AMA with Barack Obama - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obama_president_of_the_united_states/ <comment><USER7> Can't wait for the top post to be another asinine "comment phrased as a question" about legalising marijuana!

Joking aside, I predict disappointment. Reddit users will want hard-hitting answers, Obama will definitely not give them (already the internet freedom question has been fluffy-answered). In all honestly, no-one should expect anything else- the POTUS is not going to unveil new thoughts and strategies through Reddit.

That said, it shows how far they've come from the "jailbait" scandal a few months ago, but I strongly suspect Republicans will refer back to it in good time.

EDIT: Hey, at least PresidentObama bought Reddit Gold. Somehow I doubt it'll be enough to cover the bandwidth, though.

<comment><USER8> The President of United States is doing a Reddit AMA and all you can do is _predict disappointment_? Really?

Why bother?

If you're wrong, your comment will seem too negative and cynical (which it is).

If you're right, well, that'd be disappointing, right?

Comments like yours make me want to rename this site Hater News.

<comment><USER9> "In all honestly, no-one should expect anything else- the POTUS is not going to unveil new thoughts and strategies through Reddit." <\-- cold, hard common sense

If understanding how the world works and telling others makes you a hater, then sign me up.

<comment><USER10> This reminds me, in Chris Hedges' book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, there is a great section on why everyone always hates reality-based thinkers.

Essentially before and during when the war crimes (or whatever) are being committed, everyone hates the truth-tellers because they think they are wrong and they are challenging their worldview or whatever. And then afterwards, everyone hates the truth-tellers because they remind them that they were wrong. That's why you will never read an article about prominent Republicans coming forward and apologizing to Michael Moore or whatever.

<comment><USER11> Michael Moore, truth teller? Ha.

<comment><USER10> Don't worry, I'm sure we'll find those WMDs any day now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was really hoping he'd respond to the law school student along these lines: "Well, where in your class did you graduate, and why did you think you'd have job prospects as a lawyer? Unless you're in the top 1/3 of your class at a good law school or top 5% of your class at an OK school, getting a job is hard in today's market. Part of the reason law school (and school in general) is so expensive is because we've removed a lot of the risk from the loan side of the equation. We give you 7% money, guaranteed against default, and the schools jack up the prices. That combines with faulty transparency in which some law schools hide employment rates. My guess is that a lot more people are going to law school than should be, and we need to fix the incentives to keep all parties honest about their prospects."

<comment><USER13> Yup. I don't have much sympathy for him, considering he took out $160,000 in debt with only a 50/50 shot to pay it back (that's your chance to get a high enough salary coming out of a top law school to service that debt, outside of Harvard and Yale). His poor decision is further compounded by the fact that he decided to go to law school after the legal market crashed in 2008 and people started to realize how ridiculous first year associate compensation was getting. I'm not really sure why my tax dollars should be bailing out a guy with a college degree who took a six figure gamble (though I suppose we've already set the standard by bailing out those who took gambles much larger than that).

<comment><USER14> I don't disagree with a single thing you said - but I do find some irony in the fact that this community for the most part is centered around startups - some taking huge risks with either bootstrapped money, or angel money - <USER2> the failure rate is often estimated between 30% to 40%.

<comment><USER15> Sure, and the "woe is me" rate is estimated between 0% and "why don't you fire up that bong again" -- much lower than that of the (formerly) wealthy students that gambled on an expensive education.

<comment><USER16> The difference is who takes on the risk. With startup investment, the investors risk their money, and if the company dies, the investors take that loss. They do this because they can make a lot of money from the startups that make it big. With student loans, the risk lies with the student.

<comment><USER17> With the number of government-backed education loans that are defaulted on, you could also say the risk lies with the taxpayers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It looks like the Obama AMA has really caused some serious fires in reddit's backend infrastructure. The site's been down for the last 10 minutes.

I would've thought that they'd have brought in some additional computing power for such an event, should've been easy for them considering they have a cloud deployment. Maybe this gives them greater reason to hire more engineers. I found it impressive that they served billions of impressions with just 2 engineers a short while ago..

Also, it says a lot about the "Come Cloud with us, we'll help you scale" marketing bandwagon. We've seen time and again issues with EC2s infrastructure and if EC2 doesn't have issues right now (<http://status.aws.amazon.com/>) then it's just sad that they can't order a gazillion instances for this event and have it scale easily.

Definitely makes me think that we still have a long way to go to compute in a truly 'elastic' way.

reddit definitely does have some crazy infrastructure in place but this would've been one of the most important moments in reddit history (so far..) and I'm sad to see that their engineers are probably going to get blamed for this..

EDIT: Okay, they're back in read only mode.. I wonder how they'll hack in some write access for the AMA while keeping everything else read only. Time for some app server redeployments! Funsies!

EDIT2: And they're gone again _sigh_

<comment><USER19> Stupid question: is the because reddits backend is in python?

I often hear that PHP + varnish is only limited by the size of the pipe. Can this scale on cloud platforms?

<comment><USER20> It's a stupid question because the particular dialect of assembler this was written in is completely irrelevant for performance considerations.

You've been brainwashed by the idiotic pop culture language wars that pretend a question like Ruby vs Python vs whatever has any meaning. These are debates over buzzwords, not reality.

All that matters is the database configuration and associated architecture. Not some buzzword drama.

<comment><USER21> Wow, news.ycombinator surely has become very offensive and attacking. So much that a person cannot ask questions about IT.

<comment><USER20> "become" ?

4 years ago, stupid comments were brutally discouraged. People with stupid things to say would be dogpiled by negative comments.

It is pop culture that thinks asking stupid questions is a virtue.

Most people are just too tactful to tell the truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think it's particularly interesting to watch some internet event go "mainstream" and watch even large services like reddit strain under the load. Put some perspective around how many people true mainstream media services reach.

<comment><USER23> Weird... I am guessing that if Obama was going to be on Reddit, they would have given the Reddit staff some early notice, in order to add some extra preparations for the load. Or maybe not, does anybody know if there's any sort of normal protocol around this sort of thing?

<comment><USER24> The reddit admins knew. Heuypriest himself confirmed the validity of the AMA.

<comment><USER25> Since I'm not up on the Reddit staff, in case anyone else is wondering, Hueypriest is Erik Martin, Reddit's General Manager (formerly Community manager) <https://www.twitter.com/hueypriest>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Glad too see the peanut gallery keeping it light

_____________________________

demaney 69 points 28 minutes ago

For proof, did he send you a picture of him holding a dated index card? Or did the Secret Service land a helicopter on your house?

yishan 183 points 25 minutes ago

He faxed a copy of his birth certificate.

<comment> brown9-2 yishan is the CEO of Reddit.

<comment><USER27> yeah... that's what makes it amazing :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 I imagine the emotions at Reddit HQ must be all over the place for employees right now:

\- This is so cool, the President of the United States is going to use our website to answer questions!

\- OMG, the site is down and the President wants to use our site, fix this now!

<comment><USER28> I can't imagine this hasn't been negotiated by the White House ahead of time.

<comment> brown9-2 Still, I imagine the pressure of getting a down site back up is somewhat elevated by knowing that the head of state wants to use it.

<comment><USER29> Especially considering the president only has a 30 minute window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I would be very much in favor of political leaders doing AMAs on a regular basis. Monthly, or heck, weekly like PMQTs.

Connect with the people more often and more directly. Eventually those politicians who made genuine connections would perform better on AMAs than those that simply regurgitated the usual talking points.

That kind of thing could make a real difference.

I think the odds are against it since it would remove some of the buffer that the current style of message-controlled, divide-and-conquer, us-v-them politics absolutely depends on.

But we can dream.

</comment><comment><USER30> No flying cars or moon bases; just average people off the street able to talk directly to the "leader of the free world" on level ground.

Not the future we were expecting, but I'll take it.

<comment><USER31> While, cool, this is no different than town hall meetings we've had since the inception of the Republic.

<comment><USER32> It's also very different since our population is now 300+ million as opposed to 3+ million at the inception. Any one of those 300 million could potentially have asked the president a question, not limited by geography or social/financial status.

<comment><USER33> Reddit doesn't track or verify geographical location, so in reality someone from Iran could be asking the President a question just the same as someone from Virginia. That's awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is pretty cool...if you like canned PR replies that haven't been repeated ad nausaem (sp?) elsewhere.

<comment><USER35> This is supposed to be him live [http://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/240909486234161152/pho...](http://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/240909486234161152/photo/1)

<comment><USER34> You really must not understand how PR works for public figures.

<comment><USER35> >supposed to be

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Just his responses. Clicking "context" gives you the previous message: <http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama>

</comment><comment><USER37> Gotta admit, found this hilarious: "By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience - NOT BAD!"

<comment><USER35> Which further confirms that this whole AMA is a carefully crafted PR stunt.

<comment><USER38> And?

I'm really not sure what you expect. The President has a busy schedule, plus (as the guy running for office) enough money to hire people to do stuff for him.

