politics, I'm not surprised that it's a more interesting subject matter for a statistician. He never seemed too much into the wonkier side of politics.

The science of predicting election outcomes may continue to be improved, but perhaps it's essentially solved in a way that sports prediction isn't.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm relieved actually. I've been trying for years to NOT EVER read the NYTimes but Silver's blog was so good that I had to.

</comment><comment><USER28> I really hope to see future election coverage from him; not sure how that will happen at ESPN.

<comment><USER29> Because it's owned by ABC, which will host his election coverage..

<comment><USER30> Definitely agree that ABC will host election coverage, and that Nate will appear on the network!

But did want to mention that ESPN is 80% owned by The Walt Disney Company (which also owns ABC)... and 20% owned by Hearst.

Here's the history of ESPN's ownership, from Wikipedia: "In 1984, ABC made a deal with Getty Oil to acquire ESPN. ABC retained an 80% share, and sold 20% to Nabisco. The Nabisco shares were later sold to Hearst Corporation, which still holds a 20% stake today. In 1986, ABC was purchased for $3.5 billion by Capital Cities Communications. In 1996, The Walt Disney Company purchased Capital Cities/ABC for $19 billion and picked up the 80% stake in ESPN at that time." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ESPN](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ESPN)

I've met with Hearst a few times, and their executives love to mention their 20% stake in ESPN!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I want to know details about how he constructs his models. At least in terms of what kinds of models he uses, what types of statistics are needed. Is it all "Bayesian"? I could not find much via google, anyone have pointers?

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if the strengthening paywall at NYTimes was a factor.

I hit the ESPN 'premium' wall far less often than at NYTimes. 'Grantland' has been mentioned as a model for the Silver subbrand at ESPN; are any 'Grantland' stories premium-only?

</comment><comment><USER33> Sell any NYT stock you are holding. Nate was one of the last honest things at the increasingly craven, frumpy NYT, where Occupy didn't merit coverage until the third month, and the Iraq war got the greased-rails treatment.

Don't forget who has forsaken their credibility. Never forget that. It is only by remembering who has lied that we avoid future lies.

Would you lend money to a bankrupt company? No? Why then do you read the NYT?</comment>


Down with Innovation, Up with Imitation - <AUTHOR> http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/08/03/down-with-innovation-up-with-imitation/

<comment><USER2> The author of this one doesn't even consider The Most Holy Intellectual Property. Why not?</comment>


Re: The Spirit of Free Software, or the Reality - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com <comment><USER2> So, from what I gathered it's just the favicons of the search engines, some mozilla country stuff (not sure why) and google safe browsing (which you can turn off and is a good feature for casual users) So what's the issue here? All this isnt really a problem and safe browsing is, in my opinion, even good for normal users.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure that these get requests don't even fetch with cookies, so fingerprinting is probably impossible here. The most info they can get is "hey, this ip uses Firefox". Harmless in itself. It can be compounded with more info to track someone, but all of this info already contains IP/browser info so this doesn't help at all.

<comment><USER4> I recall reading something on the internet that IP + browser fingerprint is good enough to unique identify a large number of people. Has this changed or otherwise untrue?

<comment><USER5> Getting the type of "browser fingerprint" they're depending on here requires a bunch of Javascript. You can't get that data from just looking at a single request, which is all that they're getting here.

<comment><USER6> I think IP + useragent + locale (which is sent with every HTTP request) is enough to pinpoint most users.

<comment><USER7> Especially Debian users ("iceweasel" in the user agent string!)...

<comment><USER8> I made an add-on that tries to help with that: [https://github.com/avian2/thawed-weasel](https://github.com/avian2/thawed- weasel)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is what happens when folks with a radically-non-mainstream view of privacy try to use an app built for mainstream folks by folks with slightly more mainstream opinions about privacy.

<comment><USER10> It's not obvious to me that "I want my browser to tell Google about every site I visit" actually is the mainstream view of privacy.

<comment><USER2> "Privacy

Google maintains the Safe Browsing Lookup API, which has a privacy drawback: "The URLs to be looked up are not hashed so the server knows which URLs the API users have looked up". The Safe Browsing API v2, on the other hand, has the following privacy advantage: "API users exchange data with the server using hashed URLs so the server never knows the actual URLs queried by the clients". The Firefox and Safari browsers use the latter." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing#Privacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing#Privacy)

<comment><USER10> Heh. The next paragraph after that quote is:

> Safe Browsing also stores a mandatory preferences cookie on the computer[9] > which the US National Security Agency allegedly uses to identify individual > computers for purposes of exploitation.[10]

That may or may not be true, but must one be a radical to be concerned?

<comment><USER11> It's true, but slightly misleading.

If you open firefox and browse to a few sites, it will send that cookie. If you then take your computer down to the coffee shop and keep browsing, even if you don't log into anything, it will still send that cookie in the clear.

There are other ways that the NSA can figure out a list of IP addresses you've been using, but this is 1) totally silent, and 2) is common to a _lot_ of systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At Webconverger I've been working on whittling these leaking issues down, by wiresharking Firefox, e.g.

[https://github.com/Webconverger/webconverger- addon/issues/42](https://github.com/Webconverger/webconverger-addon/issues/42) [https://github.com/Webconverger/webconverger- addon/issues/41](https://github.com/Webconverger/webconverger-addon/issues/41) [https://github.com/Webconverger/webconverger- addon/issues/43](https://github.com/Webconverger/webconverger-addon/issues/43)

Though with things like [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1100304](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1100304) and anti-features like [http://dustri.org/b/firefox-youre-supposed-to-be-in- my-pocke...](http://dustri.org/b/firefox-youre-supposed-to-be-in-my-pocket- not-the-other-way-around.html) you got to wonder if Mozilla has stopped caring about privacy.

