Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we're doing - <AUTHOR> https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2019/09/07/malicious-attack-on-wikipedia-what-we-know-and-what-were-doing/ <comment><USER2> Remember: there are BitTorrent links that the Wikimedia Foundation gives out of SQL dumps of Wikipedia and the other projects. You can have a copy in case this happens in your country: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Wh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Where_do_I_get_it.3F)

Also, the Kiwix project has a hotspot project that allows you to host ZIM files (dumps of Wikipedia and other CC licensed content, like TED talks and StackOverflow) on a Raspberry Pi, allowing you to share it with others. Setup info here: [https://www.kiwix.org/en/downloads/kiwix- hotspot/](https://www.kiwix.org/en/downloads/kiwix-hotspot/)

<comment><USER3> I'd actually love to see a fully working IPFS fallback for wikipedia when regular hosting doesn't work. Would it even be possible with ipfs?

<comment><USER4> IPFS has a Wikipedia mirror but it is fairly out of date since it is dependent on the Kiwix archive.

[https://github.com/ipfs/distributed-wikipedia- mirror](https://github.com/ipfs/distributed-wikipedia-mirror)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone claimed the attack on twitter with some details (DDoS) - and proved it later by stopping the attack for x minutes then restarting it at a specific time. [https://twitter.com/fs0c131y/status/1170093562878472194?s=20](https://twitter.com/fs0c131y/status/1170093562878472194?s=20) \- the attacker also went on to DDoS the twitch ingest servers (not twitch.tv itself) knocking some big streamers offline.

<comment><USER6> It looks like a volumetric attack from this tweet. Wikipedia needs to use Verisign BGP mitigation. They create GRE tunnels to your routers and are capable of handling 2Tbps. During an attack, you make a BGP announcement and the traffic goes via Verisign scrubbing/tunnels. No application changes are required, no Matthew Prince selectively and benevolently enforcing CF neutrality. It's used by large banks.

<comment><USER7> After working with a few large corporations and their DDoS protection solutions, I did not have a good experience with Verisign, and they were not able to handle attacks or get things working. However, I have great experiences with Akamai and Cloudflare. I trust the people at Wikimedia will choose wisely. I would I have learned that Verisign has one of the worst BGP mitigation/scraping solutions out there. There are a few alternatives that have more experience and provide much better uptime, include solutions from Cloudflare and Akamai.

<comment><USER6> Any serious mitigation solution must be BGP based, not proxy. Besides its technical merits and convenience, it also minimizes the risk of a benevolent controller (e.g. Matthew Prince of Cloudflare) ruining your company, because it becomes your upstream provider only during the attacks. Otherwise the GRE tunnels are not in use. The IP addresses are still yours always.

We used Verisign for mitigation of a 44Gbps volumetric attack and it worked very well. We also evaluated Neustar, but Verisign's infrastructure seemed to be more robust.

<comment><USER8> A proxy is a perfectly acceptable "serious" solution for this type of problem, as well as nearly all of the rest. Wikipedia is not the kind of website that would warrant being removed from Cloudflare. What's wrong with having an upstream provider for caching close to the user and other features when you're not under attack?

<comment><USER9> > What's wrong with having an upstream provider for caching close to the user > and other features when you're not under attack?

The problem is that you are basically mitm:ed all the time.

<comment><USER10> That's not what MITM means. I get that you don't like Cloudflare but voluntary use of a CDN isn't a MITM any more than, say, Amazon is a MITM because you host on EC2.

<comment><USER9> Cloudflare is in between the client and the server, decrypting, rewriting and (if set up right) re-encrypting the request/response. It masquerades as the server by presenting a proper certificate for the domain even though it is not the entity that is actually controlling the domain.

That to me sounds very much like MITM, although it is not a MITM _attack_ since the entity controlling the domain opted into it, so basically it is voluntary MITM.

Using a VPS like EC2 is a different story since the decryption happens within the layer that you control. Of course you need to make sure that you choose a vendor for that layer that you trust, but on EC2 the traffic that amazon sees is encrypted with keys they don't have and decrypted with keys stored on a layer that I control. Amazon could read out the memory of my EC2 to get the keys but their business depends on not doing so, so in this case either I have a vendor that always will decrypt and read traffic (Cloudflare), or a vendor whose business depends on hypothetically being able to but not doing it. There is a clear difference to me.

That is the same for most CDN's (including CloudFront and all the other major offerings), so I'm not trying to single out Cloudflare.

<comment><USER10> If you don't trust Cloudflare, don't use them but there's no meaningful security distinction between what they do and what AWS does: in both cases you have a vendor with the capability of violating your security and a promise that they won't abuse that access.

This is why having a threat model is so important: it keeps you from wasting effort on things which sound like security but aren't actually changing anything meaningful.

<comment><USER9> There is a security distinction, and this has been shown by for example cloudbleed. Every step that has access to plaintext data is a potential attack vector and might be logging/leaking information.

There has also been times where cloudflare (when setup improperly as I mentioned in the previous comment) has misrepresented the security of a connection, as shown by [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/14/cloudflare_investig...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/14/cloudflare_investigating_mystery_interception_of_site_traffic_across_india/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just want to mention, WMF has a very small but elite team of engineers. Amazed they maintain an Alexa top 5 site with many orders of magnitude less engineering staff than Facebook or Reddit. I think they must count ~100 engineers?

I can't imagine what such a small team must be going through with a major DDOS - wish them well in their efforts!

<comment><USER12> It's because they're just serving a big site, not running the world's most sophisticated surveillance and ad serving machine. Serving giant websites isn't all that hard if you're just spewing out SQL queries into html templates. It all scales in all directions with a properly thought through architecture.

<comment><USER13> > Serving giant websites isn't all that hard if you're just spewing out SQL > queries into html templates. It all scales in all directions with a properly > thought through architecture.

No.

1\. Your comment makes it sound like Wikipedia is just, or mostly, serving read-only content, which is far from true. Yes, static read-only content is significantly easier to serve than dynamic, editable one, but Wikipedia is the latter.

2\. Claiming it's easy to build something at this scale is "isn't all that hard" just makes me think you've never done anything similar. It reminds me of devs saying they could re-build MS Office over a weekend. It's just ignorant of the software's actual complexity.

I'm not associated with Wikimedia in any way, but have worked on large-scale software projects before, and things are quite different from, say, websites only serving 100k monthly active users.

<comment><USER14> I've never heard anyone in my life say they could rebuild MS office in a weekend.

What, in your opinion, would be the work needed to go from a 100k monthly active user site to a wikipedia scale site - that would be comparable to rebuilding MS office?

<comment><USER15> The core parts of Office could be done on a weekend, but in order to get the same complexity and incompatibility it would take several "codemonkeys" several years to achieve.

<comment><USER16> Silly Microsoft wasted hundreds of people and decades of time. Why didn't you tell them?

<comment><USER15> Software projects are usually 90% done in 1% of total time taken. And if you just solve the problem with duct tape eg. a shell script, like piping stdin to a file, or contenteditable=true in HTML, you would have a very basic word program, and if you take that route you will probably have the essential features done over a weekend. But going from that to a full Office clone would take years. The real challenge in development though is to solve real problems, eg not make solutions looking for a problem, and not implement new features ( implementing only features that solve real problems).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just like trying to set your local public library on fire. There are always crazies in the world.

<comment><USER18> There was a string of arson attacks on little free libraries in Metro Vancouver; eventually a pair of teenage boys were arrested.

I suspect that the sharing of knowledge and encouragement of developing wisdom is, to some, a threatening prospect. Perhaps they have experienced learning difficulties and are struggling with shame and frustration, or perhaps they disagree strongly with the concept of an intellectually liberated population. Libraries are, after all, a pillar of liberalism.

<comment><USER19> That's sad to hear, I always love coming across the little free libraries. I would guess they were just bored and angry teens, likely not making any deeper statement but just expressing their anger and frustration and willingness to break the rules. Also, it's fun to watch things burn, and they come with built-in kindling. Hopefully some judge will make them rebuild what they burned, that would be fair and give them more appreciation for the work of others that they destroyed thoughtlessly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Apparently this group is behind it. Also attacked WoW and twitch servers..

[https://twitter.com/ukdrillas](https://twitter.com/ukdrillas)

<comment><USER21> Part of the liability should be shared with the people owning the compromised machines these crazies are using for their attacks, otherwise attacks like these will never stop as long as enough free "ammunition" is being left around by incompetent people who can't be bothered to secure & monitor their systems properly.

Edit: in reply to some of the (valid) counter-arguments, I'd like to say that there are indeed many issues that will need to be considered before passing such a law - this is just an overall idea. In addition, my intent isn't to punish the occasional kid doing something stupid and leaving a misconfigured device, it's to punish companies selling/deploying obviously insecure devices at a large scale, like ISPs deploying cheap shitty outdated network hardware or the countless resellers white-labelling insecure network cameras. Currently there is no penalty for manufacturing insecure hardware and this situation is the consequence of that - I'd like to fix this problem. We have regulations that (mostly successfully) prevent companies from selling hardware that blows up and destroys your house, why can't we have the same for networked hardware?

<comment><USER22> Can't wait to tell Gran she's legally liable for a DDoS because her unsecured IOT washing machine best buy sold her caused the internet to cave in ;)

<comment><USER23> Skip Gran and sue Best Buy and the IoT washing machine manufacturer.

<comment><USER24> There are exactly zero big box retailers or lobbyists that will abide that.

