House Homeland Security Committee Subpoenas 8chan Owner - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/457454-house-homeland-security-committee-subpoenas-8chan-owner <comment><USER2> I'm a bit confused about House committee subpoenas. It seems like they're really not all that important. Some folks, notably Attorney General William Barr, and ex-White house lawyer Don McGahn. Former White House staffers Hope Hicks and Annie Donaldson (McGahn's aide) were told not to comply by the White House.

But clearly some people do have to comply, otherwise the subpoenas would be invitations, right? I'm confused about who has to comply, and for who a subpoena is optional.

<comment><USER3> Refusal to respond to a subpoena will result in you being found in contempt of Congress. Congress then has several options, ranging from referring you to the DOJ for prosecution to referring the citation to a federal court, effectively converting the subpoena/contempt into contempt of court, or literally imprisoning you in the House basement, which will never happen but it's amusing to note that they technically have that authority.

Subpoenas of administration officials complicate this because the primary vehicle Congress has for enforcing contempt citations is a referral to the DOJ, which is part of the administration; a civil referral is, I think? its own kind of civil suit, which is time-consuming and complicated, and it's likely that the House majority will keep their powder dry on referrals about administration officials until they have a really good case.

But random civilians aren't so fortunate, and can effectively be compelled to testify, and it's likely that Congress would not have much trouble getting their subpoena enforced.

<comment><USER2> > enforcing contempt citations is a referral to the DOJ, which is part of the > administration

Weird, seems like a flaw in the checks-n-balances, a lot like the "American Rule" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_\(attorney%27s_fees\))) for paying attorney's fees.

<comment><USER4> That rule, justified in the wikipedia article, is a double edged sword. It allows me to sue a large corporation without the fear that I'm going to run up a million dollar bill because they insist on the best lawyers. Under a system where I have to pay if I lose, I'm not going to want to sue unless I'm 100% sure I'll win, as opposed to just 51% likely under the american rule. Sure, it sometimes leaves people footing the bill for the defense of frivolous lawsuits but it also enables more people to seek justice.

What it is not is a flaw on checks and balances between the branches of government.

<comment><USER5> > It allows me to sue a large corporation without the fear that I'm going to > run up a million dollar bill because they insist on the best lawyers.

That does not follow. In Germany, for example, the winner is entitled to costs up to the statutory hourly rate. Which is the minimum rate lawyers may bill. If you choose a lawyer that bills twenty times as much, your opponent pays only a twentieth.

<comment><USER6> Out of curiosity, the statutory hourly rate times what? Is there a limit on the number of billable hours that can entail?

The cost of the "best lawyers" doesn't (always/just) mean paying one lawyer an exorbitant amount, it means paying a large team of in-house lawyers, or large legal firm, to spend thousands or tens of thousands of man hours on a case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The House Homeland Security leaders previously asked Watkins to "provide > testimony regarding 8chan's efforts to investigate and mitigate the > proliferation of extremist content"

This seems... fairly self evident? What do they want his testimony for, except a dog and pony show?

<comment><USER8> Did 8chan even have any legal obligations to do what they are asking about?

<comment><USER9> If the content it hosts violates the law, then yes. Granted, 1st Amendment protections extend beyond what I typically find people believe it covers. Illegal content mostly falls under the category of:

1\. Credible, specific, and actionable threats.

2\. Illegal videos & images (CSE, I think revenge porn might fall into that category now).

3\. Recruitment or tangible assistance to terrorist groups.

Even things like broad threats of violence are protected by the 1st Amendment (e.g. calling for killing of groups of people, provided the statements do not amount to specific or actionable threats). See this case as one example of this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio)

<comment><USER8> Great info thank you!

<comment><USER10> In 8chan's case, I believe that Section 230 is mostly what protects them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember reading posts from Watkins on gab.com recently along the lines of the manifesto being posted first to Twitter - If true, I expect that to change things, all else being equal.

<comment><USER12> He claimed it had been posted to Instagram first, Hotwheels contests this and it would have been unlikely considering it was posted to 8chan in a PDF and the user would have had to go through the trouble of compiling images from Instagram into a PDF

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sheesh, the fourth estate (whom Congress ultimately answers to) is really beating the drum around the democratization of media-incited violence. Disruption is a bitter pill to swallow!

The truth of the matter is that these recent senseless acts of violence are better seen as a _scaling down_ of the status quo. Historically, mass media would rile up the entire country against a different whole country, creating an all-out war. This new trend is of isolated groups egging on lone members to directly commit an act of "war" at an intrinsically small scale.

The Iraq War was an act of media-incited senseless violence, with around 60,000 direct deaths. None of its cheerleaders were criminally prosecuted for speaking the untruths used to fuel it. Why are we panicking and abandoning our longstanding value of Free Speech over a comparatively tiny number of casualties from what are better described as ordinary _crimes_? Every single human death is its own tragedy, but wisdom cannot prevail when ignoring a sense of scale.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have two questions; maybe someone more in-the-know on procedure can answer them:

1\. Sounds like this will be done by phone call. Will there be recordings or transcripts made public; is it closed even to reporters?

2\. Is this expected to be mostly technical/fact-finding or emotional/political posturing? Frankly I'm not even sure how the usual Democrat/Republican split looks in this case.

<comment><USER15> > "The bill could create a bipartisan commission of experts tasked with > drawing up recommendations to deal with the "intersection of homeland > security and social media," a committee spokesperson told The Hill."

This is just going to be political theater. Everyone already knows that unmoderated anonymous boards are cesspools of hate, the obvious recommendation is to do moderation. The government can't infringe on free speech, so this is a waste of time. What are you hoping to get out of him?

Only way this turns out to be substantive is if it leads to a push from the Democrats toward a constitutional amendment in regards to hate speech, which I could see happening.

<comment><USER16> > What are you hoping to get out of him?

Sound bites that you can use to get votes. What else?

<comment><USER17> Or, less cynically, a public airing of the various arguments and points of view around this issue?

<comment><USER18> How many people will watch the hearing on C-Span and how many will watch the condensed and heavily editorialized version released by the news source most closely aligned with the preexisting political opinion?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Praying that his phone accidentally goes off mid-finger-wagging. _" Never gonna give you up..."_

</comment><comment><USER20> Doesn't the guy who runs it live in the Philippines? Is the USA playing Team America: World Police or do they have jurisdiction?

<comment><USER21> If you read the article you would know he's currently visiting Reno, NV and is voluntarily going

<comment><USER20> You caught me. But it is bewildering that somebody in his questionable legal circumstances would willingly visit the USA. Most of the other people who run sites like 8chan relocate to obscure regions with no extradition.

<comment><USER22> What "questionable legal circumstances"? He runs a forum, he's not selling drugs and guns on the dark web...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a graph of how this thread trended: [http://hnrankings.info/20709448/](http://hnrankings.info/20709448/) .

<comment><USER23> Would you please stop doing this?

Also, please review [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and don't submit stories like this. Garden-variety politics is dime-a-dozen and off topic here. "Committee issues subpoena" is not a significant story, let alone an intellectually interesting one—even less than "politician introduces bill".

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry 'dang. I'll stop submitting stories like this one.

As for linking the graph of how a thread ranked, I'll stop doing that too. However, could you also please call it out in the guidelines too then? The second last point of _In Comments_ seems like the most appropriate place:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, > and it makes boring reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hopefully the IRS audits him too.

<comment><USER25> This is not a good thing to hope for. We don't weaponize clerical agencies for criminal, civil, or political purposes. It's a very bad idea, and _will_ come back to bite you when the "other side" gets power.

<comment><USER26> Yup. Everyone remembers what happened with the whole IRS/Teaparty thing.</comment></comment></comment>


Nationwide internet outage affects CenturyLink customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/28/nationwide-internet-outage-affects-centurylink-customers.html <comment><AUTHOR> The Portland area got an emergency phone alert that 911 service was down in some areas. (Supposedly, the outage only affected areas around Vancouver, Washington.)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/aa85iv/911_lines_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/aa85iv/911_lines_are_down/)</comment>


Interact.js – drag and drop, resizing and multi-touch gestures - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/taye/interact.js

<comment><USER2> The second example needs some more work.

When you drag no-drop over the yes-drop div it appears on top. If you then drag yes-drop and go back to dragging the no-drop this then appears under the yes-drop div.

Also I don't get what causes the highlight of the drop zones to activate. Percentage of shape? Center of Shape? Personally I prefer that it is the mouse pointer that activates the enter / leave and not the shape itself.

Added: If you drag the yes-drop from the side to enter the drop zones, the outer zone looks like 50 pixels wide and yet the error or margin to drop it in there is about 2 pixels before you enter the inner zone.

<comment><USER3> > When you drag no-drop over the yes-drop div it appears on top. If you then > drag yes-drop and go back to dragging the no-drop this then appears under > the yes-drop div.

This is because before dragging, there's no CSS transform style. After dragging the transformation causes the element to be rendered above its siblings. Then when the other element is transformed it is then rendered above. I've added

      transform: translate(0px, 0px);

to both elements to fix that.

> Also I don't get what causes the highlight of the drop zones to activate. > Percentage of shape? Center of Shape? Personally I prefer that it is the > mouse pointer that activates the enter / leave and not the shape itself.

It's mentioned in the JS code comments

      interact('.dropzone').dropzone({
          // only accept elements matching this CSS selector
          accept: '#yes-drop',
          // Require a 75% element overlap for a drop to be possible
          overlap: 0.75,

You could instead set overlap to "pointer".

