What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.optimizationtoday.com/social-media/what-i-learned-when-facebook-disabled-my-account/ <comment><USER2> On the one hand, I cannot help but feel for this person - Facebook, without an explanation, did significant damage to this person's career. At least that's the way he paints it (though he mentions a rule in his mailbox that deleted mail from facebook automatically, so there might have been a warning and all that - we'll never know).

On the other hand, well, that is precisely what some people warned us of - give a single company that much power, and it will inevitably be abused, be it by malice or incompetence.

But it is not easy to give any useful advice, because there is basically no alternative to facebook - you can go with the flow or stay away from it. But there is not "something like Facebook without all the problems that come with it being a single large profit-driven corporation". The only solution I can think of is for lots and lots of people to pool their money and start a non- profit Facebook. And even then, I am not overly optimistic, because by now the network effect is far too strong.

<comment><USER3> Folks have tried starting alternatives to facebook: I think the real problem is that facebook is more similiar to a phone company that only connects its users to others that have the same phone company. It was the only game in town for a while, so this has made it into a near-monopoly.

If facebook was required to have some level of across-platform access, this might level the playing field and give us actual choice. Unfortunatly, I think this will take legislative action to accomplish. Until then, luck and time might change the course of things.

<comment><USER4> Facebook has never been the only game in town. It has just been and continues to be the best game in town.

<comment><USER5> And the best by being the largest...

<comment><USER4> "People use it" is a pretty important feature for a social network though.

Whatever replaces Facebook will have to be "cool" enough to get people to actually want to use it. "Facebook but with better privacy" just isn't cool, so the average person isn't going to bother.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know the article is old, but the author showed a severe lack of common sense.

Facebook is NOT a backup. If you only keep stuff in your Facebook account, then it is as 'at risk' as if you only kept on the hard-drive of your ageing laptop that you bought on discount in Walmart/ASDA ten years ago.

This oft quoted adage also applies: 'If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product'. The author seemed to think that Facebook owe him for some reason, and that he is fully justified/entitled in begging for his account back. Facebook is a private company who most of the time let the general public mingle in the lobby of its HQ[1]. As their lobby is still their property, they can refuse entry _whenever they like_.

Something needs to be done about Facebook's near dominance of the Social Media space. If we let this run unchecked for much longer, there won't be an 'internet' \- just millions of stale, abandoned websites all simply redirecting you to their respective Facebook Pages instead. It also wouldn't surprise me if at some point, new phones will be released where the browser app is no longer installed by default, but the Facebook app is. Even if this happened today, most non-technical users wouldn't even notice.

\---

[1] Because the lobby is full of adverts from Facebook's business partners and Facebook gets a nice cut if you buy something being advertised.

<comment><USER7> Law is full of regulations and court precedents that restrict what people can do to their private property. Here on HN people seem to think that private property is like a subclass in python where the owner is free to define whatever method or property he wants and overwrite rules inherited from the society superclass. It's not.

Landlords cannot just evict renters based on the landlord's own terms of service, not even a renter's non-paying children or girlfriend with whom the landlord didn't contract, and not even the renter himself although the stopped paying: The landlord needs to follow the rules of society, go through a bailiff's court or follow similar strict procedures defined in society to ensure that mandatory law is followed.

Not everybody can set up a medical clinic on their private property, even if they offer their services for free.

TV stations in many European countries can't show hidden ads in programmes and cannot show ads for kids for certain products. Even though the viewers didn't pay. Even though they are free not to watch.

In most places landowners cannot freely decide to do what they want with their land, like building a factory, without taking into consideration zoning laws and without hearing the neighbors or wider community as well.

For millennia, what we today call criminal laws, have applied on private property as well. You can't just hit somebody in the face because they are in your house and the terms on the door clearly says that you can. Think that's ridiculous? Well, it used to be that restaurants in America could chose to serve whites only. It was the choice of the property owner. Until it wasn't. Courts and congress decided that such practices were so despicable that the general interest of non-discrimination outweighed the interest in business owners getting to decide for themselves. Same with businesses hiring men only. Today most of us regard it as obvious that non discrimination laws trump the interest of private owners. A few decades ago, most people thought the owner could choose freely whom to hire.

I hope we will start regulating the new advertising industry comprised of social networks and search engines more tightly.

<comment><USER8> _You can 't just hit somebody in the face because they are in your house and the terms on the door clearly says that you can._

This may be worth a read: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine)

<comment><USER7> Note how the conditions for invoking the castle doctrine are set by society, not by the property owner. It's not a method defined within the class. It's a method inherited from the superclass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Big companies don't owe you anything by hosting the files for you, because you are the product. Something similar happened to me in 2012 but with a Gmail account[1]. So, I built an app to backup my emails.

The whole ordeal, in hindsight, was the best thing that could happen to me, it taught me a good lesson on data sovereignty in the internet world and opened up a small passive income stream.

[1] [https://thehorcrux.com/why-i-built-horcrux- app/](https://thehorcrux.com/why-i-built-horcrux-app/)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I too was a victim of a random Gmail ban without warning or recourse, so I stopped using webmail ask together and keep all my mail local.

<comment><USER9> Agreed.

I always tell people I know to atleast use an email address with their own domain, if they can't set up their own server.

[https://thehorcrux.com/about/#advise](https://thehorcrux.com/about/#advise)

<comment><USER11> In one line, you said Google disabled your account.

In another line, you say have your own domain and let FastMail or google apps manage your mail.

I don't understand ./?

<comment><USER5> 1\. You can still backup your email if you want to.

2\. You get to keep your email address if you ever get banned.

I do not think there any benefit in operating your own mail server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the worst thing that they do is disable your ability to send messages. This weekend a friend committed suicide, and I had just started a seven day ban due to idiotically posting the wrong photo (a nude) to a meme group.

Whereas most of my closest friends have me on WhatsApp, so I could reassure them I was ok, it was really fucking horrible getting a bunch of Messenger messages asking if I was ok and being completely unable to respond to them.

Poor timing I know, but if they expect people to use and depend upon Messenger, it's actually really irresponsible to take away the ability for people to communicate with each other, plus I see no benefit in doing that.

Most of my friends I eventually managed to get in contact with in other ways, but others I couldn't. Sure it's technically my fault for posting smut whilst drunk, but hindsight is 20/20 and we all make mistakes.

Furthermore, there appears to be absolutely no form of appeals process or a way to say, get the ban suspended due to it being some messed up times.

With great power comes great responsibility.

<comment> King-Aaron I know it's not directly on-topic, but I find it amazing that people end up copping a seven-day ban for a bit of titty, but then nothing is done for those videos of people killing puppies and shit.

<comment><USER13> There are plenty of racist extremist kooks on FB, and their posts are rarely - if ever - banned.

Apparently a stray nipple is more of a threat to society.

<comment><USER14> A stray nipple is a cheaper binary test than "above some threshold of ideological hatefulness"

<comment><USER15> "cheaper binary test" shouldn't be the way to decide though.

<comment><USER16> It's _the_ quintessential Computer Science way to decide. "Which algorithm has lower complexity? Nudity filter? Ok, use that one."

This is why it's very frustrating that any equivalent of "the public square" on the internet is almost always owned by a private entity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The meta-lesson from this, is that hosted domains, services have to meet the AUP of the host, and your SLA with the host has to cover off on dispute or you are in a high risk situation. I have a personal domain hosted at google. I stand at risk of having them close the google account but retention of the domain is outside of that situation, I would need to be rejected by both google, and the dns registrar to lose all control of that personal domain (not impossible. not unlikely if google WAS my dns registrar). I might lose the data, but I can at least have continuity of service at my own risk levels if I do some basic minimum of holding copies off the domain or managing the state of the domain outside of google.

In facebook, this is just a lot harder. There is no outside. The tools to upload and manage content as a small enterprise are much less clear to me. What I've seen suggests most people treat it as the repo, and write into it as the repo, and operate in it. They don't upload to it from an external state or use an API.

But it would be true in AWS, in any hosted solution, in any space which you think is your space, but is actually a brand like myspace: if you don't own it, you run it under their terms and conditions.

Its a contract. you might not like it, but that 30 page ream of randomly mutating text T&C matters.

I've talked to people who got shut out. It sure hurts. I do not like to think what I would lose, should I fall into breach of my T&C or be detected as being in breach, and blackhole the notices.

My colleagues who do, or did work in google say that whilst it looks arbitrary, if you respect their mails of warning and commitment, if you reply in sequence through the hoops, you can survive being called out. If you dis- respect their sequence, or try to avoid hoops, you will suffer.

My experience with FB is similar, helping persians who suffered abuse of yahoo emails by opponents of their world view, marked as recovery accounts for facebook pages. If you do the right sequence (mutating) of things with FB, you can recover. But its not well documented at any specific point in time what that sequence is and you cannot easily get third parties to help you.

<comment><USER18> The reality is that you are always subject to T&Cs and decisions of a wide range of third-party service providers. Even in the most independent case, you're probably still dependent on domain registrars and one or more ISPs--as well as being affected by the actions of organizations like Spamhaus.