<comment><USER25> Big box retailers seem to be able to comply with regulations mandating physical safety. Digital security requirements could be enforced by a similar system.

<comment><USER26> Because "physical safety regulations" is something that the majority understands, so it's hard to argue against that in public. With digital security, most people lack the mental models to follow the discussion, so it's really easy for lobbyists to tell them flatout lies about how those damn dems are out to take their smart lightbulbs away from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That post neither says what they know nor what they're doing IMHO. I hope there will be a more detailed post Morten soon.

<comment><USER28> _post-mortem_

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Note: The short blurb doesn't say anything about the nature of the attack.

</comment><comment> ga-vu These are the clowns, btw: [https://twitter.com/UKDrillas/status/1170221000363061250](https://twitter.com/UKDrillas/status/1170221000363061250)

<comment><USER30> And... they've been booted from twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> On a side note, I was surprised to learn, that Wikipedia does not have a proper status page. status.wikimedia.org redirects to grafana dashboard and it too was down yesterday.

<comment><USER32> I wouldn't expect a site to have a publicly available status page or anything like public grafana boards. Isn't that what HTTP error codes are for?

Can you share examples of where this is common?

<comment><USER33> HTTP status codes tell you that something is broken, but likely not details. Or nothing at all, if all you get is a timeout because the service just got DDoSed.

Many services and sites have them, a few random examples:

[https://status.flickr.net/](https://status.flickr.net/)

[https://www.vimeostatus.com/](https://www.vimeostatus.com/)

[https://3down.mit.edu/](https://3down.mit.edu/)

[https://www.githubstatus.com/](https://www.githubstatus.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone know the nature of the attack? If specific countries were targeted, or if it was widespread but only crashed some smaller sites with less resources/redundancy?

</comment><comment><USER34> Are there non-malicious attacks? Doesn't the word "attack" imply maliciousness?

<comment> marble-drink "Attack" is a technical term and doesn't imply malicious intent. Many attacks are accidental or the result of negligence. Some are performed by researchers in purpose but without malicious intent (e.g. the attacker wants to prove that something is possible without actually doing any damage).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't understand the goal though. What to gain ? Training for another big target ?

<comment><USER22> \- Advertising for potential DDoS service buyers

\- Bragging rights

\- Experimentation

Edit: Also potentially political or personal. Eg Posting something that offends 8chan||nation states etc.

There's quite often blackmail involved (Pay us $x BTC and we go away).

Cloudfront or similar should offer DDoS protection for free as a gesture of goodwill, it's good bragging rights for CF so everyone wins.

<comment><USER36> > Cloudfront or similar should offer DDoS protection for free as a gesture of > goodwill, it's good bragging rights for CF so everyone wins.

Well, it is still a lot of wasted resources (bandwidth, energy, compute) for everyone involved (ISP, CF, attacker, defender, compromised machines), so I wouldn't be so quick to say that "everyone wins".

<comment><USER22> Consider it a 'cost of doing business'. Everyone gets DDoSed, I'm pretty sure that's one of CloudFronts primary service-based solutions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I appreciate them making this statement. I had issues accessing Wikipedia from Turkey a week ago and I assumed censorship, but this week I have also had issues accessing it from Poland and I started suspecting something was amiss.

</comment><comment><USER38> Huh, so it wasn't my network having issues. The weird thing was. That at the same time google.com (though not google.de) stopped working. Weird coincidence?

</comment><comment><USER8> DDoS, I'm assuming? It was intermittently offline yesterday, which was annoying, but I didn't assume malice then.

</comment><comment><USER39> Read through it. Any more info who is doing it. Not for accusation but prevention.

</comment><comment><USER40> Maybe the damage will randomly improve the political articles and knock down some of the fiefdoms for a change. Couldn't get much worse...</comment>


IBM Quantum Experience - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Quantum_Experience <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the link to the actual playground: [https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/editor](https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/editor)</comment>


An erroneous paper on religion and generosity is retracted - <AUTHOR> https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/human-flourishing/201909/does-religious-upbringing-promote-generosity-or-not <comment><USER2> I think it's situations like this that result in society having such a hard time with 'science'. The term has been so heavily co-opted by fields that just don't have sufficient rigger for the term to hold weight. Yet, on various topics, we have this publicized attack of "your a science denier!". At the end of the day, there are two 'types' of science, one where I can take the results and make accurate predictions, and one where I can't. The later just amounts to 'our best guess' where the accuracy is entirely unknown. If we want the general populous to 'trust science', we need to stop calling the later science. In short, if you can't repeat and predict, stop calling it science.

<comment><USER3> Scientists usually try to distance themselves by saying those are soft science or even pseudo-science. This leads to the embarrassment of the demarcation problem[1] which is that no one can give a bright-line rule[2] to distinguish between the "real" science and pseudo-science. All of the demarcation criteria that have been proposed (such as Popper's falsifiability[3]) are inadequate in one way or another. In particular, they don't seem to capture the reasons a scientist would give about why a particular nutrition or social science paper is bad. The scientist would say things like, "Well, your sample size is small and not representative of anything except psych undergrads, you didn't control for age or gender, the participants and experimenters weren't properly blinded, you tested 15 hypothesis and only reported the p-value for the one that was under 0.05, and even that is wrong because you didn't apply Yate's continuity correction on your chi-squared test, AND NONE OF THAT EVEN MATTERS because the effect size you report is too small to be of practical consequence!" Nothing in there about the hypothesis not being testable; yet this is the kind of stuff that really separately the wheat from the chaff.

So we're left with a "No True Scotsman fallacy" where have to say that some science is "good" and some is "bad" and the only way to tell is to ask someone knowledgeable to evaluate each paper on a case by case basis. Not terrible useful to the layman.

And why do we want any kind of science to automatically get respect anyway? Good science is good because its already been subjected to an incredible degree of scrutiny. It will hold up to a little more. The real problem is disingenuous, bad faith arguments which are allowed to dominate the conversation. The real problem is to teach the general public to distinguish between sincere, good faith arguments and patent bullshit. This is much more difficult than it sounds because bullshit can easily conform to any merely superficial characteristics.

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

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright- line_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright-line_rule)

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

<comment><USER4> Why not have a general checklist with a minimum set of requirements for scientific papers that are relevant across all branches of science? The people putting their names on the paper would have to show that they followed everything or give reasons for skipping a step. The receiving journals would have their editors re-check the checklist. As part of reporting the results of the paper, the level of completeness of the checklist would also be in the report.

Yes, the checklist would not be all-encompassing or foolproof, and there would likely be revisions to the checklist, and maybe even domain-specific variants, but it would be an extra level caution that the media could report or choose to ignore at their will. Over time, the apparent level of scientific rigour would improve. No, it's not bulletproof and there will be people who will try to meet the checklist and still present erroneous conclusions as reliable science, but it would be an improvement in the status quo for a layperson who is aware and values said checklist.

<comment><USER3> There are things like CONSORT[1] which kind of do this. Statisticians like Fisher[2] have a ton of good general advice of the design of experiments. (A plug for The Lady Tasting Tea[3] and the 7 Pillars of Statistical Wisdom[4] feels appropriate here.)

On the whole though, most of the things you _should_ and _should not_ do are so domain specific its very hard to give much useful advice at the level of "all science." Right now this seems to work because researchers are so eager to anticipate objections and and avoid unnecessary arguments during peer review they stick slavishly stick to the same methods used by seminal papers in their field, and this has the same effect as running down a checklist.

There probably is a case to be made for using an actual checklist, though[5].

[1]: [http://www.consort-statement.org/](http://www.consort-statement.org/)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments#Fisher's...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments#Fisher's_principles)

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

[4]: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27311742-the-seven- pilla...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27311742-the-seven-pillars-of- statistical-wisdom)

[5]: [http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist- manifesto/](http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The paper received a great deal of attention, and was covered by over 80 media outlets including The Economist, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Scientific American."

And how many of these will cover the retraction? A dozen at most? And all those articles will be sitting out there, getting cited and read on occasion.

<comment><USER6> Really sad to see and feels like it's becoming more common (maybe just because I'm paying closer attention). If it fits the narrative, accept first, retract later. It would be interesting to see view statistics on the original article vs the retraction.

<comment><USER7> It's not just narrative fitting. There is also a strong bias towards publishing results that seem surprising because that gets more readers. Of course, that also biases toward wrong results because wrong results are likely to be surprising.

<comment><USER8> "wrong results are _[more likely]_ to be surprising".

This case is interesting because there's a large population who would find these (unproven as it turns out) results _confirmatory_ rather than unexpected.

In the end they were neither.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Releasing your data should be a requirement for publication. If the original author had wanted to keep this a secret he could've withheld his data and nobody would've been able to correct him, there simply would've been discrepant studies.

<comment><USER10> I see where you're coming from, but would the subjects be comfortable with all their data becoming public?

<comment><USER9> I think you could, and should anyways, make the data anonymous. Just give every participant a GUID for a participant ID and add a step to purge personally identifiable information. Then you can share records without identity.

<comment><USER11> That didn't work for the AOL research several years ago. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets- liv...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-live-online- in-databases-of-ruin/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Alas, these kinds of problems are not restricted to the social sciences. Case in point, this retraction from a couple of days ago: [https://retractionwatch.com/2019/09/25/nature-paper-on- ocean...](https://retractionwatch.com/2019/09/25/nature-paper-on-ocean- warming-retracted/) Very similar to this one really; the paper claimed to overturn our existing knowledge in a way that fitted a narrative people were inclined to believe (in that case: we're all doomed) and was immediately seized on by all the news sites because of it, except the statistics were mucked up and it couldn't show what it claimed to. The fact that it was so surprising should've been even more of a massive warning sign in that case though.