We all nearly always plan what we say and do. The stakes might not be quite so high for us most of the time – but the principle behind it is the same.

The only difference is that the President can afford people whom he can delegate some of that planning to. It's very simply not possible to do this any other way.

<comment><USER39> If the Woody Harrelson AMA has taught us anything.

Do a legit AMA or don't do one at all.

Although I'm surprised more people aren't calling him out on completely dodging the questions.

<comment><USER38> No, from that we can only learn to plan your AMA better. His PR people sucked, that's all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reddit Admins, When you get a chance to read this. Please write a blog post on the traffic story from today... I'm sure I'm not the only one who's interested to see statistics on "new users" and hits. I'd also be interested to see the long tail effect as well.

</comment><comment><USER26> CLIFF NOTES: 10x

______________________

REMEMBER TO VOTE IN NOVEMBER - if you need to know how to register, go to Gottaregister.com.

It's hard - truthfully the main thing other than work is just making sure that I'm spending enough time with michelle and the girls. ...

I understand how tough it is out there for recent grads....

Money has always been a factor in politics....

The decision to surge our forces in afghanistan. Any time you send our brave men and women into battle, you know that not everyone will come home safely, and that necessarily weighs heavily on you. ...

Win or lose, I'll be thanking everybody who is working so hard - <USER5> all the volunteers in field offices all across the country, and the amazing young people in our campaign offices.

We've really focused on this since I came into office - 18 tax cuts for small business, easier funding from the SBA. Going forward, I want to keep taxes low for the 98 percent of small businesses that have $250,000 ......

Jordan - I'm a Bulls guy.

Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard to make sure that the internet remains the open forum for everybody - from those who are expressing an idea to those to want to start a business. And although there will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals, I won't stray from that principle - and it will be reflected in the platform.

Making sure we stay at the forefront of space exploration is a big priority for my administration. ......

__________________________

</comment><comment><USER40> The reddit team must be absolutely shitting themselves right now under strain. How the hell do you accurately predict the load when the President is using your site?

<comment><USER41> I don't know, but I hope they post a graph of the traffic spike.

<comment><USER42> I hope they frame it!

<comment><USER40> 'and this spike right here was our happiest DDOS in company history...'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> When Obama refreshes and gets the "You broke reddit" error 500 page it's actually true

</comment><comment><USER44> I wonder how many new user accounts Reddit is going to get today given that Barack posted a link to that thread on his Twitter account.

</comment><comment><USER45> __YAWN __

Seriously. He won't answer anything in a _meanful_ way.... and only safe questions will get answered. Next?

</comment><comment><USER46> For those who can't get access to the site, here are his answers so far. I hope you can deduce the questions, jeopardy style:

I am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA

[+]PresidentObama[S] 4 points5 points6 points 2 minutes ago (0 children) [–]PresidentObama[S] 4 points5 points6 points 2 minutes ago

It's hard - truthfully the main thing other than work is just making sure that I'm spending enough time with michelle and the girls. The big advantage I have is that I live above the store - so I have no commute! So we make sure that when I'm in DC I never miss dinner with them at 6:30 pm - even if I have to go back down to the Oval for work later in the evening. I do work out every morning as well, and try to get a basketball or golf game in on the weekends just to get out of the bubble. Speaking of balance, though, I need to get going so I'm back in DC in time for dinner. But I want to thank everybody at reddit for participating - this is an example of how technology and the internet can empower the sorts of conversations that strengthen our democracy over the long run. AND REMEMBER TO VOTE IN NOVEMBER - if you need to know how to register, go to Gottaregister.com. By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience - NOT BAD! permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA

[+]PresidentObama[S] 21 points22 points23 points 10 minutes ago (0 children) [–]PresidentObama[S] 21 points22 points23 points 10 minutes ago

I understand how tough it is out there for recent grads. You're right - <USER4> long term prospects are great, but that doesn't help in the short term. Obviously some of the steps we have taken already help young people at the start of their careers. Because of the health care bill, you can stay on your parent's plan until you're twenty six. Because of our student loan bill, we are lowering the debt burdens that young people have to carry. But the key for your future, and all our futures, is an economy that is growing and creating solid middle class jobs - and that's why the choice in this election is so important. The other party has two ideas for growth - more taxs cuts for the wealthy (paid for by raising tax burdens on the middle class and gutting investments like education) and getting rid of regulations we've put in place to control the excesses on wall street and help consumers. These ideas have been tried, they didnt work, and will make the economy worse. I want to keep promoting advanced manufacturing that will bring jobs back to America, promote all-American energy sources (including wind and solar), keep investing in education and make college more affordable, rebuild our infrastructure, invest in science, and reduce our deficit in a balanced way with prudent spending cuts and higher taxes on folks making more than $250,000/year. I don't promise that this will solve all our immediate economic challenges, but my plans will lay the foundation for long term growth for your generation, and for generations to follow. So don't be discouraged - we didn't get into this fix overnight, and we won't get out overnight, but we are making progress and with your help will make more. permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA

[+]PresidentObama[S] 631 points632 points633 points 24 minutes ago (0 children) [–]PresidentObama[S] 631 points632 points633 points 24 minutes ago

It will be out soon! I can tell from first hand experience, it is tasty. permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA

[+]PresidentObama[S] 242 points243 points244 points 25 minutes ago (0 children) [–]PresidentObama[S] 242 points243 points244 points 25 minutes ago

Money has always been a factor in politics, but we are seeing something new in the no-holds barred flow of seven and eight figure checks, most undisclosed, into super-PACs; they fundamentally threaten to overwhelm the political process over the long run and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. We need to start with passing the Disclose Act that is already written and been sponsored in Congress - to at least force disclosure of who is giving to who. We should also pass legislation prohibiting the bundling of campaign contributions from lobbyists. Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn't revisit it). Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change. permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA

[+]PresidentObama[S] 557 points558 points559 points 31 minutes ago (0 children) [–]PresidentObama[S] 557 points558 points559 points 31 minutes ago

The decision to surge our forces in afghanistan. Any time you send our brave men and women into battle, you know that not everyone will come home safely, and that necessarily weighs heavily on you. The decision did help us blunt the taliban's momentum, and is allowing us to transition to afghan lead - so we will have recovered that surge at the end of this month, and will end the war at the end of 2014. But knowing of the heroes that have fallen is something you never forget. permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA

[+]PresidentObama[S] 809 points810 points811 points 35 minutes ago (0 children) [–]PresidentObama[S] 809 points810 points811 points 35 minutes ago

Win or lose, I'll be thanking everybody who is working so hard - <USER5> all the volunteers in field offices all across the country, and the amazing young people in our campaign offices. permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA

[+]PresidentObama[S] 199 points200 points201 points 36 minutes ago (0 children) [–]PresidentObama[S] 199 points200 points201 points 36 minutes ago

We've really focused on this since I came into office - 18 tax cuts for small business, easier funding from the SBA. Going forward, I want to keep taxes low for the 98 percent of small businesses that have $250,000 or less in income, make it easier for small business to access financing, and expand their opportunities to export. And we will be implementing the Jobs Act bill that I signed that will make it easier for startups to access crowd-funding and reduce their tax burden at the start-up stage. permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA

[+]PresidentObama[S] 765 points766 points767 points 39 minutes ago (0 children) [–]PresidentObama[S] 765 points766 points767 points 39 minutes ago

Jordan - I'm a Bulls guy. permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA

[+]PresidentObama[S] 1527 points1528 points1529 points 40 minutes ago* (0 children) [–]PresidentObama[S] 1527 points1528 points1529 points 40 minutes ago*

Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard to make sure that the internet remains the open forum for everybody - from those who are expressing an idea to those to want to start a business. And although there will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals, I won't stray from that principle - and it will be reflected in the platform. permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA

[+]PresidentObama[S] 1810 points1811 points1812 points 43 minutes ago (0 children) [–]PresidentObama[S] 1810 points1811 points1812 points 43 minutes ago

Making sure we stay at the forefront of space exploration is a big priority for my administration. The passing of Neil Armstrong this week is a reminder of the inspiration and wonder that our space program has provided in the past; the curiosity probe on mars is a reminder of what remains to be discovered. The key is to make sure that we invest in cutting edge research that can take us to the next level - so even as we continue work with the international space station, we are focused on a potential mission to a asteroid as a prelude to a manned Mars flight.

<comment><USER47> Pretty weak, typical round-about answers that you'd expect from any politician. Not what AMA has come to expect, and what's the proof that it's actually Obama writing the answers and not some intern or campaign staffer?

<comment><USER48> Yeah it's mostly sanitized, but I'm still impressed though at his overall level of savvyness, deciding to do a Reddit AMA at all. Come on what did we expect? A heart to heart with a _unicorn_ , err... I mean honest politician? :p

He seems to be getting credit and generating overall positive impact, regardless of the depth of his answers.

