Teaching Square Roots to a Five Year Old - <AUTHOR> http://dlewis.net/blog/2013/01/31/teaching-square-roots-to-a-five-year-old/ <comment><USER4> Sometime before I was eight years old (this becomes important later), my mom taught me about negative numbers. This excited my curiosity, and I remember walking into my mom's bathroom as she was getting ready to shower to ask her what happened when you divided a positive number by a negative number. So yes, my mom is a saint (she answered my question, and got in the shower).

Later, in third grade, a substitute teacher was ridiculing the work of a student who'd had the temerity to subtract a larger number from a smaller number. Everyone knew that was impossible. Full of indignation as only an eight-year-old Galileo can be, I stood up (I don't know why I couldn't have just raised my hand like a normal person) and protested that it was entirely possible. For my trouble I shared in the ridicule, and later got a talking-to about "teaching things when people are ready for them."

It might look like it, but I'm not leading up to a critique of the elementary school system. My point is different entirely: math can be fun. Maybe not all at once and with Consequences If Not Correctly Learned, and maybe "fun" in the way programming is fun (i.e. still hard), but it's still fun.

You've got a long while before your kids have that drummed out of them. Use it. My mom was a Dance-turned-English major, but she still answered my absurd questions in absurd circumstances. I wish everyone could have my parents.

<comment><USER5> I totally agree with this sentiment. My parents would always attempt to answer any question, however absurd: What's this made of? wood. What's wood made of? Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen. What's Carbon made of? Protons and Neutrons. What's a Proton made of? It would stop at this point because they weren't Physicists and didn't know about Quarks and Gluons.

Following many of these experiences, I though it always appropriate to ask probing questions, and continue to ask them until I understood a problem or situation fully. This attitude continues to this day, though curbed in some social situations. I'm not sure whether this persistent character trait is correlated with my parents behaviour or caused by it.

I distinctly remember feeling quite angry during my first "adult" interactions with many of my friend's parents. Most had equal or greater education than my parents, yet when queried about aspect of their field that I knew they had deep knowledge of (eg. Ships engines from a Marine Engineer, Offshore tax havens from a Tax Accountant), they'd be very hesitant and often express "why do you ask so many damn questions?"

In hindsight, perhaps this result was in part due to my lack of social awareness and emotional intelligence, but I swear it's imbued their offspring with fundamentally different characteristics. My friend's that had parents such as these have tended to follow more qualitative pursuits (Musicians, writers, journalists) while those with parents similar to mine ended up in strongly quantitative fields (Engineering, Maths, Science).

Obviously my experience is a single sample from the distribution, yet I wonder if others have observed a correlation between their own or others parent's attitudes towards answering their children's thorny questions and life / career attitudes? Perhaps it simply comes down to genetics?

<comment><USER6> My parents were like this too, and my innate thirst for knowledge led me to persistently question people for years until I realized how much many people seem to dislike this.

I love explaining in depth and enjoy the opportunity to explore the boundaries of my knowledge. "Actually, I don't know! Let's find out!" comes out of my mouth often.

But so many people seem to get irritated or annoyed when I (inadvertently) expose their lack of knowledge. I still haven't quite figured out why, but I've been told on more than one occasion to "Stop grilling me!" when I'm simply curious about someone's job or how they see things.

<comment><USER7> You lack the knowledge, so it's fascinating for you to learn it for the first time. They already have the knowledge, so it likely gets increasingly tedious the more questions you ask as reciting what they already know lacks the fascination of discovery that you experience.

<comment><USER6> Then am I abnormal in that I get vicarious joy out of seeing someone else learn something for the first time?

<comment><USER7> You've probably seen/read interviews with people where the person doing the interviewing has a list of questions already prepared and just goes through them one by one, occasionally asking a question that was just answered as part of a previous question or failing to dive deeper into an answer that is so fascinating that it's a shame not to explore it more. I find those kinds of interviews frustrating since the interviewer is putting no thought into it.

A good interviewer is someone who asks questions, then connects them with previously learned information in order to ask a better, more insightful question that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to ask had they not just learned the info. It's clear that this interviewer isn't just going down a list of things to ask. A really good interview is one where the interviewee walks away having learned something, even though they've only answered questions posed to them.

Asking questions is a lot like this. If you're more like the first interviewer going through a list of disjoint questions (or questions which only probe for further detail) then it's not surprising to me if people get annoyed. If you're like the second interviewer asking insightful, deeper questions where you're connecting the dots in such a way that you're asking questions that matter and they still get annoyed then perhaps it's just them. Of course, if it's totally new territory for you then you may need to go through seemingly disjoint questions in order to establish a baseline of knowledge to be able to ask more intelligent, interesting questions. You may lose people in your attempt to bootstrap your knowledge to that level.

It's also entirely possible that they hate their job but through cognitive dissonance they've learned to cope with it. Your questions may increase the dissonance for the work they do in which case they'd rather avoid thinking about it entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think of "square root" as meaning "do half of something".

For example, A^2 means do the operation A twice, A^1 = A means do the operation A once, A^0.5 = sqrt(A) means do half of A. What's half of A? Something that when done twice gives A.

For example, take a number line. We have integers going from zero to infinity. Now lets add a "negation operation", and call it -1, so we can make the numbers from zero to negative infinity. On paper, this is equivalent to rotating the number line by 180 degrees. Now the number line runs from negative infinity to positive infinity. Now let's do the operation sqrt(-1), which means "do half of a negation". On paper, this means we rotate by 90 degrees instead of 180 degrees. We now have a new number line at right angles to the original one, and the original number line has turned into a number plane. (Feel free, at this point, to launch into an explanation of complex numbers, with i=sqrt(-1) meaning "move in an orthogonal direction".)

Similarly, a cube root means "do a third", and so on.

<comment><USER9> Spoiler alert: When people talk about "group theory," this is the sort of thing that it does. The operations of addition, multiplication, and functional composition share certain symmetries that group theory makes formally sound. Once you grok the relationships, and how multiplication is "the same type of thing as" rotations, then you can see how square roots are similar to fractional rotations.

Less abstractly... the Exponent operation lets you turn addition into multiplication. It takes a little while to wrap your head around that, but once you do, it's straightforward to see how square roots correspond to fractions.

This is also concretely visible in Matrix algebra. Some matrices literally are rotations, and the square roots of such matrices are rotations by half as much. Matrices are nice to study in group theory, because they bridge the gap between numeric operations and functional composition.

<comment><USER10> Matrix algebra is one of the nicest courses to have had. Makes so many other maths and statistics subjects more easy to grasp.

<comment><USER11> Quaternions are handy for 3d graphics too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I cannot stress how important this is, don't just shrug of the questions your kids ask, how stupid, obvious or unexplainable the answer may be. Even if you don't know the exact answer.

My son asked me a question some time ago "What is a tree made of?" ... "Wood" i said, which just backfired another question "What is wood made of?" to which I actually took the time to explain (to my best of knowledge) that wood exists out of fibers which in turn exist out of carbon which is an atom, explaining that materials exists out of structures built from atoms while I drew a sketch of an atom and how it can bind to other atoms to form materials like wood, iron, etc.

The look on his face was worth millions and it made me feel real good and proud that my 5 year old son took interest into something that even for an adult without proper knowledge is hard to comprehend. I'm fairly confident that all this went way above his head but the fact that my explanation piqued his interest and set his imagination on fire is more than worth it.

Explain all the things!

</comment><comment><USER13> That is really great. We did something a little similar with the tiles on our floor. Geometric answers are nice as they are tangible.

I have found some beautiful books to use for reading time - but they tend to be biology/ physics/ astrology/chemistry - rather than pure math.

Growing up the boys both drooled on, ate and generally mangled about 5 copies of the same Animal encyclopedia. Also Roger Tory Peterson-ish "Field Guides". Good quality illustrations; they are relatively durable and the text gives parents the answers to thingsl like 'Where does a 3 toed sloth live?" or 'how big does an aligator gar get?', etc, etc

No Starch press has a nice little book "The Lives of the Elements" which my boys ( 8 and 6 yrs) devour repeatedly. We also got some of the Manga series for fun (also O'Reilly or NoStartch).

"Big Questions for Little Minds" is a nice book. Little 1-2 page 'essays' on "why is the sky blue" questions. They are written by experts in each area and are fun. They also have a handful of hard vocab words for kids that age and they are mostly written by British experts so there are some variants for North American readers to learn.

This book is beautiful: "The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science"

but is more for the cool graphics than the text.

Math is a subject where parents need to improvise a bit more.

Math I am often at a loss. My kids - though they are in the same system - <USER2> not had the same experience with learning math. My elder son grokked odd/even numbers in kindergarten but my younger son did not get that.