What you can (and often should) do for critical services is to use providers that don't create huge dependencies on a particular provider. It's probably a lot easier to switch from sites hosted on Digital Ocean to AWS than it is from Facebook to X. Furthermore, if you're hosting sites on a site that actually exists for that purpose, I have a lot more confidence I'll be able to work through issues than one hosting sites more or less incidentally (as in the case of Facebook).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> From 2012. This part is quite dated: "Facebook can disable your account if your display name is different than that on your birth certificate".

<comment><USER20> Right. Now they make you upload a photo with your full face showing. No need for certificate.

Just create a new account, now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Every person I've known to have their FB account deleted also happened to be people who posted inflammatory, toxic content on a daily basis. most of them also acted that way in PMs with people, but on an even more terrible level. Harassment level conversations, and probably a much larger scope than I was directly aware of.

I am not at all convinced that Facebook just deletes accounts for no reason. Sure, high-profile people get maliciously flagged sometimes, but I seriously doubt these randoms who get deleted are telling the entire story.

<comment><USER22> Facebook is such a mega-center of cultural life, that for it to have a black- box method of permanently banning people is dangerous, however you may feel about the "attitudes" of the people who're ostracized.

Maybe I am inflating their role.

<comment><USER21> It's not a black box method. Their Community Standards[1] are pretty cut and dry, and every person I've known to have been banned was flagrantly disregarding those standards for months prior to their accounts being deactivated.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards](https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I learn to quit facebook very early days. I don't like the privacy violations or that big brother spying you feeling. Also account deletions are happening to everyone who talk against facebook. Crooked as google. Both really disappointing services all the way.

People, please use alternatives

<comment><USER24> Alternatives to Facebook that's not made by Google?

<comment><USER25> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social)

[https://gnu.io/social/](https://gnu.io/social/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As others have pointed out: fb is not your primary disk, so back up your pix. If they're offering a free service, you are the product.

I'm gunna add one obvious thing to that list... fb is not _your_ product.

As I was reading through that article, it was all - client this, client that. "I can't admin my client's fb pages." _Admin_. A fb page admin. Cuz it sort of reads like: I perform guerrilla social marketing, SEO, and branding campaigns for a myriad of clients on someone else's social network, and they banned my account for spamming their users.

 _" Why would fb do this to me"_, he asks himself, but then realized something, " _something very important - I hate getting bullshit spam all day from facebook, so I filtered all Facebook updates to Skip Inbox, Delete. Surely the answer to why they blocked me was there somewhere._ "

</comment><comment><USER6> Site down. Cached copy:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170525042302/http://www.optimi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170525042302/http://www.optimizationtoday.com/social- media/what-i-learned-when-facebook-disabled-my-account/)

</comment><comment><USER27> And this is why we should move away from services with a centralised point of failure.

</comment><comment><USER28> If this happened, then under the EU data directive facebook would be obligated to still provide all data they have on someone even after they disable their account. So, the data would not be gone as long as it was not deleted.

</comment><comment><USER29> From my experience, it's nearly impossible to get help from Facebook/Instagram if what you need is not listed in their help page. I used to have two Insta accounts and two FB accounts(personal & professional). When Instagram released a new version to add multiple insta accounts, I did the mistake of adding my work account. But Insta was so buggy that it merged my imported FB friend list of both my Insta accounts. This incident made me never trust Insta/FB/Whatsapp again.

<comment><USER30> Slack has a flawless multi-account implementation, which surprised me in this era where corporates try to aggressively create links between our accounts (import/suggest users, merge, or share the advertising ID). But, for example, if you do politically controversial activity on one Twitter account [1], I wouldn't add it in the multi-profile iPhone app: I would be too afraid of being banned from one and losing all accounts together, or the identity of all accounts be shared with law enforcement. I wonder what Chrome shares between multi-accounts profiles, but I have low trust in it for isolating data.

[1] I criticize my city's law enforcement, by filming where crime happens, where the police really is and the faults they do. I don't think it's illegal but I still wouldn't want my identity shared to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > So what did I learn from my experience with Facebook? Back up your account! > You never know if/when they'll decide to delete you.

Just delete your account. Find a way to share your photos without any of this nonsense: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Flickr. Not only do you run the risk of Facebook deleting your stuff, but [when I still had an account] it was was a dreadful UX for exploring photos. Use products built for photos if you want to get the most out of your photos.

<comment><USER32> Yes. Thankfully I've never felt the inclination to join Facebook and reading stories like this just makes me angry at Facebook and at people for making them so powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> (cough cough) www.famipix.com More info: [https://www.famipix.com/privacy- promise](https://www.famipix.com/privacy-promise)

And: free for schools, with intuitive (and well-documented) features to let schools quickly share photos with parents.

And of course download a zip of your albums whenever you want.

-

I started this site in 2005 to share photos of my growing family, as I was living abroad. I've never shared any meaningful photos on Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER34> This applies to almost any online service including Amazon, Google, etc. Basically, these services are so unreliable and risky that using them for anything critical is dangerous. Even if you pay for them. They can and will shut down accounts for no reason. That is a risk people should be more aware of. Since the services are not dependable, it's a mistake to depend on them.

<comment><USER30> I run my whole company on a Digital Ocean account. I'm frightened at the idea of the account being suddenly shut, for example if I miss a payment and the process had a bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Anybody know what those who have the "wrong" name on Facebook but who can't change their name anymore (because they already changed it once and got reported or something) are supposed to do? Obviously IDs are going to show your legal name rather than the one you go by, so if you send one in, won't you just be giving Facebook proof that you violated their ToS, and won't they just ban you instead of updating it? Or if you don't send one in, then how can you change your name to the "correct" one so you don't lose your account like this later?

</comment><comment><USER36> The article is from 2012. Not that I have seen Facebook changing its ways, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER37> We've always felt strongly about Facebook's views on real names: they're intrusive and unfair.

So we made Lyra, a better conversation service which lets you have whatever name you like (among other things). [https://hellolyra.com/c/343](https://hellolyra.com/c/343)

We're a nonprofit and don't take investment, so excuse the plug :)

</comment><comment><USER38> Pretty weird, I have been operating a number of fake accounts for spamming, trolling and information retrieval purposes for years and never got a single account blocked.

I've only got challenges to identify people in pictures if too many people deny your friend request in some time window. But this is easy to solve as you can see the faces by searching their name in second window.

</comment><comment><USER39> You should have learned to be very happy they disabled your account! Facebook is for idiots and for companies that milk those idiots. This event likely saved you for wasting even more of your precious life time. Be happy and do some great things with your life without feeling the need to constantly show off.

<comment><USER40> I partly agree with you, as I quit Facebook years ago, and have never wanted to go back. That said, I don't think people who use it are idiots. In fact, I can see that they get a lot of value from it. A lot of genuinely valuable content is siloed in Facebook - you're not an idiot just because you can't get it from somewhere else.

<comment><USER39> I didn't say all people who use it are idiots. But willingly sharing your private data for free while waiving all your rights? If you realise that facebook runs AI on that data and knows much more about you then you could ever imagine, and if you realise they are selling that data to companies you might not like so much, or what else more, that's pretty stupid imao.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Am I reading it correctly that this guy never actually found out why his Facebook account was disabled?

<comment><USER42> Sort of. Facebook never told him. But he guessed that it was because of either real name policy or more likely because one of his clients ran a single semi spamy marketing campaign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Although unfortunate for the author (and a huge inconvenience), such cases display in the best possible way the problem of depending on non-federated communication tools which promote disowning your data under ridiculous privacy policies.

</comment><comment><USER44> TL;DR: don't use Facebook for messaging, nor as disk backup for photos.

</comment><comment><USER45> Seems like an appropriate time for this Andrew Lewis quote - _" If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product"_

<comment><USER45> Haha. I have to chuckle. I'm really curious why anyone would downvote this comment, unless of course they worked for Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> That site is struggling under the HN load. Maybe they should have optimized prior to today?

<comment><USER47> I hope he learned new things after this load.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Consider not using Facebook at all. It has zero value for the user, it only has value for Facebook.

<comment><USER49> Facebook has _enormous_ value for the user. They didn't get this popular by accident. They provide a wonderful service, and they chain it to acceptance of their awful terms.

Imagining that your use case is the only use case is the great bane of geeks and developers. If you want to help build a world without awful tech companies, you need to stop doing that.

<comment><USER45> I have to agree with Marenkay. I left Facebook a long time ago and haven't missed it on bit. There was some minimal value, I suppose, in being able to have anyone contact me if they didn't have my email. And possibly organize invites for events. All of this is, of course, possible without Facebook, they just made it easier. However, the real issue is the secret cost of Facebook far outweighs any benefit the user derives.

Also, the reason Facebook is popular is not because it adds extraordinary value for the user, it's because it caters to things like curiosity, narcissism, and ego that reside in all of us. It's feeding those things that keep the user hooked and coming back. Not "value". The extraordinary value you speak of is what the shareholders have.

<comment><USER49> Again, your use case is not the only use case. Facebook doesn't provide value _for you_ , and that's perfectly reasonable. But at this point you're basically a guy who doesn't care for falafel standing outside a packed falafel restaurant trying to figure out what character flaw drives people to eat there, since _obviously_ they can't just like falafel.

