Ask HN: Do you still use the same online handle? - <AUTHOR>

I am watching an episode of Criminal Minds and a comment was made that hackers stick to their handles as it's their online identity. I don't use the same handle I used 15 years ago, nor the alternate I used 10 years ago (though I have 2 I still use in addition to my full name which is a pretty recent thing).<p>So, the question is, how many people are still using their handles from years ago, and how long have you been using your current handle? <comment><USER2> As I entered my second career, as programmer, I made a very conscious attempt to use a very personal handle for services that were even remotely professional. For most, that meant something like 'jnovinger', which is my first initial and full last name.

The reason was that I wanted build a professional reputation. I wanted to say smart things and have them associated with me as opposed to some handle I used long ago. I said some really stupid things when I was younger and much, much more naive. Plus, seeing my real name at the top of the page reminded me that what I was saying was public, permanent, and subject to making me look like an idiot.

Having said that, I chose 'nantes' for HN, because, well, you all intimidated me when I registered. It took a while reading HN before I really felt like I had something useful and relevant to add to the discussion. Even then, my experience was dwarfed by HN and I worried that I might post something poorly thought out or downright dim-witted.

I've started to get over that. A little bit.

</comment><comment><USER3> I intentionally switch handles when I join a new service / community. I don't think of my handle as my "identity" in any sense - rather, it's more like a license to post whatever thoughts I have at the time. Barton Fink happened to be the most recent movie I watched since I started posting here. It has only a tenuous connection to my real identity, and I'm not particularly vested in it at all. If HN generated random ID's for me on posting, for example, I wouldn't mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find that an interesting perspective - most people I know have always had some tie to their handle - even if they later discarded it or attempted to keep it as a completely anonymous gate - but to be completely anonymous with random id's I haven't come across before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You need to be a bit more specific regarding whether you mean:

1) using the same handle in new services

2) using the same handle in services that you have already registered with

I personally dont change my handles during the lifetime of a service [for example, Ive used the same AIM screen name for over a decade]. It's a pain to have to go back and inform others that the name has changed, plus id have to change my personal workflows to match the new names ...

However, I do change the handle that i use when i register for new services. veyron is the flavor of the month, but that will change at one point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Overall my question was really about your attachment to your handle - so even if you carried it over across various services over the years i.e. from BBS to IRC to web forums and instant messengers. Just curious if people see their online identity as a reflection of themselves and do they stick with that personification over time.

<comment><USER4> Some people like to link their online identities to their real identity, but others like to keep them separate.

Read this: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/technology/10facebook.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/technology/10facebook.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)

tl;dr: 'One trait those sites have in common is crucial to Japan's fiercely private Internet users. The Japanese sites let members _mask_ _their_ _identities_ , in distinct contrast to the real-name, oversharing hypothetical user on which Facebook's business model is based.

Japanese Web users, even popular bloggers, typically hide behind pseudonyms or nicknames.'

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting - I used to be of the mentality that my online persona should be completely separate from my real identity and valued my privacy greatly - but, as made obvious here on HN, I have moved towards using my real name in what I do. I'm not sure what my reasoning for this change was, and it intrigues me what makes people choose the route they go when using a handle or not.

Thanks for the article :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mine haven't changed over the years, but I have different handles for different types of accounts. i.e. professional, casual, gamer, hacker.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've used the same handle for most things for 16 years, but have others that have also evolved over the same time period, like nicknames, these are often less under our control than we think...

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes, and I wish I'd used my real name here instead. My old AOL screenname really doesn't seem to fit with Hacker News. I try to comment as if it were my real name though.

<comment><USER8> Same here... I've been using this screen name for over 10 years.

And the strangest thing is that I feel like I keep seeing you everywhere on the internet. I know I see you on reddit all the time, and I'm vaguely positive I knew you on a Gamefaqs board years ago... TO?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I still post on TO regularly. Got rid of my reddit account though. Too many memes. I still visit /r/Minecraft a decent amount though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been using the same handle in _some_ places for 26 years, wow. Started on BBS systems obviously. Notably it is not my handle on HN because it was taken.

</comment><comment><USER10> It took a very long while of careful consideration to arrive at this handle, and I'm not giving it up for anything. It's unique, tasteful, and memorable, much more so than my real name, which was the 3rd most popular the year I was born.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been using this nickname for more than half the time I've been alive.

</comment><comment><USER12> For some things, yes, for others, no. My oldest handle is 15+ years old and still active, but less and less relevant.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've been using mine for longer than I haven't. I came up with in 1994.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've had mine for about 9 years.

</comment><comment><USER15> I generally go by Michele online. It is my actual legal middle name and I use it socially offline as well. It is typically not available as a handle for a board that has been around a while. I tried to sign up for HN as Michele but it was already taken. My default if Michele is not available is to add a faux "last name" of some sort but that tends to lead to very long handles which can be annoying. So, to avoid the long handle syndrome, when Michele fell through here, I opted to use initials of a familiar handle that felt to me like a real nickname.

However, I kind of expected that to be too short and to be rejected (nevermind that I already knew that pg goes by pg here) and was still in the mindset of uppercase first letter followed by lowercase second letter so it wound up looking like a feminist title rather than initials. I'm real quick: It only took me like 6 weeks to realize that folks might interpret it that way, at which point I wondered if I should change it. However, people seem to routinely think I am some strident feminist strutting around in black leather with a cat-o-nine-tails looking for some guy to whip into submission anyway <eyes cross>, so "a rose by any other name" and all that. Y'all will eventually see my handle as representing whatever you think about me, however inaccurate I might think it is. <shrug>

tl; dr: yes, no, maybe, sorta.

Edit: Though, really, I don't think I qualify for the description of "hacker". So maybe you didn't want to know to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yup. I'm geuis anywhere I go, and have been always. My name is Charles Lawrence but it's a rather common name, whereas geuis is rather unique. I don't make any effort to disambiguate between online and offline.</comment>


Tell HN: The Secret To Launching Is Removing Unfinished Features - <AUTHOR>

The secret to launching your start-up is removing unfinished features.  It's that simple.<p>Many things you think you need in your first version can usually wait.  That unfinished social feature?  Remove it.  That broken button to let users tag content? Comment it out.  The extra benefit of removing those unfinished features is that users won't appreciate them if they're in the initial version.  If you add those same features later, users will actually notice the features and get to share your thrill of improving your product. <comment><USER2> 37Signals take on this: [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2895-link-svn- flashback-essen...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2895-link-svn-flashback- essential-vs-non-essential)

</comment><comment><USER3> So instead of saying "Social Recommendations Coming in Future!" you would just not implement that feature in the first place early on

Would you recommend, instead, to tweet or blog about upcoming features to keep user excitement up?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an old sales tactic: Just don't mention what's missing. If you mention the missing features missing then all you do is draw attention to the fact those features aren't there. And if you blog or tweet about those features, then you ruin the surprise. Users like pleasant surprises. Work on the cool new features behind the scenes and unveil them Steve Jobs style when they're polished and ready.

<comment><USER4> Also, you can communicate your upcoming features with the press under embargo, they will be happy to break the story exactly at the date and time you specify, everybody loves to brake a story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't call this "The" Secret but yeah, it makes sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's secret in that good artists know what to put in, while great artists know what to leave out.</comment></comment>


You Can Do It in SQL, Stop Writing Extra Code for That - <AUTHOR> https://geshan.com.np/blog/2018/12/you-can-do-it-in-sql/ <comment><USER2> It's funny that this even needs to be a blog post. I can see why simple key- value stores have become so popular in recent years. Developers don't want to learn SQL properly, and end up using the database as if it were a key-value store, and at some point, they begin to question why they need SQL at all, and switch to NoSQL. Later, when they do need more sophisticated querying, they then have to slap Elastic on top of their key-value store to get that feature back, when they could've been using SQL all along. Full circle!

<comment><USER3> I agree with what you're saying but I think its important to point out that there is a Developer experience in most mainstream languages and then there is the Operations experience of deploying, configuring, maintaining, scaling, and paying for, various RDBMS.