<comment><USER14> Amazon UK and US links

Big Questions From Little People Answered By Some Very Big People: ([http://www.amazon.co.uk/Questions-From-Little-People- Answere...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Questions-From-Little-People- Answered/dp/0571288510/ref=reg_hu-rd_add_1_dp)) ([http://www.amazon.com/Big- Questions-Little-People-Answers/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Big-Questions- Little-People- Answers/dp/0062223224/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362583996&sr=1-1&keywords=big+questions+from+little+people))

Wonderful Life With The Elements: The Periodic Table Personified: An Adventure through the Periodic Table: ([http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1593274238/ref=ox_sc_act_...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1593274238/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE)) ([http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-Life-Elements-Periodic- Perso...](http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-Life-Elements-Periodic- Personified/dp/1593274238/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362584034&sr=1-1&keywords=wonderful+life+with+the+elements))

The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science ([http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Where-Why-How- Illustrate/dp/1452...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Where-Why-How- Illustrate/dp/1452108226/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y)) ([http://www.amazon.com/The- Where-Why-How-Illustrate/dp/145210...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Where-Why- How-Illustrate/dp/1452108226/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y))

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The idea of associating multiplication with the area of a rectangle seems to be very helpful. Commutativity falls directly out of that idea, and so does the basic algorithm for two-digit multiplication (I guess that is distributivity of + over *, explained by adding up areas).

Also, the idea of being able to mimic the calculator is fun for kids. They like to be able to find an answer, and then check with the calculator (or REPL).

<comment><USER16> Another great trick is using diagonal lines to calculate multiplication [1]. It's a neat little trick that really helps drive home an understanding of what 'multiplication' actually is, since it's just like the OP's grid of boxes but turned on its side and contracted down to points. The trick is getting 45 degree lines so they line up more easily.

The advantage of lines is that you can spew out multiplication in the double- digit by double-digit range quite quickly. 51x23 for example is super easy to calculate - 10 100's + 17 10's + 3 1's. You're essentially just doing 50x20 + 50 _3 + 20_ 1 + 1*3, but with lines to track everything.

Show it to a kid, and watch it blow their mind.

[1] [http://lifehacker.com/5975917/quickly-multiply-big- numbers-t...](http://lifehacker.com/5975917/quickly-multiply-big-numbers-the- japanese-way)

<comment><USER17> How painful then to see it called "magic" and read "I don't know how or why this works [...] wonder why we don't teach math the way"

That doesn't sound like any kind of understanding is involved...

<comment><USER18> With a method like that it is very easy to accept the answer you get as magic, because there is no understanding involved. The method shown by OP is not practical to use for anything other than teaching concepts, but it is at least easily expandable and actually describes multiplication. This line thing is more of a trick than anything else.

I sincerely hope that if this is used to teach children, they also properly explain multiplication rather than simply pulling a rabbit from a hat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Kids are cute when they get excited about learning something. My own kids are awesome. I hope they never lose that excitement :-)

<comment><USER20> Sad to say, school will force it out of 'em.

Sad to say, school is necessary to function in society.

<comment><USER21> >school is necessary to function in society.

No it's not. An education is necessary to function in society, it's not necessary that it comes from school, or the type of school that forces the joy of learning out of children.

<comment><USER22> I don't think you fully grasped the point. Look a level deeper.

<comment><USER23> Schools are necessary for society to function?

<comment><USER24> I believe he's saying that crushing the dreams of children is required for a functional society.

<comment><USER19> That would merely make him wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Awesome article. I love teaching math concepts especially to kids. This is something I will have to remember.

Here is a smartphone/tablet app that teaches kids algebra. <http://dragonboxapp.com/>

<comment><USER26> I second the recommendation. My five year old nephew plays Dragon Box, and he seems to grasp quite a few of the concepts now.

<comment><USER25> My 9 year old finished it in a weekend. He was hooked and considered it a fun puzzle. My only problem was trying to keep the energy going and challenge him more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a fairly old teaching method. I remember doing it over 30 years ago when I was 6 years old at Montessori. We used a wooden board and pegs though.

<comment><USER28> "...We used a wooden board and pegs though..."

They still do.

<comment><USER29> But they used to too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I find this interesting - I too discovered the square root at 5 - but I had little help from my parents and actually I reverse engineered it to find out how it worked. square rooting from 0 up to 10 and scratching my head for a while trying to work out why 0, 1, 4 and 9 were special...

Calculators are great. The first time I encountered one I learned more maths than the next 4 years of school would teach me in mere hours...

I'm not sure how but mass education seems to have made difficult and scary concepts like decimals and negative numbers, which are so intuitive that they require little or no explanation when naively encountered 'in the wild'.

Everyone should let their kid play with a calculator I think. :)

I'm also strongly in favour of encouraging children to learn for themselves through experimentation. Explaining things is difficult, and at that age - <USER3> may not remember - but learning things is not. Not to mention that when you do reinvent the wheel you get a truly deep understanding, rather than some rote memorisation tricks to pass highly targetted exams.

<comment><USER11> My experience around the same age (well, maybe more like 6) was with early BASIC home computers circa 1980, and once I learned "FOR loops" and "print" and saw all these weird "function" things in the manual complete with handy example code, I started randomly seeing what happened when I used functions and got all wound up that sqr() crashed on negative numbers and almost never was a "even round result" except for certain numbers and another thing I found hilarious at the time was repeatedly taking the square root of ANY postive number the computer would accept, would eventually, sooner or later, round to exactly "1". Playing with log and antilog was another weird experience, as was early probing of the boundaries of the scalability of factorials (so, why does it crash on any factorial bigger than 70 or so?) I also learned that trig is hard. I learned more about math from a TRS-80 model3 at age 6, than until I went to university.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I see this a lot in my friends who've decided to raise tiger kids, so lots of math, python programming, foreign languages, music lessons at a young age. You'll never know how they respond. A couple turned into academic and musical prodigies, the others are normally bright kids for whom Xbox vs. Windows gaming is the big issue.

tl;dr time intensive, expensive, can't hurt

</comment><comment><USER32> I've been thinking how to explain to my 8 and 6 year olds that the square root of a prime number is irrational.

I've been over primes lots of times. I've talked about decimal fractions, repeating decimals, and the possibility of there being numbers which are non- repeating. I know the proof for the square root of 2 being irrational. It's just tying it all together.

<comment><USER33> The easiest and most accessible way I've found to do this is as follows:

      Let's suppose that sqrt(p) = a/b
      That means that p = (a^2)/(b^2)
      That means that p * b^2 = a^2

Now since you've covered primes and factorization, look at how many times _p_ can turn up on each side of that equals sign. It must be an even number of times on the right, and an odd number of times on the left.

Another way to say this is that every time you take a fraction and square it, you never get a prime number.

And yes, I know there's a lot missing from this explanation, but the things that are missing can then be expanded later, rather that muddying the waters now.

<comment> alex-g At what sort of age do you think people are ready for proof by contradiction? I remember being taught it explicitly at secondary school (in the UK) but we may have seen implicit uses of it earlier. I would imagine that some very young children might find it difficult to remember the train of thought.

<comment><USER33> That's why flipping it to say that every rational, when squared, doesn't give you a prime. The concept of irrartional is already tough. I've found that when handled carefully, even quite young kids can handle at least some of it.

But you're right, proof by contradiction can be tough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My son has always had his math questions answered. His mother has a MS in both Math and Neuroscience and a BS in CS (with a minor in History). His dad (me) is just a dumb-ass programmer.

When he was 5 we would practice 'math' in the car as we drove to school in the morning. Mostly addition, but then subtraction (including negative numbers). From there we moved on to repeated addition (multiplication). Sometime in first grade, he asked a question at the dinner table. He'd noticed that 2x2=4 and 3x3=9, but wanted to know if there were two numbers that could be multiplied to 'make 5'.

Square roots. Did the same picture thing.

He went to school the next day, and proudly told his teacher that he knew "square roots". We got the note back asking us to not teach him "advanced math". The Parent-Teacher conference ensued. The teacher didn't remember what they were.

#include <polite/conversation/about/not/discouraging/him>

sigh.

</comment><comment><USER35> I love stories like these, and the stories that inevitably pop up in the comments. My first son will arrive in less than a month and I'm excited about upcoming opportunities like these. These stories always give me ideas that I wonder if I ever would have thought of otherwise, and it makes me wonder how many other simple inspirations are out there that I might not think of, either. Is there any sort of 'hacker parenting' group/forum/resource/etc out there for spreading stories and ideas like this? I know there's the parenting stackexchange, but it seems more geared towards identified issues; I'm interested in getting ideas for things I haven't even thought to identify before the kids are too old for it to make as much of a difference.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wrote this! Glad to take any questions.

(and why'd it come up now? I wrote it a month or so ago.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Saw it somewhere online (probably Facebook) last night, and figured HN would like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Kind of on the topic - I know there is a way to calculate a square root without a calculator. Of course you can do it the "brute force" way, but one day my music teacher told be about a better way, but never explained it in detail. Does someone know how to do this?

<comment><USER38> I don't want to sound smug or anything, but didn't you study it in school? In Spain we learn it in fifth or sixth grade, just after learning the concept of square root. I thought it was basic enough to be studied at about that age in the rest of the world.