I don't use Facebook much, in part because of how awful its policies are, but when I do use it, it remains a fantastic tool for keeping in touch with friends. At this point someone always declares that it's actually just narcissism, because email and IM exist and nobody actually _needs_ Facebook, which is a lot like someone 20 years ago declaring that this email thing is just a fad because we already have phones and mail.

<comment><USER48> > it remains a fantastic tool for keeping in touch with friends ... that is > exactly what I question about FB. Their notion of friendship is merely on a > level of "people you met at least once".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Any designers at HN giving reason for this?: W3C unveils HTML5 logo - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/News/2011#entry-8992

<comment><USER2> The real question is, how many designers would release the logo before the product has shipped? ^^</comment>


Rubinius 3.0 – Part 1: The Rubinius Team - <AUTHOR> http://rubini.us/2014/11/10/rubinius-3-0-part-1-the-rubinius-team/

<comment><USER2> I've been using HN regularly for 5 years and this is the first time I've ever felt inspired to comment. I am incredibly impressed with this approach to community building. I think we need to see a lot more things like it in both the open source community and the tech sector in general. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Prompted by this post I tried to run my latest Rails 4.1 app with Rubinius. It's been a long time since I wished to give it a try.

I had to comment out some gems which don't work with Rubinius, all stuff I use only in development (byebug, binding_of_caller, did_you_mean). There is a Rubinius debugger but I didn't try it [http://rubini.us/doc/en/tools/debugger/](http://rubini.us/doc/en/tools/debugger/)

I had to remove the space after the arrow in lamba definitions like -> ()

Then I run rake spec. I bumped into a few show stoppers here.

One is due to some compatibility issues with the mail gem. There is an open issue on GitHub about that and it should be fixed in the gem. In general, if gems don't support Rubinius reliably we can't use it. And if we can't use it many gems won't have an incentive of testing against it.

The second one is that I got an overall feeling that Rubinius is slow. The examples include many integration tests with capybara and the js driver. Rubinius runs them in 7 minutes and 13 seconds (with spring) without the ones that failed. RMI 2.1.4 runs them in 1' 54" (all examples green). Maybe it's slow only for this kind of workload but such a difference in testing is hardly bearable. Too bad.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand Rubinius implements native threads, which means for parallelizable workloads you get a potentially equivalent performance gain to the regression you are talking about. Currently the only way you can get this is JRuby (which of course comes with own its own JVM pros/cons).

I'm not using rubinius yet either, but I think there is already a compelling case to take a serious look at it.

<comment><USER3> That's also what I was thinking but I'm a little wary of using something in production which I don't use in day by day development and I run tests against it only a few times. It seems a recipe for letting bugs slip into deploys.

By the way, I googled a little and removing simplecov shaved a couple of minutes out of the rake spec times. Still too slow and very inconvenient, even if I can still use simplecov with MRI thanks to conditionals like if RUBY_ENGINE == "ruby" ... end

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good to see rubinius is still chugging along and doing things its own way. A while back the IRC channel was the place for a lot of interesting PLDI discussion.

</comment><comment><USER6> What a great post. Not only the open commit policy but the comments on diversity and merit. Thanks for writing that (and for practicing what you preach!)

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome work, Jesse! Huge fan of rubinius, keep it up.

</comment><comment><USER8> Best of luck to everyone involved, your work on Rubinius is extremely important to foster competition and improvements in everything Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER9> Really nice to see Rubinius progressing. Looking forward to 3.0.</comment>


Skel: A Streaming Parallel Skeleton Library for Erlang - <AUTHOR> http://skel.weebly.com/about-skel.html <comment><USER2> The good stuff is here:

[http://chrisb.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/skel-test- master/tuto...](http://chrisb.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/skel-test- master/tutorial/bin/tutorial.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wish the videos were more than just screen captures of the terminal, but regardless, this seems really nice and a good way to abstract away some of the boilerplate.</comment>


Show HN: Unlimited HTML Email Templates – SaaS for Designers and Marketers - s-stude http://www.givemehtml.com/ <comment> s-stude Hi,

I'm building GiveMeHtml - a service which will help designers and marketers to build HTML email templates from their designs and will save some money.

My model is to give teams an ability to test their ideas and to make email templates quickly.

Any comments are welcome.</comment>


Stupid Unix Tricks: Workflow Control with GNU Make - <AUTHOR> http://teddziuba.com/2011/02/stupid-unix-tricks-workflow-control-with-gnu-make.html <comment><USER2> _"Feels good, man."_

It does. I keep an eye out for when make will work well for me. When it works out it saved a _lot_ of time and trouble.</comment>


FCC Clears Google to Pursue "Minority Report"-Like Gesture System - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/fcc-google-radar-gesture <comment><USER2> "Minority Report" isn't even the earliest pop-culture reference:

What about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

> For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning > dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were > made touch-sensitive – you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; > now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the > components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but > meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep > listening to the same programme.

> Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again.

Also, the Taelon shuttles in "Earth: Final Conflict" used a gestural interface.</comment>


Common Crawl announces Open Source Big Data code contest winners - <AUTHOR> http://commoncrawl.org/announcing-the-winners-of-the-code-contest/

<comment><USER2> I like how this contest shows that anyone can ask questions that previously only Google, Microsoft (Bing) and a handful of 2nd tier search engines could ask. Now if we can just get a simple query language for it all. I could then pump in $100 in quarters, ask my question, and wait a couple hours. Isn't this what the information ask was supposed to get us?

</comment><comment><USER3> Linking Entities to Wikipedia is awesome. I love the idea of Online Sentiment Towards Congressional Bills but it's too bad they didn't show their results.

<comment><USER4> Don't worry, we're working on it - we should have our results up by this weekend. We're planning on doing something like <http://www.albertwavering.com/projects/commoncrawl/bill.html> to show our results, but I would love to hear suggestions.

<comment><USER3> Oh cool. How many bills are you going to show? Will there be histograms or some kind of visualization or just the lists?

<comment><USER4> We are looking at about 50 bills this time around. We really wanted to do a histogram, but we didn't have time to solve the problem of distinguishing between when things are crawled and when things are published.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The YC crowd needs to pay attention to this. There will be a new wave of startups based on the common crawl as it develops.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is the "Facebook infection" code open source? There is no link to the code.</comment>


Germany considers free public transport in fight to banish air pollution - <AUTHOR> https://www.thelocal.de/20180213/germany-considers-making-public-transport-free-to-fight-air-pollution <comment><USER3> In Tallinn (Estonia) free public transport was launched on the municipality level. What's interesting, is that despite criticism that this is too expensive for the city - free transportation has actually turned out to be profitable.

This is because only residents of the city can use public transport for free. So thousands of people, who have lived there already, but were not registered as residents, now declared their residency to access free public transport—and started paying their taxes there too.

<comment><USER4> This does not make sense.

If the citizen (as you say) is deciding between paying taxes or buying transit tickets on a monetary basis, he or she will choose the cheapest option, and the city will lose out on revenue. On a purely financial basis making this the citizen's choice cannot be a win-win for the citizen and the city.

Besides the above argument, it is also unlikely that there is any possibility of net revenue to the city. Even if a few people irrationally decide to pay more taxes than they were paying in transit fares, and hence generate some revenue, there are presumably only a small minority of the population who make this decision. But these additional tax revenues have to cover not just what these citizens were spending on their own transit passes, but also the loss in revenue to the city from _everyone else in the city not paying for transit anymore._

Certainly, it is likely that free public transport enhances the economy and generates revenue in other ways, but it does not add up in the way you have presented it.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't make sense because you don't understand how registered addresses and taxes work in the former eastern bloc. It's common for people to move to a large city and officially still be registered as living at home. Sometimes it's due to laziness, sometimes they don't want to get the paperwork to get registered at their new address, sometimes they just like having mom take care of all their paperwork/tickets/etc.

Free public transportation is incentivizing these people to register where they actually live. They aren't paying more in taxes, they've just registered as official residents of the city, so their taxes are counted as being paid in the city.

<comment><USER6> It's not just the Eastern Bloc - it's not uncommon in the US, particularly among recent college grads who move to a new state, to not get a new driver's license (which costs $), or to avoid getting new license plates on a car and summarily to avoid the higher insurance costs in that locality, etc..

<comment><USER7> With respect to auto insurance, the insurance contract is governed by the laws of the state in which the car is registered, however the rate paid is based on where the car is principally garaged. If someone is paying a lower rate by not correctly listing where they live, that is insurance fraud (albeit of the small time variety), and depending on the state can void coverage or incur other penalties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Practically every city with a transit system should be giving away free rides _all the time_. Something along the lines of every citizen can come get a ride card that gives you 4 free rides a week on the tube or 4 free bus rides within city limits.

It accomplishes a ton:

* It gets people who cannot afford regular fares to use these services when appropriate, rather than what might be less desirable (having a friend drive them around if they are too poor, etc).

* It gets people _using_ services they might not use otherwise. A lot of commuters would take the train once or twice just because its free. If you can get people started on using public transit, they might just keep using it.

* You can also give away free rides during low density hours, such as at night. This can help offset daytime load by getting people to do their time-flexible commutes at off hours.