<comment><USER13> It's interesting, especially since Firefox currently heavily uses "privacy" as their selling point:

>Committed to you, your privacy and an open Web [1]

>We've always designed Firefox to protect and respect your private information. That's why we're proud to be voted the Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy. [1]

>When it's personal, choose Firefox. [2]

[1]: [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/desktop/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/desktop/)

[2]: [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/new/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> These browsers are all constantly accessing many sites. Here's[1] a comment I posted a month ago about Firefox. The summary is here's (at minimum) what Firefox accesses when it starts up as a Guest in OS X, and this is _after_ I unchecked a bunch of boxes:

       self-repair.mozilla.org
       snippets.cdn.mozilla.net
       search.yahoo.com
       location.services.mozilla.com
       www.mozilla.org
       tiles.services.mozilla.com
       safebrowsing.google.com
       aus4.mozilla.org

Try it yourself as Guest. But make sure that Parental Controls are on. That way OS X will popup these sites and ask permission. Firefox is unusable w/o opting in all of these.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9743799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9743799)

</comment><comment><USER15> The whole shrugging off and downplaying of issues like this are exactly the reason the internet is complete shit when it comes to security.

Why, after all the exploits, insecure software and bad decisions, can people _still_ not see that they can't anticipate everything?

For instance, here's a scenerio I can easily envision: The NSA strongarms Ebay into letting them sniff TCP connections to their favicon, combines the TCP fingerprint with the browser useragent to uniquely identify you from perhaps millions of other users. Geolocate your IP to determine where you are and _bam_ they know all about you they need to know. Tin-foil hat? Of course. Plausible? Totally. Doable? Absolutely. They don't need to be perfect, just good enough.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wait, we all realize these are grabbing the favicons for the bookmarks right? This list of .iso's reads to me like a list of default bookmarks.

</comment><comment><USER17> I also wonder how much work it would be to make a version with these striped out. Replacing functionality with a NOOP, is often not that hard.

<comment><USER18> The problem is that it's a big responsibility. You can't just do it once and dump it on the internet. It has to be kept up to date with the latest Firefox versions, and it has to have prompt releases (within a day). You also need to be absolutely sure that your changes aren't creating more problems than they're fixing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19>
       127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com

       127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com

       127.0.0.1 www.hosted-pixel.com # I Swear I'm Not Making This Up

On some but not all operating systems it's better to use 0.0.0.0.

It's better to block it with a firewall but your aged grandmother doesn't know how to configure them.

iOS and I expect Android have hosts files but you must jailbreak to edit them. On iOS you can do that with iFile from the Cydia store. iFile once cost money but it's free now.

<comment><USER20> My Grandmother's a real ace when it comes to editing hosts.

<comment><USER21> Your grandmother probably doesn't use Ice Weasel, and probably doesn't care it's making requests.</comment></comment></comment>


Gendercide: The worldwide war on baby girls - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15636231 <comment><USER3> "Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence—especially single men in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, as it does in China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble."

In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright discusses this in addressing the social benefits of egalitarian, pro-monogamy social values. As a kind of real world experiment illustrating the meliorating effect of marriage, consider this:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/all- you-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/all-you-need-is- love/2351/)

In the 1970s, the PLO reigned in the radical militant young men in Black September by marrying them off.

Apart from the obvious horror of infanticide, this is what I find most unnerving about the widening gender skew in these countries.

<comment><USER4> The American West was "Wild" until women started showing up in adequate numbers to provide wives for men instead of just whore houses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorite story is of someone who sold a treatment that guaranteed boys, offering a full money back guarantee if you had a girl. Half his customers were fully satisfied.

Quite clever I thought.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a friend whose mom told her: "I wish I'd left you to die when you were born." She's Chinese, and a successful Chinese-American entrepreneur.

I can't even begin to imagine what a mindfuck that must be.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't have anything new to say about the larger societal issues raised in this article, but as a father of a young daughter, this article certainly made me feel sad for all the daughters who aren't given a chance.

<comment><USER8> No doubt, I read this article with my 2 year old daughter in my lap and my 3 year old son sitting in the other chair and cannot imagine choosing her over him or vice verse. It really makes you wonder how much societal norms affect things that seem like basic human tenants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just finished Genji Monogatari, a work from 12th Century Japan. It follows Prince Genji from being born to an low ranking concubine of the Emperor and follows his adventures, and how he gets exiled, and returns, and eventually becomes Emperor himself. Very interesting read.

Anyway, at one point in the book, he meets a family in the countryside where the mother had died and the father was working off in another city, leaving one last elderly grandparent in the care of a 10 year old girl. Genji took her, raised her, and she became a member of his household. About 10 years later, after Genji's wife died, he actually married her.

Anyway, it'd be totally politically untenable to loosen the adoption restrictions, and going as far as to allow adoptive parents to compensate the family would never happen. It'd be just politically impossible due to perceptions involved, and maybe that's a good thing. Still, infanticide is no good, and I wonder if there's other solutions if we could broaden our perspective.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's fairly easy to see that this is going to be one of the great causes of worldwide instability in this century. Many of these societies will be left with little choice in the face of political and societal forces but territorial expansionism, civil war, totalitarianism, or cultural suicide.