The algorithm is a little complicated compared to other things that we study at that age, but it's not really difficult, although most (and I mean MOST) people, even engineers and such, forget it when they don't need it any more. It infuriates me a little that no teacher explained to us why did it work, but that gave me oportunity to "reverse engineer" the method a few years later, and expand it to a generic n-root algorithm.

<comment><USER39> > I thought it was basic enough to be studied at about that age in the rest of > the world.

Where do you think GP went to school? Neither the post nor the profile indicates a location.

Edit: I should say that I don't know for sure that you don't know from some other post GP made.

<comment><USER38> I don't know, that's why I just talked about "the rest of the world". I'm just surprised that this is not as common as I thought it was. Cultural blindness, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Nice method.

The trick with children that age is to take what they do know, in this case counting blocks in a square, and take it just one step further.

My wife used to teach kindergarten. The first grade teacher came up to her at the start of her second year and asked her how the class knew how to multiply. My wife, who is NOT a math person by any means, realized that multiplying is just the natural progression from "skip counting", which is a skill in every kindergarten standard.

</comment><comment><USER41> "until probably 100 or 144" - ugh. That's 10 and 12. I hope he 's wrong about that and schools aren't that bad where he lives. In Germany we've had to memorize squares for numbers 1 to 20 and 25, which gives you the roots of 1, 4, ..., 100, 121, ..., 400, 625. For every other number beetween these, you can estimate the root with two decimal places pretty well.

<comment><USER42> I fail to see a correlation between how good a school is and how many squares of numbers you have to memorize. I don't remember being forced to memorize any higher than 10 at either of the schools I went to and I'd classify them both as 'good' in the grand scheme of things. Once you know the multiplication table up to 10 and a couple of techniques for multiplying larger numbers there really is no need for memorization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What a great explanation. On a related note, if you liked that then I recommend you check out the game <http://dragonboxapp.com/> I think it is really quite genius how they have turned solving algebraic equations into a fun game for kids.

</comment><comment><USER44> I thought this was going to be about the first final fantasy games...

</comment><comment><USER45> How big a slice of toast do you need to use all this peanut butter?</comment>


Steve Jobs Doesn't Want to Kill Publishers, But Apple's Subscription Strat Will - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/19/apple-kill-publishers/

<comment><USER2> End run around the apple subscription debacle:

Publishers already offer multiple rates for different subscription lengths. Often the cost of a year subscription to a magazine is 1/3 to 1/4 of the newsstand cover price. Newspapers are similar. As far as I know, there's no requirement to offer every pricing variation available via in-app purchase.

Solution: Just offer the cover price, or some shorter, higher cost/issue via in-app purchase. Offer other deals, including physical/digital combos, externally via your own store.

<comment><USER3> It would be nice to do that, but if Apple has shown us anything, it's that you either play entirely by their rules, or you don't play at all. ANY attempt to circumvent this will just mean your app gets bounced, then you're fucked. Once you're in the game, you'll have customers who depend on that app being available on the iPad. You can't risk pissing Apple off, so these types of workarounds aren't going to work. Anything that just involves physical goods is fair game, but if you're offering anything that's accessible through the app, you're digging your own grave by messing around.

<comment><USER2> Imagine a "digital + physical" bundle that costs less than the digital alone, or a once yearly "archive" CD of the entire year's issues.

Apple's policy is here:

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/02/15appstore.html>

The pertinent section: "However, Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app."

So, throw in a single letter once a year and you have physical + digital, and there is no issue with different pricing vs. App Store.

<comment><USER4> You seem to have missed the part of their policy that says " _We reserve the right to change our policy if you try to do an end run around our policies_."

That's exactly how the current policy came to be: People like Amazon decided to give razors away (what's 30% of free?) and sell the blades on their own stores without giving Apple a cut.

<comment><USER2> Could you link to where you've seen Apple say that? It's not in the article I linked.

<comment><USER4> The developer license agreement states this very clearly. Apple does not publish this agreement, but you can get yourself a copy easily.

Versions of it have been published on the web from time to time, e.g. By the EFF:

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/iphone-developer- progr...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/iphone-developer-program- license-agreement-all)

The text in question is: _Apple may change the Program Requirements or the terms of this Agreement at any time. New or modified Program Requirements will not retroactively apply to Applications already in distribution. In order to continue using the Apple Software or any services, You must accept and agree to the new Program Requirements and/or new terms of this Agreement. If You do not agree to new Program Requirements or new terms, Your use of the Apple Software and any services will be suspended or terminated by Apple. You agree that Your acceptance of such new Agreement terms or Program Requirements may be signified electronically, including without limitation, by Your checking a box or clicking on an "agree" or similar button. Nothing in this Section shall affect Apple's rights under Section 8 below._

<comment><USER2> How is that different from any other EULA for any other service?

That seems to me like a generic boilerplate catchall, which doesn't speak to this specific issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll believe the gloom and doom about 30% on subscriptions when publishers stop sending me postcards offering 90% off the subscription price if I renew for another year.

<comment><USER6> I'd really like to say that's a zinger, since I am mostly on Apple's side about all this. But the fact of course is that they're offering you X percent off the cover price, not X percent off the actual subscription price. The other fact is that whatever discounted rate happens to be the REAL price of a subscription will end up being the rate that the publisher in question has to offer in-app in iOS as well.

That said, I completely agree with you about the gloom and doom, because that normal subscription price includes the costs of actually printing a paper magazine and shipping it to the customer. I'm pretty sure that in the vast majority of cases, the costs for providing an online edition will be much less. So there's still a profit margin here, and a sizable one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For now, newspapers are unprofitable and Apple is not really interested in attracting a large number of independently minded companies - their deal with Murdoch is much more in keeping with the their objective of exclusive content.

Instead Apple's subscription terms are aimed at streaming music apps which will compete with any iTunes streaming service and Amazon which already competes in the eBook marketplace.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is Apple also taking a cut of the advertising? That's where the real money is with publishers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Do you people realize Amazon takes a 70% cut on Kindle subscriptions?

</comment><comment><USER10> I was picturing an apple guitar when I first read the headline.</comment>


The SEC Just Voted To Lift The Ban On General Solicitation - <AUTHOR> https://wefunder.com/post/36-the-sec-just-voted-to-lift-the-ban-on-general-solicitation <comment><USER2> I think this is a mixed blessing. I agree that the ban has been a hindrance on people trying to find investors but lifting it may not be the best solution.

If you look at the way YC demo day works, its a pretty reasonable way for potential investors to find startups which are compatible with their investment goals. I think this addresses the challenge of the general solicitation rule (finding the startups) without the negative of creating a bunch of unvetted startups advertising for dollars. Basically, I believe lifting this ban increases the noise significantly without much boost to the signal.

The analog I thought about when I saw the SEC was thinking about going this way was the lift on advertising prescription drugs. That really hasn't been a 'win' for me, while I'm sure some folks have discovered there are drugs available their doctor didn't know about (signal), a whole lot more people are asking their doctors to give them drugs which aren't really appropriate to their symptoms (noise). It has made the national news shows practically infomercials for a variety of meds for 'old people problems'.

<comment><USER3> My instinct is to lash out against this move. General solicitation lowers the amount of social vetting a manager must go through before being able to raise funds. It also makes un-accredited investors more aware of the investment barriers around them, which could loosen resolve for maintaining those walls.

But 2013 isn't 1933. The average sophisticated investor is more versed in finance, more wary of solicitation if they are not, or closer to one of the former.

What this is, is a boost to non-conventional assets and managers. The ones too young or crazy to have made it through the traditional vetting process. There's already plenty of noise if some idiot broker put you on a mailing list...

<comment><USER4> > But 2013 isn't 1933. The average sophisticated investor is more versed in > finance, more wary of solicitation if they are not, or closer to one of the > former.

"This time, it's different."

[http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com/](http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com/)

<comment><USER5> I think things are fundamentally different now than in the early 30's. Not pie in the sky 'well people are more sophisticated now' different.

There are a ton of tools that people can use to gather information on a potential investment and the people involved.

<comment><USER6> While it's easier to be smart about investing, it's also very easy to not be smart. I'm pretty sure most retail investors invest with zero or negative[1] information advantage, but don't lose a lot of money because the median expected value of investment opportunities open to the public is positive.

1\. Due to cognitive biases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is a positive step, but doesn't go far enough. It looks like investing is still limited to accredited investors (individual income above $200k, household income above $300k, or net worth above $1M). So basically, most engineers who work at these companies can't invest in companies in their industry, but inexplicably their doctor can.

I'm not one to beat the drum of deregulation, but I think the accredited investor requirements are stupid and wrong. The beauty of the securities laws is that they democratized investing by addressing some of the information asymmetries in the public markets. Regimes that reduce disclosure requirements at the expense of creating accredited investor requirements throw the baby out with the bathwater. Essentially, you cut off many promising investments to the masses, and also artificially prop up the returns to a certain class of investors by lowering the supply of capital. It's a solution that's worse than the problem.