<comment><USER49> Pretty naive to think the President is the savvy one deciding to do a reddit AMA, and not one of the many, many people in his reelection campaign PR team.

Anyway, it reminded me that the news of his first election was the highest voted submission in reddit's history at the time.

<comment><USER38> So he is good at managing you say?

I mean, that's one of the most important traits of any President: The ability to hire the right people and delegate. You cannot administrate a country alone, it would be truly sad and pathetic if every good idea he ever decided on implementing came only from himself.

You are naive and have a very simplistic view of the President's role if you think this is totally worthless if it wasn't his own idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know more about how reddit does booking for their iama? They have a schedule and consistently book notable people. Do they have a staff dedicated to it?

<comment><USER50> AMAs are strictly user-run. The mods of the IAMA subreddit do a lot of work, although I think they do get a bit of support from the admins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> It'll be down the entire time he's supposed to be answering questions.

<comment><USER52> Let the conspiracy theories start. Did the Republicans DDOS the server to stop the President from connecting with Redditors, or did the Democrats do it so that the President wouldn't have to really answer any tough questions but just say he did? Or is it the work of Terrorists? Or Kevin Rose's final revenge?

<comment><USER53> I don't think Reddit crashing requires a conspiracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I've read, I don 't know, hundreds of AMAs through the years on reddit and, in each and every case, I hate the UI experience. I wish there was a way I could say "Only show me questions that have been answered by OP". Right now, doing a find for [S] is about as good as it gets. When you get large AMAs though, they get buried due to the sheer number of comments. Ugh.

<comment><USER55> Check out <http://reddit.com/r/tabled>. Only useful after the AMA is over, admittedly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Given direct access to the most powerful person in the world, people on Reddit still act no differently. Yay consistency.

</comment><comment><USER29> "reddit is under heavy load right now, sorry. Try again in a few minutes."

Oh dear..

</comment><comment><USER57> Reddit.com is down. Pretty poor capacity planning. Having spent the better part of this month trying to accomodate spikes in traffic up to 100k concurrent users then receiving just a fraction of that, I am jealous of Reddit's lazy effort.

</comment><comment><USER58> Seems to have crashed reddit.com at the moment.

<comment><USER59> Why does reddit crash so often?

<comment><USER60> It's a tough site to run because hundreds of thousands of people have write access to the database and reddit attempts to provide the millions of people reading the comments pages with up-to-the-fraction-of-a-second updates.

It's like running a tenth of a twitter with a 10k char limit, if twitter had 10 people on development/operations

<comment><USER61> >up-to-the-fraction-of-a-second updates.

I don't think that's true. I believe the comment pages are cached for 1 min.

<comment><USER25> I've anecdotally noticed an increase in stale pages lately as well, which I would guess is from more aggressive caching. For example, new submissions used to show up instantly, but on popular subreddits may now take a few minutes to show up on the New tab.

<comment><USER61> If someone really wants to figure it out:

<https://github.com/reddit/reddit>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Like many, I've unsubscribed from all the default reddits for a more, eh, 'curated' experience.

I was wondering why Reddit was having load trouble. This explains it.

</comment><comment><USER26> _And although their will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals_ [sic]

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

-[engineers everywhere]

Edited: for relevance ;)

Edit2: SIC WTF? - per comments below

Edit3: Downvotes? Wow. POTUS commenting on IP Law, Privacy, Internet Freedom. etc. PLS Read the context. It was included. Tks.

________

[–]SharkGirl 812 points 32 minutes ago

We know how Republicans feel about protecting Internet Freedom. Is Internet Freedom an issue you'd push to add to the Democratic Party's 2012 platform?

[–]PresidentObama[S] 130 points 10 minutes ago

Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard to make sure that the internet remains the open forum for everybody - from those who are expressing an idea to those to want to start a business. And although their will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals, I won't stray from that principle - and it will be reflected in the platform.

load more comments (25 replies)

[–]davidjoho 104 points 29 minutes ago

And when you say "Internet Freedom" do you mean the Republican version ("Freedom for the access provider monopoly") or the version in which the Internet is free to anyone with an idea or an expression?

<comment><USER63> > And although their will be occasional disagreements on the details of...

One would think that the president of the united states would be able to use "their" and "there" correctly...

<comment><USER25> Someone else corrected "a asteroid" in another question as well. Perhaps the POTUS has discovered that trolling is a art.

<comment><USER26> The grandparent was posted on the merits and relevance of the material. If you read the context, BO tells Reddit: "I'm all for internet freedom, but don't sweat it if a couple of details are either here or there." Which in matters relating engineering and/or IP law, is a bit of a flip answer. That Potus laid down a [SIC] error is poetic irony, humourus (or not). So your comment, is not really warranted and should at least be qualified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> for redditors having trouble reading the page:

log out your profile and you will get served the cache for the 99%, at least thats why theory why it works for me

<comment><USER65> It's too late now (I presume the AMA is over), but private browsing or incognito mode has the same effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Very strange that he would wade into this (racist/sexist/…) cesspool.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm looking at the sort rank of questions on reddit and they don't exactly feel right. I can't pin point it except to say that a question with 59 upvotes posted 58 minutes ago is ranking higher than a question with 620 upvotes posted 60 minutes ago.

Do reddit moderators step in during these situations to supervote questions?

<comment><USER55> [http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment- sorting-s...](http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting- system.html)

<comment><USER66> Yes, I'm in love with their sorting algorithm. That's why I was particularly interested in seeing what appears to be deviations in it. However, I'm probably just seeing things.

<comment><USER55> Ah, gotcha. Did you catch what the downvotes were for each question?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Does this seem like it could be fake to anyone else? Could someone have simply hacked his twitter?

He only posted it on the @BarackObama twitter. Not any of the other ones related to his campaing. Reddit didn't advertise this AT ALL. Most big celebrity AMAs are known for days. The photo of him is just him sitting in front of a laptop. There's no proof at all that he's doing an AMA.

Reddit is going down HARD. I doubt the Obama campaign spontaneously decided to do this. Anyone savvy enough to suggest an AMA should know that it would likely take down the site and they'd probably talk to Reddit first.

His answers seem like answers the president would give though (but he did reference his NOT BAD meme, which seems too cool to be true). If you were impersonating the president, it would seem like you would try to wreak some havoc.

Anyone else feel like this?

<comment> cf0ed2aa-bdf5 There is also his campaign site "Redditors for Obama" <https://barackobama.com/reddit>

Not definite proof but if someone hacked the POTUS's Twitter Account and posted a fake IAMA to reddit it would probably have been shut down by now.

<comment><USER67> The Redditors for Obama wasn't there the first time I had the page load. That definitely helps the legitimacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Responses so far:

[–]SharkGirl 1504 points 51 minutes ago We know how Republicans feel about protecting Internet Freedom. Is Internet Freedom an issue you'd push to add to the Democratic Party's 2012 platform?

[–]PresidentObama[S] 1185 points 29 minutes ago* Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard to make sure that the internet remains the open forum for everybody - from those who are expressing an idea to those to want to start a business. And although there will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals, I won't stray from that principle - and it will be reflected in the platform.

\</comment><comment>

[–]ormirian 2350 points 51 minutes ago* Are you considering increasing funds to the space program?

[–]PresidentObama[S] 1471 points 31 minutes ago Making sure we stay at the forefront of space exploration is a big priority for my administration. The passing of Neil Armstrong this week is a reminder of the inspiration and wonder that our space program has provided in the past; the curiosity probe on mars is a reminder of what remains to be discovered. The key is to make sure that we invest in cutting edge research that can take us to the next level - so even as we continue work with the international space station, we are focused on a potential mission to a asteroid as a prelude to a manned Mars flight.

\</comment><comment>

[–]FifthSurprise 762 points 50 minutes ago What was the most difficult decision that you had to make during this term?

[–]PresidentObama[S] 158 points 20 minutes ago The decision to surge our forces in afghanistan. Any time you send our brave men and women into battle, you know that not everyone will come home safely, and that necessarily weighs heavily on you. The decision did help us blunt the taliban's momentum, and is allowing us to transition to afghan lead - so we will have recovered that surge at the end of this month, and will end the war at the end of 2014. But knowing of the heroes that have fallen is something you never forget.

\</comment><comment>

[–]daveforamerica 319 points 51 minutes ago What is the first thing you'll do on November 7th, win or lose?

[–]PresidentObama[S] 482 points 24 minutes ago Win or lose, I'll be thanking everybody who is working so hard - especially all the volunteers in field offices all across the country, and the amazing young people in our campaign offices.

\</comment><comment>

[–]silent1mezzo 415 points 47 minutes ago What's the recipe for the White House's beer?

[–]PresidentObama[S] 158 points 13 minutes ago It will be out soon! I can tell from first hand experience, it is tasty.

\</comment><comment>

[–]karlfranks 93 points 51 minutes ago Who's your favourite Basketball player?

[–]PresidentObama[S] 433 points 28 minutes ago Jordan - I'm a Bulls guy.