Developers grow up crashing their programs. Crashing your DBMS (or similiarly messing it up) is not as friendly or immediate in feedback/consequence, so people shy away from it.

The end result is that many developers are influenced to use code more and databases less.

<comment><USER4> Elasticsearch quite conveniently makes it so difficult and fucking annoying to do data analytics with their pile of turd custom query un-language shambles that it leaves anyone stuck with it rightly reinventing oblong wheels with diamond bearings lubricated with iron filings in code. Aah, but dev-mis-ops say that it's easy to deploy and maintain on AWS. It scales too! Well, at least the whole set-up keeps everyone employed.

<comment><USER5> Could you elaborate more on your specific ES problems? Having worked with Elasticsearch extensively for many years, and do not share this sentiment.

Many of the ES queries fundamentally aren't meant to have a 1-to-1 equivalent in SQL as ES's goal is to specialize as a distributed search index, and not a general relative database.

If your point is that ES is being more frequently used as an alternative to just writing/scaling/using a SQL service to it's full potential, then I can somewhat understand the sentiment.

<comment><USER4> I completely agree with the idea that ES might be good as a distributed search index. I really wish people would leave it at that.

The company where I last worked had a main product which would send in readings every second. The only interface to these readings was Elasticsearch. dev-mis-ops were convinced that this was a good idea. Even the front end would send its queries to Elasticsearch to display statistics.

My task was to look at the average energy usage over one year for the seven days in the week divided into fifteen-minute intervals. This is literally just a SELECT MOD GROUP BY in SQL. I am not even talking about more advanced SQL features here like windows, transactions, joins and so on.

I tried for ages looking through terrible documentation trying to get it to work, at which point I thought I'd have one of the resident ES experts take a bit of his own medicine. It took about five attempts of back and forth over two days to get it right.

This wasn't the only query we had problems with. At some point, I just asked them to give me a CSV interface so I could do it in AWK. You can't even download CSVs of data sets without some external tool! They were still convinced that ES was fit for purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I understand where the author is coming from, and for purposes of aggregation or filtering, they are correct; it's often better to do those things in SQL. There are two problems, though. CPU and IOs on your DB server are likely your organization's most scarce resource, and SQL is often hard to test and has unpredictable performance characteristics (cliffs, blocking, etc). By all means do the things you must do to get your app servers the data they need with the fewest IOs and bytes across the wire possible, but please do your string concatenation and sorting (when not using TOP or LIMIT) on cheap app servers that you can always deploy more of.

</comment><comment><USER7> Relational databases are brilliant, but SQL is terrible and I don't understand how it hasn't gone the way of COBOL yet. For a start, the bizarrely English- oriented structure forces a completely different ordering of the code than what comes out, and the syntax appears to completely ignore the underlying tabular concepts. Not to mention that IMO joining on foreign keys shouldn't be a thing--the database should be able to figure out what you want when you write `order.customer.address.taxRegion.rate` without specifying any joins at all. Even if you use an ORM you still have to understand the code it will emit to avoid building bad queries. There's just so much awkwardness in trying to write a SQL query that I can definitely see why people would avoid it.

<comment><USER8> > Relational databases are brilliant, but SQL is terrible and I don't > understand how it hasn't gone the way of COBOL yet.

Having written extensive amounts of SQL and greater than zero lines of COBOL (f. you, Lawson), this really couldn't be further from the truth.

> For a start, the bizarrely English-oriented structure forces a completely > different ordering of the code than what comes out, and the syntax appears > to completely ignore the underlying tabular concepts.

Every language has keywords; I'm not sure how you expect to write code that doesn't involve English in some form. Is the concept of `SELECT this_data FROM this_source WHERE true_conditions ORDER BY columns` really that convoluted? Sure, it _definitely_ gets more complicated, but is there really a significantly better way to do it that doesn't involve taking away low-level control from the programmer, in exchange for something sexier and easier to pick up?

> Not to mention that IMO joining on foreign keys shouldn't be a thing--the > database should be able to figure out what you want when you write > `order.customer.address.taxRegion.rate`

Why can't you have a key-value storage engine that doesn't involve using keys to look up values?! (Is that really your question?) Okay, just as an example, what if you have more than one address for a customer? You need a way to tell the engine which address(es) you want.

> There's just so much awkwardness in trying to write a SQL query that I can > definitely see why people would avoid it.

While I don't claim that SQL is easy (or always intuitive), saying that it is "terrible" for the above reasons is like saying that C is terrible because it's not Pythonic.

<comment><USER9> I'd prefer it if C were more pythonic tbh.

<comment><USER10> sooo..... go?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Be careful in using group_concat in mysql - it actually truncates the result to the max_len setting which is by default 1024 and will not tell you it truncates the result in the logs. it took us forever to find the cause of this issue in one of our batch jobs (I wish mysql issued a warning when truncating):

"In MySQL, you can get the concatenated values of expression combinations. To eliminate duplicate values, use the DISTINCT clause. To sort values in the result, use the ORDER BY clause. To sort in reverse order, add the DESC (descending) keyword to the name of the column you are sorting by in the ORDER BY clause. The default is ascending order; this may be specified explicitly using the ASC keyword. The default separator between values in a group is comma (,). To specify a separator explicitly, use SEPARATOR followed by the string literal value that should be inserted between group values. To eliminate the separator altogether, specify SEPARATOR ''.

The result is truncated to the maximum length that is given by the group_concat_max_len system variable, which has a default value of 1024. The value can be set higher, although the effective maximum length of the return value is constrained by the value of max_allowed_packet. The syntax to change the value of group_concat_max_len at runtime is as follows, where val is an unsigned integer"

[https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/group-by- functions.h...](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/group-by- functions.html#function_group-concat)

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a setting to make it longer.

<comment><USER11> Yes this is mentioned in the documentation I quoted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> SQL is a real programming language (even though, many people seems to not think so). I use SQLite, although there are other SQL implementations (with different features) too.

It is true many thing can be done well with SQL, whether you call from other programs or use standalone.

Whether it will be faster or not to use SQL probably depends on what SQL implementation is in use, whether the indexing is set up properly, and what programming language you are calling it from.

Also, much things can be done with a shorter code in SQL if you are doing such things as sorting the result set.

</comment><comment><USER13> Some things are harder to do in SQL then in code. For example, assigning a rank based on a field in MYSQL. I did this for production code in a rails app, and it wasn't just ugly (requiring separate DB calls for variable initialization and output and updating) but it ran slow enough that it had to be scheduled for off peak time, and it requires temporary variables (or you can do it with whole temporary tables, I believe).

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3333665/rank-function- in...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3333665/rank-function-in-mysql)

That's not to say that I would do it in Ruby if I had it to do over again, I'd probably use Redis, but still, sometimes SQL isn't as fast as other solutions.

I like SQL. Optimizing DB calls to speed up stuff is fun for me. But it's not always the right choice.

(There's probably a clever and fast way to do it in postgres, but DB choices were not mine to make).

edit: Incidentally, if you just need to know 1 record's rank at a time, like getting a player's position on a leaderboard, instead of including each record in the DB, you can do a select on scores (or distinct scores) greater then the current record's score and add 1, and that can be much faster.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the problem is with Excel sheets and CSVs. We aren't taught how to manipulate data otherwise without the use of code. SQL seems to have immense overhead. Set up a db, import data, etc. Although it makes sense, it's an afterthought. We know how to write scripts, but we don't necessarily need to learn SQL to get the job done.

</comment><comment><USER15> This discusses the "how" but not the "why." I'm not a SQL expert, so I find it far easier to maintain my code in a language I am familiar with than to maintain (seemingly cryptic) SQL equations, queries, etc. Is there a quantifiable performance gain with moving more operations to SQL rather than implementing it in my language of choice?

The conclusion states:

> Exploit the power of SQL to write less code because "the best code is the > code that was never written". If it is not written there is no need to > maintain it.