<comment><USER8> I'm not an expert, but if a few of those engineers pooled their money together into an investment club, wouldn't that club be able to meet the accredited investor requirement?

<comment><USER9> I don't believe the club would have to meet the requirement. I think if you do your investing via an LLC or Corporation you could subvert that rule but I'm not really sure.

<comment><USER10> The "club" would have to have at least $5 million in assets, according to current SEC guidance: [http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm](http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm) .

<comment><USER11> Actually, 501 already requires that the indivual investors of the 'club' also be accredited, and the club cannot be formed for the purposes of 'an' investment. However, a group of engineers could form an entity and each become active managers, and their club is able to accept funds from the engineers via a 4(2) exemption under the '33 Act. Then, so long as they didn't run afoul of the '40 Act, they could invest so long as they had $5m in assets. And the neat thing about intellectual property is that the engineers could purchase their stake in the club via a combination of cash and IP, easily and lawfully exceeding the $5m threshold.

<comment><USER12> So what, write a short story and value it at $5m? Surely there are laws about market valuation, even for IP?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have little doubt that this will accelerate the super-seed trend, wherein small startups avoid VC for extended periods of time.

One thing that struck me: the wefunder guys clearly believe this is going to be a big deal for small-time investors. How will firms accept those "$1000" checks? As far as I know, privately held securities can be issued to only a very small number of investors.

Will Facebook/Goldman style investment vehicles become a common mode of skirting the law? Is the SEC going to loosen that 500 investor limit?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good questions. The Facebook/Goldman style investment vehicles have been blessed by the SEC in the form of a No Action letter back in March. For readers unfamiliar: an LLC fund is created that investors invest in, and that fund makes a single investment in the target company. The company only has one investor listed on their cap table and it makes several things (e.g. collecting signatures) significantly simpler. Investors maintain financial rights, but don't have voting rights in the company.

We can offer that vehicle to companies as a fundraising option. We also have a standard convertible note specifically for a large number of small investors that we've been using ourselves which addresses "large number of investor" concerns in a different way.

The JOBS act has already increased the accredited investor limit to 2000, and once the unaccredited investor legislation takes effect, those unaccredited investors won't count against that total.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been a bit out of this loop, but what kinds of protections remain in place to protect small investors from hucksters "starting a company"? Is it pretty much caveat emptor or is there stuff not mentioned in this article?

I think this approach is pretty cool, but there are these drawbacks. Are there going to be limits, protections, or restraints? Is the solicitation still only limited to qualified investors or how does this work?

EDIT: I see I missed that the article says "qualified investors", but I'm still not sure if that's the legal term or a more loose term.

<comment><USER15> I'm assuming that qualified investors means accredited investors. SEC definition here: [http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm](http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's correct. I changed the post to say "accredited" \- thanks!

<comment><USER14> Okay I get it. That was my hangup. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.

For one thing, I expect it to continue the trend of shifting the balance of power from investors to founders. Basically, this will be a huge amount of new competition for angel investors. And crowdinvestors don't have voting rights or a board seat. In order to continue to get into deals they want, angels and VCs will have to bring more value to the table and accept less favorable terms. So I would guess, anyway.

On the other hand, it isn't necessarily going to be a river of cash for anyone who wants it. Along with the art of pitching to individual investors, one will also have to learn the art of pitching to the crowd -- and will be competing against everyone else doing the same thing. I expect to see a small industry of companies assisting founders in this new kind of marketing.

<comment><USER17> > Basically, this will be a huge amount of new competition for angel > investors.

It is unlikely to do any such thing. To argue this, you must believe that there exists a substantial number of accredited investors who are not actively investing in private companies because they haven't received random solicitations to do so.

The reality is that accredited investors come in all shapes and sizes. The vast majority of the ones who are interested in putting their capital to work through investments in young private companies are _already_ the people we call angel investors. In other words, lifting the ban on private solicitation is not likely to produce enough _new_ angel investors to have a meaningful impact on competition for deals.

> I expect to see a small industry of companies assisting founders in this new > kind of marketing.

There is _already_ a well-established cottage industry of firms that help private companies raise money from accredited investors.

Obviously, the firms that do this don't do so for free, and some of them demand finder's fees that no savvy founder would ever pay, but there's absolutely no reason to believe that companies unable to raise money on their own will pay less trying to market themselves to investors directly than paying a finder's fee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was listening to Alan Kay on the More or less blog today, and what he said resonated here.

Basically the stock market no longer bears any relation to the simple business of providing capital to companies to grow.

The trade in secondary markets is so huge that the stock market can happily ignore smaller growing companies - and it is it seems if VCs and similar are to be believed.

Plus we know it is - reaching IPO should be when a company really starts to deliver, takes the capital and expands. Not when the founders leave, and the growth halts.

So yes, a new stock market, not bound to the financial gaming house, is needed to supply capital to growing companies.

It wont be kickstarter. But it will be something. And I doubt it will be American. It will be a federation of small markets across India and Brazil and China.

And it wont be tech-led. We can barely use the capital.

</comment><comment><USER15> You still need to be an accredited investor to take part in these potential general solicitation rounds (net worth above $1 million, minus primary residence, or annual income of more than $200,000), right?

<comment><USER19> This article confusingly referred to "qualified" investors but according to other reporting it is actually "accredited" investors [1]. This is particularly confusing because "qualified purchasers" is an even higher standard required for some investments [2].

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/10/us-sec- advertising...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/10/us-sec-advertising- idUSBRE9690I520130710)

[2] [http://globalfundexchange.com/about/230](http://globalfundexchange.com/about/230)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch, I've s/qualified/accredited. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing I noticed in passing when reading the articles about this today: the accredited investor rules have not been updated for inflation since they were passed in 1982.

If they had been, by my calculations, the net worth requirement would be $2.41m instead of $1m and the income requirement $482k instead of $200k. Definitely easier to get accredited these days...

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't have a particular objection to the change, but it's a _little_ overstating the previous situation to say that only people with access to private networks could fund startups. Startups couldn't advertise overtly with "Got $1000? Fund us!" banner ads on Facebook, but nothing prevented a potential investor from emailing the contact addresses of interesting companies the investor saw on TechCrunch or HN, and asking if the company is interested in discussing an investment. Some companies will even telegraph their openness to such contacts on their website (not phrased as a solicitation, but making it clear they are in a fund-raising phase).

</comment><comment><USER22> Just curious, what was the point of this ban in the first place? To protect the public from scammers?

</comment><comment><USER23> How does this affect state securities ("blue sky") laws? It doesn't do a lot of good to be allowed to solicit under federal law if you have to comply with 50 (well, some are null, but still close) different regulations. IIRC NY and CA are particularly tough.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't need to comply with the blue sky law investor limits. And the 500 investor limit has been increased to 2000, which doesn't include non- accredited investors (once that part of the JOBS act is implemented).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good points on the opportunities/challenges today's SEC ruling on general solicitation brings to startup funding. At Bison.co, we believe the important changes from these new rules will have less to do with accredited investors and more to do with increasing data openness in the private equity industry. Check out our latest blog post for details on how it will play out... ([http://blog.bison.co/2013/07/10/hello-private-equity- marketi...](http://blog.bison.co/2013/07/10/hello-private-equity-marketing/))

</comment><comment><USER25> But the people who invest still need to be accredited investors, i.e. meet some criteria of annual income and/or net worth? Otherwise you will see a flood of scam and trash public image of the whole idea of starting a startup.

</comment><comment><USER26> General solicitations must still be directed only at accredited investors, not the general public. I feel that this is an important point missing from this conversation.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this effective immediately?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. Our expectation is within 30 days, as that's usually the delay, but we don't know for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> And I thought they just legalised streetwalkers...</comment>


Why I Am Switching to Secure ProtonMail - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2018/10/31/why-i-am-switching-to-secure-protonmail-from-insecure-google-gmail <comment><USER2> The free tier has a rather limited 500MB limit, but I guess that's all a small company can give away, without the ability to monetize with ads.

<comment><USER3> I looked at protonmail about 6 months ago but decided its free service was too limited (no imap/pop3 access) and the paid service was too expensive. I ended up going for [https://mailbox.org/en/](https://mailbox.org/en/) which is not free but much cheaper, and seems to offer a reasonable level of security, privacy and functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ELI5: Encryption is a two-way street. If no one I want to correspond with uses it, what good is it?

<comment><USER5> Proton Mail encrypts your mail at rest, and they do not store the decryption keys, so theoretically Proton Mail cannot read your normal emails unless they intercept and store them during sending or receiving. This is already a benefit whether your contacts use encrypted email or not.

There is a way to send an encrypted message to any other email address, but you have to share a password with them somehow, either by including a hint or by some other channel. It is essentially encrypting and storing the message on Proton Mail servers, and then giving the recipient a link to un-encrypt it (they must know the password to do this). I'm not sure if this process is zero-knowledge or not.

In addition all Proton Mail to Proton Mail emails are end-to-end encrypted.