\</comment><comment>

[–]suzmerk 321 points 55 minutes ago What are you going to do to end the corrupting influence of money in politics during your second term?

[–]PresidentObama[S] 106 points 21 minutes ago Money has always been a factor in politics, but we are seeing something new in the no-holds barred flow of seven and eight figure checks, most undisclosed, into super-PACs; they fundamentally threaten to overwhelm the political process over the long run and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. We need to start with passing the Disclose Act that is already written and been sponsored in Congress - <USER6> at least force disclosure of who is giving to who. We should also pass legislation prohibiting the bundling of campaign contributions from lobbyists. Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn't revisit it). Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.

</comment><comment><USER69> Someone ask Obama how many war crimes he's committed.

<comment><USER70> That's the nice thing about reddit - if you care about a topic, _you_ can make a post!

Edit: To clarify, I think it's an excellent question. It's just very lazy of you to ask someone else to do it.

<comment><USER71> I don't understand how a question with an unsupported/uncited premise equivalent to "do you still beat your wife?" constitutes "an excellent question".

<comment><USER70> He's free to answer 0/"I have never beaten my wife". It's an excellent question because Obama has been responsible for the deaths of many people, some of whom were almost certainly killed illegally.

<comment><USER72> Your second statement begs the question: Pres. Obama would argue that none of those killed were due to an illegal direct order from him (and he may rationalize this with his own begging of the question).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Looks Barack Obama has proven that cloud infrastructure just isn't quite there yet, ha. I'm really curious as to what others have asked especially in relation to 911, Wall Street and the birth certificate fiasco.

This aside and I'm not starting an argument here, but this very AMA bringing down Reddit pretty badly goes to show that even EC2 isn't the answer to life's scaling problems nor are other cloud services like Heorku.

</comment><comment><USER74> It makes me wonder what some US politicians wouldn't do for a vote. I'm not in the US at the moment, so I don't know the full extent of what his appearances. But I can only imagine. I know he was recently on Entertainment Tonight. That seemed a little peculiar. Now he's on Reddit. What next?

I'd like to see him do Fear Factor.

If you want my vote Barack, you have to go on Fear Factor. Those are my terms. Non-negotiable.

</comment><comment><USER75> There are already more than enough questions. What I'm wondering is how the president is going to answer anything if the website is down.

<comment><USER76> He won't be F5ing the page himself, nor will he be typing in answers, so I'm sure answers will just appear as and when his staff are able to post them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> 1\. Check out the up and down votes on reddit! 158,753 up votes 152,631 down votes with a net difference of 6k or so positive. That's crazy! Are those partisan lines or something? Why wouldn't everyone on reddit be excited to see the president?

2\. Why has this had such low rank on HN given the number of votes? It had 200+ in the first hour and never seemed to get in the top 3.

<comment><USER33> 1\. Reddit doesn't show the real numbers, like mentioned. If a post is getting a lot of upvotes, it will register a handful of downvotes as well. If you look through the highest ranking posts of all time, you'll notice most of them are quite old. Some time ago, they implemented an algorithm to keep votes from getting out of control; as the number of upvotes gets higher, the number of downvotes does as well. This is to normalize it at a certain level of votes. There's a ceiling that the votes practically cannot get above.

2\. HN doesn't allow downvotes but it does allow you to flag a post. I don't know the algorithm for this, but it's possible people were flagging this post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Heavy load? Is there a site in the internets that can handle a billion connections? Because sooner or later we will get there.

Shame on all of us!

<comment><USER79> Akamai handles that billion connections. "All" Reddit has to do is handle the database transactions. They're also serving all signed in users directly, from a secondary cache, but this is the kind of traffic they already handle on regular basis anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I was able to load a few pages, but I can't find any of PresidentObama's answers to any questions. What a gyp :).

<comment><USER81> What slouch said. Also note that it was submitted 22 minutes ago and he has answered 2 questions, 1 and 3 minutes ago.

<comment><USER82> Probably because reddit is dying under the load right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> The amazing thing about this is that he was literally (like at 3:30) doing a rally in Charlottesville! Busy man!

</comment><comment><USER84> It seems the President lives up to its meme: "if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience - NOT BAD!"

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obam...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obama_president_of_the_united_states/c60nmtc)

</comment><comment><USER85> One way to handle this kind of thing would be to setup a separate stack just for Obama. obama.reddit.com running on a separate web/db/etc. That way even if everyone else is slowed down he can keep going.

Of course it entirely depends on where the problem was, but this kind of thing tends to work in a lot of cases.

</comment><comment><USER86> Huffington Post is aggregating questions and answers here: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/barack-obama- reddit...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/barack-obama-reddit- ama_n_1840908.html?utm_hp_ref=tw)

</comment><comment><USER87> I'm 18 years old. I'd consider myself politically indifferent, in part because I did research at an organization investigating lobbying and money.

No matter how much of a publicity stunt this was, though, I registered to vote today. Obama was pretty persuasive.

</comment><comment><USER88> The _multiple_ "aha! I corrected the President's grammar. hahah" posts are sickening.

<comment><USER89> Grammar-naziism is a part of reddit culture, and one of the reasons they still have relatively erudite discourse given the size of their userbase. I think it's a net positive, and only natural that it would come out in this AMA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Doing an AMA on Reddit does more for global health than mobilizing the 6th fleet

</comment><comment><USER91> If I was Steve Huffman or Alexis Ohanian I'd be feeling pretty good about myself today. You know Reddit's become a fairly important piece of infrastructure when sitting presidents are conducting interviews using it.

</comment><comment><USER92> I'm not sure if I am more impressed the President did that, or how people seem to be on their best behavior in there.

Either that or every moderator on all of Reddit was called to the thread.

Is it true the load took down Reddit for a little while?

</comment><comment><USER93> Aaaaaand the top post is a shitty watercolour as I look at the page right now, <http://i.imgur.com/Ju94o.png>

Never change Reddit, never change.

<comment><USER94> I love reddit but I still don't get the appeal of his posts.

<comment><USER93> They were pretty shitty back when he first started but they've improved steadily, and he really does churn them out. And Redditors do love their novelty accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I love that Reddit humour is prevalent on even the most serious of AMAs.

I can't log in though, which is slightly annoying. Would be interesting to see the traffic stats for this once it's done.

<comment><USER96> What does Reddit 'humour' consist of in this case? Tired pun threads? (He did Nazi that coming, Anne Frankly...) Reddit 'celebrities' posting inane comments with all of the child comments consisting of people fawning over them? A Shitty_Watercolor painting? Someone referencing Rampart like it hasn't already been done in every single IAmA since it happened?

<comment><USER95> I believe that's fairly typical of reddit humour, yes.

Apologies if it wasn't clear my response was tongue in cheek.

<comment><USER96> I'm normally fairly good at picking up on sarcasm on the internet, but I missed it in this case. No worries. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> I didn't expect any real, solid answers from Obama. The reason is simple: he's not stupid. He knows that the Internet remembers everything, _forever_.

</comment><comment><USER98> Wow, he only answered 10 questions, and it;s over.

<http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama>

<comment><USER99> 1 every 3 minutes, not bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> This is by far the coolest fucking thing to happen in politics since Kennedy told everyone that we are putting a man on the moon.

</comment><comment><USER101> obama killed reddit :p

</comment><comment><USER102> This just in: President Obama shuts down social news site "Reddit"

...by making one thread very, very popular.

</comment><comment><USER94> So the site seems to work a bit now and all the great question seem unanswered :)

</comment><comment><USER103> I should have asked a better question. Still happy he answered mine.

</comment><comment><USER104> It's over from what I can tell: He said he needs to get back to DC.

</comment><comment><USER105> No patent questions?!? Come on, this was the time to upvote that

</comment><comment><USER106> And Reddit becomes inaccessible for the remainder of the week...

</comment><comment><USER107> The President appears to have crashed his AMA.

</comment><comment><USER108> How do you suppose they will verify identity?

<comment><USER35> <http://twitter.com/BarackObama>

<comment><USER108> /wooshingsound</comment></comment></comment>


'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/cancel-culture-comes-to-science-11578867753 <comment><USER4> What appears to have happened here was that a climate denialist group that deliberately use "NAS" to confuse people into thinking they are receiving an invitation to speak at a conference by the National Academy of Sciences, was called out by an open science advocate who himself felt mislead. Then the Wall Street Journal was snookered into publishing an editorial because they'll publish pretty much anything that claims to be about "cancel culture". And now we're here debating how some tweets mean science has been ruined by cancel culture warriors or whatever. The irony is that the person being "canceled" is exactly the person being accused of it.

<comment><USER5> Wow, I hadn't realized. How insidiously dangerous. Funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.

 _Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at MIT and former member of NAS, says he was initially drawn to the organization because he was worried about what he saw as a growing relativism in the academy, evident in the work of deconstructionist philosophers like Jacques Derrida. NAS seemed to be taking a stand against those intellectual currents, Emanuel said — though he adds that he eventually became concerned about the organization's stances on climate change, especially during a much-publicized incident in which hackers stole thousands of emails from a group of climate scientists and accused them of misusing data.