But they're wrong, since you still need to maintain all of the SQL implementations...

Edit: I previously said "I'm not a DBA", but some folks seem to be getting hung up on that rather than the rest of my comments/questions.

<comment><USER16> There is a significant difference between being a DBA and knowing SQL

Regarding your question:

> Is there a quantifiable performance gain with moving more operations to SQL > rather than implementing it in my language of choice?

It depends, of course, but in my experience the answer is yes for 90% of the cases.

<comment><USER17> Is this due to query optimization, or something else?

<comment><USER18> I'd love to see an answer from someone more experienced on this as well.

In my experience, the database is just faster than application code at most stuff and queries can be written in a way that similar logic can't be optimized at the application level. Additionally, database code is usually (always?) going to be faster than something like Python/Ruby.

Code review is more difficult at the database level, however, and SQL talent is more rare. It may be more challenging to scale and maintain a team of engineers working on a codebase with a lot of application logic implemented in stored procs/SQL versus ORM code (such as active record or Django). Just my opinion, have worked on teams with ORM usage as well as separate DBA teams and all logic in SQL. SQL by hand is more powerful and flexible, surely, but for most use cases I would prefer to keep code in one place (application) and only reach for the tool (raw SQL) when needed for optimizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Off the top of my head I'm thinking that there's a serious lack of thought in these use cases, especially string manipulation which I could imagine becoming painfully slow as the database grows; any manipulation of the projection like this is going to incur a large performance overhead.

It would be quite good to see this blog post, or a response to it, evaluating the SQL codes performance on different datasets.</comment>


Disability Rights Advocate Dies After Insurance Co. Denied Her Necessary Meds - <AUTHOR> https://jezebel.com/disability-rights-advocate-carrie-ann-lucas-dies-after-1832933366 <comment><USER2> I don't understand. I thought the great benefit of privatized healthcare was that it was not rationed - yet she was denied medication? How perplexing. /s

<comment><USER3> I know this was tongue in cheek, but the truth is that all healthcare is rationed. It's just that in a capitalism-obsessed culture the mainstream belief is that rationing on economic lives is somehow better than doing so based on efficacy.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> To top this all off, "United Healthcare's attempt to save $2,000 cost over $1 million in health care costs over the past year."

To save a small amount of money, they ended up spending way more money and killing the patient.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if having both private health insurance and medicare actually worked to her detriment here. Both assuming the other would pick up the tab for the expensive antibiotic but then neither did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And under UHC the doctor wouldn't have even suggested the expensive drug.

<comment><USER6> Why would the doctor change her recommendation of an appropriate drug based on who was paying for the insurance?

<comment><USER7> Kickbacks, direct and indirect</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did you adapt to a rapidly-growing startup? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,<p>I'm an engineer working for a startup entering a period of high-growth. One year ago, I was the first (non-executive) full-time engineer. Currently I'm one of six, and in a year's time I'll likely be one of 20. As we continue to add engineers and engineering managers, I'm not quite sure how to find my new place within the organization. How have you adapted to your team growing around and above you without feeling like you're being replaced? <comment><USER2> I went through what you are describing.

What happened to me is that I went from being _the_ key employee who built and architected major parts of everything, to slowly but steadily being stripped of every single task, meeting, project, in favor of new people who were brought in to cover those areas they had experience with on their resume (but not necessarily performed at a higher level even after their ramp-up period, in my obviously biased opinion).

In the end (after about a couple years from my productivity peak) I ended up as a completely disposable resource, with literally nobody paying attention to anything I had to say. It surely was a very tough mental exercise for me, I had to brain dump all I knew about the technology to all these new hires dozens of times, knowing that they would completely replace me in months and leave me task-less, which they did. I had crazy impostor syndrome constantly thinking "do I suck this much that they are replacing me for everything?" (the answer was no: I was able to obtain job offers from 4 FAANG companies, and I joined one).

The worst part of all is that nobody will tell you what's going to happen, your manager (manager that you didn't have when you joined since you built the damn thing when nobody was even around!) and everyone around you will keep praising you. But each and every single day, one little piece of the puzzle will be taken away from you and given to the new hire with the shiny experience on the resume.

What "saved" my mental sanity is that I am a good negotiator and so I was able to negotiate a decent equity package at the beginning and put it in writing in my contract (2%+). Unless the company is doing particularly bad business-wise, screwing up common shareholders, especially if you early exercise, it's not that easy, so throughout all this period I took comfort in the fact that I was still likely vesting more shares than anyone else non-exec who was brought in to replace me.

I have left that company now, but so far it paid off, since I've already been able to obtain some liquidity for those shares by selling some of them to private parties. In the vast majority of cases, it would have been worthless as startup equity ends up underwater.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you talked with your manager and/or the CEO? Usually the hierarchy is quite informal. I would schedule a 1-on-1 over coffee in a different place than the office.

</comment><comment><USER4> A growing company needs different roles at different times:

[https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and- police/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/)

It might be the case that you excel at the "first wave", but are not interested or not talented at the kind of work that needs to be done at a later stage of the company lifecycle. If so, that's nothing to be ashamed of.

edit: i guess what i am arguing is that it isn't a failure if your skills are better suited to one early phase of a business lifecycle. these skills are highly valuable in the right context. if that's the case, it could be win-win- win outcome (for you, your current employer, and your next employer) for you to switch to a different company that is in the phase you are most effective at, if your current employer has sucessfully grown out of that phase.

</comment><comment><USER5> Getting more colleagues means getting direct accessable peers within your field. THat can only be a __boon __.

If you were not needed, you would have been let go already. Just do your work as you are used to from the beginning, keep learning new things and be as flexible as a gymnast when it comes to _learning_. THat will make you more valuable.

</comment><comment><USER6> The thing you need to realize about startups is that everyone else is figuring it out too. If you feel left out or like you're being replaced, it's not on purpose.

Unlike a big company where there's a very strict hierarchy and structure, and all you have to do to rise up in the ranks is put in the time, in a startup it's a free-for-all.

That means you have the power to change your situation. As more engineers join and take on pieces of work you've been involved in, you can start to scale yourself. Be a leader, start new initiatives, think about the bigger picture instead of just your job, and inspire others to see your vision.

You don't need a fancy exec title to be a leader. You don't need permission. You just need to start behaving like one.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps as informed an opinion as you're likely to come across: [https://steveblank.com/2019/03/08/dont-get-abandoned-as- your...](https://steveblank.com/2019/03/08/dont-get-abandoned-as-your-company- grows/)

<comment><USER8> Maybe the high-growth companies should try not to abandon their employees rather than putting the onus on employees to not be abandoned. This could be done with some careful planning as they grow, but most of the high-growth companies I've experienced have their employees as priority number N (for some high value of N) and the actual growth, profits, etc. as priorities 1 to N-1.

<comment><USER7> I don't have a dog in the fight, so I have no reason to disagree. To me the video seemed relevant to the question. What I found useful in Blank's presentation are the ideas that we now have some language to talk about these events and that these events are ordinary results of the way _some_ companies are structured.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What about your company and teams growth makes you feel like you're being replaced?

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the introspective question. I think at a foundational level, it's a matter of being left out of meetings and conversations pertaining to tasks/features that I was previously responsible for. While I do miss having my input heard, I imagine that being "another cog in the machine" is just something that I'll need to get used to for the remainder of my time here.

<comment><USER10> Maybe you should have more candid discussions about where you _want_ to be with whoever it is you report to...

I think the first step would be making sure you know what you want, they know what you want, and everyone is on the same page to get there.

I mean, are you okay just being another engineer or do you want to a key technical leader as the organization grows? Those can be two very different roles.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple 'accidentally' enabled iCloud and syncs data to cloud - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/849534060049444866 <comment><USER2> It might be possible for the government to get a court order compelling Apple to turn on iCloud syncing for particular individuals as a way to get around device encryption. Maybe that is what is going on here.