These are not as good as if everybody used email encryption, and it was all end-to-end zero-knowledge, but it's better than the status-quo, in my opinion at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been using ProtonMail for almost a year now and love it! Don't see any reason to switch away. There are some concerns about ProtonMail being proprietary, but with the smtp bridge I personally don't have any issues.

<comment><USER7> ProtonMail has significant quality of life issues that I wish they'd work on.</comment></comment>


WikiLeaks springs a leak: full database of diplomatic cables appears online - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/08/wikileaks-springs-a-leak-full-database-of-diplomatic-cables-appears-online.ars <comment><USER2> Link to the '.csv' or I don't believe it happened.

Given the unusually high amount of attention being paid to Wikileaks and the interests that powers have in spreading rumors that the leaking platform is unsafe, not believing it until the actual database has been located is a reasonable position.

Despite many efforts by Wikileaks supporters on the Wikileaks IRC, nobody has managed to locate this file. So if somebody could link to it, you will be doing a massive favor.

"WikiLeaks responded to the leak on Twitter on Monday by writing: "There has been no 'leak at WikiLeaks'. The issue relates to a mainstream media partner and a malicious individual."" - From the ArsTechnica article

<comment><USER2> It is 48 hours later, but it turns out the Guardian have indeed leaked the password. I would hand a link, but Wikileaks are going to dump EVERYTHING in the next day, so it's best to go with the source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here is the same report from a different angle:

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/28/unredacted-wikileaks- cables...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/28/unredacted-wikileaks-cables-found- online-probably-depressingly/)

Here is a German article from 'Der Speigel' through google translate about the original report of the leak:

[http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&...](http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&tl=en&twu=1&u=http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/vorab/0,1518,782845,00.html&usg=ALkJrhhgvJ7YU4Xu4n3Zew0kFo7kk52OLg)

</comment><comment><USER4> Seconding the call for a link to the file, I'd like to see this.</comment>


How do you make important decisions quickly? - <AUTHOR>

Or, in general, what's a good method for decision making? <comment><USER2> I gather facts and listen to my gut feeling. If my gut feeling tells me something is off, it overrides the facts and I go with my gut feeling.</comment>


T-Mobile ISP - <AUTHOR> https://www.t-mobile.com/isp? <comment><USER2> > By checking this box you agree that T-Mobile can contact you about > purchasing T-Mobile Home Internet, including future Home Internet offers, > via autodialed call, email, or text to the number provided above. Consent is > not a condition of purchase; you may also call 1-844-839-5057 to get > started. (required)

"Check Availability" does nothing useful. The landing page is an opt-in lead generation tool.

<comment><USER3> I'm glad this is the top comment. I clicked on the link and typed my address like a dummy hoping to get a binary yes or no answer. This is kind of infuriating and a waste of ones time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > During congestion, Home Internet customers may notice speeds lower than > other customers due to data prioritization.

> Video streaming resolution depends on available speeds. For best > performance, leave video streaming applications at their default resolution > setting

Food for thought in their terms.

<comment><USER5> On their mobile offering, if you have a data plan that features unlimited streaming/high speed data (that is, a plan with an option to not count streaming applications in your data allowance), they will stream the content of these partner services at lower quality than you would normally be capable of. I expect a similar story here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We were able to be included in the test roll out for this, but we didn't end up sticking with it. Our biggest problem was the reception in our house was pretty bad. The box also doesn't lend itself to being mounted somewhere like a window very well. Also setting it up with our existing wifi equipment and not using the built in mediocre WiFi router wasn't super easy.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty wild, $50/month for unlimited data. It looks like between new cell tech and low orbit satellites we're finally going to see real competition between ISPs in the coming years.

<comment><USER8> But, is it _really_ unlimited? Or is it the typical "unlimited [star]" where the [star] points to a tiny, 5 point font, footnote at the bottom of a page where they actually detail that you can use as much as you like, up until you use X units, then they throttle you until next month, unless you pay an extra $39.95 for extra data units.

<comment><USER9> It's a valid question. T-Mobile for their cell service only offer "unlimited" plans but it's two kinds of "unlimited". There's "5gb at LTE speed and then unlimited at 2G speed" and there is "truly 100% unlimited with no catch".

I've run up over 100gb in one month on my truly unlimited T-Mobile plan and never had any issues. But who knows what their ISP offer will be.

<comment><USER10> The truly unlimited will de-prioritize you after around 50GB iirc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is interesting. Most of cell towers are on battery backup for at least 24 hours. As long as you have a battery backup for your device it should allow for Internet Service even during power outages.

It will all be interesting when Elon finally gets Starlink up and running. If there was a way for a mobile phone to connect directly via sat chip, you could do voice over IP and do away with cellular service all together. It could serve as your connection for everything. What a disruption for the Telco's.

<comment><USER12> If your phone supports cellular over IP (T-Mobile does, for example), this should work if the StarLink terminal supports a wifi hotspot function. You will still need a pizza box sized sat terminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We got this last week. I just called Spectrum to cancel our service. It's good enough for the price, especially since Spectrum raised the price of Internet to $69.99 this month.

\- Speeds vary, but we seem to average around 100/20\. The highest I've seen is 150/50\. The lowest is 50 down. I have (separately) seen some awful upstreams—around 2 Mbps up.

\- Latency is server-dependent but worse than cable. It's probably not good for latency-sensitive applications (like some games).

There is one important caveat: T-Mobile uses CGN. Their network is IPv6 with 464XLAT bridging to non-IPv6 sites.

<comment><USER14> If you don't mind, does it give you a /64 subnet? And do you know if you can get a larger subnet?

I am interested in this, but I have three VLAN subnets for my network, and the last time I tried it, it turned into a massive headache.

<comment><USER13> > If you don't mind, does it give you a /64 subnet? And do you know if you can > get a larger subnet?

It does give you a /64\. I don't know whether it's possible to get a larger one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> T-mobile should be doing a home broadband push sometime soon. Their merger deal with sprint requires it[1]:

> The deal is contingent on the two companies agreeing to stipulations on the > development of next-generation 5G technology and the expansion of broadband > internet access to rural areas.

[1] [https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/sprint-t-mobile- strik...](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/sprint-t-mobile-strike-deal- fcc-merger-n1007661)

</comment><comment><USER16> Well heck. I have to actually consider this. Most of the time I am at home I use my cell's LTE since it's better than my cable. Will it be just as good when I'm playing LOL and the rest of my family has 3 video streams running is the question. Also MediaCom has a cap of 200GB a month which I hit every month making their plan even more expensive.

</comment><comment><USER17> Signed up this morning for the service. I should have the gateway next week. A few things to note

1) The gateway has built in wifi (and is provided free) 2) It provides 2 ethernet ports 3) You use an app to see most of it (how much data you've used, etc). 4) They say when 5g is in the area, it will be upgraded to it.

<comment><USER18> What area of the country? I got waitlisted in New England.

<comment><USER17> Just south Lancaster, PA. I know a co-worker who is north of the city is waitlisted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Kudos to T-Mobile. Seems like technology changes before government can get its act together to come up with regulation (often ill-considered and ineffective, with the possibility of just being regulatory capture anyway).

</comment><comment><USER20> Really curious what the latency numbers will be. I would love to drop Comcast.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hoping this will be good for rural internet. Not holding my breath, though

</comment><comment><USER22> Wish the UK had something like this.

I'm paying approx 30usd/mo for unlimited 4G in Sweden. The coverage is fantastic. Middle of nowhere, still getting 1MB/s symmetric or so.

<comment><USER23> > Wish the UK had something like this.

I believe it does. Three offer unlimited data for £22/month, with 5G in a few areas. I would not be surprised if other providers have similar offers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This seems to follow the craze of mobile broadband in the UK. Unlimited data is a very nice option to have though

</comment><comment><USER25> I love their tag line "Everyone deserves to be connected."</comment>


The moral?  Always use "-Wall" (or don't use C) - <AUTHOR> http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/HuntTheBug.html?HN_20150601 <comment><USER2> Use -Wall and -Wextra

Also, periodically recompile with Clang, or Pcc or Tcc.

If you have project that uses bison, yacc or byacc, try one of the other ones every once in a while.

Then re-test.

</comment><comment><USER3> -Wall AND -Werror</comment>


How the Blog Broke the Web - <AUTHOR> https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/ <comment><USER4> Am I allowed to plug my own site? The old web is still around - you just need to dig through more new web to find it. I run my site through a few Gulp tasks to minimize files and provide security-integrity checks for my CSS - <USER3> otherwise it is all hand written HTML. Every page begins with copy/pasting another page and changing out the content by hand.

I've noticed in the last few years the articles about the "early 90's/00's" web has increased. A desire for the older, more personal, mostly text and some cheesy few-framed animated .gif web. A web that felt more person to person instead of corporation to corporation or plastic Barbie doll to plastic Ken doll full with fake personas.