In a 2010 article published on the NAS website, Emanuel described the event as "a scandal" — but he didn't see it as a challenge to the scientific consensus on climate change. The National Association of Scholars, on the other hand, sought to extrapolate the Climategate incident "into a universal condemnation of the field," Emanuel told me. "It was just patently disingenuous."

He left the organization soon afterward.

"It sort of revealed them not to be what they claimed to be — people who stood for scientific truth and scientific integrity. It was just another organization that used that as a front," Emanuel said. "They're basically a political organization posing as an organization dedicated to free inquiry," he added._

[https://undark.org/2018/04/18/national-association-of- schola...](https://undark.org/2018/04/18/national-association-of-scholars- reproducibility/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > " By Peter W. Wood"

> " Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. "

Of course the person being "cancelled" would write an opinion piece on "cancel culture".

One person criticised his event on twitter and he wrote an opinion piece on WSJ about how he's being persecuted. This seems incredibly childish to me. Especially considering the original tweet* got under 100 retweets and about 130 likes.

Honestly, I feel like this is more likely to be advertising for the conference than an actual complaint about "cancel culture". Nothing here is noteworthy in any way.

*[https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1215380405597065216](https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1215380405597065216)

<comment><USER7> Opinion piece author, an anthropology PhD holder, has been pushing climate change denialism and attacking individual scientists via his NAS organization since 2009. He did the same thing to another scientist in 2011[1]. The publications he lists on the Federalist Society make his other agendas very clear. And yes, this is plain as day advertising and deception.

[1]:[https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/b...](https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/bottling.nonsense.pdf)

<comment><USER6> His articles on the Federalist for anyone who's interested [https://thefederalist.com/author/peterwood/](https://thefederalist.com/author/peterwood/)

The paper, along with some really basic googling, raises a big red flag over NAS's impartiality. Namely that:

* NAS was founded by a conservative

* Its president is conservative

* Its funders are conservative

* Its board is full of conservatives

* It frequently uses conservative (arguably far-right) catchphrases like "defending western civilization"

* Often pushes conservative viewpoints such as climate scepticism

* Other conservative organisations call NAS conservative

Yet despite all that NAS, or at least Peter W Wood, consistently claim they are not a conservative organisation.

This is completely absurd. Definitely an advert and no sane person should trust anything that Wood is saying here.

<comment><USER8> Are you insinuating that conservative voices should not be listened to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some relevant context here contesting this view: [https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738](https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738)

<comment><USER10> This guy's Twitter thread doesn't seem like a great defense, because he doesn't make any specific scientific claims. It's all just ad-hominem that this org are "climate deniers."

More troubling is his claim that they are "weaponizing" reproducibility against climate change. Doesn't that raise a red flag? If you're worried that reproducibility poses a problem for something, doesn't that mean you might just a little bit probably have beliefs not based on reproducible science, but on faith? And that the irreproducible science has a chance of being wrong?

I'm not trying to deny climate science, I think it's real. But it seems like there's a real problem with this person's stance and how they're trying to argue and obstruct.

I'm kind of a believer that people can think for themselves. Let anybody attend anything - if it's a science convention that isn't promoting science it seems like it's not going to get very far, no protesting required.

Who are these people who feel that simply listening to someone speak is equivalent to endorsing them?

<comment><USER11> > Who are these people who feel that simply listening to someone speak is > equivalent to endorsing them?

There are certain topics that are so settled, that to engage with anyone with a contrary view is tantamount to giving them credibility and a platform to reach the uninformed. Some topics simply don't have "both sides" in any meaningful sense. Flat eartherism, Holocaust denial, and antivaxxerism are ones that immediately come to mind. Anyone who denies the mainstream consensus on those subjects is either a moron, a dishonest person with selfish or malicious motives, or both.

Denial of human-caused climate change is close to being in that bucket by this point (the next 2 decades will determine the truth of it). From the perspective of those advocating for action against climate change, deniers have blocked any sort of meaningful action for nearly 30 years. Their actions have led to unprecedented, potential economic, humanitarian, and ecological crises.

<comment><USER10> Yeah but climate science is complicated by the fact that it is overwhelmingly political.

You could say the same thing about geocentrism, germs [1], fat vs sugars, etc. - which all turned out to be false, given time and scrutiny.

Scientists have to learn the science to understand it, and that means encountering it from all perspectives. As new generations of people learn, they all have to go through it all again.

To not do so is to promote faith, not science.

Plus if denialism is wrong, then there should be nothing to worry about anyway. Assuming scientists are scientific, they will consider it, consider other evidence, and come to the correct conclusion.

[1] [https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/532074/how-promoting- han...](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/532074/how-promoting-handwashing- got-one-19th-century-doctor-institutionalized)

<comment><USER11> > Plus if denialism is wrong, then there should be nothing to worry about > anyway.

I don't follow the logic of that. If denialism is wrong, but it's influencing society and policy, how is that not something to worry about?

<comment><USER12> If your side is failing to convince people, the solution shouldn't be "shut up the other side", no matter how right you may be. It's intellectually dishonest.

By engaging in cancel culture, it gives the silenced side _way more_ credibility, because they can say "why are they afraid to let us speak?" It's not just that cancel culture is morally bad, its also ineffective.

<comment><USER11> When the "other side" is arguing in bad faith, you're damned if you let them speak and damned if you don't. Someone like that isn't going to play by the rules of logical, rational discourse - such as sticking to the facts - <USER2> there isn't much to be gained by letting them speak versus not giving them a platform. I point you to Holocaust denialism, which has a long, rich tradition of ignoring, obfuscating, or concocting elaborate alternative explanations for any truths that run counter to their dogma. Or for something more benign, the flat earth movement or the Apollo landing conspiracy theorists.

It's easy for a bullshitter to make up more bullshit, and people love to believe "contrarian" bullshit so they can appear smarter than the next guy. Refuting bullshit takes time, energy, and effort that could be spent on more productive activities.

It's absolutely a worry that legitimate contrarian speech (I get that that's an oxymoron to some people) might be suppressed. But that's not what's currently happening.

<comment><USER13> An analogous historic example can be found in lead toxicity denial and denial of the harmful effects of tobacco. It took generations to chase away the bad- faith actors in the scientific and medical communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A point I've heard Neil deGrasse Tyson make a few times is that despite the fact that Edwin Hubble was a heinous racist, that should have no bearing on the validity of his scientific contributions.

I have a feeling that with sufficient rabble rousing a twitter mob could figure out how to get the name of the space telescope and constant changed.

</comment><comment><USER15> One of my guilty pleasures is finding someone on the web saying something foolish and engaging them in debate. Rather than cancel these guys, wouldn't it be better to have a few well-prepared opponents attend and do the same? (Isn't that how science is _supposed_ to work?)

<comment><USER16> Debates can make for great entertainment, but are a poor forum for establishing truth and fact. Case in point, the 'cancel culture' argument is designed to shift the debate away from the science and instead focuses the debate on the 'character' of the scientists. So instead of arguing about the facts of climate change (which at this point are hard to refute), we are arguing about whether its okay for scientists to try and boycott right wing conferences. That debate is a little more complicated and nuanced, enough so that the right leaning audience can walk away feeling like they have some ground to stand on. The point isn't to prove that climate change doesn't exist. It is to merely sow enough doubt in the minds of enough people to keep climate change action out of reach for the politicians.

<comment><USER15> It's not the kind of evidence I prefer, but people who concentrate on _ad hominem_ attacks do effectively provide evidence in favor of their targets' position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The term cancel culture like political correctness is a PR term and an effective one. For global warming 1st year college physics is enough to tell that global warming is in fact real and pretty much all the cranks are on the well funded fossil fuel side. And then there's the likelihood that man created global warming will put an end to the human race.

Like the tabacco industry, maybe dissing these folks and giving them a hard time is in fact a good idea and also like tobacco pushback comes from older folks and the industry. In the former case it's a conservative form of ignorance. I've been smoking my whole life and it hasn't killed me yet or in this case I've been driving my whole life and it never caused any harm. In the latter case, it's psychopathic opportunism.

Meanwhile Australia and California (in season) are burning.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm Lenny Teytelman, the target of this article. I'm the CEO and cofounder of protocols.io, an open access platform to improve reproducibility of published research. Accelerating science has been my mission for the past eight years.

The claims in this piece of "cancel culture" and fear of disagreement on my part are utter nonsense.

This National Association of Scholars is a group using the legitimate reproducibility discussion to undermine the EPA and climate research.

I've warned people not to attend this conference because 7/21 total speakers are climate change deniers and 0 are climate experts. My full response is here: [https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738](https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738).