<comment><USER3> I honestly would not have been surprised to find out that Apple automatically created iCloud IDs for people if they didn't have one already.</comment></comment>


The San Francisco Rent Explosion: Part II - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-san-francisco-rent-explosion-part-ii/

<comment><USER2> There is a special hell for people who present tabular data as images.

<comment><USER3> I sometimes do this in emails because for some reason Gmail hates CUT AND PASTE from an Excel table into an email and none of the work I did to format padding, widths, etc. in cells are preserved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I live in Boston and have visited SF a few times, definitely not connected to the SF rental market like I am to Boston. What I am curious about is how new and how large these 1 bedroom apartments are in SF. My hunch is your dollar probably goes further in SF than it does in Boston.

A 1 bedroom/1 bathroom in the Back Bay (nicer, while not nicest part of the city) will run about $2500/mo. But it'll be 100 years old, 400 sq ft, outdated, no laundry etc.

I wonder how that compares to apartments in SOMA, which appear to be newer buildings at least.

<comment><USER5> I have a friend paying $2200 for a 230 sqft micro-apartment in SOMA. It's like having your bed in a tiny kitchen.

<comment><USER6> I'm paying $1800 for a ~250 sq. ft. microstudio in Soma. It's very much like having my bed in a tiny kitchen, but it's by far the cheapest place within a 15 minute walk of work (FiDi) by myself with somewhat reasonable facilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised that the Tenderloin has resisted gentrification for so long. Why is that neighborhood so impenetrable?

<comment><USER2> According to their numbers, rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Tenderloin actually _fell_ 12% last year. What's going on there?

<comment><USER8> > __* What 's going on there? __*

ghetto

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do coders (like at Twitter) typically make over $200K/yr? Or do they just eat ramen every day?

<comment><USER10> Some. Most do not. San Francisco's economy relies on young people not realizing the importance of saving, and the consequent willingness to spend to the bone.

In some cases the importance of saving is realized, but offset by the certainty that they're going to cash out huge Any Day Now(tm).

<comment><USER11> Also, I would think they are sharing 2-3 bedrooms with other co-workers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm currently interviewing for a position in SF that will likely be a dream job, but as a midwesterner, the rent situation terrifies me. Salaries certainly seem to be inflated because of this, which is fine, but could anyone offer some insight or precautions about moving to SF at this time?

<comment><USER13> I have a friend who recently moved to SF. The tip someone gave him was basically to not take anything less than $150K for a salary.

<comment><USER14> Only 28 out of 638 startups on AngelList in San Francisco list software engineering jobs at over $150k.

[https://angel.co/jobs?utm_source=home_gs#find/f!%7B%22locati...](https://angel.co/jobs?utm_source=home_gs#find/f!%7B%22locations%22%3A%5B%22San%20Francisco%22%5D%2C%22types%22%3A%5B%22full- time%22%5D%2C%22roles%22%3A%5B%22Software%20Engineer%22%5D%2C%22salary%22%3A%7B%22min%22%3A150%2C%22max%22%3A200%7D%7D)

<comment><USER10> There's a growing gap between people who know how to negotiate and position and people who do not. Despite heavy competition for talent it's still easy for an experienced, capable engineer to make "only" $120K in SF.

If you really have the chops, and know how to stick to your guns and position yourself in negotiations, companies _are_ willing to break the $150K barrier (even the $200K barrier). They're simply hoping you're not smart enough to know how.

This includes not advertising the fact that they're willing to go above that barrier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One question I'm not seeing asked is, other than the wealth of interesting jobs for those in tech, is SF even worth the price of admission as a city? My experience here so far says "no fucking way".

<comment><USER9> Seems people tend to conflate the price of admission with desirability. There are plenty of reasons why rents can rise much faster than inflation, other than desirability increasing.

<comment><USER16> Yes, things like economic opportunity

<comment><USER9> Current biggest reason is likely that mortgage interest rates are being minimized by gov't so that banks can unload the houses they're holding at higher prices. When house prices rise, rents tend to as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is crazy. I pay $2300 for a large-ish 2 bedroom loft in an expensive place in the Seattle area (Downtown Bellevue). I hope prices here don't get to what they are in SF.

<comment><USER9> If you plan to stay in Bellevue long term, buy as soon as possible. The Seattle area's population is growing rapidly (mostly immigration it seems) and the cranes aren't keeping up.

<comment><USER17> I can definitely see the Chinese diaspora becoming obsessed with Seattle in the same way they have with Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne, etc ...

<comment><USER9> I stopped short of mentioning that. It's harder for them to get into Vancouver now, with a change in immigration law there. I think the ones who would've picked Vancouver now tend to settle on Seattle, willing to pay the same $million in cash for a house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> one reason for sky high rents, with the rules so bent towards renters the higher rents and deposits filter the majority of those people out.

Its akin to renting homes, rent below 1k and your more than likely to get a bad renter.</comment>


The market figured out Gitlab's secret - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2019/08/08/built-in-ci-cd-version-control-secret/ <comment><USER2> Every time github releases a feature this is the response. These posts are so pathetic. I'm surprised that they continue to play this angle. It's a very polarizing way to address the community that will definitely continue to stir up us vs them mentality between GitHub and Gitlab users.

<comment><USER3> GitLab don't have to worry too much. Their uptime has been fine for us over the course of several years. And it's good that GitLab is around, so that we don't have to worry quite so much about Microsoft/GitHub messing around with the code in international projects. They have a great history[1] of co- operating with nefarious people. (And no, most people do not sign their commits and watering hole attacks are an obvious worry).

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20645964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20645964)

<comment><USER4> I use Gitlab CE and I certainly prefer it to GitHub. The interface just makes more sense to me as an operations-first guy. The CICD connections are great.

That said, I do SOME work in GitHub to stay familiar with it. And I've set up web gonna to push to lambdas, but I would probably hate that process if I wanted to clone a private repo and had to deal with the security there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For all the bashing GitLab gets, personally, I want GitLab to survive and keep competing at some level with GitHub.

Should GitHub dominate the market and gobble up competition, we all know how it goes for its parent company.

<comment><USER6> As soon as gitlab sprung up, I got unlimited free repos and shortly after CI.

I'm happy with this competition.

<comment><USER7> Praise be to the teams that patron the second best and keep the first best on their toes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some will continue to prefer a self-hosted GitLab instance over GitHub, but requiring _at least_ 4GB of RAM [1] for a low traffic instance sounds like an aberration. There should be better ways to manage memory consumption, and a lean GitLab instance that we have full control over could still be their selling point over GitHub.

[1] [https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/install/requirements.html#memory](https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/install/requirements.html#memory)

<comment><USER9> We agree 4GB is too much. We put a team together to get the memory usage down [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/en...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/enablement/memory/) They're rolling Puma out as an application server on .com within weeks. After that is successful we'll make that the default. That should save a lot. After that the memory team will keep improving it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Well, if you don't believe that it's better for a user, at least believe > it's more efficient for us, because we only have to release one application > instead of two. Efficiency is in our values.

Wow, this is some terrible reasoning. Efficiency and cardinality are orthogonal.

For a company of the size of Gitlab, releasing two apps instead of one shouldn't be much of a burden.

Now two different concerns' uptime and performance are coupled.

No wonder that Gitlab has an infamous track record when it comes to response times / uptime.

(more constructively: I'd point out that both end-users and GL developers could have an equally unified experience while the concerns remained separate. Good architecture makes it possible)

</comment><comment><USER11> What a strange post.

GitLab is under siege from GitHub.

The argument for GitLab has always been that they are more feature-rich, the argument for GitHub has been that their uptime is >80% and their UX is excellent.

If GitHub achieves feature parity, GitLab is dead.

<comment><USER12> The arguments for gitlab are that they are open source and that self-hosting isn't an afterthought.

We need more of both.

<comment><USER13> Unless you want their enterprise features. Gitlab is open core.

<comment><USER14> However, that core is REALLY BIG. I do not really miss any enterprise feature. I ordered enterprise edition only to support it and I never installed it.