<comment><USER13> Interesting. Hadn't seen the Retraction Watch website before.

Wonder if it'd be possible to automatically scan new papers added to (say) arxiv.org, for retracted papers in their references?

eg to warn the authors, and maybe eventually automatically as part of the upload process for arxiv.org (and similar)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Conclusion of the new analysis:

 _In sum, Decety et al. [1] have amassed a large and valuable dataset, but our reanalyses provide different interpretations of the authors' initial conclusions. Most of the associations they observed with religious affiliation appear to be artifacts of between-country differences, driven primarily by low levels of generosity in Turkey and South Africa. However, children from highly religious households do appear slightly less generous than those from moderately religious ones._

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982216306704)

</comment><comment><USER15> From the article:

Although Decety's paper had reported that they had controlled for country, they had accidentally not controlled for each country, but just treated it as a single continuous variable so that, for example "Canada" (coded as 2) was twice the "United States" (coded as 1).

I mean I don't even understand how this seemed like a normal thing to do?

<comment><USER16> The variable for Country should have been treated as a categorical variable, but was instead processed as a numeric variable.

This mistake would be downright trivial to make in R. Just declare that Country is a Factor (which is the built-in type for categorical variables), and then throw the data into a library whose attitude towards errors is to coerce everything to numbers until the warnings go away.

Background: Factors in R are the idiomatic way to work with categorical data, and they work somewhat like C-style enums except the variants come from the data rather than a declaration. So if you take a column of strings in a data frame and cast it to a Factor, it will generate a mapping where the first distinct value is coded as 1, the second distinct value is coded as 2, etc. Then it replaces the strings with their integer equivalents, and saves the mapping off to the side.

I forget the exact rules (if there are rules, R is a bit lawless), but it's not very hard to peek under the hood at the underlying numeric representation. Many built-in operations "know" that Factors are different (e.g. regressing against a Factor will create dummy variables for each variant), but it's up to each library author how 'clever' they want to be.

<comment><USER17> Right then...

...strong typing: for or against?

(To be fair even strong typing won't save you if you don't use it. But fuuuuuk, what an error. I noted that paper mentally and would have quoted from it)

<comment><USER18> Yup, I'm all for extremely strong typing. In 40 years of writing code I can't say I've ever had any real trouble with strong typing other than when dealing with libraries that reinvent wheels. Weak typing, though--nuke it from orbit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Another, more consequential paper that popped up on HN recently has been retracted as well. The one about ocean warming. The retraction notice is a masterclass on weasel language, worth reading in its own right.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1585-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1585-5)

</comment><comment><USER20> Sometimes I feel weird coding zip codes as strings but this is a great example why. If my program ever treats a zip code like a number I would like it to throw an error. At least in this case the error looks like an accident.

On topic, from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067764)

It's another social sciences paper but in this case a co-author has requested a retraction over his strong belief that the paper includes fabricated data. The retraction request has been denied. It differs from this paper in that the data anomalies look intentional.

<comment><USER21> > If my program ever treats a zip code like a number I would like it to throw > an error.

One interesting thing you can do though, is sort by zipcode. This sorts your mail from East to West in the US. You can use that as a rough estimate of shipping time.

<comment><USER20> That's really cool, even if I never find a place to use it.

Anyway you can still sort strings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wrote a webpage in 2015 about the Decety paper, what it was and how it was presented in the media, which might be of interest. The paper seemed highly suspect in various ways even at the time. I added an update in 2017 that "new analysis shows that the original study failed to adequately control for the children's nationality". On the (unfinished) page I'm using the paper as an excuse to teach myself basic statistics and research methods.

[http://www.adamponting.com/decety/](http://www.adamponting.com/decety/)

</comment><comment><USER23> so a categorical variable got mixed up as a numerical one and produced misleading results.

to the credit of the authors, they released their data sets. -- however, i suspect that proper data exploration and visualisation would have prevented all this. visual inspection would have most likely revealed that there is no visible effect, or even an effect in the opposite direction, and once you see this, all alarm bells should go off if your model predicts otherwise. so i suspect that the authors skipped some basic steps and got carried away by results that promised a nice headline.

<comment><USER24> Agreed. However, another factor may be that, we tend to scrutinize more closely results that don't line up with what we expected. In fact, in this case it was another researcher who had gotten results that pointed in the opposite direction, who convinced the original researcher to release their data (which, to their credit, they did).

Which, is one reason why having higher and higher percentages of academia and science researchers be from the same part of the political spectrum, is worrisome to me. If you have more diversity in ideology, there is more likely to be someone in each field to have the instinct to scrutinize closely a result which, when scrutinized, won't hold up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There were even news sites that published articles about the original article AFTER the retraction was announced! The state of science reporting is very sad.

</comment><comment><USER26> "But when they included their categorically-coded country (1 = US, 2 = Canada, and so on) in their models, it was entered not as fixed effects, with dummy variables for all of the countries except one, but as a continuous measure. This treats the variable as a measure of 'country-ness' (for example, Canada is twice as much a country as the US) instead of providing the fixed effects they explicitly intended"

How did this not get caught immediately? If I did a study and found out that kids in Zambia are 47 more times as generous as American kids that'd make me instantly suspicious.

Or maybe the reviewers were all Canadian /s

<comment><USER27> I don't think it's quite as obvious of an error as you are suggesting.

They were trying to correct for scenarios like this: Hypothetically, Canadians are twice as generous as Americans and twice as religious, but religious Canadians are equally generous as non-religious Canadians and religious Americans are equally generous as non-religious Americans. On the surface, it appears that religious people are more generous, but really it's just that Canadians are more generous.

Instead of treating the countries as discrete groupings, they treated them as points on a spectrum with each country being assigned an arbitrary place on the spectrum.

If #3 happened to be China, they would be assuming that people in China should very similar to people in the US and Canada, because 1 vs. 3 on a scale that goes to 200 is hardly any difference at all, but really the numbers are just arbitrary identifiers.

<comment><USER28> I'm a data scientist and this is an incredibly embarrassing 'n00b' error to make. If these researchers were using anything other than deep learning, it's almost certain that each parameter of the model was manually selected. That the author made the mistake is bad, that no one caught the error is a disaster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As much as I like spreadsheets and other general purpose numerical analysis tools, I wish there was a restricted subset of their functionality that could be used that was more formally verifiable, to prevent issues like this and Reinhart–Rogoff (see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Methodological_flaws) ) from being a common occurrence.

</comment><comment><USER30> If a research does not release the code used in their research, their papers should not be trusted. We wouldn't trust a paper where the researchers hid their experimental methods or analysis - it wouldn't even be allowed to be published. But if their experimental methods or analysis are done in code, those parts are allowed to be a black box and we're supposed to trust them. If we were willing to just trust them, there wouldn't even be a peer review process and it certainly wouldn't deserve the imprimatur of 'science'. This has been a problem for years, and I will personally not be the least bit surprised if we eventually see a death toll attached to it.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if a religious education resulting in some positive effects might be akin to the "any diet is effective" thing, i.e. it's not the specific upbringing as much as being exposed to _any_ moral thinking in general.

I don't mean to imply that there aren't moral a-religious educators of course, just that it seems likely to have less discussion of ethics for any kid once the temple/church/mosque/whatever is removed.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wait a second. If the issue with the analysis is as the article says, that is that some countries were weighted far higher, that means that in some countries the original conclusion does hold (probably for a small sample size). Perhaps this is because some religions promote generosity and some do not? Would be interesting to look in to.

</comment><comment><USER33> Fun to see all these software engineers criticizing scientists for a bug in their code

</comment><comment><USER34> And even though it was corrected and the result retracted, it was already cited by many papers, the media didn't report the retraction etc. How much of scientific reporting gets skewed by media interests (controversy and sensationalism) and funding and political interests?

Furthermore, this whole field was called cargo cult science by Feynman, using correlations, p-hacking, data dredging, and more

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

The best analysis I have seen of the corner we have painted ourselves into

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group- is-o...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of- control/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Can we go back to basic principles and all agree that psychology and social studies are not true sciences anyways?

Science is to me something where you extract natural laws that predict phenomena will occur 100% of the time given certain conditions. Physics, chemistry, computer science, most branches of medicine operate this way.

A field like psychology that says "well sometimes people will..." or "we found in 60% of cases that..." is not science. It's a comment upon society maybe, but it does not produce broadly repeatable, predictable results.

Not true science.

<comment><USER36> I think you're forgetting that the "replication crisis" also occurs in your so called "100% deterministic fields". CS has the issue of ML models, medicine drug studies, etc.

The bottom line is science is hard to do, and even harder to do right. I think all fields do try to follow the scientific method to the best of their ability, but for some fields it is simply harder to do because of the sheer complexity of the subject matter being hard to model, experiment in, and understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is fundamentally one of the many disastrous outcomes of scientific publishing being controlled by greedy conglomerates.

For the uninitiated: If you want to publish a scientific paper today, you basically sign up to sign over the rights to any publisher that's interested (please someone publish me). That publisher will then review that paper in a more often than not mostly undisclosed process and publish that paper. Everyone knows that to be a high-regarded publisher one must have a very own typographic formatting: Unreadable font, weird multi column layout to prevent accessibility and tables disregarding standards are a good start. Afterwards, the paper gets published on the publisher website, which again follows as little agreed upon standard as possible. Data is of course excluded, study itself is in PDF. Also put up a fat paywall, don't want those pesky poor people be scientifically literate. Give a few cents of your $70 fee to the authors, it is not an unethical business you're doing here!