> Added: If you drag the yes-drop from the side to enter the drop zones, the > outer zone looks like 50 pixels wide and yet the error or margin to drop it > in there is about 2 pixels before you enter the inner zone.

The deepest dropzone element in the DOM gets drop priority if the element/pointer is over multiple dropzones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's neat but on Android Chrome the areas that accept taps/drags/pinches/etc. consume swipe/drag to scroll events which means you have to create lanes or something on long pages(like the interactjs.io page itself).

<comment><USER5> Yep, saw the same thing. Everything works nicely but on a small screen you can get into situations where you can't scroll the page unless you drag the very edge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The components are usable and the abstractions seems good. Since I discovered famo.us ([http://famo.us](http://famo.us)) earlier this year I have preferred to do use it for javascript UX code to ensure scrolling and animations run smoothly. I would love to have interact.js rewritten as an extensions to famo.us. Famo.us runs smooth, but lacks good examples, tools and extensions.

<comment><USER3> I've never liked famo.us and never bothered to look into it so a rewrite for it won't happen (at least not by me). I'd like to think that if famo.us is any good then something like interact.js should be able to work with it without heavy modification or with a thin layer on top, but maybe I'm thinking too highly of my own work :-P.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks really nice and worked really well in my S5. The one issue I had was with the multi-touch rotation example, you're not able to touch and scroll up with your fingers if you touch in the background. The resizing example isn't as bad but doesn't seem to register the first time you touch+drag either.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Unfortunately I've had only an Android tablet and Firefox OS phone to test the homepage extensively so I'm not surprised that the website has some usability problems on other devices and form factors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On Chrome on Mac the dragging to the left leaves a trail behind, which goes away when finished.

<comment><USER9> Same on Safari, besides the fonts "flash" when animations start/stop.

[http://i.imgur.com/9DCsEZg.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/9DCsEZg.jpg)

Hardware acceleration on browsers is still complicated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first example on [http://interactjs.io/](http://interactjs.io/) is buggy in Windows/Chrome. When I drag, it leaves a trail of the right edge of the object; reminiscent of a crashing Windows 98.

<comment><USER3> That's due to hardware acceleration so really Chrome is buggy. I don't really know what to do about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great stuff. Works great on a desktop except for the two-finger gestures. I'd love to see a zoom and rotate binding to the mouse scroll-wheel.

</comment><comment><USER12> Really interesting - We've just implemented a html5 drag and drop which supports IE all the way back to IE9 but not mobile! This looks great

</comment><comment><USER13> Well done!! The only thing that is missing and that I really need is the grid layout support, but animations are really light and smooth!

<comment><USER3> I think that that sort of thing would better done in a separate library. I've actually been thinking about doing it myself but I haven't had the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is pretty fantastic, and at a bare minimum looks like a nice replacement for jQueryUI's drag-and-drop.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very nice library & code - thanks for making it not require jquery or any other library!

</comment><comment><USER16> The double tap example never resizes on my Chromebook Pixel. The others work nicely.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just tried the demos on my phone (iPhone6) on the way home. Works wonderfully.

</comment><comment><USER18> Typo: "Resize from the bottom and left edges", it means right edge.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for mentioning that. It's fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> At first glance, this seems...really solid. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> My heart sunk a little, before the ellipsis. You're welcome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great job. It seems like a subset of jquery functionality? Is there something that interact.js does that jquery doesn't? Or is it just a size thing...

<comment><USER3> Thank you.

I wouldn't call it a subset and I didn't make it as an alternative to jQuery UI. However, I do have plans to make one ;-). I think that the advantage is in what interact.js _doesn 't_ do. It's more about providing the data that applications need for responding to pointer input however they like - Drag and drop is just one way to use the input data.

I wrote about the ideas behind it on the Mozilla Hacks blog recently: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/11/interact-js-for-drag- and-d...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/11/interact-js-for-drag-and-drop- resizing-and-multi-touch-gestures/)

<comment><USER20> Got it. Really nicely done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Impressive! Great work.

</comment><comment><USER22> pinching and multitouch wont work on my Lenovo Flex 15 notebook..

<comment><USER3> Gah! Thanks for mentioning this. What browser did you try it with?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Please don't put "Show HN" in the title unless you're personally involved with the project.

Anything that anybody posts is technically being shown to HN, so if we didn't have this rule, Show HN would cover everything.

</comment><comment><USER24> Seeing how this isn't a Show HN post, wouldn't it be more prudent to log issues on the Github page rather than in HN comments?

<comment><USER23> The author appears active in the thread, so we needn't worry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Trying let see how it works for me</comment>


.co TLD appears to be down - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone else noticed the .co TLD seems to be having issues? Lots of reports on Twitter today that t.co won't resolve for anyone so all links are broken.  https://twitter.com/support/status/559087122192150528
It appears to be a DNS problem, with no A records being reported when running a simple 'dig t.co'. I personally can't load any .co domains. Someone suggested it may be an AWS -> .co issue: https://twitter.com/maccaw/status/559077778507571201
Anyone else being affected by this? <comment><USER2> Every .co I checked was down at 13:10 PST. I was starting to diagnose when everything returned by 13:20. Los Angeles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, looks like it's slowly coming back for me now too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://isup.me/t.co](http://isup.me/t.co)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thus is the nature of DNS...

<comment><USER4> The nature of DNS is redundancy. _every_ domain must have redundant servers. Most top level domains have multiple servers that can serve results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was wondering why New Relic kept saying my .co had DNS errors...

</comment><comment><USER6> Up for me.</comment>


Ever Wished Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-that-calvin-and-hobbes-creator-bill-watterson-would-return-to-the-comics-page-well-he-just-did/ <comment><USER2> If he returned you'd wonder why he changed. Accept that he left when he wanted to and for the right reasons. You wanting him is not a good inspiration for an artist.

I have all of his books, he was a part of my childhood. I miss his work. He should not come back.

</comment><comment><USER3> The three Watterson-drawn strips:

[https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/04](https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/04)

[https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/05](https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/05)

[https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/06](https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/06)

</comment><comment><USER4> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861295)

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a really good documentary on Bill Watterson called "Dear Mr. Watterson". Until recently it was on Amazon Prime but you can still rent it at: [https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Watterson-Joel-Allen- Schroeder/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Watterson-Joel-Allen- Schroeder/dp/B071228F17/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=watterson&qid=1552512512&s=instant- video&sr=1-1-catcorr)

</comment><comment><USER6> I saw Bill take out the garbage once! Highlight of living in Chagrin Falls, OH.

</comment><comment> forgot-my-pw Bill used to complain about the space limitations of print media. I wish he would embrace the web nowadays.

<comment><USER7> Berkeley Breathed came back with Bloom County and it has been great. One of my favorites is his coloboration. [https://www.berkeleybreathed.com/store/signed- strips/399-cal...](https://www.berkeleybreathed.com/store/signed- strips/399-calvin-county)</comment></comment>


Air travel is going to be very bad, for a very long time - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/james-fallows-flying-will-never-be-same/611413/ <comment><USER2> No matter what the topic, there seems to be no market for writing articles about minor changes or slight adjustments. The world is always ending, there is always an impossible deadline, and the worst possible projection is absolutely the most likely one. This state of affairs is a consequence of the usual culprit: advertising. Society/the media needs to develop a new business model, and fast.

In reality, airlines will probably have a tough year or two, airports will adopt some new health measures, and things will mostly continue as they were before.

<comment><USER3> I think this is overly optimistic. I used to fly regularly and I have no intention of getting on a plane anytime in the next couple years. Maybe we will take a road trip in a year or two, but the idea of getting in a plane is completely out of the question for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER4> I think this is overly pessimistic. I used to fly regularly and I have every intention of getting on a plane soon. I'm booking extra trips so make up for the travel I've not been able to do for the last few months and to make up for missing things in the past.

<comment><USER5> This is completely dependent on how the public health situation develops over the coming months and years.

If the outcome is there needs to be six-foot distancing aboard planes, that's not going to mean a 150-seat plane takes 100 passengers, it's going to mean a 150 seat plane takes 20 passengers. That would mean everyone paying first- class fares.

And if some countries have different infection rates, different rates of testing and tracing, and some less trustworthy reporting of those numbers? If every international flight is subject to a mandatory 2 week quarantine in a hotel, say goodbye to 98% of international business travel and vacations.

On the other hand, if there's 'herd immunity' or a vaccine, things could be largely back to normal. I certainly know a lot of people who've been saving up money and vacation days during the lockdown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I understand this is asked every time, but honestly in the 2 months of Covid19 and 20 years of post-9/11, I still haven't seen an answer that makes sense:

Why are we obsessing over airplane security so much, but completely ignoring ground transportation?

Never mind Metro/Subway/Underground, which we can claim not every city has (I'd still imagine total number of subway passengers daily outweighs airplane passengers or is at least comparable) - what about buses? Trains? Street cars and trams?

Any airplane I've ever flown had better filtering and circulation, more spacing and better hygiene, than any bus I've ever ridden in. Every airport terminal was more spacious than every indoors bus or train terminal. Across countries and continents this ratio has held true.

So why this _obsession_ with airplanes as the vulnerable part of the equation? Is it all just... human inability to calculate risks and our focus on the "flashy"?