<comment><USER13> Well a lot of _enterprises_ care about things like user directories (LDAP) and the extra access control. Just because you don't need enterprise features doesn't mean that large enterprises (the target audience for Gitlab Enterprise) don't!

I'm not saying it isn't great stuff, it really is, but "it is all open source" is sort of a misnomer. It is open core.

I'm of the same opinion with Dave Neary on Open Core Software. He's a long time contributor to the GNOME Desktop Environment:

[https://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/19/rotten-to-the- open-...](https://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/19/rotten-to-the-open-core/)

<comment><USER14> You are right in general. Most open core tools do not let anything enterprise like into community versions. However, Gitlab is somewhat different. For example is that it lets you have LDAP/AD integration in core version. Compare that to lets say Mattermost which doesn't.

And yes, I need enterprise stuff, I just don't need enterprise stuff currently in Gitlab. Looks to me those stuff are created for really big teams and really big multinational companies. My company is 1200+ employees big with IT having around 70 people, and in that context I don't miss anything.

Futhermore, some enterprise features finish in core after some time. I have never witnessed the opposite in Gitlab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems like misdirection. Gitlab's largest problem is their record of operational incompetence. This will take some time to recover from. Personally, I won't use them for a least two more years, based on their data loss incident two years ago.

I do wish them luck. Github/Microsoft should have a credible competitor.

</comment><comment><USER16> What a strange post. Considering the timing, it seems like it must have been posted in response to GitHub's announcement of new CI/CD functionality (also on the HN front page):

[https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now- supports-c...](https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-ci- cd/)

But if so, it's quite a backhanded response – the post itself only mentions GitHub in passing.

<comment><USER17> Not sure the down-line developer community is the audience for the post (or at least, likely not the primary audience).

They took $100M in D round funding in last 2018 [1], so it's likely a victory lap to validate their investment, and also a "see, you should buy us" post for engineering managers buying their services.

And, that said, they aren't wrong. It's a solid model.

[1] [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/09/19/announcing-100m-series-d...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/09/19/announcing-100m-series- d-funding/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> GitLab is right.

I ran a company that was in the GitHub marketplace and was a partner. At the GH partner day a few years ago they shared their view the world: their thinking was that it was preferable for devs to be able to use "best in class" tooling for CI, project management, etc, with gitHub's version control at the center.

GitHub contrasted this with the "one stop shop" approach where you get all your Dev needs met with (presumably) inferior tools from a single vendor.

Because, the thinking went, how could one vendor do everything better than many vendors? Especially if you have sets of vendors focused on one tool in the Dev toolchain?

Between Projects, Actions, and CI/CD, it seems GItHub has indeed come around to the one stop shop view of the developer toolchain.

I guess each of those only has to be good enough and not best in class. And there are efficiencies to be gained for customers from an integrated approach.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found the post interesting from a product-management angle.

The decision to fuse the two components (SCM and CI/CD) must have been quite a leap of faith. Wasn't aware of this.

</comment><comment><USER19> _GitLab will automatically detect where in your codebase that vulnerability exists, update the dependency, and deliver it to your production environment._

Auto patching and deploying to production in an automated fashion sounds like a terrible idea. Do people actually do this? Does it work for them?

</comment><comment><USER20> I think what GitLab really needs is what a lot of open source projects are lacking: popular community forks. Their product development benefits from the community's QA feedback, but there are no community forks (that I am aware of) that are taking GitLab CE in directions that gitlab-org won't go. IO did this for Node and everyone has benefitted.

I think GitHub's UX has caused new developers to lose true meaning of fork. When software doesn't work the way you want it to, you fork it, and if other people want it enough, they will merge it into their own forks and maybe some day it will get adopted upstream.

<comment><USER9> We had companies forking GitLab instead of contributing upstream, they all fell behind with upstream and couldn't keep up to date anymore.

Any examples of things you see that we at GitLab Inc. are not open to?

<comment><USER20> [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues?state=opened&...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues?state=opened&author_username=deckar01)

As more of the feature development goes into EE, there is less of a need to back port the latest changes. There are tons of workflow processes I would love to more tightly integrate with GitLab, but not all of them would make sense outside of my organization. Some of them can be hacked together with bots, but some of them require extending the core functionality and would probably require a fork.

> forking GitLab instead of contributing upstream

I think this is the problematic mindset. Meaningful contributions to upstream will follow useful forks.

> they all fell behind with upstream and couldn't keep up to date anymore.

Code churn doesn't just slow down forks, it slows down core development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > At the time I believed we needed to have tools that are composable and that > could integrate with other tools, in line with the Unix philosophy. Kamil > convinced me to think about the efficiencies of having a single application.

The Unix Philosophy is dead today, but I don't believe that's because of any inherent flaw in the principle of "composability". It's that we no longer have a good composition mechanism for the types of programs that people run.

In 1975 or 1985, you were running a command-line tool to process some data. (That kind of sucked, but whatever, that's what we had.) The idea of being able to pipe bytes from the output of one to the input of another is pure win. Fewer steps, no temp files, see results as they are completed -- and the cost is literally one character. No wonder it took off.

Today, the types of programs people run are native apps (which don't have an obvious I/O mechanism, apart from the filesystem, if that) and web pages (i.e., programs awkwardly split across my computer and some server in Virginia, speaking an ad-hoc protocol). Making them talk to each other takes a developer and a month.

I'd _love_ to be able to have a web app, a word processor, my contact list, etc., talk to each other and easily and meaningfully pass data between them (and I'm working on software to do just that -- see my bio). Why _can 't_ I pipe my Facebook friends list straight to a spreadsheet, or a map?

They speak of the efficiencies of having a single application. It's more the lack of an efficient standardized way to combine different applications. Back when it was "type one character", the efficiency argument went the other way. We need to get back to where sharing data with every other program is the default.

<comment><USER22> The Julia language can solve all those composability problems you are having, much of the package ecosystem is very composable. It is currently focused on scientific computing, but it is a full general purpose language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Amazon was not the first online bookstore, nor is Apple first to market with their product features. Funny thing is, they made it sound like they pioneered the idea of:

> Realizing the future of DevOps is a single application

Google already realized the value of coupling their version control to CI years ago

</comment><comment><USER24> Seems like marketing speak, and weirdly self-congratulatory in a not entirely correct way (reminds me of announcements made by Apple, in fact), but they're not wrong.

</comment><comment><USER25> All else aside, I realized that if you add hosting and assume dogfooding, GitLab's product is a platform made for building, configuring and running the platform you're building, maintaining and configuring... It feels Hofstadterian from several angles.

> Idera acquired Travis CI

This is disingenuous. That acquisition is not a validating example.

That aside, I don't feel a need to read in as much passive-aggressiveness as everyone commenting does. It's a bit of rivalry, sure.

Resource-usage aside, I was happy self-hosting GitLab for years.</comment>


The USDA just descheduled tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) - <AUTHOR> https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/cannabis/the-usda-legalized-thc-but-no-one-noticed-14976778 <comment> dfeojm-zlib Supposedly, there's progress in the Second Circuit to compel the DEA to deschedule all cannabinoids. Irrespective of the outcome of that, the handwriting is on the wall but it will take some time regardless.

<comment><USER2> More details on that here: [https://www.cannalawblog.com/cannabis-litigation- second-circ...](https://www.cannalawblog.com/cannabis-litigation-second- circuit-could-force-dea-to-re-or-deschedule-marijuana/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For someone who has better insight into this --> What is the expected path towards legalization of marijuana (from a bureaucratic point of view?)

<comment><USER4> The major breakthrough would be rescheduling marijuana from a schedule I drug to schedule II or higher (out of 5). The main difference between schedule I and the others is that schedule I drugs are believed to not only have a high potentinal for abuse (debatable, but under some circumstances correct regarding THC) but that they also have ZERO medical benefits (the recent advent of CBD based treatments, and pain relieving benefits as a contrast to opiods well to dispel this notion).