Now there are a lot of tweaks on the model, like making free rides only eligible for non-peak hours. But the whole point of public transit is to increase the efficiency of people and business in the economy where it is built - it is never meant to turn a profit, and if it is profitable it is probably failing on that first premise by costing so much to use. Making it completely free all the time makes it rife for abuse unless you institute a system where riders who ride the most get the least priority. But honestly if anyone were willing to implement such a system making the transit free and just using the tax revenue of booming business to pay for the transit is a much more sensible model than trying to keep your transit system revenue neutral or even cash positive (cough, Amtrak).

<comment><USER9> This is a fantastic idea - is there anywhere which implements this?

However, if the transit system is already at capacity at peak time, then it would need to be restricted to off peak (in lieu of building more services), as the ticketing is acting as demand management rather than revenue collection.

<comment><USER8> I'm not convinced that even with finite free rides public transit users would make rush hour worse. The people taking the tube at rush hour are usually doing it where they cannot travel at an alternate, less congested time. Those people will go for free or not, and are stuck riding at the times they do. Even with a free ride card, you would still want to avoid rush hour just to not have to wait for transit to become available.

What is interesting is that most public transit obeys the same congestion rules as roads - if you take a congested road system and add more roads, you often just end up with more cars on the roads at the same times congesting the new roads again because of all the offset load that uses transit at off hours due to congestion. For people on the roads, they are effectively "free" to use once you have the car, but people still actively decide to drive at off hours to avoid congestion. The same happens with any transit system regardless of cost - unsurprisingly, people don't want to be stuck in traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Other attempts around the world to offer citizens free travel have failed, > including in US city Seattle.

Why do they not mention the large amount of cities where free public transit is working just fine (most notably Estonian capitol Tallinn)?

List: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport#List_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport#List_of_towns_and_cities_with_area- wide_zero-fare_transport)

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure how Germany organizes their rail systems, but I'm guessing the rail companies profit from increased property values like in much of the world. This makes free public transport potentially workable (and even profitable) at least in the subway aspect. The US does not exercise a system like this in the vast majority of cases.

Of course, there's also the fact that if you have a well-designed system, free transport _should_ encourage a lot more economic activity that'll pay back into the funding of the system. That's another thing many cities in the US lack.

<comment><USER12> Not really, the infrastructure is state-owned and separated from the rail companies.

<comment><USER11> I'd be interested to see how they intend to make this plan successful, then. There's no other avenue for the rail to collect revenue in that case, unless its economic benefit is already a significant net profit for the government. It may be, for all I know, it allows higher population density and encourages market participation, both of which increase taxes collected.

It is hard to see how it'll really convince many people not already taking public transit to use it, though. Cars are pretty expensive to have anywhere in Europe with the price of gas and typically more discouraging laws for car ownership (not sure what they're like specifically in Germany), I can't imagine it's a large cross-section of the population that drives because it's cheaper.

<comment><USER10> Marginal cost, I would guess.

When you have a car, but you don't have a transit pass, the cost of completing a particular trip by car is (or at least appears to be) cheaper than doing so by public transit. For example, if I have to go to the city center and back by tram, the cost for two one-way tickets is € 4,60. The cost of one liter of gasoline is somewhere below € 2,00. Public transit only becomes cheaper than going by car if you use it regularly and thus purchase monthly or yearly passes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, plans say the government is subsidizing Electric cars and Plugin-Hybrids with 4,000 Euro. Half payed by the government and the other half from car manufacturers.

They even want to expand these subsidies to small businesses and extend the amount to 8,000 Euros.

The problem indeed is that this would not help to banish air pollution, because the numbers are to low. The second thing is, that only wealthier people would benefit from these subsidies. You have to be able to afford a new car at first. And second you have to be able to afford an electric car. And even if you are the typical buy brand new cars guy, you typically drive these cars 6 to 10 years. So these subsidies might come in an unpleasent moment of your car-buying-cycle.

Free public transportation could reduce car traffic and everybody could benefit. Even poor people.

<comment><USER14> In light of this, the decision to shut down nuclear power plants by 2022, but keep the coal power plants is, err, interesting? Sure, renewable sources are increasing, but fossil fuels are still the biggest source. I wonder where the energy for electric cars will come from if they truly become popular. Keep in mind that Germany imports energy. So phasing out nuclear power, while still importing from nations running nuclear is somewhat hypocritical (e.g. France has some plants along the border).

Even in Germany, politics are politics and fears are not always rational.

<comment><USER15> > Keep in mind that Germany imports energy.

Germany imports energy. It also imports electricity sometimes. But Germany actually has a large export surplus for electricity over the last five years - even though several nuclear power plants have been closed. And the surplus is widening.

> So phasing out nuclear power, while still importing from nations running > nuclear is somewhat hypocritical (e.g. France has some plants along the > border).

Germany has now the largest electricity export surplus in Europe. Germany also has a large electricity export surplus with France.

The German export surplus of electricity in 2017 was 60TWH. 2016 56 TWH, 2015 57TWH. Etc.

[https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=import- export...](https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=import- export&period=annual&year=2017)

In money this means an export surplus in 2017 of 1.4 Billion Euro.

Renewable energy is now at 36% for electricity and Germany now for the first time has days where the whole country is powered by renewable electricity.

> e.g. France has some plants along the border

The old french nuclear power plants Germany would like to see closed.

> I wonder where the energy for electric cars will come from if they truly > become popular.

Depends where you are, but I live in North Germany and it's possible to have large amount of surplus electricity in one or two decades from wind with buffers (like hydro in Norway which is then transported via HVDC lines to Germany).

<comment><USER14> > Renewable energy is now at 36% for electricity

Great, but my point still stands. Would I like more renewables? Of course! Would I prefer running the nuclear powerplants we already have instead of coal? Yes.

The surplus is great, but just illustrates the issue with renewables. I just wish we could be a bit more truthful about the surplus. Large numbers are nice, but that's manager level detail. A surplus when you don't need it and have no way of storing it is useless, and you end up paying people to use electrisity, which has happened. And that's with only 36% renewable energy. This problem will get worse, not better.

I guess electric cars will be able to store some of that by charging during the day and overnight. But we're still far away from 100% renewable without electric cars, and just because we're not burning petrol or diesel doesn't make electric cars environmentally friendly.

<comment><USER15> > Would I prefer running the nuclear powerplants we already have instead of > coal? Yes.

I would not. But I'm for phasing out coal next.

> A surplus when you don't need it and have no way of storing it is useless, > and you end up paying people to use electrisity, which has happened.

these are rare events. As I said Germany has a surplus export not only in TWH, but also in Euro.

The large exports numbers are not because we have renewable energy we can't store, but because we have too much power plant capacity and the owners don't want to shut them down while they are making money. Thus one can export the surplus production - the power plants are already there and paid.

Also keep in mind, the old days of an energy market which is limited to a country is over. The EU is also about a EU-wide energy market. This transition is ongoing and in the future you will see more of this and you will see whole new electricity networks set up between EU member states - for example connecting all north-sea countries. These networks will also buffer demand spikes. For example upcoming HVDC lines between Norway and Germany will be able to reverse transport directions based on demand or storage priority. Stuff like that is already in the works, like this 1.4GW line between Norway and North Germany

[https://www.shz.de/deutschland-welt/wirtschaft/stromkabel- no...](https://www.shz.de/deutschland-welt/wirtschaft/stromkabel-nordlink-die- verlegung-in-norwegen-hat-begonnen-id17458221.html)

A second line is thought to follow somewhen in the next decade...

> have no way of storing it is useless

Storing electricity will get more important in the future. But the transition phase to 100% renewable is still more than three decades and when storage is REALLY needed might be a decade or more away.

Right now it is more important to deliver surplus energy to regions where this would be needed. But keep in mind that this is also not an infrastructure problem, but also about regions unwilling to import electricity from other regions. Regions are egoistic and they want to benefit from the electricity production without having the negative sides.

For example many regions in Germany were keen to have a nuclear power plant and were happy to profit from electricity sales, but literally not a single region could persuade their population to allow storing of nuclear waste, hosting the dirty parts of the nuclear industry (like reprocessing plants) or setting up some of the 'riskier' nuclear power plants (like breeders).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not so fast!

This "consideration" comes with a couple grains of salt.

First the regulatory-political climate: The pronouncement was stated days ahead of a court ruling regarding what measurements communities could take to reduce air pollution, as well as weeks ahead of a decision the EU will make about how to punish countries that repeatedly miss pollution thresholds, like Germany.

That means: The government is telling communities 'behave', dare not prohibit any type of cars (diesel) from entering your cities, you may get into our "free public transport program" instead.

That it is a crude plan is exemplified by the fact, that some of the "first tier" communities in the plan didn't knew about the plan at all and first heard from it in the news, most of them were just informed days before. So far, all communities criticize the idea.

The estimated costs for Hamburg alone would amount to 800-900 million EUR/year, paid by all the rest of Germany. And then there is the problem that public transit crosses community boundaries - the crude plan though as it is, would grant citizens of one community free access to the same transit system that the neighbouring citizens would have to pay in full.