This is why I support Neocities [0] and host my site with them. You can find all sort of interesting sites if you browse [1] a while. My personal favorite is browsing all the layers of [2].

[0] [https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/)

[1] [https://neocities.org/browse](https://neocities.org/browse)

[2] [Warning: Auto-playing Music] [https://mebious.neocities.org/Layer/Wierd.html](https://mebious.neocities.org/Layer/Wierd.html)

<comment><USER5> Does neocities survive solely from donations? That's pretty impressive if so.

<comment><USER6> Yes, and supporter accounts. [https://neocities.org/donate](https://neocities.org/donate)

Nobody is more impressed than I am. It hasn't stopped being amazing to me that it works.

<comment><USER4> Thank you so much for your work on Neocities - and sorry for sending the HN hoard your way!

I personally think the support model is all about scaling properly - or simply not scaling past a sustainable point. As long as the number of patrons scales with the number of "freeloaders" it is a sustainable model. The issue is if you begin to hockey stick and don't restrict your scaling (because you "want to be larger" or you "hope people will donate as we hockey stick upwards"). Once that happens, donation ran sites tend to collapse under themselves - which, for recent examples, is what has happened to so many pomf.se clones. Becoming too popular can become a death sentence.

As a support-driven site, can you provide any insight into that? Or offer whether you agree/disagree with the idea? Would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I mourn whenever a consumer technology becomes streamlined, homogenized, and commoditized.

There's a pattern - it happened with smartphones too - where a new technology appears, and at the beginning people _engage_ with it directly. They _use_ it, they _do things with_ it. And in that type of relationship there's the opportunity to have _fun_ with it. But then as the new medium grows - as it becomes more economically lucrative and scales to an exponentially bigger audience - it's made to be more efficient instead. Eventually users no longer _use_ , they _consume_.

Think about how weird and wonderful the first iPhone apps were, with their kitschy skeuomorphism and novel uses of sensors. The accelerometer-based lightsaber. The sound boards. The odd and interesting domain-specific utility apps. Even Instagram had personality back in 2010. And then people would jailbreak their iPhones, so they could add widgets and toolbars and ridiculous neon color themes. The smartphone started out as a magical anything-object that people looked at as its own entity, just as web pages started out as magical worldwide bulletin-boards that people would put together and decorate for their own sake.

These days the smartphone is boring. It intentionally falls to the background, serving as little more than a stylish content-pipe feeding your every craving. It is minimalist and inoffensive and ever-present. Even apps are supposedly on their way out. The very action of opening an app and _doing_ something is seen as a piece of friction, keeping people from consuming content as effortlessly. Google Assistant and Siri would rather predict what you want and serve it to you before you even ask for it.

Play is how the human brain stays alive, and it can't happen without back-and- forth interaction and tactility, and user agency.

<comment><USER7> Interestingly, something of a reverse effect is happening in the game development space. I think the driver of the above pattern is mainly economic; as a technology becomes more and more commercialized, it gets less personal and more streamlined. This is aided by the technology itself improving to allow it to be more efficient. With games, though, the barrier to entry was always (since the 90s, at least) so high that _only_ corporations could participate. So in recent years, the technological strides that have been made have actually allowed the space to become _less_ commercialized, and therefore _more_ personal and diversified.

<comment><USER8> Consequently, game development these days is more limited by art assets than by programming or game systems design. The difficulty and complexity of producing good-looking, stylistically consistent, original 3D assets has led to sprite-based games, mock pixel art "8-bit" games, and games where form follows function.

However, game engines companies now offer asset stores. To OP's point, it's not hard to see a future where some successful indie games are made by stitching together assets and mechanics sourced entirely from others. Would it cheapen the result, despite the talent and effort put into those components none the less grand? Perhaps.

Technology and popularity move the goalposts. It increases the amount and/or changes the nature of effort required to attain acclaim.

<comment><USER9> To a point. I think, however, as the technology increases and gets better, the trend towards realism will overpower. Consider: as assets get more and more complex, the uniqueness of an individual asset will actually _decrease_. I can easily point out the difference between a tree in the witness and mario 64, because they're both low poly games that do their own thing _instead_ of emulating the real world. If, instead, you ask me to differentiate between a tree in skyrim and one in the last of us, well, they both just look like trees. At this stage, what matters is the visual aesthetic that you're able to create with lighting, with combination of different assets. Whether you happened to make an individual asset yourself will matter increasingly less as time goes on.

<comment><USER7> Why would people abandon unique styles just because it gets easier to implement a realistic one? An artist's goal isn't just to make something that doesn't look like crap; it's to make something that expresses a certain feeling. Stylism isn't just a band-aid for lack of realism.

<comment><USER9> I'm not saying that they'll abandon it, I'm saying that as publicly available art trends towards realism, being an 'asset flip' won't be such a bad thing anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel like this story leaves out a very important factor -- Slashdot. Slashdot was huge long before Moveable Type. It was so huge in fact that when my team built a web server in 1998, the first question from the boss was, "can this handle having one of our posts on Slashdot?".

I'd say if anything Slashdot was the one that drove people to make chronological posts. Because if you wanted to be on Slashdot, you had to post something new, and the best way people knew if you had something new was if you had a date on it.

<comment><USER11> Wikipedia has a page on the history of blogging, and indeed Slashdot is there: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_blogging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_blogging) That doesn't mean that it inspired people to convert their personal websites to blogs, though. While people did see chronological posts, that doesn't mean the idea of converting their websites to that format was put into their heads. There's a big difference between Slashdot and a personal website.

<comment><USER12> Only one data point but I made my first blog inspired by Slashdot. I wrote a CGI script that read flat text file posts to make the front page, then when you clicked a link, another script wrapped the chosen post text file in a basic HTML template (eg added a header and footer, that's it).

Making that (and clones customised for friends), got me into web development and ended up in a 20 year career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If anything media companies and content marketing broke the web, not individuals creating online journals or hobby content.

<comment><USER14> I wish there were more _real_ personal blogs. Heck, sometimes I wish for the days of Xanga and LiveJournal. Reading one from the past really feels like you're inside someone's deepest thoughts. People were unafraid to really be vulnerable when writing those things.

Now we have lame blogs owned by corporations like Techcrunch, or filled with vacation pics and food porn.

<comment><USER15> Given the mob mentality that's settled into modern social media/the blogosphere, it's actually amazing there are still as many personal bloggers as there are. One wrong word and ...

<comment><USER16> As someone who runs a fairly popular "personal" (not corporate, opinion-based) blog, it is an ongoing fear. We have to try to make sure the things we say are as least controversial as possible. But in a way, this is a good thing.

My blog is about my city, and there are plenty of things we "can" talk about but probably should't. For example, I don't think the business that's in one of the cornerstone buildings downtown is the right business for the neighborhood. But I'd never say it. It'd be needlessly confrontational, my opinion isn't going to get that business to move, they're paying their rent so they have every right to stay there, and all it would do is piss people off who disagree with me.

On the other hand, we generate minor controversies all the time. People who live outside of the city always want more parking, we're pretty strongly against setting minimum numbers of parking spaces when putting in new buildings. We support new higher-density living in the city, many neighbors are strongly opposed to it. As such, we're the target of smear campaigns and any relevant social media post is often swamped with the people who disagree with us. We've also been factually wrong in the past, and some people do their best to remind us of it as often as possible.

The trick is to ignore it. Haters gonna hate. Don't be unnecessarily confrontational, and just roll on without acknowledging your public critics. They're just trying to piggyback off your success.

It's not really a "one wrong word" situation, it's "one word you really knew you shouldn't have said, but against all better judgement you did anyway" followed by "engaging your critics in arguments", then topped off with "caving and admitting defeat because you knew you were wrong all along".

I can't think of a single collapse of a public figure because of one wrong word that wasn't extremely egregious and then handled extremely poorly.

<comment><USER17> > _We 've also been factually wrong in the past, and some people do their best > to remind us of it as often as possible_

THAT dynamic is toxic and we need to somehow evolve a social rule against it. Something like Godwin's Rule, back when that worked.

 _Everybody_ has at some point said something factually incorrect and _everybody_ has at some point said something that sounds wrong or mean when taken out of context today.

If forever bringing up " _Remember, this is the person who said (worst thing ever)!_ " is a valid move, it's an attack on identity continuity. The existing defenses against that attack seem to be:

(a) completely abandoning identity continuity (eg: 4chan)

(b) trying to appear perfectly accurate and inoffensive at all times by retroactively deleting any posts that might make one look inconsistent or mean and hoping nobody notices or keeps an archive.

There really ought to be more options than those. For instance, one could adopt a statute-of-limitations approach: _Anything said more than two years ago is off-limits as an attack on that person /blog/institution today_.

Once the right rule is documented, those who break it are demonstrating they are too dumb or ill-informed to engage with what is being said _now_ and thus have lost the argument.

<comment><USER18> There's an evolving social norm against this, I think. Increasingly, I've noticed the people who trawl through years-old posts looking for controversy are seen as deranged.