<comment><USER5> If I'm reading the article correctly, the author argues that it is no longer a scheduled drug. "Hemp" was previously de-scheduled, and the USDA now says "hemp" can contain any amount of THC, which would in turn make THC legal.

<comment><USER6> That's the USDA though. The Controlled Substances Act still makes the Department of Justice responsible for enforcement, not the Department of Agriculture.

Seems like quite the legal reach to say that, because the USDA permits it, THC is totally legal. More like I expect we'd get inequal enforcement and conflict and the CSA + DEA will probably win it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens - <AUTHOR> https://www.ipsos.com/en/what-worries-world-september-2018 <comment><USER2> No surprise that countries with the most oppressive internet surveillance and censorship also rank highly in self reported satisfaction. Chinese citizens probably got a boost to their social credit score for answering positively on this survey.

I was just in Beijing and Shanghai for a few weeks and almost everyone I talked to in private admitted that they expect an economic crash in the near future. So this survey is essentially useless for countries where privacy on the internet is not expected and dissent is punished.

<comment><USER3> > almost everyone I talked to in private admitted that they expect an economic > crash in the near future

That is currently the same in every country I talked to citizens. Not a very good way of measuring.

Your observations about China might very well be correct, but this is not an interesting point imho. When I speak to my friends in China they worry about the economy but they do actually believe their country is going in the right direction generally. Ofcourse my sample of the populous is limited: I speak to tech people only, but they do not care about the things you or I think they care or should care about. They are content with the way it is going.

<comment><USER4> There's no way you can look at the social credit shit they have going on and say "uh yeah everything looks fine!"

People in cults also say they're doing fine...

<comment><USER5> That's the whole point of the survey, as I read it. You can't look at it and say it's fine, but they do. That is important to understand.

As a counterpoint, the US polls the lowest concern in the world for poverty and inequality. Yet there's no way in my mind you can look at inequality in the states and say "yeah, that's fine", but over 4 in 5 Americans polled said exactly that.

<comment><USER2> Of course they say that it's fine. You would too if you could be punished by your government for saying otherwise.

<comment><USER6> How would the US government punish someone who complains about poverty and inequality in the states?

<comment><USER2> I'm not talking about the Americans, I'm talking about the Chinese saying things are going well, which is what the first part of the comment I'm replying to was referring to. Then they shoehorned Americans into the argument for some reason. I'm saying that I doubt this is just a matter of the Chinese being blind to the issues in China. It's a matter of them bring unwilling to risk speaking out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was wondering about how representative this is of the populations. The link to the survey is broken but I did find this on the Ipos Mori site:

[https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/what-worries-world- se...](https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/what-worries-world- september-2018-0)

> The remaining 11 countries surveyed: Brazil, Chile, China, India, Malaysia, > Mexico, Russia, Peru, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey have lower > levels of internet penetration and so these samples should instead be > considered to represent a more affluent, connected population

I would extend that consideration to most of the countries shown in the results.

</comment><comment><USER8> > "[this study] finds X"

without actual details on its methodology, a study doesn't find anything.

\- how are the surveyed chosen? \- how do you make sure they are from the country they claim \- what possible answers can they chose from \- etc.

<comment><USER9> Some methodology in PDF ([https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...](https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2018-10/www- september-2018.pdf))

The survey is conducted monthly in 28 countries around the world via the Ipsos Online Panel system. The countries included are Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, France, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States of America.

An international sample of 20,787 adults aged 18-64 in Canada, Israel and the US, and aged 16-64 in all other countries, were interviewed between August 24th 2018 and September 7th 2018.

Approximately 1000+ individuals participated on a country by country basis via the Ipsos Online Panel with the exception of Argentina, Belgium, Hungary, India, Israel, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden and Turkey, where each have a sample of approximately 500+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What worries me is that global warming is not one of the five major worries. Of course I understand that when you're unemployed, struggling to make ends meet, global warming is the least of your concerns.

<comment><AUTHOR> Take a look at the updated 2018 version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The US results are strange. A lot fewer worry about healthcare and inequality/poverty than you would expect. In fact only Sweden worries less about the latter.

<comment><USER12> How many would you expect to worry? In a rich country with ample jobs and cheap food,I don't worry about it much either. I've seen poverty abroad, so maybe I just don't see what Americans call poverty as poverty.

<comment><USER11> I expect more than half to worry given the number of children in food insecure households, the lack of retirement savings many americans are confronted with.

You might have seem poverty abroad but there are plenty of countries on this list that worry more (like Germany) which much better working conditions for the vast majority of people with little income.

<comment><USER12> You're equating "food insecure households" and "lack of retirement savings" with poverty. In America, the supposedly impoverished, the "food insecure", are more often obese than not and their retirement, though boring and doesn't involve golf courses and biannual vacations, doesn't involve starvation, lack of electricity, television, heating and air conditioning, and other essentials.

Open up any book from 100 years ago on household maintenance, written usually for upper and upper middle class women. There you will learn that the laundry in the apartment building is an incredible luxury, as is the store down the street, and the fact that you can buy a loaf of bread there for about $1.50.

<comment><USER11> The statistics speak for themselves. If you want to argue them away you are just further telling me that Americans are indeed more likely than not blind to those issues when surveyed compared to (some) other countries.

<comment><USER12> Yes, statistics speak for themselves. Minimum wage is roughly $10 and a meal at McDonald's is $4. Perhaps there are reasons for "food insecurity" that are not the fault of the society in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The note about Sweden seems a bit off. It is now January and we still don't have a government formed since the election in September. The politicians have all showed their worst sides in not getting along and the trust in them has plummeted. At the same time there are clear signs of a recession coming.

Things are as gloomy as a Bergman-movie in Sweden. Sort of.

<comment><USER14> Remember, these were the numbers from September, just after the election. Lots of people would still have their hopes up then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are newer results from September here: [https://www.ipsos.com/en/what- worries-world-september-2018](https://www.ipsos.com/en/what-worries-world- september-2018)

<comment><USER16> OK, we changed to that from [https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/which- countries-are-o...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/which-countries- are-on-the-right-track-according-to-their-citizens/). Thanks!

<comment><USER14> See Daureg' reply below for November numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems this reflects to a large degree societal values and current debates rather than the"real" impact. Eg US has a lot bigger inequality and higher proportion of destitute people than most of Western/Northern Europe, so the only way to explain the German & Swedish vs US numbers would be by pointing to the values/expectations and ongoing discourse.

China... You have got to wonder is it that the past was so bad? That people aren't aware of how bad problems of eg corruption are? Or are they too scared to say their true opinion ..?

<comment><USER18> > China... You have got to wonder is it that the past was so bad? That people > aren't aware of how bad problems of eg corruption are? Or are they too > scared to say their true opinion ..?

I imagine it's more about the citizens feeling like the government and its leaders have a strong vision and mission for the future of china.

I think the same thing can be seen with the M.A.G.A. movement. Lots of people are ignoring problems they face on a daily basis and vote against their interests because they'd rather believe in an ideal that is bigger than themselves (even if that ideal is a farce).

<comment><USER19> The reason people broke for Trump was because he actually represented their interests, unlike the Democrats or the GOP. The problems of crime, illegal immigrants competing for jobs, and trade with poor countries, all drive down the quality of life of the working class American.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a Brazilian, the one thing that gives me some confidence that things will get better is the low confidence people display on those studies.

<comment><USER14> Already in the November study, Brazil's confidence is up 22 percentage points, so yes things are happening. My confidence in Brazil has taken a dive, but I'm not voting there...

[https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...](https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2018-12/what_worries_the_world_us_dec2018.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "upon interviewing the locals, it turns out the winner is North Korea with 160% of residents saying they have full confidence in the leadership"

<comment><USER22> Parent makes the point glibly, but it is very serious.

I have considerable experience talking to people from one of the top places mentioned and the freedom to answer a survey is far from guaranteed.

To give you an idea of the scale of this (these are real, actual and exact numbers):

In that country (which I'll name as Northern East Soumania, a small autonomous island belonging to an African republic, or a similar African country) the President recently put in a bid to be able to stay President for life. This required constitutional changes, which were passed by the annual sitting of parliament.