Regardless of whether free public transit makes sense at all - The fact that it is brought up in such a crude proposal and the fact that it is a progressive idea taken "hostage" by conservatives it is an idea bound to fail and to be muted a long time afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER17> Poor idea.

1) It will have an enormous cost. TfL in London collects £5bn/yr in fare revenue. While fares are lower in Berlin and it's a less busy system, it will still probably cost €500mn/yr for Berlin alone.

2) Most people driving are not doing it because they cannot afford public transit fares. They are either wanting a more 'luxurious' environment, can't get where they are going easily on public transit, etc. I'm not convinced it would actually induce much demand on the system _from car drivers_.

3) It may induce a load of demand from non-car drivers, who can now do a load more trips, longer commutes, etc.

4) Most public transit systems are at peak capacity in rush hour. In London if you switched everyone who was driving to public transit you'd need to double the capacity to do so. Considering crossrail is being built for ~£20bn to increase capacity 10%, you'd probably be needing to spend hundreds of billions of euro on capacity upgrades.

Much better to actually tax the diesel cars properly for the externality cost rather than do some other policy which doesn't directly address the issue.

<comment><USER18> > _Most people driving are not doing it because they cannot afford public > transit fares_

If New York made the subway free, I'd ride it more. Less about cost than hassle: Fishing out a Metrocard, (dropping it, picking it up); swiping; learning it's five cents short; standing in line, negotiating the machine; waiting for it to return your card while your train arrives and leaves.

<comment><USER19> Half of that seems like poor planning on your part. Can you refill your metrocard online? I can do this for public transport in Atlanta and I have done it a couple times when I visited Europe. In both cases I was able to set it up well in advance.

<comment><USER20> > Half of that seems like poor planning on your part.

Irrelevant. It's friction. More friction means more complexity and less use. Not _having_ to plan is convenient and freeing. And leaves more headroom for planning genuinely important things.

<comment><USER19> I have to remember to fill up my gas tank to use my own car or charge my phone to use Uber. Both of these tasks require similar amount of work as reloading a public transport card online.

<comment><USER21> Not only is charging your average smartphone _far_ easier (one wire or just dropping it onto a pad) but most people find their phone is necessary for other uses as well, so using it for Uber requires no extra work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems like such a no brainer to me that I wonder why it wasn't implemented much sooner. The biggest problem seems to be how to handle increased demand. But increasing demand is exactly the goal of this measure!

<comment><USER23> I don't think that this is such a good idea, as mentioned above by others, during peak hours the trains are almost over capacity (At least in Munich where I currently live). Making them free would lead to a degraded experience for everyone.

One of the major reasons that I am not in favor is because in Pakistan ( where I am originally from) they launched a Metro Bus service a few years ago, the fare was a nominal flat rate ( ~ 15 euro-cents) for traveling as much as you can in one direction. Now although it is a great service for the people but the buses are always over crowded, and because they are incurring a loss and the government has to spend millions of dollars per year in subsidies just to keep it afloat; They have not upgraded capacity and it is really inconvenient to travel on those buses ( I remember getting sick 4-5 times a year when I regularly traveled on those buses).

A better solution would to be start banning the diesel engine, ramp up the taxes for fossil fuel based cars. And to force factories to reduce their carbon emissions.

<comment><USER24> It will only lead to overcrowding if the service is still good enough that more people than today find it worthwhile to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Before you get too excited: This is nothing more than a vague idea at the moment. No specific plans and particularly no budget for it.

I'd be extremely surprised if this becomes a real project.

<comment><USER26> There is really nothing more to say to this news report.

To give some context, Germany is currently in coalition talks for the forming of a new government and the Social Democrats(SPD) are screwed. They promised no more coalition government before the election but stepped back on that. The party voted by a hair to take up negotiations for a new coalition, during which the prime candidate(Schulz) was completely abandoned after trying to give him the post of former SPD foreign minister Gabriel. Now they face a party vote on getting involved in a new government and they fall in polls almost every week[1].

There is absolutely no substance on this topic.

[1] [https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/](https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This initiative gets a nice public discussion going with most people seemingly in favor. The best argument I've read against this initiative so far is that it may disadvantage rural folks. The idea is: tax money goes into urban transport hence further benefiting people in cities while giving little back to those cut off the transport networks. Personally, I believe it is the best for the environment if most people move into the cities - so I'm not convinced by that point; but still always good to know the opposite side

<comment><USER28> If Germany is anything like the U.S. (it might not be), the economically prosperous cities are subsidizing/propping up rural areas already.

<comment><USER29> It is not. Germany has a much higher population density, from pretty much any point within the country it's no more than 2 miles to the next village. And those tend to be larger than rural US villages, often 3,000-5,000 people. So public transport doesn't work as well in rural areas but there's generally some service for most of the population.

<comment><USER13> And these villages have a pretty nice industry.

There are many so called "Hidden Champions", which are often located in these areas. Farming and so on is not very typical for German villages. A village with 3,000 people has perhaps one to three farms employing at most 10 - <USER2> people.

<comment><USER30> A friend of mine just finished his PhD in Physics and is jobhunting. He's been to a lot of tiny villages in the last few weeks..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Instead of making it free, could they improve the speed and comfort of public transport?

I don't drive because it is cheaper, I drive because it is faster, more comfortable and more convenient (it gets me closer to where I want to be).

<comment><USER32> Agreed. I actually think it could be possible to make transit faster than driving by implementing the right infrastructure. For example, bus only lanes. I think there's still big issues with first and last mile though. One of the things that kills bus time is stopping at many stops and waits between transfers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In Seattle the "Ride Free Zone" caused the busses to be used as makeshift homeless shelters.

This lead to a common sentiment that busses were smelly, unsafe places, and it was eventually scraped.

(Germany seems to have less of a homeless population than West Coast cities, so perhaps this won't be an issue for them.)

<comment><USER34> So instead of fixing the problem of homelessness, Seattle decided to compromise on transportation. Is this ideological or pathological or both??

<comment><USER35> Since nobody anywhere has ever "fixed" homelessness, not really fair to criticize Seattle for not doing it.

<comment><USER36> That sounds to me like [https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says- only-na...](https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation- where-this-r-1819576527)

Seattle has ~3x as many homeless per population than the US average. The US has ~3x as many homeless per population than Germany.

That's about one decimal magnitude of difference (at a somewhat comparable climate - San Francisco likes to claim that they have to deal with so many homeless people because of the accomodating weather)

Whatever is going on in Seattle, there's likely room to improve.

<comment><USER37> Not having a problem is not the same as having fixed a problem. Did Germany have a prior homeless problem that they fixed?

<comment><USER36> > Did Germany have a prior homeless problem that they fixed?

Do millions of displaced people after a sizable war count?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I applaud EU countries of being so considerate about pollution and climate change, be it renewable energy, pollution control by traffic and other industries. On the other hand we have my country India where in budget 2018, not much attention is given to any of these matters.

<comment><USER39> I wish India would ban two-stroke engines (phase them out, not ban them outright obviously), that would make a huuuuggeee difference in the air pollution of the large cities.

<comment><USER38> You have a good point but only stopping two-stroke engines is not going to help. Single person car driving is a big problem and cab sharing is still premature. I think these are by-products of the poor public transport. Major cities don't have fully connected subway system, inter-city public transport is even worse, be it railways (sigh!) or public buses.

Other bigger factors to pollution are industries and electricity production. Curbing pollution is not possible if country/states are not very concerned about it, be it regulating the industries, making better public transport or focusing on renewable energy. Problem is, some of the leaders are focused on politics and others care only about growth and economics. They don't even think that pollution is a real issue. And those who care and think about it, are not allowed to live and do their work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The biggest problem in Germany is that the short-haul service is bad. My half- an-hour car commute would turn to more than an hour. With unreliable service and too few or insufficient connections (overcrowded at peak hours and too few outside). This needs to be fixed first.

<comment><USER41> Germany's a big place. Where exactly are you talking about?

My 20 minutes U-Bahn commute from Britz to Kreuzberg becomes a 35 minutes one if I ride a car. That's also assuming that finding a parking spot is instantaneous, which it isn't.

<comment><USER40> I live outside of one of the large cities. Apart from Berlin and maybe Hamburg people tend to live more in the outskirts. That's where the service is bad.

I've been in Japan last year for vacation. Public transportation was a breeze compared to Germany (5 min stepover time was no problem; try this in Germany).

Anecdotal: We returned from (another) vacation by plane and took the train back home from the airport. We had to stepover once. Not only was the first train late, but also time schedule of the catching train was at odds. When we left the train station there was (in the train!) an announcement that the train will not stop at some of the advertised stops in order to catch up with time. We had to leave the train at an earlier station and where left to sort out the problem ourselves.

<comment><USER42> Simply put your commute time is artificially low, by cities designed to be cheap for driving and owning a car.

Your anecdote is fine and all, but those problems are worse if you use a car, and they are cheaper to fix in public transport since it reallyis problem in the organization and prioritization of resourcse rather than sunk costs in infrastructure and space.

<comment><USER43> Given the effects of commute time on happiness, if I wanted to make life drastically worse for as many people as possible like some sort of cartoon villain, this brand of public-transit advocacy is exactly how I'd go about it.