<comment><USER19> That only applies when the target was relatively anonymous to begin with. It's frowned upon to crawl back in time to look for ammunition against someone, but if that ammunition is something that went viral and is part of public consciousness, then you're good.

One example is Bredan Eich. Because he chose to donate to a Prop 8 fund and it got out, his opinion on all subjects is automatically null and void for many people.

Another case is that of reddit user 'Unidan', who became an immediate pariah overnight because he was a dick to someone online, so he abandoned the entire identity. If any of his alternate identities were somehow linked back, it would likely become useless as well. I'd be willing to be his professional career suffered greatly because of that rant, too.

There's also Joy Reid, who has been in hot water lately because people found old tweets and blog posts that were offensive. In that case, people actively went back to look for things she said in the past.

None of these would have been possible pre-internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Eh, static site generators, CMSes, and bloghosts didn't break the web. Sure, they made it easier for people to churn out content, but it was authentic material they cared enough to write about. Whether they posted under their real name, or under a screenname, they built little fiefdoms of content with their personal time, and made it available for anyone to read, without an account, and without any obligation of feedback.

What changed was when people began putting their content into siloes protected by a login wall, and platforms strongly defined by visible indicators of popularity, which didn't really happen until Facebook and Twitter.

Even in the Livejournal and Myspace days, a lot of profiles were public, but quasi-pseudonymous, requiring some effort to actually find. It was Facebook that mandatorily juxtaposed one's real name with one's real words, which quickly led to predictable outcomes: people being doxxed, harrassed, turned down for employment. Within a few years, most people set their profiles to private in an effort to protect themselves from snooping employers, colleges, exes, and trolls, keeping most of what people write and share walled off behind a login and a friend approval gate.

Twitter was billed as "microblogging", where one could publish short snippets with more frequency vs. a long-form blog, but its bizarre interface, unclear direction, and feature competition with Facebook caused it to evolve many of the same mechanisms and signals of popularity as Facebook. Facebook's status updates were a direct assault on Twitter, so Twitter eventually morphed 'favorites' into 'likes'. With it, it was blindingly obvious that most people's content wasn't even being read.

All of this social transition took place in the shadow of the commercialization of the web, where websites were no longer just billboards for businesses, but platforms where one could conduct commerce, consume professional content, and be subject to behavioral analytics that fed back into ads. With the abundance of commercial content, consumption went up and amateur production went down.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, the article is stupid nostalgia. What killed the web is very clear: a select cadre of companies conspired and worked very hard to turn the web into an advertising platform. The developments here are obvious:

1\. Google Ads monetized linking and gave birth to the SEO "industry."

2\. Facebook mandated real names.

3\. Apple and Google completely closed off their mobile platforms requiring pre-approval for all applications.

The last piece of this is that the stewards of the web, the W3C, have completely abandoned their charge and sold the web out to these corporations. The W3C has allowed the evolution of the web to be completely captured by Google and other major corporations. Rather than making the web simpler and more accessible we've seen the W3C bless standard after standard that make the web significantly more complicated. Today nobody but extremely wealthy corporations can afford to develop a browser. HTTP2 means nobody but major corporations can write web servers these days. Abandoning a well-structured web (XML, semantic technologies) for the current html5-js-soup means that the knowledge published on the web is wholly inaccessible... unless it gets exposed via proprietary, one-off json-soup APIs.

The complete corporate capture of the web wasn't driven by "blogging" nor was it in any way a democratic process. It was a deliberate and carefully engineered process that created a web and a computing platform (mobile phones) that is absolutely and completely under the control of corporations, moreso than any previous platform.

At this point there's really only two ways forwards: (1) abandon the web and start over or (2) governments will step up and reign in corporations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> When the least expensive computer you could get was almost $5,000 and Internet access cost $5 per hour (both inflation adjusted), web users were mostly limited to academics and children of the 1%.

As the price of Internet access decreased so did the average socioeconomic status of users, and so building tools that made content easy to create and easy to consume suddenly became profitable. There simply is no alternate timeline where the web could have stayed the way it was, except perhaps one with a very abrupt ending to Moore's Law.

<comment><USER22> While your overall point is somewhat correct, your numbers are way off.

I was "surfing the net" in 1994 with a computer I built for around $700 ($1,204.59 today's price) and was using an ISP account that was $25 per month ($43.02 today).

I was not an academic or anywhere near the 1% at the time. But I agree with the point you're trying to make, as it did become more accessible for people at a poorer level. Also computers and the internet both became easier to use which contributed greatly to adoption as well.

<comment><USER23> Yep, same here. Local dial up services were born in 94 in every American mid sized town, and half my buddies (at 10 years old) were all online between 94 and 96. None of our families were wealthy, with basically lower to middle class blue collar parents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This article seems to be making two arguments. One is that popular blog software was limiting, and its popularity discourages people from trying other forms of content. Its a reasonable take, but it's not clear to me that's actually what happened. The other argument is that the web got worse as it became accessible to people who didn't have the knowledge, skill, or time to write their own HTML. I can't help but strongly disagree with that. Yes, the web lost a certain kind of character, but it gained billions of people and many other kinds of character. There's more content, better content, and more accessibility now than ever before. That's great news, and the value of it vastly outweighs the loss of the handcrafted HTML aesthetic.

Preservation and archiving are good things to be doing, and discovering the signal inside all the noise of today's internet can be challenging. Still, inviting everybody is a huge step forward.

<comment><USER25> >better content

 _Maybe_ better content in terms of the quality of the best content available, but, as you admit yourself by mentioning the noise-to-signal ratio... The average quality is abysmal.

<comment><USER26> Just from personal experience: when I switched from writing my HTML by hand (even with auto-expansion in web-mode.el) to generating pages with Org, I simply had a lot more time available to increase quality.

As an example, my article on Kernighan's writing[0] would simply not have happened if I was still writing HTML. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing which took very little effort thanks to the nice Org amenities.

[0]: [https://two-wrongs.com/technical-writing-learning-from- kerni...](https://two-wrongs.com/technical-writing-learning-from- kernighan.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Personally, I think Wikipedia broke the web; it absorbed a world of individually maintained, individually slanted resources into a mass, then slowly drained away that personality in favor of a neutral POV, one edit at a time.

<comment><USER28> I don't think they should be singled out necessarily, it's just one example of the general phenomenon of the web/content becoming centralized that we're all seemingly sad about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think what happened is the same old story: early adopters/creatives did stuff, said stuff became accessible to the masses, and as a result the overall quality decreased. I guess 'eternal september' mostly covers it?

Digg was great until it became popular. Those who lamented the decline of Digg moved to Reddit. Then a similar thing happened, despite the innovation of subreddits, and some like myself mostly moved to HN.

Couchsurfing was great until it became overrun with people who didn't represent the 'spirit' of CS. Those who lamented the decline of CS moved to BeWelcome or whatever else there is.

I'm pretty sure the same patterns emerge in every human endeavour in existence (musical genres come to mind as very similar, as does the constant protestant splintering, starting with Evangelicals I suppose, followed by Pentecostals).

As an 'early adopter' in tech as well as a few other areas of life, I'm not sure how to respond. Nostalgia is kinda fun. I loved reading this article. But personally I try to remind myself that the cool part, the part that resonates with me, is being an early adopter. I don't feel that it benefits me to start gate-keeping or yearning for the past or whatever. Perhaps a better approach is to consider it a victory: the masses arrived, our passion is validated, what's next?

</comment><comment><USER30> I think it is misguided to think that the web is "broken."

I am sure there are more people online doing more interesting things and producing more interesting content now then back in 1996.

It is just that now the internet is used by billions of people the signal to noise ratio is much lower.

Back when the internet was a few million people globally it was a very select group. That same group of people using the internet for cool interesting stuff has grown dramatically but it is still probably only a few million people globally. The difference is that now there are a couple billion other people using the internet.

There is nothing wrong with billions of people using the internet for things that interest them (mostly drama, porn, pyramid scams, and cat videos, apparently). It doesnt detract from my ability to grok some avant garde research paper that I would otherwise never have access to, run programs that do research that pulls on terabytes of data published in public databases around the world, have access to virtually every film and television show from anywhere in the world, any newspaper, etc, and collaborate with other weird people all over the world who are doing this stuff.

It is too bad that Google stop actually being a search engine and became an ad trap, but that just means going back to how you found stuff before Google: on chat (IRC then, but lots of places now) and in forums.

On the plus side google translate has transformed access to content. Back in pre-2000 the internet was basically English only. there is now so much more diversity, and google translate makes it possible to access content from a far larger group of people than what was possible in the good ol days.

</comment><comment><USER31> Consider this alternative theory: the change ("breaking") you see, the preference for a timeline, is actually caused by the advertising model.

To advertise, you have to have people come back to the site frequently and check the site frequently.

In order to do that, you have to produce new content all the time, and in order to find that the new content the reverse timeline is the best way.

(Once you have too much fresh content, you have to come up with a way to sort even that).