I've done 50-75 flights a year over last 10 years; none last 2 months obviously, and I don't foresee any soon; but I'm DEFINITELY not going to take our friendly neighbourhood Toronto subway if I can help it, as much as it's the key to fighting traffic and pollution.

This should be throwing our entire transportation industry into disarray and restart fundamental discussions about urban planning and urban landscaping of the future... and yet I only ever see the airline industry mentioned.

<comment><USER5> Probably because airlines go bankrupt constantly, and are begging the government for cash handouts right now?

Whereas busses and metro systems and roads are often city-owned, and them being given taxpayer cash is just business as usual.

<comment><USER7> Also, all the outbreak games, animations, and simulations show planes flying everywhere spreading disease and not packed subways and buses.

finally, like you said, the airline industry is always living on the edge and in the news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I can't wrap my head around: how is being packed with 100s of people inside of a plane a few times a year seen as more dangerous than being even more packed with even more people in the metro every day during commute? I feel like the risk of getting infected in public transport is undermined comparing to planes/hotels/restaurants.

<comment><USER9> Is anyone packing into metros anymore? I doubt this pandemic will be good for public transit.

<comment><USER10> They will be once things open back up.

In non-car-centric cities there simply isn't any other realistic way to get to work.

<comment><USER11> Bicycles, for many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People are treating the pandemic as over where I am. They are having friends over, booking cruises, ignoring distancing in grocery stores, etc. Plenty of social media chatter about bargain air tickets for August. Carnival is reporting a 200% surge in bookings over August 2019.

[https://www.fastcompany.com/90503385/what-pandemic- carnival-...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90503385/what-pandemic-carnival- cruise-bookings-soar-600-for-august-trips)

You ask them about it and they say that the pandemic is an old person's problem. "if I get corona" guy has lots of friends it seems.

<comment><USER12> Hopefully it won't mutate and this is just overblown: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/new-york- mys...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/new-york-mystery- coronavirus-illness-three-children-die)

<comment><USER13> Mutation is held in check with immunization and herd immunity. We have a bunch of politicians who couldn't pass a highschool biology course acting as contagious diseeases experts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Contrarian opinion. Air travel may actually get better for the first time in decades.

Ever since 9/11, there was a steady decline in comfort of regular passengers. Now airlines actually have to court those few remaining passengers. I fully expect to see of the room to come back ( even if it is with a fee ).

<comment><USER15> I agree with this - fares should increase by 3x at a minimum, more room given to passengers, and way way way more focus on customer service.

While what's going on is terrible, personally I'm much happier that I don't need to get on a flight every couple weeks. We're finally realizing that being in the same room for certain meetings offers little value when compared to the cost of personal and environmental health incurred by a flight.

Remember 3 months ago when everyone was worried about global warming? We really need to take this as a forced opportunity to actually do something about it. We should not return to "normal" because normal was disastrous for the environment.

<comment> bbv-if What you say sounds more like "to hell with those beggars who can barely afford current fees. Air travel should become a luxury as it used to be in the past". Go buy a ticket in business class if you want a better service and leg room. It also goes with that warm "I'm better than the tramps several rows behind" feeling.

<comment><USER16> Flying on planes isn't a right.

If planes are going to be empty anyway, and the ticket prices have to go up anyway, the airlines may as well differentiate themselves with better customer service.

Sheesh. I'm a lefty too but not everything has to be class warfare.

<comment> bbv-if Food isn't a right. Let's produce only organic super healthy food for 3x the price and save the planet from the global warming, pollution and everything. Everyone would win, right?

<comment><USER16> No, that's stupid and does not follow from the above discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really wish as consumers we could just pay the actual cost for air travel, rather than it being hid in smoke through all sorts of subsidies.

<comment><USER18> To "pay the actual cost" you'd need to get rid of subsidies and the financial instruments/overhead that airlines have.

without these things airlines would go out of business even more often than they already do

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article mentions Zoom, but a major change is going to be in on-site sales, contracting, and representation.

Much like commercial office space, companies have just paid all of the fixed costs for remote work, their employees have adapted their home offices.

Before, you were paying a global consulting firm to fly to your office to have an occasional meeting with your employees up to 3 days a week; now you get 5 days a week, no flight or hotel expenses, and 60+% of your employees are happier and more productive.

</comment><comment><USER20> I feel like there's a huge amount of delayed demand. A lot of people I know are pretty desperate to travel as soon as it's safe to do so (without quarantine after each leg).

I don't think demand will take such a huge hit. It just depends on whether the airline industry can ramp up supply again quickly or if it will take a long time.

But I could just be in a bubble of people who still have jobs and I suppose that might all change as the true economic effects settle in

</comment><comment><USER21> I honestly think there are 2 ways this can go. Either very badly, or very nicely.

If the airlines insist on running full planes, then things are going to suck, and its going to take a long time for them to recover. Nobody is going to want to be smashed up against a stranger for seconds, much less hours on end. And if people fear this, no amount of procedures are going to change there minds.

If the airlines decide to continue blocking off the middle seat and _raise prices to compensate_ , then this could wind up making flying much more pleasant.

</comment><comment><USER22> Seems like an obvious time to invest in long distance passenger train infrastructure. Speaking for my self personally I would rather take a longer more comfortable train ride, then a plane ride anyway. Construction of train system would help the economy, emissions go down, less cars on the road. Everyone wins. This is another area the US is behind the rest of the world on.

<comment><USER23> A mile and a half of road/rail takes you a mile and a half. A mile and a half of runway takes you anywhere, including over oceans.

I don't see rail as a particularly viable replacement for air in the US. Intercity Europe for 200-300 miles? Sure; it's great. 2000 miles across the US? No thanks.

<comment><USER24> The majority of flights in the US are relatively short distance. The top ten most popular flights in the US are [1]:

1\. LA to NYC (2800 miles)

2\. SF to LA ( __350 miles __)

3\. NYC to Chicago ( __800 miles __)

4\. LA to Chicago (2000 miles)

5\. Atlanta to Orlando ( __440 miles __)

6\. LA to Las Vegas ( __270 miles __)

7\. LA to Seattle (1100 miles)

8\. Denver to LA (1000 miles)

9\. Atlanta to NYC ( __850 miles __)

10\. Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale ( __640 miles __)

Many of those flights would benefit from a high speed rail connection. Modern high speed trains can travel at around half the speed of passenger planes, and save around 2~ hours traveling to/from the airport, checking in, security checks and boarding. That means the __break even point __in terms of time is around 800~1000 miles. Anything below that and a modern high speed trains are faster than airplanes.

That means that high speed trains are a competitive (and for many, faster) alternative to __8 of the 10 most popular flight routes in the US __. On those lines alone, they can replace ~200K flights __per year __in the US. They are also generally much more comfortable, because space and weight is much cheaper on trains than it is on airplanes.

Another very important consideration here is that we know how to make sustainable train travel; we have no idea how to make sustainable passenger air travel.

[1] [https://www.airfarewatchdog.com/blog/44259160/these-are- the-...](https://www.airfarewatchdog.com/blog/44259160/these-are- the-10-busiest-air-routes-in-the-u-s/)

<comment><USER23> Keep in mind that, because of the hub and spoke route system, that the most popular _flights_ don't match the most common _tickets_. 6 of the top 10 routes touch LAX and 3 are from ATL. I haven't been outside the airport to Los Angeles in over 35 years, but I've been through LAX probably a dozen times since then.

I wouldn't be surprised if more pax buy tickets from NYC to the Miami area (FLL above) than originate in the Atlanta area and fly to Miami area. If that's true, they're not likely to be happy with high-speed rail replacing their NYC3-ATL-FLL travel.

I agree with you on the sustainability point, but it's not at all clear to me that rail is _the_ answer.

<comment><USER24> That's a good point, but airplane transfers are pretty bad in terms of time efficiency. Every transfer adds at least another 1.5~2 hours to your journey, and is very uncomfortable because you need to get out and switch airplanes.

For your example, NYC to Miami, the distance is only around 1200 miles in total. Once you add in the extra time taken to travel by airplane _and_ extra hours to make the transfer, the total time taken for the trip easily reaches 7 hours. And those are not a very comfortable 7 hours, with many stops, a lot of waiting in lines, etc.

A high speed train could make that same trip in 6 hours, and it would be 6 hours you can spend working in relative comfort. I know which option I would _heavily_ prefer.

<comment><USER23> How long until you realistically believe we could have actual track in place allowing a 6-hour city-center to city-center NYC to Miami journey?

I think the answer is "not in the next 50 years".

<comment><USER24> This attitude is very common in the US, and it surprises me. The US has done magnificent things. When did the US become a country that couldn't, rather than a country that could?

Building a rail network of that size is also not unprecedented. China is the same size as the US, and is a country with much fewer financial resources. They started construction on their high-speed rail network in 2006, and now that network covers almost half their country.

Another interesting thing I found, apparently they are now prototyping trains that run at 400 mph [1], which is 75% of the speed of a passenger airplane. I wager we will see trains that are as fast as airplanes long before we see functional sustainable airplanes.

[1] [https://asiatimes.com/2019/05/chinas-600km-h-train-set- for-2...](https://asiatimes.com/2019/05/chinas-600km-h-train-set- for-2020-test-run/)

<comment><USER23> Well, for the NYC to DC corridor, that passes through some of the most built- up areas of the country and someone already owns all of that land. Some of the best land for placing a rail network there already is owned by freight lines and has rail installed.