Artificially depressing commute time is one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity.

<comment><USER42> First, I'm a bit sad that you choose to put words in my mouth to paint my argument as evil.

Commute times go down with public transport, for all modes of transport, individually and on a population level. When you try to fit public transport after the fact on infrastructure built for personal cars, there will always be an edge for the cars, making the choice for cars easier.

In the end you have to see infrastructure for public transport and bicycles as a tool to increase network capacity. If you only prioritize cars you are making it worse for everyone and yourself because more people will use cars and your commute time is longer until you build more roads (Rinse repeat).

This is not rocket science, it has been known for a long time.

<comment><USER43> >In the end you have to see infrastructure for public transport and bicycles as a tool to increase network capacity

Prioritizing capacity at all costs makes sense in a bursting-at-the-seams megacity like New York, San Francisco, London, etc. There, sure, everyone needs to give up some convenience so that everyone else can fit. There's a point beyond which personal cars as a transportation system doesn't scale, and above that point, we need to put them down.

But much of the world doesn't live that way and doesn't want to. It's completely appropriate for smaller and slower-growth communities which have the space (i.e. away from the major cities, like parent's comment) to optimize for quality of life, mobility, detached houses, yards, etc. instead. You don't need to sacrifice everything in the name of capacity when your capacity demands are small. That doesn't mean complete car supremacy like the exurban US, but it also doesn't mean treating hours of people's lives as necessary sacrifices.

<comment><USER42> A big part of the discussion is going to hinge on what we mean with cities and slower-growth communties. Almost everyone live in areas where public transport is vital.

You have to ask yourself, generally when you leave these car utopian places, will you pass or enter areas where public transport seems to be a good idea? The answer of course depends on the definition in the first paragraph, and I'm pretty sure you overestimate the population needed for good public transport by some order of magnitude.. If those places are an important part of your life then you also need to think about public transport.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> After living in Berlin for a month I honestly thought it was free. Never saw a fare gate and was never asked for a ticket. A wonderful system.

<comment><USER45> It's pretty embarrassing to get caught. Prepare for angry fast German, a fine and threats of jail. Probably less funny when you live there and commute regularly :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I don't know how the public transportation is in Berlin or Bonn, but I remain pretty unimpressed with it in Düsseldorf. The train schedule is very unreliable; trains and cars share the same road, and the train is regularly held up by cars. It is difficult to buy a ticket because the machines on the train only take coins, do not offer guidance on which ticket to buy, and are regularly out of order. Tickets are not checked before boarding. Instead, they regularly send stealth ticket checkers into the trains and give fines to people that weren't honest or bought the wrong ticket. Many stops are not elderly/wheelchair accessible, and it would take a lot of work to update them. That said, I did move here from Japan, so I have a high expectation. If I had come from the US, I would have been pretty happy just to see that trains exist! Minus the handicap-unfriendliness; everywhere I've been in the US, the bus drivers get out and set up a ramp for wheelchair users when needed.

</comment><comment><USER47> At first I was like "a word of caution" because Germany is inbetween governments (even though they will be the same) but seeing that ministers from all three parties involved support it, there might be something in it. On the other hand, the EU as well as the German Bundesverwaltungsgericht are playing hard regarding air quality in cities.

The source I've read ([http://taz.de/Regierung-erwaegt-kostenlosen- OePNV/!5481464/](http://taz.de/Regierung-erwaegt-kostenlosen-OePNV/!5481464/) ) mentions seven more ideas in the letter to the EU, only the free public transport standing out as radical. Traffic restrictions, incentives for e-mobility and upgrading pollution vehicles are others. I bet that's what is to be expected sooner or later and someone just slipped the radical idea about free public transport in to see the fallout.

</comment><comment><USER48> Corvallis, OR is just a small (55K) wealthy college town but all our buses are free to everyone all the time.

</comment><comment><USER49> How about offering tax breaks to companies that promote telecommuting in some fashion?

<comment><USER29> Because then everyone will promote it without any real change. Suddenly there will be more remote working policies without people using them (because their boss tells them off the record that they are not supposed to use them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Try allowing only electric cars in the city center. That should help a lot.

And electrifying buses is pretty easy and fast, comparatively speaking. Buses tend to have a shorter operational life than commuter cars and are in use a lot more and there's a lot fewer of them. Replacing tens of millions of commuter cars is a lot harder than tens of thousands of transit buses.

...of course, Germany's grid is pretty dirty since they keep building coal ("lignite", a sort of euphemistic way of saying "brown coal") infrastructure while shutting down perfectly good, clean nuclear power. But should still help.

</comment><comment><USER51> Downtown Portland used to have free public transit [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fareless_Square](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fareless_Square)

</comment><comment><USER52> Counter-intuitively, given the state of German infrastructure it seems to me they should consider doing the opposite, if it will help motivate them to actually invest in their public transport infrastructure...

<comment><USER53> well it has been shown to not have had much of an effect when practiced elsewhere. More services is a far better option than free.

example story [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/why- can...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/why-cant-public- transit-be-free/384929/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Don't take this too serious. If it would stop driving bans for diesels, this government would also consider rainbow unicorns for every school kid.

(Hello downvotes? If you are not in tune with German politics: this is the same government that is in contempt of court for failing to enforce _effective_ measurements to stop excessive pollution levels. This is not at all a sincere suggestion.)

<comment> ju-st I don't understand why you are getting downvoted either but keep in mind that complaining about downvotes is not allowed on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> FYI they are currently downplaying the contents of this article

[https://www.thelocal.de/20180214/government-plays-down- free-...](https://www.thelocal.de/20180214/government-plays-down-free-public- transport-plan)

</comment><comment><USER56> If you want to banish air pollution then allow only electric cars. Perhaps let some basic services use combustion engines because it's cheaper. There is no "free" transportation.

</comment><comment><USER57> Probably a great way to making money in the long run, wonder what healthcare cost for all people going sick by the environment.

<comment><USER58> OTOH, when I was using Munich's public transport daily, I always caught a cold once or twice per year. This never happened since I stopped using it regularly. And I know a few people who made the same experience.

<comment><USER59> Exactly, apparently the "ÖPNV-Immunisierung" (public transport immunization) was fake news, too. I can report the same experience for Hamburg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I wonder what this would do to bikers. Suddenly buying a bike is more expensive than energy consuming public transportation.

</comment><comment><USER61> The last mile problem is what usually makes me skip the Ubahn. I've tried to solve the last mile problem using the bike.

I would happily stop using the car if this happens along with a solution for taking bikes. Currently, I should buy a separate ticket to take my bike along with me(around €2.50 in Munich for a day) and I'm allowed to take the bike only during 6am to 9am and 4pm to 6pm.

</comment><comment><USER62> Or they could just invest in clean, carbon-free nuclear power... oh wait.

</comment><comment> grey-sunshine By how much does the income tax increase.

</comment><comment><USER63> one of the socialism's PROs. if done right. transport.

</comment><comment><USER64> Is this like, a version of Unix to standardize all the version? You just end up with - another version of Unix.

So, more cars on the road (at least at first) will _help_ with pollution?

<comment><USER29> Not really. It's not about starting a lot of public transport companies, more about expanding the existing ones. Public transport is heavily regulated in Germany, you won't find more than one provider in most cities (mostly because it's loss making).

<comment><USER64> Again, expanding a losing (low ridership?) business is unlikely to reduce total cars on the road?

<comment><USER29> It's not low ridership, it's mostly losing money due to low prices. A large group of people tends to get free transport (university students, children, the elderly, disabled people) which means that in the end, only part of those using the system actually pay. Monthly tickets are also often heavily discounted (not in all cities though).

<comment><USER64> Good to know. Still I wonder how many of those folks would have driven a car.

Don't get me wrong; public transport is a great thing. But just pasting it onto a culture of driving cars is going to fail, at least at the start.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-for-romney-to-win-state-polls-must-be-statistically-biased/?smid=re-share

<comment><USER2> They are statistically biased. PPP has the race tied or O+1 nationally yet they have Romney behind a lot in every swing state including North Carolina. That just is not possible.

<comment><USER3> Of course it is.

If he's at 90% in some of his own states then he can be slightly behind in every swing state and still have the maths come out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2008/10/balls-and- urns....](http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2008/10/balls-and-urns.html)</comment>


Please, donate to Wikipedia (a letter from Jimmy Wales) - <AUTHOR> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Letter/en Please help Wikipedia, if you donate post your link here. <comment><USER2> Why bother posting gigantic personal appeals on Wikipedia when they could just put a very small AdSense box to cover all costs?

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this in anyway imply that one day Wikipedia could be "Not Free"?

In other words is this just a donation request or is it a threat or extortion is disguise?

<comment><USER4> If Wikipedia denies you entry if you don't cough up some money, then it could be considered extortion.

Also, as the platitude goes, "nothing is free."

Someone has to pay all the fees. Whether it's Jimmy Wales out of his own pocket, a generous donation from a big corporation, or through the collective donations of many people - someone isn't getting it for free.