<comment><USER10> The European and the Japanese is declining in population. Greece is already bankrupt.

The United State government is racking up extraordinary debt, backed with little saving. If it keep doing that, we may entered not just stagnation but collapse.

There is also the agriculture crisis in Africa as a certain fungus ravages crops all over. It has already spread to Iran, I heard.

The 21st century certainly hang in the balance as we flirt with danger.

<comment><USER11> US government debt actually isn't very high, nor are interest payments very high compared to GDP. And racking up extraordinary debt is the correct counter-cyclical response to an extraordinary recession. Governments shouldn't be reducing spending or increasing taxes when the economy hits hard times. Instead, it should reduce spending and maintain or raise taxes when the economy is doing well.

And Greece isn't bankrupt. You can't reasonably say that a country is bankrupt until it starts defaulting on its loans.

<comment><USER10> _US government debt actually isn't very high, nor are interest payments very high compared to GDP. And racking up extraordinary debt is the correct counter-cyclical response to an extraordinary recession. Governments shouldn't be reducing spending or increasing taxes when the economy hits hard times. Instead, it should reduce spending and maintain or raise taxes when the economy is doing well._

Why would government spending help the economy at all? Let give people shovels to dig holes and fill it back it in! Surely, breaking windows will make jobs for the glassmakers.

Let not forget that all the fancy infrastructure projects that the government is making has to be maintained. We may like all the new roads that we're paying for right now, but too many roads mean higher maintenance bills, which mean higher taxes and less money for consumers to spend it on or save.

Maybe it is better to let all the irresponsible firms bankrupt themselves and let people who made the correct bet win all the money. Let the Nassim Nicholas Taleb of world win big.

The free market runs on firm failure, not just firm success.

<comment><USER12> even the relatively intelligent and contrarian crowd on HN doesn't like hearing this. there's no way we're not screwed in the long term.

<comment><USER13> The parent post was modded down to -1, but had no replies. That is NOT appropriate on this site.

You only downmod for spam and stupid comments. If they are wrong they go to 0. If you disagree then reply, but you don't downmod just because you disagree.

<comment><AUTHOR> _You only downmod for spam and stupid comments._

That is still under discussion.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057347>

(The linked comment is not the most current comment on the issue, I'm pretty sure, but one that came up readily by searching.) An older comment by pg

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171>

appears now to be superseded in part. I will follow the group culture here where pg (the site founder) and the moderators take it.

<comment><USER12> in reality people will always vote in accordance with making the thread look more like they think the thread should look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A note on South Korea:

It is by far the most Christian nation in Asia: 29% in the 2005 census and the largest (vs. 23% for Buddhism and 46.5% no religion). This is going to have _very_ strong effects on social attitudes towards women and means what happened there in reversing this problem very probably won't elsewhere. Certainly not the PRC with its suppression of religion (of _any_ non-Party dominated mass organization) and likely not in India with its well entrenched two major religions and their focus on each other.

</comment><comment><USER15> If we wait long enough, this problem will fix itself.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle>

Too bad evolution is so slow.

<comment><USER16> Humans don't have a 1:1 M/F ratio. It starts at ~1.05:1 at birth and with men dieing off sooner.

<comment><USER17> The 1.05:1 probably permits to have a 1:1 ratio at the age of reproduction in a pre-industrial societies.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. The only individuals relevant to evolutionary processes are those that reach reproductive age.

<comment><USER18> Completely false. Consider bees. Almost all females in a bee colony don't reproduce, but if the other females left the whole colony would collapse, no work would be done.

<comment><USER15> First of all, honey bees are an exception to Fisher's principle.

Secondly, your reasoning is more generally completely irrelevant.

What you said was analogous to this:

Children can kill their mothers in childbirth, so obviously kids before reproductive age are still relevant!

Ok, so obviously non-reproductive individuals can affect the transmission of a person's genes. So can hurricanes, viruses, and cows. However, when you're solving your nice systems of differential equations to look at the evolutionary dynamics of various genes, _you only consider reproductive individuals,_ because these are the only ones that transmit genes.

Yes, non-reproductives can have effects in evolutionary dynamics, but _only_ as passive environmental elements. Dying because you have a gene that makes you susceptible to a virus is the same as dying in childbirth, to evolutionary processes. There's natural selection against the genes that made you weak to the virus, and natural selection on the genes that made your fetus too large.

I hope that makes sense. It can be hard to communicate with people from different fields; they use words differently than you do. (I'm a graduate student in evolutionary biology)

<comment><USER18> If you paid closer attention to the physicists, you'd realize that exceptions break the rule: they're clues to a more general theory. Is it so inconceivable that a postmenopausal woman might provide some fitness benefit for their kin? What evolutionary basis could there be for a person risking their life for a stranger? There are many more forces at work here than strict biological decent.

<comment><USER15> You missed the point.

The grandmother hypothesis doesn't contradict what I said at all. If you wanted to model evolutionary processes, you only stick in the reproductives, because they're the ones that will be producing more copies of their genes in the next generation.

As for risking your life for a stranger, evolution doesn't always find the maximum; it often settles in local maxima. If a strategy works 51% of the time, it will persist.

And yes, there are more forces at work than biological decent, but I don't see how that's relevant to anything I said. It's so imprecise it can't help but be true. So much for physicists.

<comment><USER18> I highly recommend the book "The Extended Phenotype," by Richard Dawkins. These are hardly new debates.