It's not that hard nor expensive to put 400 miles of new rail across Nebraska. It's quite a bit harder and much, much more expensive to buy all the land needed to put 400 miles of new rail between DC and NYC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You mean it was good at some point?

<comment><USER26> Honestly, pre the current situation, it wasn't bad if you spent the money. Enrolled in whatever priority security and immigration is available, airline clubs, business/first class seating. It's (mostly) unpleasant if you're trying to save money.

And, yes, if you go back a few decades, planes were generally less crowded, there was less security, etc. Though, in some respects, travel is actually more comfortable today if you spend the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If the post-9/11 hysteria is any indication, it will _never_ get better.

<comment><USER28> That's what I don't get. 9/11 caused us to embark on a 20 year war effort.

This is like a 9/11 every other day, but it's over and we should all get back to work to keep the economy going - what?

<comment><USER29> Who would you declare on? Nature for evolving new viruses every few years?

Some people really want to blame China, but it's not as easy to invade a global superpower with a permanent seat on the UN security council, nuclear weapons and super intricate ties to the world's economy as it is to invade a few underdeveloped countries in the middle east with barely any air force.

<comment><USER30> I don't think that comment is a call for war or anything like that.

They are expressing amazement at those saying "it's all fine - lets go back to normal". The "9/11 everyday" is referring to the daily death toll (it's slightly lower now, but the point is well made).

<comment><USER28> Yeah I definitely wasn't calling for war or anything of the sort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I stopped flying about 18 years ago, mostly because I was taking too much business travel but also due to the environmental impacts and general unpleasantness of it all. I've never regretted that decision.

</comment><comment><USER32> Yeah shit's fucked up and stuff.

When will we just start telling people "deal with it" ?

</comment><comment><USER33> The simple answer is, enclosed spaces breathing strangers exhalations are going to be very risky till we hit vaccine / herd immunity.

Will your business insurance cover that?

<comment><USER34> Herd immunity is an illusion.

It would require that around 70% of people had been infected already. Using the USA as example: 70% of 328 million would be 230 million people. At a rate of 20000 new infections a day, as it currently is, it would take approximately 11000 days to reach that. That's 32 years. Let us assume ten times this rate was possible and this would still mean over three years. We do not even know yet if people will stay immune for an extended period of time at all after having gone through the illness.

All this still ignores that even in a country like Germany that dealt pretty well with the situation so far, the death rate is at approximately 4%. 4% of 230 million people means 9.2 million would die.

This also ignored any lasting damages to lungs, heart, nervous system and kidneys as they have been reported.

There will be no herd immunity as long as the disease progresses as it currently does.

<comment><USER10> The low rate of spread is due to lockdowns. Once things start opening back up, herd immunity will happen quickly.

I don't understand the rest of your post. Why does the fact that herd immunity will cause deaths and other health effects mean that it's not going to happen?

(Edit: also, I don't think it's relevant, but FWIW that 4% number is CFR, not IFR. The best estimates of the true death rate are under 1%.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Well, perhaps flying _should_ be unpleasant, given its negative externalities.

</comment><comment><USER36> germaphobery in overdrive...</comment>


Eric Holder says Edward Snowden performed a 'public service' - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/30/politics/axe-files-axelrod-eric-holder/index.html <comment><USER2> It is unbelievable how (self)censored the mainstream media/politics discussion is. Keith Alexander lied to the congress on record, whistleblowers before Snowden were jailed for blowing the whistle and there was absolutely no chance he could reveal/fix any illegal wrongdoing by the government via the official whistleblowers channels. He did not run away and ruin his sweet life for the lulz, there was clearly no other way. Why is this argument not immediately raised every time some clown uses the "he broke the law, he has to face the music" argument?

<comment><USER3> >Why is this argument not immediately raised every time some clown uses the "he broke the law, he has to face the music" argument?

Corporate media outlets exist to disseminate propaganda, not seek consistent, logical answers to important questions. They seek to frame the debate in the context constructed by Wall Street and Washington and redirect anger and angst so that people fight against each other instead of against their masters. That's why "identity politics" has become so resurgent in recent years, as the class divide has sharpened and the middle-class has withered. As long as people are polarized and can be pitted against each other on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sexuality, they aren't united against the oligarchs. Its the same exact strategy used by prison guards to maintain control of the prisons. Pit the blacks against the whites against the hispanics and the prison guards can observe safely from the walls. The guards only face a threat from the prisoners when they are united against those who keep them in bondage.

Snowden represents the greatest threat in that regards. If you support Snowden's actions, you are explicitly acknowledging not only that the law is dog shit, but that Snowden was justified in breaking it because of how incredibly repressive the government is. He represents the ultimate repudiation of the system that runs the entire country and most of the world. The corporate media is the voice of this system.

<comment><USER4> >Corporate media outlets exist to disseminate propaganda, not seek consistent, logical answers to important questions...

Do you honestly believe this? How do you think an article like this gets written? Do you think that there is some secret puppet master that dictated the talking points of this article or that every journalist including the one who wrote this article is in on some huge conspiracy? Are those options really more likely that some journalists simple have different opinions than you?

<comment><USER3> If you hire David Duke to write about race relations you don't have to tell him what to write. You hire David Duke because you know exactly what you are getting.

<comment><USER4> You are really equating every journalist working for a mainstream media company with the former head of the KKK? I'm not sure how I should even respond to crazy allegations like that.

This has been one of the annoying side effects of Snowden. Suddenly one conspiracy theory proved to be true, so now some people think that any conspiracy theory has a chance to be true. Soon we end up with people suggesting that tens of thousands of journalists in American are hand picked by the "masters" solely to "disseminate propaganda".

<comment><USER3> >You are really equating every journalist working for a mainstream media company with the former head of the KKK? I'm not sure how I should even respond to crazy allegations like that.

Perhaps the concept of an analogy is alien to your world, so I'll try to make it simpler for you. If you hire someone whose views are well known to write for you, you have a pretty good idea of knowing what you are going to get without having to offer specific instructions. If you hire Robert Kagan to write a foreign policy column in your newspaper, you don't have to send him a secret message urging him to back an invasion. He already backs every invasion. Understand?

As far as your vapid conjecture about conspiracy theories go, the media is literally littered with writers who have either been directly paid, or who stand to gain (financially and otherwise) for endorsing certain positions. These are not conspiracies, its standard practice.

Whether these media pundits are paid by the White House to endorse their policies:

[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-06-wi...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-06-williams- whitehouse_x.htm)

Or secretly instructing retired military "analysts" on news networks on how to shape the narrative:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html)

And when you don't parrot the party line, they get rid of you, like they did to Phil Donahue when he was critical of the Iraq invasion:

[http://billmoyers.com/2013/03/25/the-day-that-tv-news- died/](http://billmoyers.com/2013/03/25/the-day-that-tv-news-died/)

Or when government officials limit press access to only those reporters who are willing to offer the official narrative:

[http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2013/News-media- pro...](http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2013/News-media-protest- White-House-press-access-limits)

In short, you are delusional or woefully under informed if you don't think that the media narrative is controlled and shaped by the powerful interests that run this country.

<comment><USER5> Good list. Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent has a good presentation on this stuff. Just gotta filter out... maybe do a whole edit for others... all his philosophical stuff to leave just the tactics and evidence of media manipulation. Those are the real gold of the movie.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHa6NflkW3Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHa6NflkW3Y)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a load of BS. He praises him for "raising the debate", but condemns him for "...the way he did it -- was inappropriate and illegal..." then going on to invite him to "Go to trial, try to cut a deal."

The issue has been brought up many times, with no positive change, because there was no massive dump of incredibly embarrassing evidence. All those hoping for some kind of Obama surprise turn around in the unprecedented level of whistleblower prosecution: you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

<comment><USER7> "...the way he did it -- was inappropriate and illegal..."

What the government was doing (and still is) is inappropriate and illegal. Can't Holder understand or accept the fact that this is why Snowden chose the option that he did? Of course, were matters of law are concerned, I'm not sure Holder is a good source - he after all, let the biggest heist in the civilized world go without consequence to those involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find Holder's remarks to be ironic. After Operation Fast and Furious [0], I would be tempted to say there's more blood on Holder's hands than on Snowden's hands.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fast_and_Furious](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fast_and_Furious)

<comment><USER2> This is outrageous. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a confusing remark. He says that both it is a "public service" "but still must pay a penalty." I don't understand what that means, why should one pay a penalty for a public service?

I also think this line "America's interest" is thrown around a lot. Are we talking the interest of Americans? Or interests of the American government? It seems more and more now the two are at odds with each other...

<comment><USER10> 'The state is the name of the coldest of all cold monstrosities. It lies coldly, too; the lie that creeps out of its mouth is this: "I, the state, am the people."' (Nietzsche)

Politics likes to treat the notion of the state as interchangeable with its people, and although I don't think the US is alone in this, it certainly seems to have made an art out of it at times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "I think there has to be a consequence for what he has done.""

I agree with Holder on this. Snowden should get a ticker tape parade, the Congressional Medal of Freedom, and the Nobel Peace Prize.

<comment><USER12> I also agree with this. He should get all that, in addition to a proper trial in court for some of his misconducts, because while I do believe he performed a great public service that sparked a hugely beneficial conversation regarding privacy and government secrecy, he also neglected one of his basic responsibilities as a whistleblower by offloading all the documents he could get his hands on to the press in their original forms without even reading all of them [1], instead of exercising his own discretion and leaking only those documents that he had personally confirmed was of public interest, and performing his own due diligence by redacting any irrelevant sensitive information in those documents to the best of his abilities.