Free and not-free isn't a binary relationship; it's a sea of gray.</comment></comment>


"How" ages faster than "why" - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/how-ages-faster-than-why-712e25c9eb3b <comment><USER2> Sweeping statement from somebody whose been doing this for 35+ years. Learn core technologies. Not things built from those core technologies. Ya, you'll still have to learn the secondary stuff, but at least you have a really good idea what will NOT be around in 10 years.

<comment><USER3> What are some examples of core technologies?

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw an amazing presentation at a ruby meetup about database indexes for developers (for example). Will see if I can dig it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you are. The slides aren't as good as the tall (as you'd expect) but still may be helpful.

Other core technologies (in my opinion): cookies, http, TCP/IP, caching.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ack, forgot the link: [https://speakerdeck.com/heimir/databases-for- developers](https://speakerdeck.com/heimir/databases-for-developers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This could be one of those insightful posts that elegantly state an observation in a lasting way, and one that we'll repost every few years or so as an adage on programming. But there's a few reasons why I think it falls short:

\- It doesn't explore any of the reasons why the APIs -- the "how" \-- age in a backwards-incompatible way. Not all cases are equal: a clean break is the surest way of dooming the old and ushering in the new, but this rarely means that old code was broken beyond all belief: even if the underlying framework made some simplified assumptions, the code probably worked okay most of the time, especially if we assume intelligent, competent developers familiar with with the underlying patterns, using a framework for its merits. A good hypothesis is that frameworks aren't solely there to help _you_ solve problems with less code, but also to help others' understanding of the same codebase.

\- Yet even the article insinuates that we can't assume the previous all the time, because many developers _understand_ design patterns by first coding themselves into a situation where they would be sorely needed -- this happened to me, for example. The same way the article's hypothetical developers acquire _enduring knowledge_ , I didn't understand why I'd need dependency injection until I experienced firsthand the frustrations of handling dependent objects the naive way, and found myself re-invening it independently. This leads to the possibility that not all frameworks are picked solely for their design choices, but instead popularity, code availability, ecosystem health, press, advertising, or word-of-mouth may be factors.

\- If so, this still doesn't account for why new frameworks rise and all the time, which would logically begin disadvantaged by having smaller ecosystems, less popularity, less name recognition. What is there to gain by starting a new one? This is really a variation of point #1: there's a lot of subject matter to be explored here, and yet it's left unsaid.

<comment><USER5> \- Maybe api:s aren't meant to last, maybe rewriting more is the piece missing from the puzzle. Always leaving evolution up to others doesn't really work if we all do it at the same time, and your brain is as good as mine when it comes to recognizing truth.

\- Picking frameworks is a bit like picking presidential candidates, the whole game is rigged from the start. Once upon a time software was about solving problems, about working creatively based on your own experience. We can still learn from each other, and share code; but I feel the push towards standardizing on over engineered, general purpose code is misguided; like we're staring at fingers pointing at the moon, arguing which finger is the perfect one.

\- New frameworks arise because needs aren't being met by the current status quo, hence we need innovation to get out of here. Where did this obsessive focus on popularity come from, anyway? I couldn't care less who did what, as long as we keep moving forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's why people shouldn't chase the latest frameworks but instead understand some fundamentals. Those don't change that much over time. If you just move from Angular to React or whatever other thing is hot right now every year for 20 years but don't understand what fundamentals they are based on you have the proverbial "20 times 1 year experience" instead of 20 years experience.

<comment><USER7> > _If you just move from Angular to React or whatever other thing is hot right > now every year for 20 years but don 't understand what fundamentals they are > based on_

That person would have to be (and remain so for 20) spectacularly, blissfully, implausibly obtuse ... given the minimal cognitive capacity needed to hop from each of the 20 upcoming Angular/React equivalents to the next every year will likely both suffice and entice to "osmotically absorb" said "fundamentals" behind them all over time, even when never spelled out.

I think quite a few of us grasp the principles of this or that tech first informally by trial/error and experimentation, later when reading "the spec" or the "fundamentals book" or whatever always flip-flopping between "I know, I figured it out the hard way, smart me hehe" and "I know, I know, tell me what else is new!!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In a very meta kind of way, this is a great case study in the general way that humans acquire new skills and understanding. Grossly oversimplifying the research that's been done into this, we start with very specific things, and progress towards more general cases as experience and skill grow, until ultimately we (hopefully) reach a level where the fundamentals become intuitive.

Sadly, the next horrible insight a lot of people reach in the context of programming specifically is that while experienced, skillful developers can do everything the newbies can and more, for a great many commercial applications the newbie who has only the specific skills useful for a few months will cost far less than the expert but still produce acceptably good results. This explains a great many things, from the ageism and burn-out that are unfortunately all too common in our industry to the generally poor quality and often short lifetimes of a lot of software that gets shipped.

I'm hoping the next insight after that is how you fix those problems and achieve a step-change in the benefits our whole society derives from software by being able to use the extra skill and experience of the better developers in a viable way, but sadly I have yet to reach that level of enlightenment myself.

</comment><comment><USER9> I agree that how ages faster than why but I would like to add that how ages slower than people think how ages.

<comment><USER10> Could you be more specific?

<comment><USER11> I'm not the person you're replying to, but: technology stacks live for a long time. What's hot changes, but what was hot yesterday and the day before will still be in use for many projects, including new ones, for a long time. And equally, it takes a long time for something to become greatly popular.

<comment><USER12> You're exactly right. One simple example:

Numpy for Python, Building from source:

[https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.10.0/user/install.html](https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.10.0/user/install.html)

"Various NumPy modules use FORTRAN 77 libraries, so you'll also need a FORTRAN 77 compiler installed."

It also nicely demonstrates how with the new levels of abstractions we preserve the "hows" but hide them from a lot of the users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is very true.

However "why" can be very wide ranging. Sometimes it can be theoretical, sometimes it's simply due to emergent phenomena that is unescapable for various reasons

Sometimes "why" is because of anothers "how". A good example of this is how the "why" of many things can be explained by "how" C does it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah but you can't usually understand "why" before getting some "how".

</comment><comment><USER15> This is an important point to make imo. The human brain works better at knowledge retention on the "why" category more than the "how" indeed.

<comment><USER5> Why is making connections to prior experience, turning knowledge into wisdom, and gaining a unique perspective on truth. It's a completely different game than stacking facts on top of each other. Why is creative, and what is created can never be taken away; how is useless once obsolete.</comment></comment>


A new study reveals that men are often the victims of sexual assault - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html <comment><USER2> I'm not surprised to read this. Any statistics about rape have to be taken with a huge helping of salt, because of all the issues surrounding data collection and self-reporting. However, I have read at least some reasonably reputable sources citing that in over half of all rapes that occur in the US, the victim is male[0].

Even if this is an overstatement, it's clear that the classic "man physically overpowers woman" narrative of rape is false - both because of the gender assumptions and because rape does not always involve physical dominance.

It's kind of sad that sexual assault and rape are oftentimes viewed through the lens of gender-based crimes. In reality, sexual assault and rape have nothing to do with gender, and should be treated as serious problems regardless of the sex and/or gender of both the victim and perpetrator.

By perpetuating a false image of rape/assault, we end up with a broken matched filter[1] for what constitutes rape. As a result, people tell themselves that what they experienced "wasn't really rape" \- because the victim is male, or because they were under the influence, or because they were married to the perpetrator, or any other number of reasons. And this is how we end up with victims who stay silent.

[0] This is not the same thing as saying that over half of all rape victims are male!

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

<comment><USER3> I am not sure how your [0] can be true. The only scenario I can imagine where it is true, there are a lot of men who are raped repeatedly, but not as many women raped repeatedly, or more individual women victims.

Please clarify what you meant... citation would also be nice.

<comment><USER4> I believe that is the implication. Think of incarcerated populations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Surprised that this one didn't get any comment so far. This is 100% contrary to popular belief. Another point that often surprises people is that most of violence occurs in the family, perpetrated by people that the victim knows extremely well.

<comment><USER6> I guess that depends where you live. Where I come from (near Montréal), the issue has been talked of a lot and there are posters in colleges and universities. Probably high schools too, but I wouldn't know.

I didn't comment when I saw this thread because I thought "well, that's common knowledge..." Interesting article on an important issue nonetheless.

I'm not downplaying the fact that men get raped. This is an important issue and people should be aware of it. I did upvote the thread.

<comment><USER7> I personally have at least one male friend who was by any sensible definition raped by a woman, as an adult. There is good reason to believe that this is an extremely unreported type of crime, and the data appears to back it up. I've been talking about the NISVS 2010 study for two years now, and no one believes me when I point out what its surveys show.

[Edit: I see by now a lot of people have commented on this story. What stands out to me is that still, even in the face of the data mentioned in this story, much of the discussion revolves around prison rape with a male perpetrator. One of the points in this story is that even prison rape doesn't tell the most shocking part of the story of male victims of sexual abuse. Paraphrasing from the story: One of the studies of the Bureau of Justice data notes that in a certain subset of the data, 46% of the male victims of sexual assault _reported a female perpetrator_.