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't single out any of Dawkins' books for reading, read all of them if you can afford the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As China grows economically what is the likelihood of it simply allowing female immigration and thus pass this problem off to poorer nations?

<comment><USER21> Where are you going to find that many women? Nowhere but Africa, or possibly Latin America. That would lead to an interesting culture clash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Meh, this is a war against MEN.

In a society with such a gender imbalance, women can be more picky and some men are left without hope of getting a partner. Without a partner, what are they going to focus on life, if not work? And who is gonna get their money when they die?

Communists may be evil, but they aren't stupid, so it's unlikely they haven't foreseen this.

<comment><USER23> It's only great for the women who aren't murdered at birth. I'm not sure there's a clear winner in this gender war interpretation of yours.

EDIT: Did the math and concluded that for a normal sex ratio of ~103 to turn into one of 120, you'd have you be losing 14 of every 100 females through either prenatal abortion or unreported killing at birth.

<comment><USER14> Actually, things tend to get _really_ ugly for girls in a society where they become a scarce and valuable resource for their families. E.g. their value is in what can be extracted in the marriage market (note the comments on how this is skewing savings in the PRC), not in what they intrinsically are.

All in all I'd have to say this helps explain why the PRC is ramping up their police state (e.g. see [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870424050457458...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704240504574585120857399040.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What a blow against the Online Ads cause: I start to read the article, and a "subscribe now" popup slides right over the first paragraph. Nice.

<comment><USER25> It's the economist so I'll put up with anything they throw at me since they have such good content. Plus the ad was for their own product, and not some 3rd party crap.

I guess I'm just happy whenever I can actually access an article there. I thought they put up a pay wall a few months back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Girls in general are better people and killing them is plain stupid.

<comment><USER26> Honestly, why would anyone take offence at this and downvote? Most of human history has been dominated by men and it has been war after war after war. Throw in the several male prophets whose followers have created several religions and the subsequent strife and women win by at least 1000 points. At this point it shouldn't even be an issue which is the better gender.

<comment><USER15> There's a bit of cognitive dissonance in your post. It's obvious that you think that the reason that men have been the head of wars is _innate, biological determinism._ Yet men have also been the ones who developed science and technology. On HN, almost all of us are men. Is that also due to _innate, biological determinism_? If not, how do you explain the fact that all the things you dislike about men are innate, and all the things you like are not? And if yes, how can you say that women are better than men? Do you not value science, technology, and entrepreneurship?

<comment><USER27> I'm not going to argue on nature vs nurture but I will ask you a hypothetical question.. if you had to make a choice between fast evolution of "science, technology, entrepreneurship" and a peaceful world without war nor violence, which would you take ?

If (I have no idea whether it's the case or not) biological determinism was true and those views were confirmed, I still wouldn't see women as inferior. Being smart enough to create and have low enough morals to use the atomic bomb is NOT a gift, it's a curse.

<comment><USER15> Ask girls about their experiences in all girls schools and ask them if they'd like to experience that for the rest of their lives. It's unlikely that killing off all men and then cloning the remaining females is a viable solution to world peace.

In answer to your actual question, though, you proffer a world with no war in violence as an ideal. However, I challenge that idea that you would even enjoy living in such a world; or at least enjoy living in such a world that is necessitated by a total lack of violence.

In elementary school, we learned that the central element to every story is conflict. A story with no conflict is boring. The same is true of life.

And then add to that that it's impossible to have a world without conflict without giving everyone a lobotomy, which would then result in the sudden collapse of civilization and the extinction of the human race...

It's a very simplistic world view you have that all violence is wrong. Sometimes violence is necessary, and sometimes it's entertaining (sports or action movies, anyone? Or a good beheading in the old days?). But even if you disagree on those two points, conflict is inherent in any system where individuals of the same species compete for resources.

There are such things as dumb questions, _especially_ if they're hypothetical.

<comment><USER27> My world view is not any more simplistic than your biased view based on western culture.The buddhist's nirvana is the absence of desire and while they believe in reincarnation, they see it as a curse to those who are too much anchored to their wealth and earthly delights. What seems boring to you is some other people idea of paradise. I'm not religious myself but I feel dramatically attracted by the underlying philosophy of Buddhism. There is something wrong with you if you think that life needs to perpetuate violence for thrill's sake.

<comment><USER9> > The buddhist's nirvana is the absence of desire and while they believe in > reincarnation, they see it as a curse to those who are too much anchored to > their wealth and earthly delights.

As a sidenote, I know Buddhism is quite popular in the West these days, but after spending time in Asia, I don't see it as superior in practice to the Western religions. The best of Buddhism, the most interesting and enlightening concepts make it to the West. But they have just as much silly superstition, social control, religious rank and hierarchy, and warriorship/violence in their history as the Western religions. Actually, some of the finest fighters of their era are the Shaolin and Honganji monks of China and Japan, who were at times much equivalently brutal to crusdaders and jihadists.

As for me personally, I think struggle is a good thing. I think all the most important and valuable aspects of life are struggle - living, thriving, growing. Childbirth, one of the heights of human experience, is a brutal struggle. Farming is struggle, hunting is struggle, cooking is struggle. Training to dance or sing or play an instrument is struggle. I'm with you on non-materialism as accumulating stuff isn't particularly effective, but I (personally) reject the notion that struggle is bad. All the best parts of life are a struggle or the fruits of struggle. I embrace struggle, I embrace suffering for worthy causes - suffering in exercise, in farming, in hunting, in cooking, in dancing, in having and rearing children. It's all struggle - <USER2> don't want nirvana, give me this world and its struggles and sufferings, and I'll embrace it fully.