</comment><comment><USER32> Those quirky blogs are still out there. I have several myself.

They are harder to find, I think, and they are easier to ignore when there are slicker, more commercial things competing. I think maybe the real thing that changed is that all of the "hobbyists" with homepages at that time were unusually well educated and specifically knowledgeable about the internet and that's not true anymore. So, instead of the web being written almost exclusively by people with substantial college (or simply very well read and self-educated) and very similar nerdy interests, parts of it are now written by people with other backgrounds and interests.

</comment><comment><USER33> One thing I disliked in blogs, which made me migrate back to an old-school website, was the low bar of writing on a blog, and I ended up writing a lot of impulsive rants. Publishing on your own site makes you think twice and work the opinions before writing. Another blog problem was the "planet" \- your blog was syndicated by a planet and suddenly people complained that you were writing articles not in planet's default language and subjects. I had no less than 4 blogs to please the planets until I got fed up.

</comment><comment><USER34> And some further commentary and context around this: [https://kottke.org/18/07/did-blogs-ruin-the-web-or-did- the-w...](https://kottke.org/18/07/did-blogs-ruin-the-web-or-did-the-web-ruin- blogs)

</comment><comment><USER35> Here's my critique of the current web: [https://www.kickscondor.com/2018/07/02/things-we-left-in- the...](https://www.kickscondor.com/2018/07/02/things-we-left-in-the-old-web/)

Chronos is definitely an issue. But I think the bigger issues are: a move away from custom design, the lack of a "home page" feeling, and the hostility toward self-promotion. I know people talk about decentralization a lot - <USER3> it doesn't intrinsically solve these other issues.

</comment><comment><USER36> "Back in my day we only had static html and we were happy!"

All I kept hearing in my head while reading this article.

</comment><comment><USER37> > The backgrounds were grey. The font, Times New Roman. Links could be any > color as long as it was medium blue. The cool kids didn't have parallax > scrolling… but they did have horizontal rule GIFs.

That's exactly what the web looks like in graphical Links [0], with the grey background and all, only difference being that the GIFs aren't animated.

[0]: [http://links.twibright.com/](http://links.twibright.com/)

</comment><comment><USER38> The blog also did something else.. give non technical users a voice. Do we celebrate that or mourn for a web full of people just like us?

In the same way that Facebook killed blogging- once a better mousetrap for publishing comes along it finds an audience albeit the great technically unwashed.

</comment><comment><USER39> This seems to be wrong:

" _By late 2000, there were still only 1,285 according to Eatonweb. Same disclosures apply on those numbers, of course, but seriously…_ "

Both Blogger and LiveJournal had launched in 1999. They both had many thousands of blogs by mid-2000.

</comment><comment><USER40> Ah, nostalgia!

Yes, chronological blog feeds were hot back then, but now that FB/Instagram have taken over the role of lifestreaming platform, we're starting to see some blogs move away from the constraints of "chronostreaming", and more towards a collection of essays.

Search traffic also tends to have a power law distribution, so the majority of your incoming traffic will be focused on a few popular pages, meaning that in the long term there's really no need for an sequential stream of posts. One of the main benefits of a blog is its ability to earn search traffic for years, so why limit yourself by dating your own content?

</comment><comment><USER41> > Every design decision you make represents roughly equal work because, heck, > you've gotta do it by hand either way.

This seems extremely fallacious to me. Surely different decisions would have vastly different workloads? I would imagine the impact to be even greater for hand-crafted stuff, because you aren't automating any of the workload. I know that is just one sentence in the whole post, but it also seems like one the core arguments.

</comment><comment><USER42> There's a small resurgence of those old tacky websites on Glitch [https://glitch.com](https://glitch.com)

And some more context by Anil Dash about the old web / Geocities web dying out [https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/](https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Shameless plug for a weird thing I made: [https://elementcss.neocities.org/](https://elementcss.neocities.org/)

The idea is to make it a lot easier to build sites with just simple HTML elements, the way I used to do it before CSS. Generally designed for text- oriented sites.

</comment><comment><USER43> I feel like this is a major point in this article, if not _the_ major point:

"Homepage production became suddenly a question of economics: Go with the system's default format: zero work. Customizing the system to your format: way more work than pure HTML ever was"

I noticed that same exact trend even with WordPress or Bootstrap pages. I refuse to get into WordPress as a career. It's just copying and pasting! But if you write a React site from scratch, you really get full control over how everything looks and works.

That's what I'm banking on, that people still want custom websites that don't look generic. Those are the kind of gigs I want to get: make something completely custom and unique, and make it _beautiful_ and still _functional_. I already have one gig doing this and it's great, I'm in love!

<comment><USER44> _> I refuse to get into WordPress as a career. It's just copying and pasting!_

No, it really is not. There's a lot of things about WordPress to not like, but working with it beyond a certain level _absolutely_ involves writing code, and if you know how to write code you can "get full control over how everything looks and works" just as much as you can writing your own custom CMS.

<comment><USER45> True. There's copying, pasting, and monkey-patching!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The web isn't broken.

<comment><USER47> Thanks for that. Reading these comments make you feel as though we're in a weird parallel universe where the internet disappeared somehow.

<comment><USER48> >Reading these comments make you feel as though we're in a weird parallel universe where the internet disappeared somehow.

I've seen people claim that the big social media silos have "centralized" and "taken control of" the web so often that I'm starting to wonder if it's just hyperbole or if people really do think the rest of the web somehow ceased to exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Org-mode can publish as tidy single-file HTML pages. I should get a neocities account and keep a non-blog.

</comment><comment><USER50> tldr: At first making web pages and writing blogs was hard and tedious. So very few people did it and we had awesome things like "the big red button that doesn't do anything"

Now, making blogs is easy so millions of people do it and make generic websites. The fact that their quality is much better is irrelevant, the websites look more generic!

</comment><comment><USER51> Comment to mark rhis excellent discussion for later

</comment><comment><USER52> The web is not broke. People just prefer stories, situated within time, to "homepages," which are like reading resumes.

</comment><comment><USER53> _No two homepages were alike. There was certainly no such thing as a Content Management System. But it didn't mean that the homepage content wasn't managed._

You know, you can do that too even with a modern website and a clean blog. I have a website where I wrote everything myself, a complete front- and backend. Blog engine with hierarchical blog comments, all 100% custom. You just gotta put in the work to do this.</comment>


Man emerges from bunker 14 years after Y2K scare - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/thisisthat/blog/2013/12/11/man-emerges-from-bunker-14-years-after-y2k-scare/

<comment><USER2> This and That is interesting in that it's satirical and yet it can leverage CBC's known integrity for news to spread virally. Regularlly. This isn't the first time I've seen a this and that item shared, often on facebook you only see the CBC.ca link which in almost any other instance a shared piece of CBC.ca content is legimate news. And before Glyphobet took the bait my own office staffer was telling me about this guy over the water cooler. My suggestion to her was to find me an article from a legitimate source and send it over, i'd love to read that story.

We'll see if I get a linke to cbc.ca in my inbox before the end of the day.

</comment><comment><USER3> At the risk of ruining the joke...it's a joke.

<comment><USER4> The reason the satire works though is that this thread of paranoia does exist. I remember right around the first Obama election Costco started selling huge piles of emergency food _in the stores_ , and I'd see people pushing caravans of carts down the aisle and pickup trucks and vans getting loaded up with 5 gallon buckets full of the stuff.

They still sell it, but only online, no doubt left over inventory from those days.

[https://www.costco.com/Food%2c-Fire%2c-Filter-72-hour- Emerge...](https://www.costco.com/Food%2c-Fire%2c-Filter-72-hour-Emergency- Supply-Pallet-80-units..product.100071335.html)

[https://www.costco.com/11640-Total-Servings-Variety-Food- Sto...](https://www.costco.com/11640-Total-Servings-Variety-Food-Storage- Bucket.product.11679468.html)

[https://www.costco.com/11640-Total-Servings-Variety-Food- Sto...](https://www.costco.com/11640-Total-Servings-Variety-Food-Storage- Bucket.product.11679468.html)

They even have versions for the opposite end of the political spectrum!

[https://www.costco.com/8%2c671-Servings-of-Certified- Gluten-...](https://www.costco.com/8%2c671-Servings-of-Certified-Gluten- Free-%2526-Vegetarian-Food-Storage.product.11747940.html)

These are not quantities of food that one purchases for the occasional camping trip. This is Armageddon/Rapture preparation.

In case you have trouble getting safe water to reconstitute this stuff into food after the nukes fall or live uncomfortably close to Chernobyl or Fukushima they even sell radiation filters

[https://www.costco.com/Seychelle%C2%AE-Radiological- Filter-T...](https://www.costco.com/Seychelle%C2%AE-Radiological-Filter- Travel-Pack-by-Shelf-Reliance%C2%AE-%2526-Seychelle.product.100088253.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> People - this is from a satire show on CBC radio here in Canada.

</comment><comment><USER6> 'This is That' is a wonderful satire show on the CBC.</comment>