While I can sympathize with the fact that he was probably under a tremendous amount of stress at the time, that probably led to this unfortunate decision, a whistleblower like Snowden simply shouldn't have placed so much blind trust in the media. Letting this slide without _any_ consequences would set a dangerous precedent, regardless of how well the ends justified the means in this case.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/06/edward- snowde...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/06/edward-snowden-john- oliver-last-week-tonight-nsa-leaked-documents)

<comment><USER13> Snowden didn't release documents to "the media", he gave them to two particular journalists (Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras), who did perform due dilligence before releasing documents. This is a well established practice that helps protect against the bias of the leaker from interfering with an objective judgement of what should be redacted.

<comment><USER12> While I still disagree that Snowden's blind trust in those two particular journalists (whom I referred to as "the media", not to discredit these two journalists in particular, but because I was trying make a more general statement) was justified considering the massive scale of his leak and the fact that he was quite literally dealing with matters of national security, I admit that the trade-off between having more objectivity in what gets redacted vs the risk of leaking damaging confidential information of no public interest is an interesting one that I hadn't considered. Do you have any references for why this might be considered an established practice?

<comment><USER6> > he was quite literally dealing with matters of national security

Do you think that Al-Qaeda is a greater threat to national security than a spy agency run amok? Justifying prosecution with such logic... it reminds me of the story about the burglar suing the home owner because he injured himself while illegally on the property.

<comment><USER12> > Do you think that Al-Qaeda is a greater threat to national security than a > spy agency run amok?

Most definitely not. And I'm not sure how you could have gotten that impression if you actually read my posts instead of taking that single statement out of context.

For the record, I applaud Snowden for his revelation of the NSA's overreach. I just happen to also believe that he could have handled the leak in a much more responsible and defensible manner by carefully reviewing each document that he leaked to ensure they were relevant to the case he was making, and redact any non-relevant sensitive information that could be damaging to national security, instead of just dumping thousands of documents that he never read and delegating to the media what should have been his own responsibility as a whistleblower.

He definitely deserves much praise for his bravery and for sparking the resulting conversation about privacy and government overreach, but we shouldn't let that blind us from the potential dangers of the approach he took.

<comment><USER6> I did read your entire post - several actually. So if you were not referring to the slide with Al-Qaeda related operational details (referenced in your John Oliver link), what did he neglect to redact? If that is not the thing you want to see him prosecuted for, can you state it more clearly? I assume you aren't wanting him prosecuted for "the potential dangers of the approach he took", such hypotheticals would be an even more dangerous precedent.

We aren't going to agree though, as I believe that he should have dumped it all - unrestricted public access. Whatever potential good end a kindly king can apply state secrets is far outweighed by the potential abuses (a great imagination isn't required, lots of historical examples exist).

<comment><USER12> > So if you were not referring to the slide with Al-Qaeda related operational > details (referenced in your John Oliver link), what did he neglect to > redact?

The thousands of documents that he didn't even read (or even try to redact) before he handed them off.

> We aren't going to agree though, as I believe that he should have dumped it > all - unrestricted public access.

You're right. We'll have to agree to disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think this is a trial balloon and Holder is acting as a stalking horse for the Obama administration. They're setting up to pardon him if the public approves.

<comment><USER6> More prosecutions under the Espionage Act than every prior administration combined... I don't see a pardon in the cards. Also, a trial balloon wouldn't be Holder calling for a trial - that has been said many times by many politicians for a long time.

<comment><USER15> How many of those were legitimate though? Except for a very small handful of high profile cases, I have absolutely no idea about the rest of them so I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER6> I suppose that depends on how you define "legitimate" in this context. If you mean communist infiltrators, none; if you mean government workers leaking information to journalists, all.

[https://www.propublica.org/special/sealing-loose-lips- charti...](https://www.propublica.org/special/sealing-loose-lips-charting- obamas-crackdown-on-national-security-leaks)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hope Obama does something to resolve both the Snowden situation and get Chelsea Manning out of prison before he leaves office. I can't see what the downside is to him of doing the right thing at this point.

<comment><USER17> Manning isn't the same as Snowden. Lumping them together is a disservice to what Snowden did.

Manning volunteered for the military and gave up some rights as a result. He then distributed data that put lives in danger because he didn't think to clean it up.

Snowden was a private citizen, one who felt his country was not going down the right path. He took time to hatch a plan and release data that he believed wouldn't risk the lives of others.

Snowden deserves a medal not prison.

<comment><USER5> No, Snowden did exactly what Manning did with the data except took the time to read and organize it per several interviews. Despite being able to filter to domestic only, he instead dumped all NSA's secrets (including foreign operations) he had onto _foreign_ journalists. That's risking operators' lives esp if a foreign, intelligence service our human assets target decides to target those media organizations. Given their results on defense contractors and banks, I'd bet on the foreign spooks getting the Snowden files except for where they were airgapped, guarded day & night in person, and only used by long-time vets.

So, operations blown, tactics exposed, and foreigners having our data on foreign operations. Yes, he burned the shit out of U.S. operations on top of his domestic whistleblowing which I applaud. An example of someone who didn't burn us would be Binney who, knowing all kinds of capabilities, just leaked specific programs and data that were unconstitutional and a threat to citizens' rights.

<comment><USER18> >foreign journalists

Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald are American citizens?

<comment><USER5> Guardian and Der Spiegel were what I was thinking about. Greenwald is now in Brazil. Poitras is enemy of U.S. military who previously did exposes on foreign activities and certainly would publish even legit secrets. My comment might need some clarification but it's still accurate. More so after Greenwald's stunt of running with the stuff to Brazil to start his own publication.

<comment><USER19> >Poitras is enemy of U.S. military

Poitras is pretty clearly not a fan of the US military, but I don't think she's been declared an "enemy combatant". Calling her an "enemy" of the military is disingenuous. The US military does plenty of horrific and inexcusable things, and criticizing those who commit clear war crimes does not make someone an "enemy".

<comment><USER5> What are you even talking about? I said she's an enemy of the U.S. military. That encompasses many things she can do to disrupt U.S. military. One is leak its classified secrets about operational capabilities _in use against legit opponents_. All of them were fine with doing that. Over and over. Definitely an enemy combatant on cyber side or Espionage Act contender otherwise. I don't mean technical interpretations of it either: straight-up describing targets, tools, and techniques to our enemies. That's exactly the kind of thing it was conceived for.

Yeah, she's an enemy of the U.S. military for sure. If you need balance, she's not the person to trust for review and reveal. On other hand, if it's domestic stuff... the actual whistleblowing... she's one of best people to handle it because she won't shut up. Just got to do some redactions before turning it over to reduce damage. She and Greenwald did the one's I'd have been concerned about on domestic leaks, mainly protecting the workers. So, that wasn't a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The thing is that he should be rewarded for the public service, not punished.

</comment><comment><USER21> What a bunch of hypocrites! Meanwhile some of the people who sent us to Iraq are getting medals. Disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER22> Sometimes I wonder if keeping the Snowden hero/traitor debate in the media is some kind of psyop to keep us from actually talking about the stuff that he revealed.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm wondering if they're getting ready to pardon him, perhaps with a provision like spending 10 years under house arrest or losing his citizenship. I don't think this could happen under Clinton but Obama might issue a last minute pardon as they tend to do when they leave office. Failing that it is possible Trump might do it as a sign of pragmaticism. He's the only one who could sell it to his supporters, the same might be true of Obama for his people.

Now that time has passed both factions agree it was all inevitable, case of when and not if. That leaves Snowden hanging there as an awkward reminder.

<comment><USER24> > Failing that it is possible Trump might do it as a sign of pragmaticism. > He's the only one who could sell it to his supporters, the same might be > true of Obama for his people.

Donald Trump would literally hang Snowden:

 _"I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he's a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country — you know what we used to do to traitors, right?" Trump said, Politico reported._

<comment><USER25> Donald Trump says a lot of things on which he doesn't follow through.

<comment><USER24> I'm sure that's reassuring to those who he's promised to kill.. It wasn't a one-off comment though, he reiterated his Snowden beliefs a few months ago:

 _"When you just asked the question about Snowden, I will tell you right from the beginning, I said he was a spy and we should get him back," Trump said. "And if Russia respected our country, they would have sent him back immediately, but he was a spy. It didn 't take me a long time to figure that one out."_

Trump thinks he's a Russian spy who should be hanged for treason.

<comment> o0-0o You think he's not a spy?

<comment><USER26> Serious question. Why do you think he is one? What that he's done is in anyway consistent with the work of a spy?

<comment><USER27> If you look up Snowden's history, you'll see that before he was working for Booz Allen Hamilton, he was a CIA asset. He was literally a spy before going into the private sector.

So, if you're a CIA asset, and then you leak NSA data from the private sector, are you still a CIA asset, or are you a defector and "former spy"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Snowden is a Hero. And there are few of those around.

</comment><comment><USER29> The timing of this statement from Holder is convenient, considering the VICE HBO special that aired last night about Snowden.

</comment><comment><USER30> Holder attempts to both have cake, and eat it.</comment>


Small horned dinosaur from China, a Triceratops relative, walked on two feet - <AUTHOR> https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/small-horned-dinosaur-china-triceratops-relative-walked-two-feet-penn-paleontologists-find <comment><USER2> Kids these days get to grow up with much cooler dinosaurs. They've found like eight sauropods larger than the brontosaurus since I was a kid in the 90's. And now brontosaurus isn't even a species, they changed it to a genus!