> There is something wrong with you if you think that life needs to perpetuate > violence for thrill's sake.

This I agree with, but I think the original commentor's point was a bit more nuanced than that. I think he was saying conflict is necessary at times for life, and he was also noting that people do enjoy observing conflict and drama playing out. Myself, I've got mixed feelings on this - you know, I much prefer baseball to American football for instance. I played linebacker in high school, but watching a 6'6 220 pound receiver catch a pass in the air and get destroyed by a 6'4 260 pound safety while he's largely helpless makes me cringe a little. The strategy aspect of American football I quite like, the brutality of it not so much. So I'm with you on some points, less so on others.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wave motion in javascript - <AUTHOR> http://www.spitleaf.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I decided to go with the Raphael library again, and hacked out code from <http://www.ultrashock.com/tutorials/flash8/wave.php> . Given another chance, I'd probably go with ProcessingJS/Canvas, but I'm not too unhappy with this attempt. (Move your mouse along the gradient up and down)</comment>


Trans-Planetary Subway Systems (1978) - <AUTHOR> https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html <comment><USER2> A few dollars in energy costs for a Los Angeleno to take a 45-minute trip to NYC for lunch & some meetings, & return in time to beat the evening commute traffic jams? Sign me up!

</comment><comment><USER3> So... That's 'Hyperloop 1978'? I wonder if Musk happened to read this, or if he rediscovered the idea.

<comment><USER4> It is mentioned in the third page of the original Hyperloop paper: [https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...](https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop- alpha.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I had actually read that paper. Apparently not attentively enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was just thinking that the natural path for an intelligent species is downward into their own planet. We could be living on top of a civilization without knowing it.

<comment><USER6> This is where the lizard people are hiding...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Title implied something more Hyperionesque. Like the River Tethys.</comment>


Knowledge Gap Hinders Ability of Congress to Regulate Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/business/congress-facebook-regulation.html <comment><USER2> Being slow to regulate something you don't yet understand is arguably a laudable thing.</comment>


"Do I have the right to refuse this search?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.hlswatch.com/2009/10/15/ <comment><USER2> I once had a strange experience where, after taking a drink of water from a Camelbak bottle, a police officer asked me if he could see my water bottle. He was about 15 away, at the corner, waiting to turn left at a stoplight. I handed him the bottle, he opened it, smelled it, and made some comment about how it's illegal to have an open container of alcohol in public. It was summer, evening, and still light outside.

I remember being so caught of guard that I never even realized I was consenting to a government search until it was over. The officer was so conversational in his tone that I had no idea why in the world he would want to see my water bottle. Afterwards I regretted not refusing the search as it would have been an easy opportunity to stand up for my own constitutional rights. In the future, I can only imagine I will be on guard, treat any police officer with suspicion and only cooperative as much as is necessary.

<comment><USER3> I started to write a reply to your comment expressing my confusion, when I realized I had wrongly assumed you were in the car and the police officer on foot. Once I realized the situation was reversed, I immediately agreed.

Which makes me think there are two kinds of crimes. Crimes which are bad for their effects, and preventive measures. Of course there are grey areas, but driving and drinking is very close to doing actual damage, while walking and drinking is pretty much harmless.

I think it's a shame no law system makes any difference between the two. It would also put a lot of the drug legislation in a different light.

<comment><USER4> I do not even see where 'walking and drinking' comes in. The poster clearly said he took a drink of water out of his water bottle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find this fragment really insightful. Seems like it's a common mistake in a lot of domains.

"Over the last fifteen years or so, many police agencies started capturing data on police interactions. The primary purpose was to document what had historically been undocumented: informal street contacts. By capturing specific data, we were able to ask ourselves tough questions about potentially biased-policing. Many agencies are still struggling with the answers to those questions.

Regardless, the data permitted us to detect problematic patterns, commonly referred to as passive discrimination. This is a type of discrimination that occurs when we are not aware of how our own biases affect our decisions. This kind of bias must be called to our attention, and there must be accountability to correct it."

<comment><USER6> I'm not so sure. I read the OP to say that they're making efforts to ensure that no demographic group is getting a larger proportion of scrutiny.

She says nothing about how this correlates to actual crimes. I assume that she's intentionally trying to keep that out of the picture -- but doesn't that make them less efficient? If young adult males account for a lion's share of the crime, then why force yourself to look away from them and choose an old lady?

Surely there's a difference when you're trying to prevent a very small number of high-profile events, versus regular police work. In trying to stop a terrorist organization, they've (presumably) got the resources to play this to their own benefit by intentionally choosing that old lady as their agent. On the other hand, in day-to-day police work, I'd think that statistics are everything: the potential criminal _is_ a young man, and there's precious little he can do about that, so (assuming that's what the statistics say), that's where one ought to concentrate.

<comment><USER5> You've got a point there. More data would be nice too.

My understanding of it, is that the data is used to check whether some groups don't receive too much unnecessary attention at the cost of not paying enough attention to other groups because of some non concious bias.

"On the other hand, in day-to-day police work, I'd think that statistics are everything"

Statistics are worth attention, but I really hope they're not everything in police work;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love how people try to be logical about all this. There is no logic, it's nutcases vs power-trippers.

Here's the reality - it's not IF but WHEN the next nut gets through TSA with something else, not something new, but something they were supposed to be looking for in the first place. These are all slackers on a power-trip, who else would apply for such a job?