The vote on this bid was 2,859 votes supporting lifting the term limit, 2 votes against lifting the term limit and 4 abstaining.

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine an American president at the end of their second term wanting to lift the term limit congressionally and out of 535 members of congress (435 in the house of representatives and 100 in the senate) 530 voting to remove the term limits, 2 voting against and 4 abstaining? (Actually since the basis is 535 instead of 2,859, I should divide the against and abstaining voted by 5.5)

I would personally not be surprised if the 2 "against" votes had serious consequences for their personal life, I mean things like not being able to travel and so forth. (Despite being members of parliament in that country.)

If I were a member of that country, I probably wouldn't feel free to say in a survey that the country was not headed in the right direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Chart unreadable for red/green color blind.

<comment><USER24> I'm one such person. There is still a line in the middle, so it's ok.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > online survey

Is it representative in some way?

> Data are weighted to match the profile of the population.

No, just the opposite.

<comment><USER26> Weighting is done to make the sample more representative, because voluntary samples are always demographically biased. You can argue that the way they weight is wrong in some way, but it's purpose is exactly to address representativeness of the survey.

<comment><USER25> When the lone 80-year old that participated is weighted against the hundreds 20-year olds (I'm exaggerating, I hope) we still don't know whether her opinion is representative for the other 80-year olds that didn't respond. There is no point of weighing her more than a 20-year old.

My glib comment was about the fact that before weighing, I could have at least attempted to imagine who would typically respond to such an online-survey. It's a biased sample. But it's a sample. I could say: Well at least this many people out of the whole population answered this or that way. Once weighing mixes things up I don't even know how people responded anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> People's perception isn't necessarily an indicator of how well things are going..

<comment><USER28> So? No one said it was. Why make up a strawman just to reply?

We could come up with a long list of other things that also weren't claimed and rebut those as well but I don't really see how it helps advance the discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Polls like this are not useful for anything. They are, at best, measuring the temperament of the citizens of a country, and some of them will be overly negative or positive about anything. It would be interesting if pollsters attempted to "correct for temperament"</comment>


Astronomers announce discovery of closest Earth-sized planet yet found - <AUTHOR> https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/MEarth/gj1132b.html <comment><AUTHOR> Press release from MIT:

[http://news.mit.edu/2015/new-earth-sized- exoplanet-1111](http://news.mit.edu/2015/new-earth-sized-exoplanet-1111)</comment>


Can Genetic Engineering Bring Back Extinct Animals? - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150920-book-talk-simon-worrall-genetic-engineering-passenger-pigeon-resurrection-science-neanderthals/ <comment><USER2> Genetic engineering can't bring back most extinct animals. DNA molecules have a half life of around ~500 years and samples older than a few hundred thousand years will have too many errors to recreate. Better statistical techniques will push this bound but it's hard to argue against physics. It's estimated that DNA older than 20 million years old will be fully unrecoverable.

Notice how all the author's examples are recently extinct species, not ancient ones. I guess they don't mention this because it doesn't fit with their worldview.

Some sources:

[http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/...](http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/title/Half-Life-of-DNA-Revealed/)

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

<comment><USER3> Could you not produce viable samples by collecting multiple copies of the DNA and overlapping them, thus removing the errors that would likely happen at random locations?

<comment><USER4> Not likely. Dude to the chemistry of nucleotides, they can degrade in a particular pattern that obscures the ancestral allele. For example the deamination of cytosine to thymine can leave us with an ambiguity in what in our read for the correct nucleotide is.

Was it thymine? Or was it cytosine that degraded to thymine? That means for literally 50% of the genome we have a huge ambiguity and few ways to tell what it really is.

We can use the ancestral allele from a nearby extant species, but then we miss out on all the extinct variation (which is the important stuff).

We can try to increase coverage of the ancient genome to capture loci where cytosines haven't deaminated, but thats tough for a dozen reasons, and in the end you'll still have no confidence in 25% of the genome.

We can get very close to a full ancient genome, but never 100%. Maybe through transgenics, selective breeding, and ancient sequencing we can re-create ancient species, but we will never make them exactly as they once were.

<comment><USER5>
        we will never make them exactly as they once were

And maybe that could be good enough and better than not doing it at all...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Out of curiosity, does anyone know anyone else in real life that is _not_ open to the idea of bringing back some extinct species?

I noticed this recently. Not a single person in my social network is against the idea of trying to clone a mammoth or trying to clone an extinct cat or dinosaur. There is some hesitancy when you bring up possibly reviving old bacteria, but that's it that I've noticed.

<comment><USER7> Myself. It's interesting that so many people take it for granted that resurrecting extinct animals is a "good thing." Why is it a good thing? The referenced article doesn't ask this question.

Ben Novak (the Passenger Pigeon researcher) said in an interview "... the destructive force of the flocks led to a radical rejuvenation of forests. Thick layers of pigeon droppings fertilized the soil, which soon led to new growth." Is new forest growth currently an issue? Are Passenger Pigeon droppings the only solution?

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/scientists- aim...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/scientists-aim-to-bring- the-passenger-pigeon-back-from-extinction-a-893744.html)

<comment><USER8> One could also ask the question of whether humans need to behave in such a way as to bring about the extinction of so many species. Certainly the passenger pigeon wasn't made extinct for the common good.

Biodiversity is the only answer we have right now to the question of how to maintain a healthy planet ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity#Services_enhanced...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity#Services_enhanced_by_biodiversity)). Until we get a lot smarter, it's wise to learn how to better preserve as much as we can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Changes are now happening so quickly that they appear to be driving some species towards extinction because they can't adapt fast enough._

Well, yeah -- that's how natural selection works.

</comment><comment><USER10> Stewart Brand and the Long Now Foundation have a deextinction research program called Revive & Restore:

[http://longnow.org/revive/](http://longnow.org/revive/)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's a well known fact that most ecosystems are very delicately balanced. Introducing new species can often have devastating effects on existing ones. So even if we did resurrect extinct species, they may have to remain domesticated, as our toys.

</comment><comment><USER12> Bringing back extinct species isn't cool. You know what's cool?

Designing brand new species in DNA!</comment>


Is this research on Roundup as damning as it looks? - <AUTHOR>

I started reading this paper [1] on the effects of glyphosphate and quickly realized that I'm way out of my depth here. The claim they make is very bold, basically that glyphosphate inhibits a critical enzyme (Cytochrome p450), ultimately leading to many of our modern diseases through a process that damages gut microbes.<p>While I'm not a fan of glyphosphate or the model of agriculture it supports (for other reasons not relevant here), I don't know anywhere near enough about biochemistry to know whether there's any merit to this paper's conclusions. Are there others in this community who can shed some light on this?<p>[1] http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416 <comment><USER2> Well, Cyto P450 is involved in the detoxification of drugs such as dextromethorphan. Two important things about it are: (1) it is possible to overwhelm P450 activity which will slow down the metabolism of other P450-metabolized drugs (drug interactions) and (2) a big chunk of the population (I think 10-20%) have insufficient P450 function and they metabolize P450-toxins slower than most other people.

Of course the dose makes the poison. It's not a good idea to guzzle roundup. It's not particularly persistent and I don't think you're at a risk of eating it from food or spraying roundup to kill a weed now and then.</comment>


Facebook Gives Harman His Name Back, Apologizes - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/23/facebook-gives-harman-his-name-back-apologizes/ <comment><USER2> Taking away his vanity url was, or should have been, a deliberate action.

I cannot believe that there would be enough trademark complaints that someone doesn't check the persons name before taking away a vanity url and sending such a message.

And if techcrunch had not gotten involved I cannot see them giving the same response to any person.

<comment><USER3> Props to them for responding this quickly though.

Also, the apology actually sounds sincere.

(follow up on <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071623>)

It's amazing what a little media attention to your support issues will do.

We should institutionalize that somehow. Like the public wall of shame of old, a vetting board decides if your issue gets pushed down the pipeline and all the news outlets subscribe to it.