Citation: [http://jmm.sagepub.com/content/12/3/275.abstract](http://jmm.sagepub.com/content/12/3/275.abstract)

This discussion is so far outside of people's gender norms and assumptions that it becomes hard to have a proper debate without constantly referencing the data. These are currently the best firm data sources we have on this subject, and the narrative should eventually change to reflect the available information. Women can be and sometimes are sexual offenders, and not only towards other women and children].

[2nd edit: Aaaaaaand it's flagged off the front page. Glad I was here two hours ago, or I would have missed this excellent summary of the latest studies in a very interesting branch of sociology. The large majority of HN users should really broaden their horizons a little].

<comment><USER8> >Aaaaaaand it's flagged off the front page.

Any discussion of men's issues is usually quickly suppressed by the usual parties. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't read this study, but when I was younger I read, "You are going to prison". It pointed out that so many rapes are carried out in prison. Even twenty years ago, my friends girlfriend said, 'Well, they deserve it!". My come back was 'but wendy, most are in there for non violent drug offenses. friends girlfriend, "Well that's not a legitimate book anyways--I was written by a ex-con". Well the book scared me.

<comment><USER10> For a different perspective of sexuality in a male only environment, I recommend Surprised By Joy, by C. S. Lewis. It begins with his life in boarding school.

Lewis could quite easily have been describing life in prison. I found it astonishing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pretty sure even these statistics are underreported. For example, when in college, I have been molested by women at least twice without consent, and have never reported it -- principally for fear of ridicule from the authorities and fellow students. If you include the question that led to the famous '1 in 4 women are raped in college' statistic ([http://aspiringeconomist.com/index.php/2009/09/11/rape- stati...](http://aspiringeconomist.com/index.php/2009/09/11/rape- statistics-1-in-4/)) -- I have been sexually assaulted around 10-15 times.

Colleges have very few or no policies about sexual assaults against men. This is unfortunate.

</comment><comment><USER12> Men issues go beyond that. Men have shorter life expectancy than women. They have higher morbidity rates. Majority of work-related deaths are men. Unlike breast cancer, that affects 1 out 8 women, prostate cancer is in 90%+ of elderly men. ( But it is less aggressive.) Rates of substance abuse are higher in men. In pretty much every health metrics, men do worse than women.

<comment><USER13> Not to mention the immense college education, high school graduation, and literacy problems for young men that somehow have managed to not be a national discussion issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Once you take into account that women usually friend-zone a man before they've had the chance to have sex and men usually friend-zone a women after they've had sex (from once to many times). This isn't surprising at all. I've certainly been in situations where I've been aggressively prompted to participate in sexual intercourse with a former partner or current partner I was losing sexual interest in. I was never "made to penetrate" because I was explicit in my intent not to participate, but I can completely see how other men put in the same position being pressured to participate in a sexual act in which they have no interest/desire.

Just because two people have had consensual sex at least once, does not mean that both are interested in participating in additional sexual acts.

<comment><USER15> ... what?

See, this is why I really don't like it when this kind of issue appears on HN.

<comment><USER14> What's confusing about what I wrote? I've had many conversations about that observation with the sample of the population known as my friends and acquaintances and they generally agree. There exists the possibility that there are samples of the population for which this anecdotal information does not apply. This observation only needs to be valid for some of the general population to support under-reported figures for this type of sexual coercion.

As it stands, your comment is unsubstantiated as to why my comment is why you don't like these kinds of issues on HN. Does my observation make you uncomfortable? Or do you disagree? Or do you consider it to be an overly broad generalization. I'm been on HN for a while and have earned most of my karma from comments (not hitting the front page), and based on past experience, my comment isn't really that out of line. The only thing I see I could have done differently is to put a disclaimer that its possibly that my observation is overly broad and based on many instances of anecdotal observations (n > 50 && n < 100)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Begging the question. Who is saying they aren't?

<comment><USER3> Well, there's the new legal definition of rape, according to justice.gov, which reads... The new definition of rape is: "The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim." [1]

The headline said sexual assault, not rape, so presumably they are aware of this definition and chose not to invoke it. But this definition precludes the possibility of men being raped by women who force themselves onto the men.

[1]: [http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/January/12-ag-018.html](http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/January/12-ag-018.html)

<comment><USER17> > But this definition precludes the possibility of men being raped by women > who force themselves onto the men.

I'm not so sure about that. It says "penetration...without the consent of the victim" and it doesn't specify that the victim must be penetrated. It defines the act that must happen, and it specifies that it must happen without the consent of the victim. But it doesn't specify if the victim is penetrating or being penetrated.

It does take a careful reading to parse correctly though, so your point largely stands.

<comment><USER18> As written it reads as though the victim is the one being penetrated, but doesn't explicitly state it. I've always figured that whoever wrote it simply didn't realise that the victim might be the one doing the penetrating and so didn't even think about whether that should be included or excluded in the definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The problem is we can't talk this "men issues" without being called "anti- feminist." In fact, any attempt to talk about the struggles of being a man is invariable associated with anti-woman rhetoric. It's as if feminists want to have a monopoly on victimhood.

It's an incredibly bizarre situation.

EDIT: The downvotes only further illustrate my point.

<comment><USER20> _The downvotes only further illustrate my point._

They don't - the downvotes (none of them mine) are because this is a somewhat dismissive mischaracterisation of the issue.

No reasonable person or group objects to discussion about issues that affect men. What they do object to—quite reasonably—is the often-associated attitude which runs along the lines of "Men suffer from <any problem> too, it's not a feminist thing!", which isn't really helpful.

The idea suggested by this article is that men are actually approximately as likely to suffer from sexual assault as women are. That's a perfectly valid possibility, and it's likely true.

But what's the general goal of a "feminist," if you can use such a broad term? Let's keep it simple, and say that "a feminist's goal is to further the cause of equal rights for women." Given that, why would we expect feminists to be talking about the effect of sexual assault on males? It's not their responsibility to do so, and I'm absolutely certain that most feminists would not object to male campaign groups which highlight the problem of male sexual assault. The problems which affect both genders, even in this area, are actually quite different!

The problem with these discussions is the ease with which one can focus on outspoken minority groups. The vast, VAST majority of feminists are not "anti- male"; that vast majority of men are not anti-feminism. It's easy to get carried away by overemphasising the views of minority groups.

Your comment is ultimately a meta version of that - in truth, there's very little opposition to discussing men's issues, but instead a fair bit of opposition to discarding womens' issues because "men have it bad too."

<comment><USER18> The trouble is that in a way, feminists talk about the effect of sexual assault on men all the time. Much of the feminist campaigning on sexual assault and rape is based around the claim that they're gendered forms of violence against women that don't generally affect men. Indeed, quite a lot of feminists use the exact 2010 CDC report mentioned in the article as evidence that men don't get raped (usually by not counting men who are "forced to penetrate" despite saying they consider this rape). Yet because feminism is supposedly not about men, anyone who challenges these claims is accused of making everything about men and derailing the discussion away from women's suffering, because "it's not about the men".

Quite a lot of the feminists who do this don't even realise that they're not including many men who meet their definition of rape, simply because the issue was never mentioned by anyone with a wide audience until a few months ago.

Also, despite men's issues not being a part of feminism, quite a few feminists loudly insist that feminism is the real movement helping men, that anyone who disputes this is obviously just out to disparage feminism and not really trying to help men, and that because all men's problems are caused by patriarchy it's unfair to call feminists out for supporting those supposedly patriarchal ideas. So the net result of all this is that most feminists are helping perpetuate the shitty status quo for men whilst having convinced the world that they're actually challenging it. Needless to say this pisses people off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Man, I come to HN expecting articles about the latest javascript MVVCVCCMCCV framework, the release log of some marginally different overhyped product, yet another person flaming DHH for expressing his opinion on anything, etc... but always wind up staying for these gender politics articles. This place is like 4chan/g/ without the anime.

</comment><comment><USER15> ... can we please keep this kind of gender politicking off of Hacker News? I mean, I get the cases where it's directly relevant to the software development industry, like the Github debacle, but this sort of thing is purely the domain of MRAs and SJWs and women's studies departments and the like.

<comment><USER22> The loudest voices in the debate may at times be at the extremes, but the issue is still enormously relevant.

I would say it's especially relevant here, though not necessarily this particular story. The way women are treated online is still very, very much different from the way men are treated. And this has widespread and significant effects on damned near everything. Whether it's the structure and makeup of online communities (like this one) or the acceptance of women's voices in online gaming and tech journalism to the participation of women in hacking/development activities and the encouragement/discouragement they receive to do so, and so on.

<comment><USER15> > The way women are treated online is still very, very much different from the > way men are treated.

But the article is not about that. The article is about male rape. Which is a subject that produces nothing but endless, meaningless flamewars.</comment></comment></comment>


I've built this neat web app for book readers to track, plan, note books - <AUTHOR> https://www.candlapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys! I really need help to test it out, so if you like the idea, please go ahead and let me what you think. 6 months subscription is on me :)</comment>


Show HN: Simple Accountless, Signature Verification Only Web Hosting Server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/realrasengan/dnslive-webserv <comment><AUTHOR> SS: This is the webserver for [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22600998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22600998)

It's really a POC so no guarantees on stability and security of the server, but highlights how cool handshake can be when used as a decentralized identity solution to create 'accountless' hosting possible!</comment>