So what are they going to invent next to harass everyone? How exactly are they going to do cavity searches, or is this step meant to get us accepting enough for the next level?

The next idiot might hijack a private corporate jet with no security, and that's going to make an interesting battle of corporate lobbyists for "freedom" vs. power-tripping security theater hiding behind "keeping you safe".

<comment><USER8> But, that will always happen as TSA can only plan for what past happen not future happened.

The FBI, Secret Service, Treasury, CIA, etc have a record of 75% or higher of catching terrorists before the act.

Guess what TSA's record is? ZERO! Think about that for second. How many Congress people are connected to the companies supply and benefiting from TSA's obvious miss-management?

For security you hire law enforcement or military. Guess who does security at embassies? That is right law enforcement and the military not TSA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"I believe what we have here is the beginning of the end of complacency. It is now apparent to me that in the haste to ensure compliance with procedures that are inconsistent if not inarticulable, TSA has hastened the likelihood of failure."_

It's interesting this was written a year ago and only now are we starting to exert our right to refuse.

</comment><comment><USER10> My guess as to why she's "randomly selected" so much is the way she holds herself. Having been a cop, she probably has much different body language from everyone else.

<comment><USER11> I always get selected in about 90% of the times I travel.

I can think of no other reason than I look like I'll be easy to search and they have a quota to fill. I also think it's because I often travel alone.

In no way could I be being racially or behaviourally profiled.</comment></comment>


Mushroom burial suit turns dead bodies into clean compost (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://grist.org/living/mushroom-burial-suit-turns-dead-bodies-into-clean-compost/ <comment><USER2> Getting human bodies to decompose underground is not trivial. The idea is nice, but I think the idea of a burial forest is much nicer, as it gives an excuse to plant some trees, and provides multiple moral perspectives for not chopping them down again. The burial forest idea is basically that you bury someone, and plant a tree on top, like a tombstone, but, a tombtree, and that tree is then both a memorial for the deceased, and, more importantly, it is a tree, and trees are nice to have around.

<comment><USER3> How does that work in the long perspective? At one point it either falls over by itself, or it is chopped down? If it falls over by itself, what is done with it then?

<comment><USER4> At many graveyards you now lease a grave for a certain number of years, not in perpetuity. Not really much different to that. No idea what they do with the bodies once the lease is up...

<comment><USER5> Traditionally, the previous occupant is exhumed and their bones deposited in the ossuary building. I imagine a modern cemetery just quietly trashes the headstone when the lease expires, and re-leases the plot at full price, as though no one had already been buried there.

I'm not sure when the gravesite lease for ethical business practice expires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I assume this is coming up again because it was recently announced that celebrity Luke Perry was buried in a mushroom suit:

[https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/04/entertainment/luke-perry- mush...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/04/entertainment/luke-perry-mushroom- suit-trnd/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Liquification is another method, essentially pressure cooked in a lye solution.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis_(body_di...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis_\(body_disposal\))

<comment><USER8> Not much can beat a sky burial. Tibetians sometimes still do it. If you search around, you can find a photo sequence documenting it. The only notable modernization is plastic aprons for the workers. They strip and slash the body, then step back and let vultures eat. After the vultures have left only large bones, the workers smash up the bones with a bit of oatmeal in a bowl. The vultures like that too, ultimately leaving nothing uneaten.

<comment><USER9> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope my pals use my corpse for some cubensis when I'm ripe for it.

</comment><comment><USER11> How is this Mushroom method compare to the leading green cremation of Alkaline Hydrolysis that has been around for over 130 years?[1]

[1]: [https://www.frazerconsultants.com/2016/06/dissolved- bodies-s...](https://www.frazerconsultants.com/2016/06/dissolved-bodies- sewers-alkaline-hydrolysis-debunked/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm surprised sea burials aren't more of a thing. Much the same but easier to deal with the body really.

The boat serves as a function room so is set-up ready to go always and has business model flexibility if you want to take people out for a harbour cruise other days.

<comment><USER13> > I'm surprised sea burials aren't more of a thing

I have friends who started a small boat tour company and found that sea burials made up quite a large proportion of their business. They were jokingly wondering whether to pivot and call their new company "The Final Wave".

<comment><USER14> For more somber traditionalists, overboard the body in a No Wake Zone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Novelist brain is now feverishly working out ways to use this in a crime novel. (Probably one involving a smart serial killer.)

<comment><USER16> There was an episode of Hannibal where this sort of thing was part of the plot - using bodies to grow fungi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Shades of "The Expanse" and "Silo" series. IIRC Wool, etc.. had people being decomposed right back into the farm area, and the Expanse has bodies being fed into the "recycler".

</comment><comment><USER18> Was also a TED Talk on this.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee/](https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee/)

Edit: looks like it is linked in the article too.

</comment><comment><USER19> On a related note, the state of Washington is about to legalize human composting -- [https://thecompost.io/articles/the-kids-arent- alright#compos...](https://thecompost.io/articles/the-kids-arent- alright#composting-grandpa)

</comment><comment><USER20> The article claims the mushrooms break down heavy metals. How do they do that?

I know there are marine bacteria that can convert mercury into a less toxic form, but I am surprised some mushrooms can convert ALL the toxic heavy metals in our bodies into something less toxic.

<comment><USER21> According to Wikipedia on the lead designer:

> She earned a B.A. degree in psychology from Wellesley College (1998) and an > M.S. degree in visual studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology > (2006).