Lenny Teytelman, Ph.D. CEO, protocols.io

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting complain by the author. I checked out the Twitter account of National Association of Scholars (the organization the author belongs to) and it is just straight up propaganda with a false veneer of science. No wonder people are warning others

</comment><comment><USER20> [http://archive.md/I8yLE](http://archive.md/I8yLE)

</comment><comment><USER21> There is a fairly good piece from the youtuber Contra, it's about 2 hours and goes fairly well into the details of Cancel Culture and how the author was herself cancelled after showing a <10 second clip of a specific person in a +1 hour video. I can certainly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Herbert Marcuse's essay "Repressive Tolerance" is required reading when discussing these issues, it's where it all started:

[https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr...](https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive- tolerance-fulltext.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> non-paywall:

[https://usf.news/the-americas/northern-america/united- states...](https://usf.news/the-americas/northern-america/united- states/cancel-culture-comes-to-science/)

</comment><comment><USER24> While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest almost all of academia (and to a lesser but growing extent, industry). The result is an extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades. Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. are mired by unspoken taboos, not because certain lines of inquiry are logically unsound, but because they may uncover results which run contrary to socially acceptable, but ultimately poorly or un- justified assumptions about reality and human nature. More importantly, a subset of results may justify certain traditionally right leaning beliefs, and so certain necessary research topics are effectively forbidden. Please understand, I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable.

The results are less effective social and economic policy, and poorer research in general, as incentives are no longer aligned with classical goals of objective knowledge discovery.

<comment><USER25> >I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable.

Can you point to specific examples of this where the science is actually robust and well documented but has somehow been blocked from being published or otherwise stopped due to this pervasive bias?

<comment><USER26> How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career.

<comment><USER27> What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things? You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education...

Not to mention, what's the point of IQ anyway?

Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?

<comment> barry-cotter If we're not going to find research because it's useless that's the humanities gone. All of the topics you mentioned have been done and are being done.

The point of IQ research is that it effects real life outcomes that we care about, like health, education, social status, criminal behavior, STI status, having children outside marriage, many others.

If two groups are assumed to be identical but they have different outcomes one possible reason is discrimination. If they are not actually identical the difference can be real and not due to discrimination. East Africans are crushingly dominant in marathon running. This is not due to discrimination against non East Africans. If similar differences exist between different ancestry groups in intelligence you'll see dramatic differences in outcomes. If they're due to discrimination we can fix that. If not pretending they're due to discrimination will just lead to a great deal of wasted effort.

<comment><USER28> Funny how environment is continually dropped from the conversation of race in favor of heritability. You note that there is now East African dominance in marathon running. That has not always been the case however. As East Africans were provided opportunity to compete on a level playing field their talents whether inherited, conditioned by demand, and/or environmental were demonstrated. Now there is intense competition and selection pressure for the fastest East African runners. West Africans and East African are of the same race, but differ in the case of marathon outcomes. Why can't this be true for intellect?

Discrimination is not some leftist fantasy. Black Americans have been systematically deprived of quality environments for over 400 years. I am talking about truly horrific intellectual deprivation from making it illegal to read during slavery to living in highly polluted sections of segregated cities today.

When we talk about intellectual disparities history needs to be part of the conversation.

<comment><USER29> > _West Africans and East African are of the same race_

They have similar skin color, but that doesn't mean they're particularly closely related.

Black Africans have the by far biggest genetic diversity of any population. This is because our species evolved there, and has had the longest to develop variations. By contrast, the rest of humanity comes from relatively small populations of Africa emigrants.

As it happens the best long distance runners come from an region in East Africa, while the best sprinters come from a region in West Africa. This includes US sprinters.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/wh...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/why- kenyans-make-such-great-runners-a-story-of-genes-and-cultures/256015/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> One problem is that tenure and standing for established scientists no longer afford any of the expected protections. James Watson was not discredited but promptly fired and "disgraced" for stating a well-supported scientific finding in abrupt layman's terms for an interview. The minds of cancel culture would probably say they gave this dinosaur enough chances to fade away, but he wouldn't. If they do want scientists to be free to investigate the genetic and other bases of IQ further in order to find better answers, then it seems like they want scientists to first find a way to talk about it publicly without specifying the categories or where members of a category tend to fall on the scale.

There is a chilling effect on various lines of inquiry. For now, you can claim the information is out there, but any further writings could become more esoteric or limited. In the case of IQ, I don't think certain people want scientific answers as to why. They would rather assume IQ is highly malleable while they run social and economic experiments to find ways to equalize it and other factors that predict success.

<comment><USER31> James Watson - who was as close to royalty as you can get in science - <USER3> very long and hard to get himself fired. It wasn't just "an interview", but a lifetime of racism and sexism. Lior Pachter has a handy collection of quotes with links to sources: [https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james- watson-in...](https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james-watson-in- his-own-words/)

<comment><USER32> But you're just assuming that he is wrong based on your own presumptions without any actual knowledge about the subject.

The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years at Harvard etc, etc....or you.

This is exactly the problem of cancel culture.

Just because he points out something you don't like you're suddenly an expert and somehow think he is now wrong.

What about double helix? Is he wrong about that too? Based on what? Why don't you have an opinion about that? Because you don't care? Even though your ability to judge the correctness of this research is the same as the race- related studies.

<comment><USER33> > The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. > specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years > at Harvard etc, etc....or you.

Or we could, instead of argument to authority, look at the actual research in the field, which doesn't support Watson's conclusions. (Neither does it strongly support their negation.)

And Watson's expertise is in the low-level mechanics of heredity; it's less relevant to broad population psychometry and the analysis of heredity of traits measured through such psychometry than is, say, a bachelor's degree in any of the social sciences.

> What about double helix? Is he wrong about that too?

By "he" do you mean Rosalind Franklin? But, no, of course that's not wrong, it's been extensively confirmed.

<comment><USER32> What is interesting here is that you disregard authority for results you disagree with and quotes authority for results you agree on. It sounds like your emotions are deciding which results you find 'correct'. This is the exact problem we're discussing.

<comment><USER33> > What is interesting here is that you disregard authority for results you > disagree with and quotes authority for results you agree on.

What is interesting here is that you have an obviously pre-conceived argument and simply invent false facts (such as the appeal to authority I did not make anywhere) to fit it when reality doesn't supply them for you.

<comment><USER32> You're showing a curious case of projection. I'm not presenting any arguments in favor of Mr Watson's research, I'm pointing out that you are not basing your opinion on all available facts since you're arguing for censorship of research you disagree with for emotional reasons. And in turn, you accuse me of inventing facts that you're not willing to examine yourself. How curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not saying for a moment that this conference is authoritative at all. Let's get that out of the way first.

Is it possible for both sides of this matter to be right and wrong?

Absolutely, and that is mostly the case.

This, because of how f'd-up this climate change thing has become. It's a mess of indescribable proportions.

Why are deniers right?

Well, they are not. There's no denying this. Where they are right is in the outcome they are helping create: Taking action to "save the planet" is going nowhere.

How are deniers wrong?

Well, their belief system is completely skewed and devoid of scientific support. They believe in a fantasy they have woven over time.

OK, then.

Why are proponents right?

Well, because climate change is real. We have irrefutable data going back 800,000 years to show how things used to be on earth and how we influenced things in the last, say, 200 years. One look at atmospheric CO2 concentration and it is impossible to argue against it. And that's just the start.

How are proponents wrong then?

Well, because they have turned this thing into an ugly combination of politics and religion. It's as irrational as can be and EVERYONE is lying through their teeth.

The greatest lie is that we can actually "save the planet". It's an absolute pile of manure.

Politicians are the worst. They are using climate change as a battering ram to drive votes. And 100% of what they say are lies. And 100% of what they want to do is pointless and maybe even dangerous.

OK, you might say: That's crazy! What proof do you have to support this?

Easy: Exactly the same proof we have to show climate change is real. That is 800,000 years of atmospheric CO2 data resulting from ice core sampling.

This is the point where people don't bother to do the work and either dismiss or attack the messenger (rather than to think, follow the argument and actually apply a bit of critical thinking).

Step 1: Check out the graph for the last 800,000 years of CO2 fluctuation. Here it is:

[https://cdiac.ess- dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...](https://cdiac.ess- dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical.jpg)

Here's the source:

[https://cdiac.ess- dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html](https://cdiac.ess- dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html)

Step 2: Print that graph or open it in Photoshop and fit lines to the up and down cycles.

Step 3: Measure the slopes for up and down cycles of approximately 100 ppm of CO2 change

Step 4: Average the ups and average the downs.

What I get, in rough strokes, is (roughly):

25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase

50,000 years for a 100 ppm decrease

Step 5: Stop and think about this:

That, what you just calculated, is the NATURAL RATE OF CHANGE OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 WITHOUT HUMANITY AND OUR TECHNOLOGY ON THE PLANET.

That is crucial, absolutely crucial, in understanding just how ridiculous this has become.

It means the following: IF WE LEAVE THE PLANET IT WILL TAKE 50,000 YEAS FOR ATMOSPHERIC CO2 TO DECREASE BY 100ppm

What does that mean?