<comment><USER3> No, brontosaurus turned out to be an incorrectly assembled/restored partial skeleton with incorrect skulls substituted when unavailable, including bones from two different animals (apatosaurus and diplodocus or brachiosaurus), to depict a single animal. This naming fiasco happened starting around 1969 and validity opinions became widely held toward the end of the 1980's.

That's why Jurassic Park went with brachiosaurus as the lead sauropod. Brontosaurus, for a period of time, was viewed as incorrect and the product of archeological errors.

Since then, naming conventions have re-adopted brontosaurus as a subtype of apatosaurus to alleviate some of the confusion as to whether brontosaurus is a valid dinosaur name. As of 2015, opinions have solidified with deeper context and better data. It's sort of like the rebellion against whether Pluto is the ninth planet or not. So many people just _like_ the name, brontosaurus, that there's been a consensus to squeeze it back into a usable, valid place that doesn't leave the world confused and dismayed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad with articles like this and others recently[1], academia is finally taking the possibility of lizardmen seriously.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19707426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19707426)

<comment><USER5> And one day, we may encounter them as dramatized in Star Trek [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That is extremely cool and they look extremely grumpy from that photo.

</comment><comment><USER7> For anyone interested in anatomically accurate depictions of dinosaurs, head over to Dr Mark Witton's blog. He is a palaeontological researcher AND paleoartist.

[https://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/](https://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks bizarre at first, but then you start to see the similarities to a bird.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, add feathers and it'll almost look like a chicken. The question is if that's just the illustrator's bias, or if they actually did look like that.

<comment><USER10> Many dinosaurs had feathers, can it be ruled out for this critter?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I reading too much into the picture? the thing has a "Red" head... just a coincidental color or yet another bit of Chinese propaganda?

<comment><USER12> You are reading too much into the picture.

<comment><USER11> ok fair enough.</comment></comment></comment>


Centralise Your Bash History - <AUTHOR> https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/02/05/centralise-your-bash-history/ <comment><USER2> I need help to improve this service - if you can help let me know.

<comment><USER3> I do not know if it helps but I created a small framework to build and maintain Bash scripts, and load/save them on Github. It is horribly undocumentaed, but it is a life saver for me. Cf [https://github.com/lolive/shinyshell](https://github.com/lolive/shinyshell)

I have no clue if it can help for your project, but feel free to fork it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Domaining Profitable? - <AUTHOR>

There was a post on like 3 days ago that talked about genereaating domains that look like english to find good domains to buy. I know people have made money from domaining in the past but is the market 'closed' now or is there still oportunity?<p>Also how do people make money from just having domains? and how do people know what domains are good to buy? <comment><USER2> It is obvious that the gold rush days are over, in those days someone could purchase a domain name and flip it for millions. For example back then we bought Orlando.com from a guy for a few million and that was pretty much just for the domain name.

There is still money to be made in picking up domain names and turning them over, just not that kind of money anymore, but it is kind of a gray business market; there are some sleazy people and there are some legitimate people.

What is a better business and far more profitable, is to pick up a domain name, build a quick site / app around it with some admin screens and then flip it for a few 10-50k. The nice part is, generally you get a recurring support contract with it on top of the lump sum.

<comment><USER3> Where are you finding a buyer willing to part with that money with a quick site and no consistent revenue? I'm not "calling you out", it's just rare in my experience and I'd love to know.

<comment><USER2> [http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/275/how-to-buy-a- websit...](http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/275/how-to-buy-a-website-and- flip-it-for-profit/)

The above article will give you a deeper understanding of web site flipping and save me a few keystrokes.

As for the buyers, they generally are business or marketing guys who have no technical skill but want to get into an online market segment. We see them here all the time. The ones that post the I have a dream posts asking for a technical person that will build their dream. If it is a good idea for a web site / web app it is a turn key deal for them which is less risk than having something developed.</comment></comment></comment>


Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 6 - <AUTHOR> http://flax.ie/flax-html5-game-engine-development-diary-part-6/

<comment><USER2> I approve. That is, not understanding what there is to approve. But I totally do.</comment>


Parsoid in PHP, or There and Back Again - <AUTHOR> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/189/parsoid_in_php_or_there_and_back_again/ <comment><USER2> Reintegrating the parser into Mediawiki's PHP core goes beyond performance. Many prominent MW features -- particularly the visual editor, translation functions, and mobile endpoints -- depend heavily on Parsoid/JS, which required running it as a Node.js microservice, something not all smaller (or especially shared-hosting wikis) could manage for quite some time.

Bringing Parsoid closer to core makes it easier for non-Wikimedia admins to use more of MW's modern core features. The performance gains are a nice bonus, and I suspect are related to the general improvements into PHP 7.2.

<comment><USER3> Performance gains of "Parsoid/PHP ... roughly twice as fast on most requests as the original version" are bit more than a casual bonus and into territory of pretty dang awesome in my book.

<comment><USER2> I totally agree, but on wikis of a smaller scale it's not a difference of performance, it's potentially being able to use some of these MW components for the first time. It could be 10x faster than Parsoid/JS and that's irrelevant compared to being _possible_ on a service that won't let you run Parsoid/JS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > We will (re)examine some of the reasons behind this architectural choice in > a future blog post, but the loose coupling of Parsoid and the MediaWiki core > allowed rapid iteration in what was originally a highly experimental effort > to support visual editing.

I'd really like to read that. The decision to have this parser as a completely separate component is the main reason why a lot of local MediaWiki installations completely avoided having a visual editor -- which in turn probably created lots of missing hours and/or missing documentation because WikiCreole ain't exactly a thing of beauty or something that's used in other places (as opposed to Markdown, which is an ugly beast, too, but at least the ugly beast you know).

You need a heavy JS frontend for a visual editor anyway, so why not do it client-side?

Having to deploy a separate component, probably in an environment that's not used at all is pretty much the worst choice possible. Yes, I'm aware, you readers here probably do all kinds of hip docker/keights setups where yet another node microservice ain't nothing special (and should've been rewritten in Rust, of course), but a wiki is something on a different level of ubiquity.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm on the team. Part 2 of this post series should have lots of interesting technical details for y'all; be patient, I'm still writing it.

But to whet your appetite: we used [https://github.com/cscott/js2php](https://github.com/cscott/js2php) to generate a "crappy first draft" of the PHP code for our JS source. Not going for correctness, instead trying to match code style and syntax changes so that we could more easily review git diffs from the crappy first draft to the "working" version, and concentrate attention on the important bits, not the boring syntax-change-y parts.

The original legacy Mediawiki parser used a big pile of regexps and had all sorts of corner cases caused by the particular order in which the regexps were applied, etc.

Parsoid uses a PEG tokenizer, written with pegjs (we wrote a PHP backend to pegjs for this project). There are still a bunch of regexps scattered throughout the code, because they are still very useful for text processing and a valuable feature of both JavaScript and PHP as programming languages, but they are not the primary parsing mechanism. Translating the regexps was actually one of the more difficult parts, because there are some subtle differences between JS and PHP regexps.

We made a deliberate choice to switch from JS-style loose typing to strict typing in the PHP port. Whatever you may consider the long term merits are for maintainability, programming-in-the-large, etc, they were _extremely useful_ for the porting project itself, since they caught a bunch of non-obvious problems where the types of things were slightly different in PHP and JS. JS used anonymous objects all over the place; we used PHP associative arrays for many of these places, but found it very worthwhile to take the time to create proper typed classes during the translation where possible; it really helped clarify the interfaces and, again, catch a lot of subtle impedance mismatches during the port.

We tried to narrow scope by not converting _every_ loose interface or anonymous object to a type -- we actually converted as many things as possible to proper JS classes in the "pregame" before the port, but the important thing was to get the port done and complete as quickly as possible. We'll be continuing to tighten the type system -- as much for code documentation as anything else -- as we address code debt moving forward.

AMA, although I don't check hacker news frequently so I can't promise to reply.

<comment><USER6> One question: did you investigate why the PHP version was so much faster than the JS one ? Do you think the performance gains of the PHP versions could be achieved in JS, or do you use any special feature of the PHP interpreter ?

<comment><USER7> No, we haven't investigated it yet since we haven't had the time to do it. But, we've filed a task for maybe someone to look at it ( [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T241968](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T241968) ), but our hunch is that it would be be incorrect to conclude that PHP is faster from JS.

<comment><USER5> A slightly longer answer is that we looked into a number of possible reasons and it's not clear there's an easy answer. Lots of differences between the two setups, and every time we come up with an possible answer like "oh, it's the reduced network API latency" we come up with a counter like "but html2wt is also faster and it does barely any network requests". Casual investigation raises more questions than answers. So we've looked into it but don't yet have an answer that we fully believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why? The editor needs a frontend in javascript anyways, so why mot handle this all in real time on the client?

Now they rewrote in PHP, thats probably one of the worst languages out there, and why not rewrite in something compiled if speed was the main reason for a rewrite?

For me PHP sits in the middle as a poor language, and still slow compared to any compiled languages. Also i would want to see some wasm vs php benchmarks they did before starting with php.

Lots of poor decisions from the wiki team.

<comment><USER9> Lots of assumptions from you. "PHP bad, PHP slow, everyone has fast client." Did you assume it was 2010?