THIS is the systemic error people seem to be so happy to ignore because they're neck deep in social science not being real science memes.

This prevents interesting new startups for fact-checking or meta analysis, which are e.g. happening in journalism because that field has a lot of the things science is sadly lacking.

This creates a drift between extremely rich and rather poor countries/unis/humans in scientific ability.

This generates a tar pit for scientific process.

This wastes billions in funds because of people unaware of each other doing redundant studies (and not referencing/refuting/supporting each other in the process neither, of course) because they are literally better search engines to find Harry Potter fan fiction than there are for finding studies.

And finally, this of course allows anything from honest statistical mistakes to snake oil sellers to slip through and doing generations worth of damage, because correcting, fact checking, re-researching, comparing, meta research, _anything_ is slowed to a crawl.

So please stop embracing scientific elitism and gatekeeping for this is exactly what brought us here in first place...

</comment><comment><USER38> > Decety

What an apt name.

I wonder about the damage to public this unintentional deceit will bring...

Go science! After all, a retraction is part of discovery.

</comment><comment><USER39> Interesting, waitstaff on reddit always say religious people tip worse or not at all.

<comment><USER40> Probably because most religious people don't tend to flaunt it everywhere they go, and in my experience the ones that do also tend to be jerks. It's also possible that wait staff tend to remember the ones that do more than the ones that don't because being religious and a jerk is more memorable than religious and not a jerk.

Disclaimer: I am a religious person.

<comment><USER41> I worked in breakfast and brunch restaurants for a while, and my anecdotal experience is that the post-church rushes (we were across the street from a couple churches) had the worst overall tipping percentages that I would see all week.

<comment><USER42> One could argue that those are the folks that aren't religious enough to feel that they should not make others work on a sabbath as a result their personal commerce. The religious folk that make it rain come in on other days of the week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > In fact, Decety's paper has continued to be cited in media articles on > religion. Just last month two such articles appeared (one on Buzzworthy and > one on TruthTheory) citing Decety's paper that religious children were less > generous.

"Media articles" is carrying a lot of weight there

</comment><comment><USER44> My default presumption is that all results from the "social sciences" are false if they contradict my intuition. Whatever these fields are producing, it's not science in the Popperian or practical sense. A ton of policy has been built on the bad research and wishful thinking of the past few decades, and it's going to take a long time to unwind it all.

The problem, really, has been accelerating for a while. Something really went off the rails after WWII.

<comment><USER45> My theory is that it's engineering, not science, that confirms our knowledge. You don't really know something about the world until you can use it to do things. WWII-era science was being incorporated into tools (well, weapons), so it had to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Psychology, sociology and theology (and more logys?) was never meant to be sciences. We can blame the enlightenment for that idea, let's revert them back to renaissance activities

<comment><USER47> Psychology and sociology can be made as rigorous as individuals & institutions care to.

Theology, not so much.

<comment><USER48> Actually most of the (christian) theology (when discussed by theologists) within its confines is very rigorous.

<comment><USER47> Theology can be rigorous in the sense of its models possessing internal validity (logical consistency, parsimony).

However, because it's basically speculation about unobservable entities, theology completely lacks external validity.

Social sciences can have both.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Black Sea has lost more than a third of its habitable volume - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/4831.html <comment><USER3> Summary: The oxygen-rich habitable layer of the Black Sea has declined over the last few decades from a depth of 140m to a depth of only 90m. The oxic layer does not mix with the layers below. All theories as to why the decline has occurred are speculative, but some believe that the increase in H2S2 at greater depth may be implicated (though this is unsubstantiated).

<comment><USER4> Your summary is quite inaccurate. As the article explains, the change in thickness of the oxygen-rich layer is well-explained by global warming and the addition of nutrients from farming. The H2S2 increase is also explained, except the causes of its precise depth are not.

In discussing the changes in the Black Sea, it should be noted that Russia is heavily invested in fossil fuel production, and that Putin denies the reality of anthropocentric global climate change. This leads me to the possibility that the purpose of your comment is to divert criticism of Russia. Of course, that idea might be mistaken, and you honestly just misunderstood the article.

<comment><USER5> I do not think Russia must be solely responsible for what's going on there. Russian government and Putin himself does recognize artificial nature of climate change, as was shown in his speech on Climate Change Conference in 2015. Truth is that Russia did not make big contribution to it in last 25 years (yes, there's huge oil and gas industry, but most of it is being exported, so it's a responsibility of consumers to use it in emission-neutral way). Current emissions are more than 25% below 1990 levels - can you say such thing about America, China or India? And this happens not only due to reduced output, but also because of some investment in more environmentally friendly manufacturing (yes, Russia has ecological standards and they are enforced - unfortunately, not fully because of corruption). There exist government- sponsored programmes to invest in green energy (e.g. new manufacturing facilities for solar panels), close the top polluters (like BTsBK) and reduce car emissions. It's not that easy to transform such a big economy and fix all the issues of Soviet planning, so it will take time to change and become as green as e.g. Germany (I doubt it's even possible to start something costly like Energiewende in Russia at this moment).

<comment><USER4> The reason Russia produces so much in the way of fossil fuels is that Putin decided when he was a doctoral student in economics back in the 1990's that the Russian economy should focus through about 2150 on increasing the extraction of natural resources.

He makes this clear in the summary for his doctoral dissertation: [http://www.theatlantic.com/daily- dish/archive/2008/08/putins...](http://www.theatlantic.com/daily- dish/archive/2008/08/putins-thesis-raw-text/212739/)

<comment><USER5> Do not take seriously doctoral dissertations of anyone in Russian government but few people with academic background. They are written not to make scientific contribution, but to get "d.something.n." prefix (doctor of some sciences) and a line in CV. They have nothing to do with their real position or policy they enact or implement. Actually, some dissertations may be even written by other people (see Dissernet data mining project to reveal corruption in this field).

In Russia the only policy you can know for sure is the codified policy. Public statements cannot be treated seriously until they are codified, because very often they are made as means of information warfare, messages to specific groups of special interests. Look at the laws, court decisions, government orders etc. Sometimes you can figure out what's really going on only retrospectively, by looking at statistics and filtered stream of the news.

<comment><USER4> The reason I included this link is because Putin in his governance of Russia has followed the general economic strategy he presents in his doctoral dissertation, and so the document helps us understand the reasoning behind his decisions.

As to codified policy, Putin is an authoritarian ruler in a country with little rule of law, and so he does what he wants, no matter what the laws happen to say.

ivan_gammel, I strongly suspect that you are quite aware of all of this, and are attempting to mislead readers as to what Putin is up to and why.

Let me make one more comment. Putin believes that the road to becoming an advance industrial power is first spend a half a century focused on natural resource extraction, and only then turn to developing advanced industry. I think he is here trying to emulate his interpretation of the economic history of the UK and the US.

But this mistaken, and in two ways. First, in the US and the UK mineral extraction and industrial development proceeded in parallel, not sequentially. Secondly, more recently countries have industrialized by focusing on industry directly, and especially exports, as in the cases of Japan, China, and South Korea.

I think part of the problem here is that Putin greatly mistrusts industrialization that is successful enough to compete on global markets, because it requires independent commercial enterprises, and he is an authoritarian who wants to retain control of the economy, and this is much easier when you are focused on natural resource commodities.

In any case, the whole matter of Putin and his economic views just illustrates the general problem that Russians have never figured out how things work in the modern world, and are always trying to do things in ways that are still half back in the authoritarian, agrarian ways of their past. As a result they get off on paths that succeed for a few decades, but eventually stall out.

It's so sad, Russia could be such an amazing nation if it could just get on the right track.

<comment><USER4> There's something else here, too. For thousands of years, national wealth and power were largely based in natural resources such as agricultural land and gold mines. In the industrial revolution, new natural resources, especially fossil fuels, were added, but wealth and power shifted mainly to manufactured goods. That is why you can have great industrial powers like Japan, China, and South Korea that are relatively poor in natural sources. And it is why Russia, even though it has natural resources far beyond any other nation, is about 10th in the size of its economy.

The problem with Putin is his mind is still partly back in the pre-industrial era, and so he only half gets this. He knows Russia has to industrialize, but he still sees natural resources as being much more important than they really are, and so he is simply on the wrong economic track.

A key case here is petroleum. It accounts for half the Russian government's tax revenues, and it is central to Putin's plans and investments. But thanks to the renewable energy revolution, based on manufactured technologies like PV cells and giant wind turbines, in half a century petroleum will be largely replaced, and so worth very little. But Putin doesn't get this, which is why so little effort is being put into renewables.

<comment><USER5> First of all, Russia is already post-industrial state and it experienced multiple industrialization waves in its history - from colonization of Urals (there were the biggest manufactures in the world in XVIII century and there's a special term for that amazing period of history of Urals region - <USER2> Manufacturing Civilization introduced by Russian writer and historian Alexey Ivanov), to industrialization in late XIX century (with such projects as Trans-Siberian railway and production shifting to European part of Russia), to industrialization by Stalin in 1930s and finally industrial expansion of 1950-1980s. It's all in the past now, not least because Russia lost most of its industry in competition with China and hi-tech manufacturing to the West. Indeed, Russia is a petrostate now, but it still has large industrial capacity, to name some in which there's some good progress - aerospace (how many nations are capable of creating new civil and military aircraft designs?), arms, automotive (very hot sector with big investments and non-stop race on building new plants). It's not feasible and already too late to compete with China or emerging economies like Vietnam in light industries or consumer electronics, but some targeted efforts to join global manufacturing chains are already paying (e.g. did you know that sapphire glass for Apple products is made in Russia?)