My bet is that this doesn't really work, or, well, maybe it does, in the exact same way a buried dead body eventually decomposes.

<comment><USER22> I can give away the entire game here. I was in her class when Jae-Rhim designed this project. It was a class taught by [sic] Kzysztof Wodczizco called "Interrogative Design." He was at MIT then and is at Harvard now. [a]

The whole point of Kzyzstof's Interrogative Design practice is to design something half-ass and make it seem serious as hell to get people talking and improving the idea. It "asks a question." It's not taking the piss out of the audience, because the audience is already lulled into a consumer trance of evaluating every possible purchase and can generally be led into doing the problem-solving work. In fact, it's mainly taking the piss out of the artists because half the time they think their design will actually work.

Wodiczko has incredible cache from being part of the resistance to Communism in Poland. He impressed me, but made me incredibly cynical. Like many designers, he practiced an ideology that brought his audience so close to understanding life through aesthetic and psychological principles (bit of Jung, bit of Deleuze, bit of Steve Jobs), but ultimately left them cold, positioning himself as a thought leader, expecting the rest of the world to complete his projects, using their imagination and the money he gets from universities. For instance, when I took the class, he was obsessed with Moses and viewed the bible as a design exercise. He wanted us to come up with something as persuasive as the stone tablets. I guess I'm just another idealistic geek who thinks technical facts matter and people can do the right thing without being led around by fairie tales.

[a] [https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/krzysztof- wodiczko/](https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/krzysztof-wodiczko/)

<comment><USER14> The next generation of laziness? Fake Itt Til Someone Else Makes It.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Or have someone lay out your corpse on the ground, cover it with staked-down chicken wire to keep large scavengers from moving the body around, and dump some Dermestid beetles on it to accelerate the process. Between the beetles and the corpse flies that show up naturally, the soft tissues pupate, molt, and fly away a few grams at a time, leaving a cleaned skeleton.

I'm putting that in my next testament, along with artfully arranging the bones in a clear polyurethane casting resin, so that I can creep out generations of my descendants as a plastic heirloom.

</comment><comment><USER23> If this interests you, Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets is an interesting dissertation on how mushrooms can "save the planet." His TED talks are a decent intro as well.

<comment><USER24> Interesting Start Trek: Discovery homage I didn't know until reading this: the Discovery ship runs in a form of subspace called "mycelial network", using a "mycelium drive", whose inventor is called... "Paul Stamets".

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> We need new rituals in our society. I want my body to be eaten using dermestide beetles to clean my bones [http://beetlestobonesskullcleaning.com/](http://beetlestobonesskullcleaning.com/)

We need to punish people that do environmental damage, like use embalm chemicals.

</comment><comment><USER26> Human bodies decompose on their own. Just bury. Muslims have been doing that for over a thousand years and it just works.

It's one of those things that we (specially the west) are over-engineering. Same goes for using paper in restrooms. I am waiting for the west to evolve and just use water already.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't see how mushrooms can get rid of heavy metals as said in the article.

<comment><USER28> They don't "get rid" of heavy metals in any absolute sense, but they _do_ remove them from the environment, concentrating the metals within the fruit bodies of the fungus where they can be easily "harvested" and processed to either recover the metals or sequester them from the rest of the environment.

Fungi are also spectacularly good at remediating hydrocarbon-polluted soils and related material - even deeply polluted sites that are normally just fenced off and "forgotten" as toxic-waste sites.

Take a look at some of Paul Stamets's talks on your favourite Tube site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I was hoping for pictures, but the company page for the Infinity Burial Suit sells t-shirts! I can't think of a better gift for the Goth in someone's life.

</comment><comment><USER30> I want to be buried in terra preta wearing a mushroom suit.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is beautiful. I can't think of a better way to go. Mushrooms are the best!

</comment><comment><USER32> what is the solution to deal with all of the inorganic/e-waste that are in most people's bodies these days (pacemakers, artificial hips, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER33> page looked white until I blocked scripts on it</comment>


Ask HN: Naming My Startup - <AUTHOR>

I have put myself under a great deal of pressure and mental blocks when trying to come up with a name for my start up. Is the name the first impression or the users first experience using the site? Should the name describe the site functionality or should it evoke an emotional response? <comment><USER2> While there are some generic rules for brandability, majority of naming issues boils down to personal issues founders have with liking or disliking a name. Many startups have funky names until it becomes known. Don't get too caught up on this.

As long as you can get the .com, it easy to spell, relatively short enough, and people can pronounce it, and it isn't trademarked or going to infringe on any such issue, you're more than halfway towards an okay name.

</comment><comment><USER3> I run a naming company, and you might find our methodology and case studies pages useful:

<http://nomvilla.com/methodology>

<http://nomvilla.com/case-studies>

As far as your specific questions go:

1) The name _is_ the first impression when someone sees the site via other media; i.e. a news article, or word-of-mouth, or an email. It _can be_ the first impression when someone visits your site, but the logo and general design of the site can be the immediate first thing. In either case, the name is in the top 5 things a user first notices, and like a horrific site design, a really bad name can turn off some users.

2) The best possible scenario is an emotional company name with a descriptive product name. Apple: human, small, unlike cold, sterile computer companies of the time. iPhone: descriptive and straightforward. iMac: likewise.

If you don't have a separate company and product name, try to pick something that's in the middle. Don't be overly descriptive, but still try to have the name relate to your company, even in a tangential way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Name is important to some extent. Ease of remembering, easy to spell and its association to your service/product/app are all some factors.