<comment><USER8> Well, actually i made zero assumptions. Theres tonnes of markdown editors that work in the browser in real time. I assume the wiki syntax is not that much "heavier" to work with, if it is its another lol for the wiki team.

And by PHP i mean if this rewrite is done partly because of speed, why not build the parser in a compiled language? Its just silly that you have to work with PHP as its one of the worst languages out there in terms of dx and features.

I assume its 2020 where clients are "fast enough" to handle a syntax transformation like markdown -> HTML

<comment><USER9> "For me PHP sits in the middle as a poor language, and still slow compared to any compiled languages." No assumptions whatsoever.

2020: mobile clients. Yes, they're where the rest of the web was in 2005. Yes, they're ubiquitous.

<comment><USER8> I cant believe users on legacy phones (phones from say 2010-ish era) would be writing new content on wikipedia actively. I dont care if you have the newest iphone, you still dont write anything, you just read. For those 0.00001% of users who actually create new content they most def are not using a phone to do this.

> "For me PHP sits in the middle as a poor language, and still slow compared > to any compiled languages." No assumptions whatsoever.

Its not an assumption. PHP is slower than a compiled langauge. simple and easy. Need speed? Dont do it in a compiled language. Period.

<comment><USER10> Not exactly accurate regarding mobile editing. Edits on mobile-heavy wikis are up 18% YoY, which we attribute to improvements in the mobile editing interface. We have people who edit on T9 interfaces. Not many, but they exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Parsoid/JS had very few unit tests focused on specific subsections of code. With only integration tests we would find it difficult to test anything but a complete and finished port.

I found this a little frightening given Parsoid/JS is handling user input.

<comment><USER5> There are thousands of integration tests. The "correct" output of the parser is well-known for a given input, and those test cases have been accumulating for over a decade. But the internal structure of the parser is much more fluid, and so it wasn't (historically) thought worthwhile to try to write tests against that shifting target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Last time i tried getting mediawiki up and running as a personal wiki i found out that getting parsoid working was quite a mess. hopefully now it will be easier to get a fully fledged wikimedia installation, together with a visual editor.

<comment><USER5> Yes. We're not there yet, but that's the goal!

<comment><USER12> awesome! keep rocking!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would assume that the code is open source?

For some reason, I did not manage to find it. Neither linked from this article, nor via the MediaWiki page:

[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid)

Nor via the Phabricator page:

[https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/487/](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/487/)

What am I missing?

<comment><USER14> > What am I missing?

Google fu.

parsoid source code => [https://github.com/wikimedia/parsoid](https://github.com/wikimedia/parsoid)

<comment><USER13> Woops .. so they use Phabricator for issue management and GitHub to host the code?

<comment><USER14> The GitHub repo is a mirror. It has links to more documentation on how the development process works.

<comment><USER13> I saw that. But why not have the code on Phabricator?

<comment><USER15> Here it is on Phabricator: [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/GPAR/](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/GPAR/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Years ago I wrote the re-wrote wiki parser for Dokuwiki (which is used at [https://wiki.php.net/](https://wiki.php.net/) among other places). Originally the parser was scanning a wiki page multiple times using various regular expressions. I used a stack machine as a way to manage the regular expressions, which resulted in being able to parse a page in a single pass - it's documented here - [https://www.dokuwiki.org/devel:parser](https://www.dokuwiki.org/devel:parser)

A nice (unexpected) side effect is it became much easier for people extend the parser which their own syntax, leading to an explosion of plugins ( [https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugins?plugintype=1#extension__tab...](https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugins?plugintype=1#extension__table) )

I'm no expert on parsing theory but I have the impression that applying standard approaches to parsing source code; building syntax trees, attempting to express it with context free grammar etc. is the wrong approach for parsing wiki markup because it's context-sensitive. There's some discussion of the problem here [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec#Feasibility_study](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec#Feasibility_study)

Another challenge for wiki markup, from a usability perspective, if a user get's part of the syntax of a page "wrong", you need to show them the end result so they can fix the problem, rather than have the entire page "fail" with a syntax error.

From looking at many wiki parsers before re-writing the Dokuwiki parser, what _tends_ to be the case, when people try to apply context-free grammars or build syntax trees is they reach 80% then stumble at the remain 20% of edge cases of how wiki markup is actually used in the wild.

Instead of building an object graph, the Dokuwiki parser produces a simple flat array representing the source page ( [https://www.dokuwiki.org/devel:parser#token_conversion](https://www.dokuwiki.org/devel:parser#token_conversion) ) which I'd argue makes is simpler write code for rendering output (hence lots of plugins) as well as being more robust at handling "bad" wiki markup it might encounter in the wild - less chance of some kind of infinite recursion or similar.

Ultimately it's similar discussion to the SAX vs. DOM discussions people used to have around XML parsing ( [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6828703/what-is-the- diff...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6828703/what-is-the-difference- between-sax-and-dom) ). From a glance at the Parsiod source they seem to be taking a DOM-like approach - I wish them luck with that - my experience was this will probably lead to a great deal more complexity, especially when it comes to edge cases.

<comment><USER5> It appears that you were probably describing the lexer pass in your description of docuwiki. Indeed tokenization is a very hard problem for wikitext. We use a pegjs grammar for it, but it contains less of lookahead/special conditions/novel extensions, etc. It's hard. Wikitext is messy precisely because it was intentionally designed to be easy and forgiving to write.

Seems like we've learned many of the same lessons building our parsers. Markup parsers do seem to be a unique thing, not really like parsing either programming languages or natural languages. If we every meet I'm sure we could happily share a beverage of your choice trading stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anybody else feeling that strict typing and long var names are not worth all the visual overload?

Example: [https://github.com/wikimedia/parsoid/blob/master/src/Parsoid...](https://github.com/wikimedia/parsoid/blob/master/src/Parsoid.php#L235)

This is how I would write the function definition:

        function html2wikitext($config, $html, $options = [], $data = null)

This how Wikimedia did it:

        public function html2wikitext(
            PageConfig $pageConfig, string $html, array $options = [],
            ?SelserData $selserData = null
        ): string

I see this "strictness over readability" on the rise in many places and I think it is a net negative.

Not totally sure, but this seems to be the old JS function definition:

[https://github.com/abbradar/parsoid/blob/master/lib/parse.js...](https://github.com/abbradar/parsoid/blob/master/lib/parse.js#L70)

A bit cryptic and it suffers from the typical promise / async / callback / nesting horror so common in the Javascript world:

        _html2wt = Promise.async(function *(obj, env, html, pb)

<comment><USER17> Your first function definition leans HEAVILY on implicit knowledge - what does $config mean? What does $html mean? What are valid properties of $config and $data?

This is fine in smaller codebases, 'your' code, and code that you can read to a point where you can extrapolate these variables from the implementation, but this simply does not scale beyond a certain code size - or more importantly, a certain amount of contributors.

It can be compensated with documentation (phpDoc), but that is just as verbose if not moreso than adding type information - although you should probably do both.

Type systems come into place where you are not expected anymore to fully comprehend the code. They are useful when you are just a consumer / user of this function and all you want to do is convert some html to wiki text without having to understand the internals of that particular function (and whatever else goes on beyond it). Types are documentation, prevent shooting yourself in the foot, reduce trial-and-error, and avoid the user having to read and comprehend hundreds - thousands of lines of code.

<comment><USER18> Why would you add a docblock on top of your already typed functions? Maybe just description would be cool but phpdoc with all the duplicated parameter definitions? I think it's unnecessary but would love to hear other perspectives.

<comment><USER19> You can add e.g. descriptions to your params if needed. Also phpdoc understands types like string[] for arrays and union types like (int|string) for untyped params.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm actually curious why PHP was chosen instead of Rust or Go given that the parsing team wasn't familiar with the language. I understand that MediaWiki is written in PHP, but it sounds like they were already comfortable with language heterogeny.

They claim,

> The two wikitext engines were different in terms of implementation language, > fundamental architecture, and modeling of wikitext semantics (how they > represented the "meaning" of wikitext). These differences impacted > development of new features as well as the conversation around the evolution > of wikitext and templating in our projects. While the differences in > implementation language and architecture were the most obvious and talked- > about issues, this last concern -- platform evolution -- is no less > important, and has motivated the careful and deliberate way we have > approached integration of the two engines.

Which is I suppose a compelling reason for a rewrite if you're understaffed.

I'd still be interested in writing it in Rust and then writing PHP bindings. There's even a possibility of running a WASM engine in the browser and skipping the roundtrip for evaluation.

<comment><USER21> > Parsoid/PHP also brings us one step closer to integrating Parsoid and other > MediaWiki wikitext-handling code into a single system, which will be easier > to maintain and extend.

I assume that Wikimedia works on a rather tight budget. Choosing (and unifying on) tech stacks with a larger supply in devs seems to be an economically reasonable choice.

<comment><USER22> [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries)

<comment><USER23> Huh. What ED of Wikimedia Foundation even does?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The History of Python: Adding Support for User-defined Classes - <AUTHOR> http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/02/adding-support-for-user-defined-classes.html <comment><USER2> Interesting that Guido didn't want to have an explicit "self" variable initially. Turned out to be a good idea in retrospect, in terms of clarity. When I head back to C/C++ code, I often find myself adding "this->" all over the place out of habit.</comment>


Steve Jobs had a net negative effect on computing - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1124436013365862402 <comment><USER2> Why do people always quote the highest price Apple product as if Apple doesn't have any computer that costs less than $3000?