Putin's mistake is not that it applies XVI century resource extraction approach to finally get industrial economy (which is not true because of above), but that it applies command-administrative methods of XX century to build post-industrial economy. He is more interested in playing war games, than writing economic strategies - this job is left to his advisers, and there's ongoing competition to fill that position between liberals like A.Kudrin and communists like S.Glazyev. These bureaucratic battles did not produce any document that could be fully implemented, so significant progress could be visible in only some technical fields, which are far from politics (hence very smart Central Bank, Federal Tax Service or Ministry of Informatization and Communications).

<comment><USER6> > Russia is already post-industrial state

> Russia lost most of its industry in competition with China and hi-tech > manufacturing to the West.

Congratulaions, you've managed to contradict yourself in one paragraph.

<comment><USER7> A post-industrial state is one which was dominantly industrial, and has moved on to some other primary basis for its economy, usually because it is engaged in international trade and its comparative advantage is no longer in manufacturing but some other area.

Usually, this shift in comparative advantage is reflected in industrial work moving overseas to competitors whose comparative advantage _is_ in that kind of work.

So, the two sentences you quote as a supposed contradiction actually support each other, rather than contradicting each other.

<comment><USER6> > A post-industrial state is one which was dominantly industrial, and has > moved on to some other primary basis for its economy, usually because it is > engaged in international trade and its comparative advantage is no longer in > manufacturing but some other area.

In case of Russia it wasn't so, they still struggle to get back to Soviet level of industrialization after USSR fell apart.

<comment><USER7> > In case of Russia it wasn't so, they still struggle to get back to Soviet > level of industrialization after USSR fell apart.

The US keeps struggling to maintain or restore its previous level of industrialization, too, even though its unmistakeably a post-industrial state; there's a lot of emotional attachment to industrialization as a source of economic output that lingers even in post-industrial states, so struggling to restore it is a common response to dissatisfactory economic experiences even in post-industrial states. If Russia were struggling to get back to Soviet-era aggregate or per-capita economic output, that would be a difference -- and there certainly was a time, throughout much of the 1990s, where that was the case. But its not now (though Russia has seen a precipitous output drop since the peak in 2012, so it might be a thing again in not too long.)

(Russia may be in a situation now -- especially with the recent drop -- where living conditions for the masses are as bad or worse than in the late Soviet era, but that's orthogonal to the economy being post-industrial, and more about the _distributional_ features of the economy than anything else.)

<comment><USER4> Here is the wikipedia explanation of the term "post-industrial"

"In sociology, the post-industrial society is the stage of society's development when the service sector generates more wealth than the manufacturing sector of the economy"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- industrial_society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-industrial_society)

That doesn't apply to Russia, so ivan_gammel was using the term in an unconventional manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hydrogen sulfide area is like a death zone in the depth of the Black Sea.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hydrogen sulfide is in deep of Black See is deadly area. If clean water contamined by h2s2 most of will die about it.

</comment><comment><USER10> >The link you are accessing has been blocked by the Barracuda Web Filter because it contains spyware. The name of the spyware is: Spyware.Exploit.BRTS.sciencebulletin.org

<comment><USER11> Are these web filter things generally accurate?

<comment><USER10> False positives are a thing... but just thought it was worth mentioning that it was flagged for me.</comment></comment></comment>


The Model 3 Will Incorporate Tesla's Solar Roof Technology: Elon Musk - <AUTHOR> http://futurism.com/elon-musk-the-model-3-will-incorporate-teslas-solar-roof-technology/ <comment><USER2> While the idea of never having to plug in is thrilling, I don't think it will ever be possible with just the roof of the car.

The Fisker Karma's solar roof produces 120W max (ideal california sunshine conditions). According to Fisker, that equals about 320 km (200 miles) per year. [http://www.heise.de/autos/artikel/Beim-Fisker-Karma-sorgt- da...](http://www.heise.de/autos/artikel/Beim-Fisker-Karma-sorgt-das-Dach- fuer-Vortrieb-zumindest-ein-wenig-1331102.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This article completely misses the point that the Tesla roof tiles are opaque where the solar cells are located, and merely conceal the cells from an observers eyes using advanced polarization techniques. In short, not suitable for a windshield. Probably will be used on the roof and maybe the deck lids.</comment>


What is the most difficult thing people learn in their 20's? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Life/What-are-the-most-difficult-things-people-have-to-learn-in-their-twenties/answer/Kathy-Hurst-Davis?srid=RYB&share=1

<comment><USER2> Reposting my answer to the commenter linked here.

Your answer is true, but stupid.

If by "our country" we're talking about the United States, the answers and solutions are _bloody trivial_. Many of America's past public policies work better than its current ones; many public policies of America's peers work better than any of those ever implemented in America. When the entire rest of the world has spent a century exploring the solution-space, poaching the best of all systems and implementing it all together in a lean, mean hybrid is not that difficult a plan to come up with. And no, I'm not talking about a wondrous anarchist utopia, I'm talking about tested, proven ways of doing things better than the USA currently does them. Maybe Paradise isn't around the corner, but we've a lot of experience at building a society so self- satisfied and easy to live in that people start contemplating their existential angst.

The deeper problem is that most of the American elite is now composed of people with a vested financial and ideological interest in our current system, mostly loosely referred to as neoliberalism, which has been continually making things worse.

So the hard problem is not what you do once you've won power, because we already know how to run a _good_ society, even if _great_ ones may be very difficult. The hard problem is how you get the people dedicated to ruling over a wasteland to relinquish the steering wheel.</comment>


Halloween Bash Profile Generator - <AUTHOR> http://xta.github.com/HalloweenBash/

<comment><USER2> One option that is missing that I really thing is useful is

        wincolour=$yellow
        errorcolour=$red
        # To provide a coloured version of $?, wrapped in ().  Used in PS1
        pretty_exit_code(){
          LAST_COMMAND_STATUS=$?
          if [ $LAST_COMMAND_STATUS = 0 ];
          then echo -e "$wincolour($LAST_COMMAND_STATUS)$black";
          else echo -e "$errorcolour($LAST_COMMAND_STATUS)$black";
          fi
        }

Which just provides the exit code of the last command, but coloured differently for failure or success.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. I've been using $PIPESTATUS at the start of my prompt for a while now.

<comment><USER4> I use this, which allows a similar effect but is enabled for PIPESTATUS, and also does some good things for eterm and screen.

       PIPESTATUS_REGEX="^ +$"

       # check to see if any of the pipe statuses don't start with 0
       # ${_CMD_PIPESTATUS[@]#0} results in null if they all do
       _PIPESTATUS="
           _CMD_PIPESTATUS=(\${PIPESTATUS[@]})
           if [[ \"\${_CMD_PIPESTATUS[*]#0}\" && ! \"\${_CMD_PIPESTATUS[*]#0}\" =~ \$PIPESTATUS_REGEX ]]
           then
               _RES_STR=\" [\${_CMD_PIPESTATUS[*]}]\";
           else
               _RES_STR=''
           fi"

        export PROMPT_COMMAND="$_PIPESTATUS; $PROMPT_COMMAND"

        if [[ $TERM = screen || $_TERM = screen ]]; then
            _RESET_PROMPT="\[\033k\033\\\\\]"
        else
            _RESET_PROMPT=""
        fi

        if [ $TERM = "eterm-color" ]; then
            # XXX: this is going to break things when you start
            # use $INSIDE_EMACS to test whether we should use \u?
            _ETERM_PROMPT="\[\033AnSiTu \u\012\033AnSiTc \w\012\033AnSiTh \H\012\]"
        else
            _ETERM_PROMPT=""
        fi

        export PS1="\n$_ETERM_PROMPT\[\033[32m\]\u@\h \[\033[33m\]\w\[\033[35m\]\$_RES_STR\[\033[0m\]\n${_RESET_PROMPT}\\$ "
        unset _RESET_PROMPT

<comment><USER5> It's cool to also see the name of the signal that caused exit status > 128\. Sadly this only fits in a tweet if it can assume the possible signal names are listed contiguously, which isn't so on 64-bit Linux these days.

      S=(`trap -l`);e(){ for N in ${PIPESTATUS[@]};do ((N>128))&&echo ${S[$((2*N-257))]}||echo $N;done;};trap $'echo "\e[41m Exit "`e`" \e[m"' ERR

<comment><USER4> That's a great idea. I've rewritten my own version to use these signals instead of numbers where possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice!

A bug report, space tokens should not exhaust. Currently you can at max have 2 spaces, the one that is in the config by default and one from the available tokens.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for opening up an issue in the repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Where is the @ character?? How am I going to make the classic prompt?

        user@comp:Folder$

<comment><USER7> Thanks to WillBooth, you're now able to use the @ character. I've merged in his pull request <https://github.com/xta/HalloweenBash/pull/5>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Brilliant idea. Well done! Change the name because this will be useful throughout the full year.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey everyone,

Thanks for checking out the bash profile generator! I'm a student at Flatiron School[1] NYC (where we have electricity in NYC, no small feat today) and this project came about when we were learning to setup our CLIs in the first week.

Please let me know if you have any comments/feedback on twitter: @rexfeng

[1] <http://flatironschool.com/>

<comment><USER10> Fun project!