Here is how i go about finding names:

* Start with a list of nouns/names that you think your product should be called. Put it in a spreadsheet.

* Use a service like <http://impossibility.org/> to find domain names that are available and related to your list.

* Keep iterating it over a week/10 day period. I am sure you will stumble upon good names.

Don't over try. Use a codeword till you find a good name. Also, ask for opinions from a couple of people.

</comment><comment><USER5> I often use a mind mapping exercise. You start with a word that's central to your product or service and then branch out with words that spring to mind. You'll be surprised by how the associated words in your thought cloud will bring forth great imagery. Additionally, this exercise is great for logo design ideas.

Just be sure whatever you come up with is easy to spell and recall. Also, your name strategy should be 'future oriented'. If you should pivot will your name still work? Think ahead of how your product & services may evolve over time.

</comment><comment><USER6> This article by Rich Barton might be helpful for you to come up with a name for your startup.

[http://hopperanddropper.com/syllables-scrabble-letters- and-p...](http://hopperanddropper.com/syllables-scrabble-letters-and-picking- brand-names/)

But generally, I would agree that you should just spend some time on it, and move on to focus on building your product and getting it out to market fast to validate your assumptions and business model.

</comment><comment><USER7> For us, it was ~5 lunch meetings where one of us wrote down all of the ideas the other had for ~10 minutes, then we switched.

We finally decided that naming the company was too hard and we were just going to go back to our day jobs (I'm exaggerating, but only slightly).

We decided to back-burner it for a day or two, and the next night while I was playing D&D I came up with the name.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think naming he startup is by far not as important as naming your product (except of course if they are identical). It's probably a good idea to choose a name that helps people understand what it does. But I wouldn't stress out about it, getting the actual product ready to ship is the only really important thing. If your naming goes horibly wrong, you can always change it later.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure how important it is overall. Focus more on starting to ship stuff. There are tons of companies with weird names.

<comment><USER10> I'd agree with this. Choose something you're happy with, you might end up only starting a business once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the main thing is if you say it out loud, can people spell it correctly first time with no prompting from you?

If you shout out a few potential names to friends/family - if they start producing random mis-spellings, cross it off your list.

</comment><comment><USER12> Spend some time on this but don't get mired in it.

Two sides:

On the one hand, I spent enormous time dreaming up a name for a business. I then registered it with the county, bought the domain name, and blah blahblah. It never resulted in the first sale.

On the other hand, I spent five years working for a Fortune 500 company which has changed it's name twice, once on "a gentleman's coin toss".

The right name has some value (or Bigco wouldn't have changed it) but as others have said you need to worry more about getting customers first.

Best of luck.</comment>


Curate.me mines the web, emails you most important news - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/03/13/curate-me-mines-twitter-facebook-and-more-to-email-you-news-you-actually-want-to-read/

<comment><USER2> With Summify shutting down - curate.me should fill a pretty significant void.</comment>


Translytical has become synonymous with real-time - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoworld.com/article/3261028/database/translytical-has-become-synonymous-with-real-time.html <comment><AUTHOR> New Jargon never stops to appear. Anyone knows what's the difference between "translytical" and "HTAP"? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_transactional/analytica...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_transactional/analytical_processing_\(HTAP\))</comment>


Kids suing governments about climate. Sometimes they win - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/kids-suing-governments-about-climate-growing-trend/ <comment><AUTHOR> Getting kids involved makes a lot of sense. Current generation of people in their 50's who make regulations and own companies doesn't have that much to lose from havoc coming in 20-30 years.</comment>


Ask HN: Billing and licensing platform for a Chrome extension? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/) that I want to charge for. Can anyone recommend a billing and licensing platform for this? Things I'm looking for:
- I want to avoid having to implement or maintain my own server for handling payment details or license verifications as this seems like a lot of work to do right (is it?).
- I want the flexibility for payments to be subscription based or one-time purchases plus be able to change the prices of these.
- The ability to give out discount codes and affiliation schemes would be a bonus.
- I don't want to have to deal with complicated taxes or accountancy. I'm based in the UK.
The Chrome Web Store comes with its own payment system but then I cannot easily expand the product to work outside of Chrome later. Also, you can't seem to change the price of subscriptions or offer discount codes.
Gumroad looks promising. Would anyone recommend this? They deal with EU taxes for you. When you make a sale, Gumroad give you a license number, the user can enter this into the extension and then a simple REST API call via JavaScript is all that's needed to verify the license is valid so this approach does not require your own server.
I'm aware of other services like Paddle, Chargebee, Stripe and SendOwl but it isn't clear to me how I would implement license checking and if I can avoid having to maintain a server. Or maybe the server implementation could be done in a simple way? <comment><USER2> I haven't used it before, but it sounds like Gumroad is your best choice. Is there any reason you're hesitant to try it?

If you decide to do a server implementation, you might be able to make the billing implementation simpler by using Cheddar's API. You'll be able to issue discount codes, change prices, etc. [https://gtchdr.com/2BvCx45](https://gtchdr.com/2BvCx45)</comment>


A New Yorker's Delightfully Stereotypical Map of America - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/07/a-new-yorkers-delightfully-stereotypical-map-of-america/400142/

<comment><USER2> There's also Saul Steinberg's famous map, "View of the World from 9th Avenue", which appeared on the cover of the New Yorker magazine in 1976:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue)</comment>