It means you are not going to fix it by:

        - Switching to renewable energy sources everywhere on the planet
        - Eliminating all fossil fuel-based transportation
        - Switching the entire planet to electric cars
        - Carbon tax credits
        - Eliminating all plastic
        - Taking humanity --all 7 billion of us-- back to medieval times
        - Destroying the economies of every developed and developing nations

You are not going to fix it even if you do all of the above and more.

Why?

BECAUSE, EVEN IF YOU DO ALL OF THE ABOVE AND MORE, IT DOES NOT EQUAL ALL OF HUMANITY LEAVING THE PLANET.

Please think about this for more than a moment so you can start pushing for real conversations based on the truth rather than the ridiculous fantasies being pushed by both sides. This is beyond silly now. It's tragic.

We know that the natural down-slope rate of change is in the order of 50,000 years for 100 ppm without humanity, factories, cars, planes, etc.

What politicians and zealots are talking about is achieving somewhere in the order of 1000x better performance while all 7 billion people, our cities, factories, technology, etc. remains on the planet. I mean, you don't need to do any math to understand how silly this is.

All you have to do is look at these graphs, look at the rate of change and ask: How are we going to do 1,000 times better? How are we going to do that without using unimaginable amounts of energy and resources to the point that we are far more likely to kill everything on the planet than fix it.

These are planetary scale problems that require beyond planetary scale energy and resources to "fix". The sooner we start talking about the realities of climate change --that we can't fix it or "save the planet"\-- and stop being hysterical about it, the sooner we can start talking about how to live with it and improve things to the extent possible. Which also means both sides will meet somewhere in the middle.

BTW, this does not mean we should not clean-up our act at all. We should. All we have to do is stop lying about the reasons for it. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to live in cleaner cities with renewable power sources, climate change and saving the planet just happen to not be among them, not if we want to talk about reality vs. fantasy.

BTW, don't take my word for it. Read this for an insight into how futile some of these crazy ideas actually are. This is from Google Research:

[https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public- publication-...](https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication- data/pdf/43326.pdf)

Prediction: Nobody is going to take the time to consider the above, much less do the work and understand. And by that I mean not one person from either side of the argument. Nobody seems to care about the truth, particularly not scientists who depend on bullshit grants and don't dare bring up the fact that we are wasting valuable time and resources focusing on nonsense. There's big money and great power to be had by riding the gravy train of lies on both sides. Sad. Truly sad.

<comment><USER35> Warning: I am not a climate scientist.

However, I have to disagree that humanity has to leave the planet, or that it's impossible to fix. I will agree that it's very unlikely to be fixed or mitigated to a decent amount before disaster happens, but that's because of politics and human stupidity, not because it's not possible.

More CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't have to equal higher average global temperatures. CO2 holds in energy from the Sun. So the answer is simple: decrease the amount of sunlight. There's already ideas of how to do this, such as "solar shades". Basically, put a bunch of things in orbit that block some of the Sun's light, so less of it strikes the atmosphere. Now, even with the higher levels of CO2, less energy is entering the system that will be retained by the greenhouse effect. Of course, planetary engineering ideas like this are megaprojects and would require huge amounts of money to do, and probably international coordination, which seems unlikely given the terrible state of world politics at the moment.

<comment><USER34> You misunderstood. I didn't say we have to leave the planet. What I am exposing in the data is that we know how atmospheric CO2 would decrease if we did (and took all of our toys with us).

The answer is simple: We cannot fix this. Because any attempt would require energy and resources beyond planetary scale. Which means we are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix it.

I am not a climate scientist either. I am, however, an engineer, and I have a pretty solid handle on Physics. Conservation of Energy alone says we cannot fix this.

BTW, by "fix this" I mean, any faster than the natural rate of about 50,000 years for a reduction of 100ppm.

If you take the time to read the Google paper I linked you'll find the statement that sent me on a path to truly try to understand this many years ago. They said, paraphrasing:

"Even if we convert all energy generation on the entire planet to the most optimal forms of renewable energy, not only will we not see atmospheric CO2 levels decline or level-off, they will continue to rise exponentially".

This was a conclusion exactly opposite what the researchers went into this "knowing". I appreciate they were honest enough to publish this and actually expose just how confused we've become about this concept of saving the planet. It simply isn't going to happen. Not in a generation, not in a hundred, not even in a thousand.

You see, it's that pesky bit of data: 50,000 years for a reduction of 100 ppm. Without humanity.

This means that if humans stay on the planet, even if population growth stopped, and we magically --because it would require magic-- became carbon neutral, it would still take at least 50,000 years to drop 100 ppm, or, more than likely, 100,000 or 200,000, pick a number.

This is equivalent to trying to remove smoke from your kitchen with a small fan while you continue to burn the food you are cooking on the frying pan. You just can't do it. You have to stop cooking and then wait for the small fan do do the job over a couple of hours. If you want it done faster you have to stop cooking and use a much larger fan (more energy). If you, on the other hand, continue to burn your food and install a bigger fan, you may or may not clear the smoke. If you do, it will likely take just as long or longer.

This isn't difficult stuff to understand. It's actually the most common sense science I've seen in a long time. The graphs tell a story. All we have to do is see it, read it and understand it.

<comment><USER35> The entire problem with your logic is that you're assuming that humans will not and cannot do anything at all to change carbon levels, aside from relying on natural processes. That's completely ridiculous. Any attempt to fix the problem has to involve artificial actions: carbon sequestration, solar shades, etc.

Your entire mentality is "it took X years for nature to do this, so it'll take X years to undo it by natural processes, and oh yeah, we have to actually _undo_ it so everything goes back exactly the way it was, instead of just making the end result satisfactory". This isn't helpful at all. As I pointed out before, we can reduce the amount of sunlight using solar shades; we don't actually need CO2 levels to go back to pre-industrial levels. We just need to prevent the temperature from rising so much, while we figure out how to deal with the CO2.

>This is equivalent to trying to remove smoke from your kitchen with a small fan while you continue to burn the food you are cooking on the frying pan. You just can't do it.

Yes, you really can. With a fan powerful enough, and a vent hood, you absolutely can. It really doesn't take that much, and it depends on how much smoke you're producing, but you seem to think you need a turbojet engine to clear the air in a small kitchen from a small cooking fire, and you really don't.

>If you want it done faster you have to stop cooking and use a much larger fan (more energy).

Here's the part you're not getting. The amount of energy you need to run a vent fan isn't anywhere near the amount of energy unleashed by your cooking fire. Even better, if you constrain the air supply, the fire burns itself out quickly, or at least is prevented from producing as much smoke.

>It's actually the most common sense science I've seen in a long time.

I've noticed that people who throw around the term "common sense" a lot do so because they really don't understand things very well, and think their intuitive understanding suffices, when in fact it doesn't.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the personal attack at the end. Class act.

Don't take the kitchen analogy literally, that's not what an analogy is for. I won't discuss it, because it is purely a tool not a precise model of planetary-scale dynamics.

You also misunderstood my point entirely. And, BTW, don't tell people things like "that's completely ridiculous" unless you are in a position to irrefutably prove what you are saying. Also, it's rude.

Anyhow, my point is very, very simple:

If it takes in the range of 50,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to come down by 100 ppm without humanity around, any solution that claims to be able to do this a thousand times faster has a massive burden or proof equivalent to magic and divine intervention, combined.

Politicians toss around all kinds of proposals and plans that are equivalent of the famous "and then a miracle occurs" cartoon. They want to destroy entire economies just because they say so. And all of it is nonsense.

Now, let's think about what it means that it took 50,000 years for a 100 ppm drop (which is about what we need).

Well, it involved massive amounts of rain, hurricanes, cyclones as well as massive amounts of trees and vegetation growth. Please stop and think about the energy it took for, year after, year, for 50,000 years to drop so much water and grow so many trees and vegetation to capture the CO2 and drop it by 100 ppm. The scale is almost inconceivable.

Can we find a more efficient way to do it? OK, let's assume we can (which I think is a fair assumption). A thousand times more efficient? I don't have to do the math to know that even if we were 1,000x more efficient it would still require an astronomical amount of energy and resources. I would not be surprised if an improvement in efficient CO2 capture in the order of a million times better than the natural process still required so much in terms of resources and energy that it would be just about impossible.

And yet we are missing the forest for the trees. What I am talking about mostly is what the zealots and politicians are parading around. With the reality I presented, which is irrefutable --unless someone wants to challenge ice core data-- it is easy to prove how ridiculous their proposals actually are:

Switch to renewable energy sources: Nope, CO2 levels will still continue to rise exponentially. This has already been studied.

Stop coal plants: Nope, even if we left the planet it would take 50,000 years.

Outlaw all forms of petroleum-powered transportation: Nope, even if we left the planet it would take 50,000 years.

On, and on, and on.