I balked, however, at "deciphering web pages to do simple things like displaying the time". All of the prompt escape codes are on the bash man page. That's not a criticism, mind you[1] - just a pointer at the fact that as you develop as a command-line guru, you'll find much information is right there at your finger tips in man pages.

Best of luck in your studies!

[1] No, really. I spend all my life on the command line - it's second nature to me. On the other hand, I wouldn't have a clue where to begin to do a little web app like yours - which probably makes me an amusing old oddity on HN :)

<comment><USER4> For bash, the info documentation is probably better than man, but as someone who is very familiar with it, I would say it sometimes needs a little deciphering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very nice! Not sure why it's halloween tho, should be named something else :)

<comment><USER12> "Halloween Bash" as in a Halloween party, I'm guessing. Not exactly a 'timeless' name, but seeing as it was put up on Halloween...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very nice. I sort of with there was an easy way to do fish style prompt paths in bash (/home/username/bin -> /h/u/bin), but that's hardly this excellent website's fault. I guess I'm just annoyed at being tied to bash due to ROS.

<comment><USER14> Here's one from the Arch mailing list. Also does the ~ expansion for home directories: [http://www.mail-archive.com/arch- email@example.com/msg07...](http://www.mail-archive.com/arch- email@example.com/msg07374.html)

<comment><USER13> Thanks! With this complementing the git status function I already had, my prompt is now 20% cooler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love this idea - especially for those that are unfamiliar with BASH yet still want to customize their command line experience. Unfortunately due to a previous HN article I now use zsh - would love to see a zsh prompt generator too!

</comment><comment><USER16> At first I wondered how you managed to extract my username and then I realized it was hardcoded when I looked through the code.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great impleentation, but its odd that there a limited number of elements you might want many, like spaces.

</comment><comment><USER18> As ugly as awesome ;)

</comment><comment><USER19> Congrats Avi. Your students are killing it.</comment>


Bernie Gordon – Lessons I've Learned as a Lifetime Engineering Leader - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2IIA9Z4nRY <comment><AUTHOR> "On April 21, 2017 Bernard M. Gordon addressed the MIT Community on some of the valuable and enduring lessons he's learned in his lifetime as an engineering leader. A 35-minute lecture Is followed a 15-minute audience Q&A.

Deemed the "father of high-speed, analogic to digital conversion," Mr. Gordon is most notably the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Analogic Corporation. He was also awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Regan in 1986 and has represented the key creative and essential role of the engineer in the development of new technology."

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


Make the world a better place? Remove some JavaScript from it - <AUTHOR> https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk <comment><USER2> If you describe how to compile Python to JS, that's technically interesting.

When it's framed as "Remove JS from the world to make it better", that invites a lot of drama.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more.

Obnoxious biased introduction:

"The web is the greatest application delivery platform on Earth, and frankly it's a stain on our profession that you need to know five different programming languages and three different frameworks if you want to make it do anything. Really, all you should need is to be able to code - ideally, in a friendly, readable language that's easy to learn and isn't full of unpleasant surprises."

As someone who does fullstack dev in JavaScript I find the comment totally without basis.

<comment><USER4> What are these 5 programming languages? I assume that includes HTML, CSS, JavaScript and maybe some backend language. Still, that's only 4. Also even in desktop and mobile application development there is a separate markup language for putting together the UI. For example XAML for Windows devs and XML for Android.

<comment><USER5> Probably a query language such as SQL.

<comment><USER6> So in the end you'll get : html, css, python and sql :-D

Much better. Oh wait...

(not criticizing your own comment of course)

<comment><USER4> Well you could still need some JS for the frontend but once we're adding a database too is it really any different from whichever Desktop GUI framework? The only difference is I guess that CSS and HTML are separate whereas this isn't as common for Desktop applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Headline here is misleading, I first thought it was about less client-side scripting on websites. However, this is a talk actually about using Python (compiled to JavaScript) for client-side scripting.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love the idea of writing web apps in Python. I don't love the idea of obfuscating the async nature of the web.

When I was learning JS (coming from Python) I _hated_ async programming, but it was mainly due to the syntax of callback hell. I couldn't tell what would run after what because it was no longer in order in my source code.

As other have noted async/await syntax fixes that problem. Since 3.5 that's available in standard Python (and the concepts have been in use in packages like Tornado for ages).

So ultimately I think we will see an explosion of languages that run in browsers, I don't think hiding core concepts is helpful to that endeavor.

</comment><comment><USER9> Definitely misleading.

I loved the example off "amount off code needed in js...".

These statements make me laugh by default. Amount off code needed in these contexts is so relative.

U can write 3 functions, chain them as promise/callbacks, then make it an exportable module, and it becomes:

"var x = require('x');"

Wow 1 line off code, to reference all that code off the functions, and 1 or 2 more for the options/arguments.

There's an inherit complexity and amount of code needed due to the nature off "variation" and odd cases. Creating an app that does a 100 different things will likely need more code than when it does one thing.

That said, nothing stops you from decoupling it, and create a higher leveled file to create a virtual "hub", where u do nothing more than chain the modules and give args. Basically like Node.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've tried to use Dart and it's supposed Interop with JS (to leverage the existing JS ecosystem) and it was a bit painful at times (looking at you Dart- React). And this is with a Behemoth (Google) putting resources in this language.

I can only imagine the pain of using Skulpt (JS interop + Debugging). I might be wrong in my assumptions, any feedback from Skulp devs here?

</comment><comment><USER11> And then, the page shows, as a supposed example of the reason for not using javascript:

> _And here's how you'd do it in Javascript. I count three separate callbacks > here. I'm not exaggerating - this is an example straight from the > documentation of the postgres library!_

Yet this JS code is done on a mediocre way (for today, 2017). This code would be far shorter and easier if done in JS using async/await, which is what everybody should be using now.

So, besides that, there is the premise that using the same language in the browser AND in the server is a _good thing_ ; but how true is tat premise when the "alternate" language is pretty much similar in features? I mean, there's not such a huge benefit of going from JS to Python; perhaps i can concede that Python is mostly strongly typed (a good thing), but it's not like there were huge advantages.

And then, how hard is to go from Python to JS to C# to Java when these four languages are very similar in syntax, as well? Hard stuff, for a programmer, would be to jump from JS to Forth or to Prolog; radically different languages.

<comment><USER12> maybe it's easier to jump between wildly dissimilar languages because you wouldn't be prone to mapping the wrong mental model on to what you're doing or mixing up the behavior of similar syntax as often?

<comment><USER11> Yes, but jumping between Python and Javascript is really easy. I do it myself, even in the same day, without problems.

In the same way as people who can talk English, Spanish, French, and Italian, can easily jump between those languages in the very same meeting/social event.

I do agree with your point, for example it is easy for me to mix words as belonging to Portuguese versus Italian; but that's because i don't really speak those languages.

The bottom line is -- once you learn them, there is hardly any trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Clickbait.

<comment><USER10> One weird trick to make programmers happier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Love Python, but gosh, the lack of type checking. It might not seem like a problem with small applications, but it makes navigation and refactoring of large codebases much harder than it needs to be.

Yes there are type annotations, but they are just that at the moment, annotations. There isn't, as far as I know, a good type checker, or IDE that makes good use of them.

Ironically, an extended version of this transpiler could potentially be used to convert annotated python to Typescript. And poof! Proper type-checking in Python.

<comment><USER15> > Yes there are type annotations, but they are just that at the moment, > annotations. There isn't, as far as I know, a good type checker

Mypy is a good type checker.</comment></comment>


Microsoft and Skype to axe world's most popular IM client early 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/microsoft_messenger_kill_date/

<comment><USER2> Skype client should be axed instead. It's a pile of ugly looking mess and eats half of computer's resources. I dread to turn it on anywhere else than on my overpowered home PC. And don't even get me started on the Android client. It's completely useless on a high-powered tablet, and equally useless on a low- powered phone.

I remember the times when official IM clients were lightweight and pleasant to use. Now you either have to go to third party / open source stuff (WTW, Pidgin, you name it), or just keep that GMail and Facebook tabs open.

<comment><USER3> Skype has a Win8 App

<comment><USER4> It does indeed. But have you used it? It is missing most of Skype's features and requires you to sign in using a Live Account.

Merging Live and Skype Accounts is a problem for me personally since I want to use Skype on insecure WiFi (and obviously my Live account is also an e-mail account).

<comment><USER5> What's the problem? As long as your terminal is secure, the channel should be safe even over insecure Wifi, since the Skype client has a copy of the certificate of the server and can therefore authenticate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I still use MSN and I guess I don't really mind, MSN has a lot of history but it's a mediocre client and Skype is much better. I used to have 100s of contacts on MSN with ~50 online at any one time, now everyone that used MSN _casually_ uses Facebook chat so I have... 2 people online (both of which are listed as away) and anyone that uses IM seriously seems to use Skype. It was inevitable.

Does anyone here still use MSN? They say it's the most popular client, but that doesn't fit my current experience, I guess China makes up the majority of that usage? Of the people I know that still use MSN they just have it running because why not, they don't actively use it. That's how I use it.

<comment><USER7> I use it to talk to my other half whilst in the office - that is it.

I'll switch to IRSSI over SSH onto my hosted server (I'll just run a local ircd) and she can use mIRC on her laptop instead. I have no intention of using another hosted service. It would be more reliable as well - Live Messenger reliability has always been crap.

(For ref, I do not use Skype, Facebook or any social tools).