There is the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air.

It's just like people quote the price of a maxed out iPhone XS Max as if the iPhone 7 doesn't exist.

But not everyone wants to be a developer any more than everyone wants to be a car mechanic, plumber, electrician, etc.

Did Ford have a negative effect on transportation because it was much easier to "fuel" a horse than a car?

</comment><comment><USER3> If I'd never heard of Steve Jobs and NeXT, NeXTSTEP or how much it influenced everything from Berners-Lee's ideas about the WWW, object-oriented programming or a dozen other things, um, still no.

I learned to program on an Apple II. OSX's embrace of UNIX got me out of the Windows world, etc.

So I strongly disagree.

</comment><comment> ga-vu He did. I've always said Microsoft was the most important company of the 20th century.</comment>


Ask HN: Continue with on-site after accepting offer from a different company? - <AUTHOR>

I've been interviewing with two companies simultaneously; both are great places to work with interesting technologies.
Company A has made its offer to me and has given me an expiration of 5 days on the offer. It's a great offer and I have negotiated it well. I am planning to accept it before the deadline ends.
Company B has scheduled an on-site where they will be flying me out to visit their offices. The scheduled on-site is AFTER the expiration for Company A's offer (just 2 days after).
My initial reaction is to cancel the interview since I have already accepted the offer and can't imagine an offer from Company B that could possibly top Company A's offer. Simply put; Company A is located in a very exciting place while Company B is a little bit remote. I may get slightly higher pay at Company B, but living in Company A's area is much more exciting and enticing to me.
A friend suggested continuing with the on-site since all the arrangements have been made and paid for and to use it as a learning experience/networking opportunity. I agree that visiting their offices would be valuable for me to learn some of the technology their working on as it is pretty darn interesting.
Should I go ahead with the on-site with the intention of learning and networking, knowing that I will probably not be considering their offer (if they choose to make it)? <comment><USER2> No. Don't waste their time, energy, and money to "network" if you have no intention of taking their offer (if they even make one at all).

Arrangements "made and paid for" can be reused, it's not like they're going to waste it if you don't go.

Also if company B competes with company A /at all/ and you go out there on their dime to "learn some of the technology" and they find out you had already accepted an offer from the other company before you even went out there, you'll probably wind up with networking experience that would be better for you not to have.</comment>


Efficient Rotary Engine Lands Million-Dollar Darpa Contract - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a15233/liquidpiston-darpa-contract/

<comment><USER2> Did they fix the reliability and oil consumption for Rotary? The rx8 ate a lot of oil cause the oil lubricating it evaporates. Also the Rx7 rubber hoses tends to wear down over time.

While the rotary did won Le Man 24 hr endurance race, it is still plagues with problem. These problems isn't because Pistons are better but because Pistons had tons of time refining it. Rotary so far have been neglected and it seems like EV/battery technology will be the future while hybrid is just an intermediate step between oil and electric.

Another interesting engine that GM tried was Turbine, jet engine for cars. It sound like a vacuum cleaner.

<comment><USER3> Mazda rotary engines are designed with oil injection to lubricate the seals - they are designed to consume oil.

Rotaries, properly cared for, are a reliable engine with fantastic power delivery and small size. It's a shame they are plagued with high fuel consumption which limits their usefulness in anything but sports and racing applications.

If you read the article this is not a conventional wankel rotary - the rotor design looks like a wankel housing, so it's flipped around.

<comment><USER4> Reputedly, if you own an RX-7 or RX-8, you should spin the engine up to 9k revs at least once every trip... lest carbon deposits build up and wreak havoc.

I can't imagine a technology like this is that well suited to constant and relatively low power delivery.

<comment><USER5> Not entirely accurate. The 5th and 6th ports don't open up until 3800 and ideally you want to slightly redline it for a few seconds, but you definitely want to at least open up those ports. You can also get away with not doing it for a while, but you shouldn't.

on a pre-89 that (factory) redline is at 7k, 8k on 89-. RX8s you have to hit 9k.

This does make it hard not to speed in an RX7, especially if you've done a little bit of work to it - not so much in the RX8.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know the intent for this engine isn't for road-legal cars, but...

This runs on Diesel, and advertises a low-temperature exhaust; can someone who knows more tell me if diesel's need hot exhaust for emissions reduction? I know that they tend to use EGR for NOx, but every car with a diesel I've seen still has a catalytic converter to do _something_.

</comment><comment><USER7> The benefit and trouble with rotary engines is their reliability -- fewer moving parts means they'll generally fail less during their life cycle, and running them under higher loads / higher output, within their specifications, will generally not reduce the life expectancy (as in, run a 100HP rotary continually at 30 or 100, nearly the same running life).

But they will have a shorter overall lifespan. That large moving inner chamber and the outer chamber walls around it will wear down, and when they fail you replace a significant amount of that combustion chamber (or just junk the entire motor).

It's a neat application of the technology, and particularly in contexts where either the motor is going to run for long periods at a specific speed or not be used all the time, it could make a great option for power generation.

<comment><USER5> 2nd Generation Turbo RX7 owner here. Rebuilt 13B engines before.

The reliability of the engine itself is way misunderstood. They aren't more or less reliable than any other engine (okay, they're way more reliable than Subaru engines...).

The problems are with heat and lubrication. The early RX8s had a flawed design. 2nd and 3rd Gen RX7s had problems with their OMPs and terrible electrical problems. 2nd gens have really weak alternators stock. Turbos usually fail before engines do.

Honestly the engine itself is awesome. Yes, if you lose a seal it will screw your engine (but usually the housings & rotors are salvageable). Piston engines throw rods and screw your whole car. If you bypass the OMP and run premix and actually do proper maintenance on your car, they will last. My 10AE has over 110k miles on it and has not blown up yet -- probably has another another 40k on it before it'll be ready for a rebuild. I still am on the stock OMP (it's an S4).

<comment><USER8> _My 10AE has over 110k miles on it and has not blown up yet -- probably has another another 40k on it before it 'll be ready for a rebuild._

That's really low. I don't think I've ever bought a car with only 110k miles on it...

<comment><USER9> in canada it is unusual to see cars with more than 300,000 km on them, so a vehicle with 176,000 km is more than half way to being really well used, not "really low" mileage.

I had a toyota land cruiser with 365,000km on rebuilt engine and 800,000 km on the body though.

Where do you live that 110k miles is low mileage? How many miles is a lot to you? How/why are people driving that much?

<comment><USER10> > in canada it is unusual to see cars with more than 300,000 km on them

That's largely because of the need to salt roads in the canadian winters - yearly, excessive exposure to salt water drastically limits the possible lifetime of a car. The further away from cold weather requiring salted roadways you get, the longer cars last.

<comment><USER9> So in developed countries that don't have icy winter roads most people are driving cars with more than 300,000 km on them?

I'm really curious where the parent lives that people are investing so much in the longevity of a vehicle. By the time they get to 300,000 km even if they aren't rusty they are usually 20 years old and things like drivetrain start to go and the vehicle is not worth the cost to keep up the required maintenance.

<comment><USER11> I can attest that this is not unheard of in southern california. 1995 cars are driving all over the place. Cars seem to have a lifecycle where they get sold to poorer owners with more and more miles piling on, and only get junked when they are beyond repair. Even a 150-200k miles car is worthy of selling on craigslist (for super cheap of course, but there are plenty of buyers).

Now to be fair, SoCal has a rather unique and essential car culture, so this is probably an outlier as far as "most" cities go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From Another Article: The compact design of LiquidPiston's lab engine currently tips the scales at 80 lbs for the 40-hp model. It would weigh less than 50 lbs in production, the company claims, far less than a comparable 40-hp diesel that would tip the scale at around 400 lbs. [1]

How on earth do you get a 400lb diesel engine that ONLY produces 40HP. First, when comparing engines for power production, you should really talk about kW production capability, not HP. Engine's HP is only half the story, you also have to talk about it's torque.

I know rotary engines are a cool technology, but something about this smells like BS.

[1][http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a8174/liquidpistons- hyp...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a8174/liquidpistons-hyper- efficient-engine-turning-the-rotary-inside-out-13817971/)

Edit: citation added

<comment><USER13> If they're talking about a generator that's expected to run at its peak power all the time, then I'd expect it to be heavier than an automotive engine that only hits peak power intermittently.

and 40 hp is 29.8kW. they're both measures of power. you don't need to know the torque to make the conversion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The efficiency is mentioned, but I don't see any numbers telling how efficient it is, which is what I really wanted to hear. (Just numbers about how small it is.)

<comment><USER15> _The cycle, which combines high compression ratio (CR), constant-volume (isochoric) combustion, and overexpansion, has a theoretical efficiency of 75% using air-standard assumptions and first-law analysis. This innovative rotary engine architecture shows a potential indicated efficiency of 60% and brake efficiency of >50%._

From [http://liquidpiston.com/technology/technical- papers/](http://liquidpiston.com/technology/technical-papers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a version of a Wankel Engine, right?

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

Originally invented and patented way back in 1929.

<comment><USER17> Not a Wankel:

[http://pop.h-cdn.co/assets/cm/15/05/54caf9230d439_-_liquidpi...](http://pop.h-cdn.co/assets/cm/15/05/54caf9230d439_-_liquidpiston-02-1012-de.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A better chance at Darpa than selling it to the doofuses at the big motor companies, where it would certainly be shelved.</comment>