What you are saying about blocking the sun is another one of those ideas. First of all, anyone who has spent a reasonable amount of time in aerospace and gotten into the physics of the matter understands the unbelievable amount of energy it would require to launch millions of solar shades and put them into orbit. I mean, it takes energy to create the fuel and oxidant to put into a rocket. And these processes are not clean. On top of that, that many rocket launches would only add to the problem. And then we are talking about meddling with a planetary scale ecological system that is the result of billions of years of adaptation under existing solar conditions. There is no way whatsoever to predict what could happen. Again, we could succeed at killing absolutely everything on this planet. The only people who believe simulations are those who wrote the code, for the most part we have no clue what <doing x> will produce 10 years from now, much less 50 or 100.

It's hubris to think we can actually do this when everything we touch is far more likely to cause more pollution and require hyper-planetary scales of energy and materials.

I know lots of people --politicians!-- have a lot of sunk costs and interest in not challenging --even a little-- the status quo. And so I fear we are going to do a whole bunch of really stupid things. And I can't do a thing about it. Nobody can, because that train is already on the tracks in more ways than one. In that sense and more this conversation is a complete waste of everyone's time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Aren't a lot of topics already taboo in science/academia? I'd say cancel culture has been in science for a while now. Afterall it is part of academia.

Didn't a female brown university professor's study on transgenders get "canceled" because it offended some people not too long ago?

Didn't Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, at some college in oregon get "canceled" not too long ago?

Didn't Jordan Peterson get "canceled" not too long ago?

Academia and journalists have been canceling people for a while now. Was WSJ asleep for the past decade?

<comment><USER37> Not sure about the first example, but Bret Weinstein was fired because his behaviour didn't reflect his employer's values, not because of the science he was doing. I also don't think Peterson is having particular difficulty doing scientific work, nor is the actual research he does "taboo".

<comment><USER36> > Not sure about the first example

If you are that well versed in the lives of weinstein and peterson, you most definitely are aware the first. But being as woke as you are, you probably can't admit it to yourself.

> but Bret Weinstein was fired because his behaviour didn't reflect his > employer's values, not because of the science he was doing

Weinstein wasn't fired, he resigned after getting a settlement from his university since the university couldn't provide for his safety from racist mobs.

> I also don't think Peterson is having particular difficulty doing scientific > work, nor is the actual research he does "taboo".

You don't think? I suspect Peterson would disagree. You sure his research into political correctness, authoritarianism, identity politics, evils of postmodernism, etc aren't "taboo"? If it wasn't taboo, jordan peterson wouldn't be so well known. He'd be just another no-name professor somewhere in canada.

Instead of saying racism, hate and cancel culture is bad, you are defending racism, hate and cancel culture. Which may get support and upvotes in echo chambers online, but is laughed at in the real world. Reality will ultimately trump fantasy.

<comment><USER37> (That's a pretty condescending and presumptuous post.)

I wouldn't say I'm "well-versed" in this but I have read around the case of Weinstein and have looked into what Peterson has to say about things here and there.

The question, it seems to me, is whether particular avenues of science are being stifled, or whether scientists are being stifled because of the nature of their scientific research.

Weinstein was pressured out because of his opinions on a matter separate to his scientific research. This sort of thing has happened before and it will happen again. I'm not defending it, I'm just saying it's not a case of science itself being stifled.

Jordan Peterson's diatribes on things like political correctness and postmodernism might be informed by his knowledge of psychology but unless I'm mistaken they don't in themselves constitute scientific research.

He has an extensive record of published papers that you can find on google scholar. As far as I can tell he doesn't have major issues getting funding, publishing papers or obtaining academic positions in pursuit of his actual scientific research, but I'm happy to be shown wrong here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Where has this been since 2015?

<comment><USER39> Cancelled, I suppose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> 'Culture War' Comes to HN?

</comment><comment><USER41> The line between genius and madness is famously thin and there is no way to distinguish a room full of cranks from a room full of enlightened scholars without listening carefully and weighing up what gets said. And of course one side straight up lying is a fairly useful indicator.

So I suppose as long as these people are trying to tell the truth as they see it good luck to them. But articles like this are fundamentally a cross between advertising and propaganda so aren't much use to the general public. There is a dire need for some political balance in academia as it is a sheltered institution that by and large doesn't have to deal with the cost of things in the same way as broader society does; so it is good to see someone pushing the right wing as long as they are playing by the rules of honesty and citation which is what academics is about.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's funny that this is posted on HN since places on which you cannot speak any controversial opinions are the main way in which CC spreads. HN being one of those places by design.

</comment><comment><USER43> > Our list of speakers includes no women. (All declined our invitations.)

The fact that every woman they invited declined to give a talk is a huge red flag.

<comment><USER6> Could be a red flag but it's not possible to know unless you can find out the number of women who were invited, the number of men who were invited, and the ratio of men/women in the field. Maybe they invited a reasonable number of women but they all had scheduling conflicts. Depends on the numbers.</comment></comment>


Redcar: Textmate-ish programmer's editor for Gnome with bundles support - <AUTHOR> http://redcareditor.com/

<comment><USER2> I've written my own editor too. Would you like to see my .emacs file?

All kiding aside, the most important thing about an editor is an ability to customize it, whether it be via Emacs Lisp, Vim Script, or some other means. No software developer or plugin writer is going to be able to anticipate your needs, instead give yourself the ability to fulfil them.

For example, just recently I wrote up a quick Emacs Lisp function to allow me to toggle between header files and source files for C/C++. I'll add a recursive search (to account for more complex project layouts with /inc and /src) after exams.

<http://paste.lisp.org/display/77348>

For those that think learning to customize an editor takes too long, learning to program takes even longer. You'll learn how to make your editor do anything you want longer before you become an excellent programmer. Textmate and textmate like editors are great shortcuts, but probably crutches in the long run. That being said, Textmate does anticipates the average programmer's needs suprisignly well out of the box, so in that sense it fills a niche.

<comment><USER3> I think one can compare customization against wizards in Studio or scaffolding in Rails.

Sure, it's an easy way to get started with whatever: MFC apps, Rails apps, or text editing. But when you outgrow hello world application, you'd want much more power.

I used Emacs on and off for maybe four years but never customized it. I finally gathered up some attention month or so ago, got through tutorials and now I'm editing _everything_ in Emacs (and this comment too). There is just a lot of accidental complexity in my brain, which can and is successfully automated by Emacs.

If you are a programmer, you should be pissed off and outraged by anything that doesn't allow you to automate itself. After all, automation is what we all do -- to get away from all the boring stuff and concentrate on things that are really fun. Like sex. Or running.

That's why I don't like GUI: remembering key chords is a way of automating tasks through memorization, and clicking on buttons requires much more cognition and interaction with the screen.

And that my friends, is what really grinds my gears.

<comment><USER4> _If you are a programmer, you should be pissed off and outraged by anything that doesn't allow you to automate itself._

Ooh, burn burn, rage rage, agreement!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know some Mac users who've said they would switch to Linux if there were a TextMate-like editor available. This could be it.

<comment><USER6> I don't get why people are building these fancy new editors - You can get both Emacs and Vim to behave Textmate like in many ways. They are both usable everywhere, including in a terminal.

No matter which editor you want to use, you have to learn it and it takes time. A few years back I decided between Emacs and Textmate and learned Emacs - the main reason was because I can still use it when I am forced into a terminal or Windows.

<comment><USER7> But vi (and likely emacs as well) has terrible discoverability. I can modify my gedit or eTextEditor syntax highlighting easily. You could spend an hour learning how to do the same in vi. Hell, to even find 'colorscheme' you'd have to wonder round vimtutor for ages.

<comment><USER8> You're right. But it isn't hard to learn with a deliberate effort to do so. You have to treat it like learning a new programming language. When you do that, and read a book on it ( i like [http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Editor- Nutshell-Linda-Lamb/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Editor-Nutshell- Linda-Lamb/dp/0937175676) ) then it comes together and you start to really feel like a maestro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For people stuck on windows who would like to try a TextMate-like editor, check out <http://intype.info> (still in alpha at the moment, but quite usable).

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm a big fan of textmate, probably my favorite utility on the mac. While things like this and e editor(windows) help, there is still a ton of nice apps only on the mac. As for the Vi and Emacs people, I rather not spend weeks customizing my text editor, I just want something that can color code out of the box and I can get work done.

<comment><USER11> gedit and kate come to mind, if that's all you desire...

And about ten thousand other editors that use the standard keybindings. The bundle compatibility seems much more interesting as a feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This comment explains why I decided that Redcar would be my next project. [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6f2nh/what_do_y...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6f2nh/what_do_you_do_for_a_hobby_project_when_youre/c03o3s6)

This project just lasted longer than most. Other than that, every justification I could offer has already been written in this comment thread.

(author of Redcar)

</comment><comment><USER13> What won me over to TextMate was the syntax mechanism: it's specifically geared towards situations where you're mixing more than one language in a single file (common in web development). Does this editor have that (couldn't figure it out from the link)?</comment>