<comment><USER8> Just as an FYI, you can setup your own XMPP server in 20 min, and chat with people on facebook, gtalk, etc. www.prosody.im

<comment><USER9> Nope, not on Facebook you can't. Unless I'm sourly mistaken, the Facebook Jabber server does not support s2s federation (by choice, obviously) and won't let users outside the Facebook Jabber server chat to those on it.

Cue walled garden rant.

Wha you can do is use an existing Facebook (Jabber) account on a regular Jabber client such as Pidgin, Adium and such.

No problem chatting with @gmail.com JIDs from any Jabber server though (well, besides the fact that Google's Multi User Chat support is pretty shitty in my experience, and that the two-way Jabber subscription process it bit weird in Google land).

I absolutely second the Prosody advice though, wonderful server and very friendly community and devs!

<comment><USER10> Haven't tested, but this says the opposite: [http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/10/facebook-chat-launches- xmpp...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/10/facebook-chat-launches-xmpp- support/)

<comment><USER11> This only describes the feature of connecting an XMPP client to facebook chat.

S2S federation means server-to-server. That is, use your XMPP account on your own server (such as prosody, as proposed above) to communicate with facebook users (on facebook's servers).

But that would go against fb's walled garden approach, so it's unlikely to come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Back in 2006, MSN Messenger was one of the world's best-known brands (its logo outscored Mickey Mouse!); in large parts of Asia and Europe it had become a verb -- "I'll MSN you"; and had some clever approaches to ads that got extremely high clickthroughs.

But then MS changed its name to 'Windows Live Messenger' to boost the Windows Live brand; underinvested in development and support; and focused its advertising on trying to compete with Google for search ads.

Ah well. The path not taken.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can they optimize Skype so that it doesn't require 80MB-130MB just to run in the background? How can it require this much memory to run an instant messenger? Couldn't they delay load some of the features if they aren't yet being used (such as video codecs and audio codecs and other such features?)

<comment><USER14> I guess in a time where 4-8gb ram is the norm, 80-130mb memory consumption is not seen as a priority.

<comment><USER15> Yes it would be a great trade-off, but the window still takes seconds to display.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Performance aside, here is what I hate about Skype compared to MSN / WLM: privacy. (1) Skype logs you in to your last known status / on MSN you could choose before login (for example, "appear offline"/"invisible"). If I just want to check if a contact is online without my aunt start chatting, I can't. (2) There is no easy way to block whole contact groups temporarily. When I'm at work, I don't want my friends to see me online; when I'm at home, I don't want to be contacted by co-workers. (3) Say I'm chatting with Bob, and he goes offline just before I send him a last IM. This IM will be delivered the next time that we are both online. Even if one of us is "appearing offline"/"invisible". So we have a way of knowing when someone is hiding: just send someone a message when they are offline. Bah. (4) Not related, but the delivery of old messages is awful across platforms. What annoys me the most about these bugs (1-3) is that they seem so easy to fix, and yet nothing is done. Meh. Do you have similar frustrations?

<comment><USER17> (2) surely isn't a bug; if you have two subsets of contacts that you want to keep entirely separate why use a single account?

<comment><USER18> Skype doesn't make it easy to use two accounts. There is no "multiple accounts" feature where you can be logged in as one or both; instead, you have to log out and log back in again as the other. Sometimes, you might be on- call, so chatting with friends is OK, but you still need to be available to coworkers.

The problem with Skype is that it's totally closed. I use a multi-protocol IM client, with multiple accounts, so I can chat with people over AIM, FB, Google Chat, my work chat, and so on. Sadly, despite the fact that my work has Google Apps, which includes chat, they have standardized on Skype instead, so I need to have an entirely separate client, and log out and log back in when switching between work and personal accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They kill the client or the protocol ? It's not really clear from the article. Don't care about the client itself (most IM clients suck anyway), that's why we have pidgin.

<comment><USER20> I thought the protocol used a central server for transferring contact information between users. If they shutdown those severs, then pidgin's msn implementation wont do us any good.

<comment><USER19> Found some more info about this at [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2012/11/micros...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2012/11/microsoft-to-kill-off-the-messenger-client-and-regroup- under-the-skype-brand/) .Apparently the won't kill the servers too so there's still hope of continuing with pidgin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I sign onto my various IM accounts from a variety of locations simultaneously (e.g. desktop at home, laptop in office, phone) and I find it infuriating that every protocol has a different way of handling that.

MSN: Sends incoming message _only_ to the last active computer (where last active seems to be defined by which computer last sent an IM or updated your status)

AIM: Sends incoming messages to all computers

XMPP (Gtalk): Inconsistent behaviour. I think the priorities set by various clients screw things up.

Skype: Does weird chat/history syncing between all your computers (this raises Privacy issues, as many times if I delete a chat on my desktop, it somehow reappears on my phone when I sign in on it. Also although it syncs the chat text, why not also sync whether the messages have been read or not, because at the moment if I sign in on my phone, it constantly buzzes for about 5 minutes as it 'catches' up on a ton of unread messages (which I've read ages ago on my computer).)

What's worse is status fragmentation. I've set my desktop and laptop to auto- away after 5 minutes, so people know if I'm there or if they can leave a message I'll read later. Run through this situation: 1) Signed in on desktop, go away. Pidgin sets Away on my accounts. 2) Some time later, turn on laptop. Adium sets all my accounts as Online. 3) Turn off laptop to go somewhere. Adium signs out and my accounts get left as Online. Desktop doesn't re-auto- away and so people think I'm there when I'm not.

None of these are ideal, and the only 'solution' I've found is to use a service like <http://imo.im> where their service only signs on _once_ to the accounts, but you access imo.im on any number of devices so it can make sure that every device has the same chat there. Problem with this is I don't like using web apps and would prefer to use native Pidgin/Adium if possible.

Any suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER22> According to Ars Technica, the infrastructure will be the same. [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2012/11/micros...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2012/11/microsoft-to-kill-off-the-messenger-client-and-regroup- under-the-skype-brand/) This is more of a rebrand than an "axe".

</comment><comment><USER23> The best way to spend any extra money saved on retiring MSN: open up the Skype API for devs to use. Adium is still the undisputed king of IM clients and with a proper Skype plugin for it I'd be happy again. Because let's face it, the Skype client is really, really bad.

<comment><USER24> Goddamnit yes. Waiting years for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Google needs to work hard and fast pushing google talk. This will determine Google's place in the future of VoIP / video calling in the Internet.

<comment><USER26> google talk was killed too. Now it's all G+

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Did anyone notice how Skype now shows ads on the their iPhone app? Far as I'm concerned it and live messenger have the same overall experience. I'd do away with Skype if I weren't using it to keep in touch with clients.

</comment><comment><USER28> A truer description might be that the brand is being axed.

I believe that Skype has been migrated onto a messenger backend... so really this is a unification of the chat tech onto messenger, and the brand onto Skype.

</comment><comment><USER29> Surely they know something we don't. I expected them to go the other way by bringing Skype into Messenger.

</comment><comment><USER30> Related: Can't seem to find Skype metro in windows store on release preview. Any way of running it here?

</comment><comment><USER31> This fixes the "Messenger" branding issue.

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe this will help the uptake of xmpp.

<comment><USER32> Windows Live Messenger _is_ XMPP - <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/live/hh826554.aspx>

<comment><USER11> It's even worse than facebook's approach to XMPP (I didn't think that's possible): Not only does it not provide server-to-server access, it also requires client tokens for OAuth that must be requested out-of-band, so any vanilla XMPP client can't make use of that endpoint.</comment></comment></comment>


Insurers poised to raise prices after costly string of natural disasters - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/insurers-poised-to-raise-prices-after-costly-string-of-natural-disasters-1514462400 <comment><USER3> I've always wondered this about insurance company's business model. How is it fair or legal for them to pass on the increased costs to their customers? Providing insurance is a risk that companies take, for which they get rewarded if there is more inflow of cash (premium) vs outflow (payouts). If they have a bad year where more customers are to be paid out, then how can they increase the premium on everyone, just to ensure that their profits grow or remain same?

<comment><USER4> They cannot change the terms of existing insurance contracts. The increased prices will show up on new contracts - either renewal or entirely new properties.

That said, as the article notes:

> There is some skepticism that reinsurance prices can rise enough in the > coming year to offset the decline over the last decade. Any changes may also > take some time to flow through the industry. In Florida, one state tested by > this year's events, many insurers won't renew their reinsurance policies > until June.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://archive.is/S4qHs](http://archive.is/S4qHs)

</comment><comment><USER6> aren't insurance rates supposed to be based on risk? so unless the recent string of natural disasters increased the risk (or revealed increased risk) of future disasters, they shouldn't raise rates. or did the reinsurers want to recoup some of that lost money?

<comment><USER7> Disasters essentially provide information that lets insurers price risk. Inflation is their chief enemy. During times without events they do bank for payout. When an event happens often risk is better understood and policies might be renegotiated after a disaster a la Katrina on offshore oil and gas. It happens through groups of "syndicates" at Loyds of London - <USER2> actuaries with capital.

<comment><USER6> if disasters provide information about risk, then the lack of disasters should also provide information. which means that insurance premiums should be steadily decreasing in years where there aren't many payouts. does this happen in practice? feels like insurance premiums only ratchet up (at least on a personal level).

<comment><USER7> It doesn't really at least not for my house, haha! I think it might be related to inflation so that in real terms it really does fall.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Shuts Out Competitors on Android? Hardly - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/technology/android-faces-monopoly-claims-as-its-users-tackle-an-abundance-of-choices.html <comment><USER2> An alternate point of view by the Economist: [http://www.economist.com/news/business/21697193-european- com...](http://www.economist.com/news/business/21697193-european-commission- going-after-google-againthis-time-better-chance)

<comment><USER3> Tl;dr: Android is open sourced, Google Play services are not. Licenses for manufacturers to preinstall the proprietary Google Play app require them to also to preinstall Google search.

Android manufacturers aren't forced to preinstall Play services. Users can still uninstall either Play, search, or any number of the preinstalled manufacturer apps (which aren't locked by manufacturers), right? How is this different than if Google made just one app for play _and_ search?

<comment><USER2> The legal question is whether the exclusivity terms in the licensing deals are anti-competitive given Google's dominant market share in Europe.

"handset-makers that wish to pre-install Google Play must, among other apps, also add Google Search and make it the device's default search service; if they want to share in Google's ad revenues they have to exclusively pre- install Google Search; and if they pre-install Google's apps on any of their models, they must commit to install only Google's standard version of Android on each and every one of their models."

<comment><USER3> That's a quality control clause to keep manufacturers from pushing apps that don't work to users. The Google play apps are not compiled to run on every conceivable custom configuration of open-sourced Android. Samsung installs Tizen on it's models that don't use play services.

<comment><USER2> If I understand "if they pre-install Google's apps on any of their models, they must commit to install only Google's standard version of Android on each and every one of their models" correctly, Google does not allow handset-makers to sell models with custom Android versions (but without Google Play) if that maker also wants to sell any model with an approved Android version and Google Play.

Tizen is not an Android derivative. Do you know enough about Google's licensing terms to be able to contradict the accusation in the article?

Btw, I entirely understand and sympathize with the desire to prevent Android fragmentation.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I wasn't aware of restricting the specific forks. I'm not sure how that works if you open source software but then license someone to only use a specific version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This whole anti-trust case seems to be for the benefit of certain businesses (Microsoft, Yandex, etc) and not consumers.

<comment><USER5> As a customer, I'm annoyed by having an un-removable Google bar in the recents menu on my Nexus device. No way to remove without modifying the OS itself (unlocking bootloader, compiling AOSP myself, flashing myself).

As a developer, I'm annoyed by being forced to use Google Cloud Messaging – even when that might make it impossible for my app to send notifications, because there is no single server sending notifications, but millions (distributed systems are like that), and therefore Google is now locking my app out from receiving notifications on Android M and N during doze. On Android M that means during the night, on Android N that means as soon as the app is in background, it can't send notifications.

And then there's the Anti-Fragmentation clause, that forbids OEMs from forking Android.

The Anti-Fragmentation clause – which has been used several times by Google against Kindle devices and Tizen – might in fact end up being illegal. The EC has picked the fight mostly because of this.

<comment><USER6> I hope it doesn't wind up being illegal. The android security landscape is a disaster, in part, because of fragmentation. OEMs need to stop screwing around with devices.

<comment><USER5> That's the cost of having a choice. If there was only one car, we would have far less to worry about, too. But the laws say that a software manufacturer – Microsoft or Google – can't coerce OEMs – be they Dell or SAMSUNG – into using their OS on all systems.

<comment><USER6> What coercion? Those developers can use AOSP and roll whatever OS suits their fancy.

They want to ship Google's code, they play by their rules. Sounds only fair.

<comment><USER5> No, they can't.

Google prevents OEMs like SAMSUNG from shipping Kindle devices. If SAMSUNG were to ship a Kindle device, Google would immediately stop licensing them the Play Store for their other devices.

This is part of the contract between Google and OEMs, and it contains this specific limitation that an OEM can only either ship Google Play devices, or AOSP devices – but not both at the same time.

<comment><USER6> Ah! Okay, that makes a lot more sense and definitely reeks of 90's era Microsoft-tier anticompetitive behavior.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. The EU already fought it back then, so it makes sense they'll fight it here again.

The other EU antitrust case – the one about the Google Search – also was often misrepresented, but one of the major concerns was that Google took reviews from Yelp!, displayed them in Google Maps and Google Search, did not link back to Yelp!, and when Yelp! requested Google to stop doing so, Google threatened to blacklist Yelp! from the search completely.

These cases are not just hot air, although it seems like a lot of people try to misrepresent them, be it for misguided corporate loyalty or personal incentive.

I personally hope the EU can improve the situation for us users soon.

A Kindle device from HTC would be nice, and the ability to use DuckDuckGo from the recents menu, not just the Launcher.

Being able to use non-Google push notification services would also reduce my own costs – I'm a student working on FLOSS apps – by about 15$ a month – I'd finally be able to get 3G speeds on my phone, currently I can only afford 64kbps unlimited internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is it always Google? Apple's iOS is far more locked down and I don't ever see them in the sights of anti-trust lawsuits.

<comment><USER8> Antitrust law is concerned with anti-competitive contracts and agreements. Apple controlling what Apple ships on Apple hardware is fine. Google controlling what Samsung ships on Samsung hardware is not so fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point of the article is that Samsung is free to load up its phones with dozens of apps that compete directly with Google.

Samsung can change the default search engine to Bing, they can pre-install Facebook, Whatsapp and Skype. They can make is so you can't uninstall Facebook if you don't want it.

Seems like a much more competitive market than the Apple or Microsoft mobile ecosystems.

<comment><USER8> > The point of the article is that Samsung is free to load up its phones with > dozens of apps that compete directly with Google.

OEMs must give the Google apps very prominent placement, including a Google search bar on the home screen, and in many cases set them as the default. But this isn't at the heart of the objection. The strongest point is that Google forbids its licensees from shipping alternative versions of Android. This means that Samsung cannot offer consumers a choice between (say) GoogleAndroid and Cyanogen.

> Samsung can change the default search engine to Bing

Google requires OEMs to set Google as the default search engine, according to the EU complaint. I don't know if that's true; I speculate it's not true for Samsung (which has negotiating leverage) but is true for smaller OEMs.

> Seems like a much more competitive market than the Apple or Microsoft mobile > ecosystems.

No way. A true competitive market would be a bunch of Apple-like firms, independently building whatever products they want. Instead we have all but a handful of OEMs beholden to Google, under contracts which oblige them to do things Google's way, and no other way ("anti-fragmentation").

The article makes a case that consumers aren't being harmed by this, because OEMs make terrible software. This may be true. But it's still anti- competitive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious to see if the argument made in the article holds water in court. Do the examples of other services winning in messaging, music, social, & storage out weight the App Store and search dominance. Or will the case be about the limits placed on phone manufacturers, not consumers, making all of it moot.

<comment><USER10> It's not about limiting consumers actions it's about limiting consumer choice in the market place.

Related but different. The EU actually has a pretty good case tbh, though I doubt it'll lead to very much.

Google wants to have the closed control that Apple does (because they want to control the software) but wants to tout their difference in "openess" because they needed that to sell hardware (which they profoundly suck at at scale).

Now they've got better at the hardware (see, Nexus lines) they want to slowly choke off competition. This has been obvious _for years_ but there was very little to be done about it other than companies moving away from Android (which isn't really practical short to medium term) or some kind of governmental play - which this is.

Now... will the EU win? Possibly, it's not a slam dunk, but it could lead to small - but important - changes in how Google has to play the game.

<comment><USER3> Except this isn't about consumer control. The EU anti-trust suit is based on licensing for the proprietary Google Play app, which requires Google Search to be bundled by manufacturers that want to install Play.

Android is open sourced, the Google Play services are not, and they're not required to run Android. Consumers can install/uninstall anything they want. Manufacturers can preinstall anything they want, just that if the license to preinstall the Play app they need to preinstall Search.

<comment><USER10> > Except this isn't about consumer control.

I know...? I said exactly that..?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The title reads like a cryptic crossword clue.</comment>


Founder in pursuit of press takes basket of sex toys, oysters, booze to reporter - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Tech-companies-haven-t-gotten-past-sexism-1-0-5845691.php

<comment><USER3> > He said he was sorry I felt uncomfortable with his choice of swag, but also > appeared genuinely surprised at my discomfort. He didn't want to offend me, > but also didn't understand why I would be offended in the first place. > Francis didn't seem to grasp that sex — or a woman's sexuality — isn't a > topic appropriate for a professional setting.

Is he in 9th grade or something? This sounds like a basket Vincent Adultman would put together: "Expensive food, a alcohol, sexy toys... grownup stuff! Because I'm a grownup, giving a present to a grownup."

</comment><comment><USER4> It is fucking baffling how anyone could think this was not a terrible idea, never mind a good idea.

There's probably room for a Q&A site IsThisAStupidIdea.com where you post something you're going to do ("I'm going to put together a press pack - <USER2> will include a bottle of alcohol, lube, and sex toys" and people can rate the idea for terribleness).

<comment><USER5> The last few paragraphs kind of soften it a bit. The items were all items users recommended on his app, and each had a pic of the recommendation attached. The founder also said he'd sent the same items to other journalists, male and female, and just wanted to send items that would "stand out".

It's still an awful choice, but if you squint real hard you can see how a clueless person could get there.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> When I started reading, I assumed it a sex toy company and was thinking this is one case where _literature_ rather than samples would have been better (unless the reporter actually specialized in reviewing such products). ...Only to read on and see it was a Q&A site?

It would also be interesting to know whether the reporter was able to verify the founder's claim that he sent the same basket to other male and female journalists.</comment>