That could create some serious consumer power.

<comment><USER4> Institutionalizing this kind of attention would normalize it. It would remove its extra-ordinary nature, its very newsworthiness, thus diluting the effect.

<comment><USER3> I think that depends on how you bring it.

If you were to bundle the facebook complaints, the google complaints and so on then by virtue of the cumulative effect it would be newsworthy again.

But you're right that 'making it normal' would detract from the newsworthiness, so you'd have to combat that by sheer volume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From personal experience I'll say this: nothing makes Facebook move faster than bad press (or the threat of bad press).

<comment><USER6> Not only Facebook, every corporations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow - anyone see the number next to his inbox in the screenshot? 2863 messages!</comment>


curl 7.66.0 – The Parallel HTTP/3 Future Is Here - <AUTHOR> https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/09/11/curl-7-66-0-the-parallel-http-3-future-is-here/ <comment><USER2> Curl is great piece of software, both libcurl and the CLI.

HTTP is a friggin beast of a protocol, but curl does a good job of balancing features, complexity, structure, scope.

And while I can't speak to the quality of the C code base, from the outside it looks very healthy embracing new features, TLS changes, HTTP/3, etc.

<comment><USER3> Hear hear, Curl is a great piece of software. Have been using it a couple of times in the past decades, and it always worked as expected. Very stable as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tend to reach for wget. Options are more intuitive and I've used the recursive download feature.</comment>


Ask HN: Brave browser as a platform for the legal industry? - <AUTHOR> Please roast me on the technical merits of this failed proposal to Mozilla MVP Builder. I'm now looking at the possibility of Brave, rather than Firefox. I'm limited to 2000 characters here, so most of the application has been cut out.
XXXXXX is an open-source, privacy-based, distributed web platform for the online delivery of legal services to the public.
The proposal is to fork Firefox and introduce an open-source, decentralized, privacy-based, distributed web platform that is a search engine & browser, and profile & file directory for consumers, a site hosting and content management system for lawyers, and a legaltech app store. Make a separate source of truth, away from the fake news and scammers, and a platform for authorized practitioners and vetted legaltech companies to serve more people, with permissioned, universal login IDs & profiles.
What this means is the consumer will see a web interface much like Firefox, (after download), and will be able to search for legal services, both lawyers and apps, and then create their universal profile on an as-needed basis to be able to give permission to the applicable legal service of their choice. The search results will be limited to authorized legal service providers, and the app store view will be only vetted, privacy-based legaltech apps. The consumer will be able to upload files relevant to their legal matter and have a folder system, much like Google Drive to work with. In this way, the consumer can discreetly get proper legal information, and interact with legal service providers without the fear of being tracked, or having their information shared or sold, (like the existing ad-based and data mining services that exist now).
Thanks so much, Blake <comment><USER2> Good luck with getting people to upload sensitive legal information to a free platfrom that they know nothing about and which has a confusing operating model. Unless you're a big company and you're offering something which looks, feels and actually _is_ expensive, you'd only get laughs in the industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this! Certainly I have some experience with this already from my legal services business. The main difference being the clients trusted me first.</comment></comment>


Australian telcos block access to 4chan, other sites - <AUTHOR> https://www.9news.com.au/2019/03/19/16/47/telcos-block-access-to-4chan-liveleak <comment><USER2> > the blog Zerohedge and video hosting platform Liveleak.

Let's say I get why they'd block 4chan and 8chan, but blocking a blog is just over the top. Liveleak I also half-understand, but I also don't approve of it, for a while it was one of the best online video resources on the atrocities committed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, just hiding our unwanted images under the rug won't help much.

Later edit: For example videos of the Tikrit massacre [1] are only available on Liveleak (I'm talking of the "mainstream" web), YouTube has nothing on it. It is my very strong opinion that we need these images to remain in the public psyche so that we'll try our best not to make the same mistakes again, and by censoring access to this kind of videos we're not helping with any of that.

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

<comment><USER3> You "half understand" liveleak and "you get" 4chan and 8 chan but should that be the basis for law and what thought is acceptable in a free society?

Do we really want some political committee sitting around and arguing the merits of these people's writing? What about weird kink websites? What about radical political blogs that advocate for policy you find dangerous? You may find some of these things abhorrent but there are almost certainly people who would find certain things you believe abhorrent.

Any time you get into individual selection of what is acceptable thought and what isn't you are crossing a very dangerous line. Even if the initial things that are deemed unacceptable seem reasonable.

Edit: Telco monopolies relating to infrastructure are essentially state actors. There is a big difference here between a Telco refusing to route traffic and a bookstore deciding what content to carry.

<comment><USER4> We are talking about Australia. They already essentially have a political committee that decides whether any given videogame is acceptable for import.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And yet, Facebook was the platform that was used to facilitate the live streaming of the horrendous events we saw in New Zealand.

I am looking forward to Facebook also being banned.

<comment><USER6> like guns, 4chan et al. have few positive features and many negative ones. Unlike them, Facebook has a more balanced mix.

Please consider the sites as a whole, or please take your false equivalency elsewhere

<comment><USER7> I would argue that Facebook has many negative features and few positive ones, with the negative features far outweighing the positive ones. The fact that Facebook spends so many resources making sure you can't ignore it speaks volumes. Meanwhile, facebook "news" is mostly garbage, their livestreaming service is full of livestreamed crime, not even touching what they do with your data, and how much they capture that you don't even know about. 4chan, meanwhile, is exactly what you make of it. All you have to do to not get "shot" on 4chan is stick to any board that isn't /b/ or /pol/ and voila you have heavily moderated anonymous imageboards for a ton of topics.

<comment><USER6> You would argue that but you'd be wrong/out of alignment of the vast majority of the world's population.

<comment><USER7> That's an excellent rebuttal, lots of people use it so if you don't agree with them you are wrong. Most people use plastic products as well, please tell me how wrong I am for not liking single-use water bottles or disposable utensils.

Facebook's userbase is dropping steadily, so I would say that more people are realizing it isn't as great a piece of software as when they first made an account. We're not arguing Stackexchange vs 4chan, its one social network vs another anti-social network, one of which treats you like a gold mine, and the other couldn't care less. I know which one I'd rather use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good. Ban them all. Force everyone with an unpopular opinion off the major platforms.

While we're at it, let's ban political debate and fake news. Ban NPR and ban Breitbart. Ban religious debate too. If it offends someone, get it off the platforms.

Let's make it so every controversial content and comment is forced off YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

It's the fastest way to end centralization.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ok, I am going to say it.

I am not a free speech absolutist. But with the coming technology, like MaidSAFE and others, it will become possible for people to communicate and say whatever they want, no way to censor. Full stop.

The governments will go back to having moles inside each group they care about, which is more targeted and harder.

For numerous examples of why free speech matters, the other way, look at the latest article on at [https://qbix.com/blog](https://qbix.com/blog)

It's like 3d printed guns, or desktop printers or copiers. Things that governments heavily regulated through gatekeepers now can be produced by anyone.

I will say this... if you add up ALL the mass shootings in the USA they add up to less than 2% of all shootings. And if you add up ALL shootings and killings, including by Boko Haram and so on, we have far less than 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, 5,000 years ago etc.

Steven Pinker was right. We are getting far more peaceful, because of technology. As long as we keep a check on population growth, we may even have enough resources, not too much garbage and sustainable living in every generation.

If anything, Boko Haram (which stands against Western education) is an example of values from hundreds of years ago. They are more violent.

Today's values are much less violent but they will only survive if we can live sustainably, and that starts with women's education and having children later.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's not mentioned in this article but from what I understand (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), "blocking" is happening at the ISP DNS level, and anyone living in these affected areas can simply use a different DNS service to continue using these websites unimpeded.

<comment><USER11> Is it so simple?

I stare at my iphone and start to wonder where I get to change my dns settings...? So I've just spent five minutes poking around and I haven't found it yet. So I've just googled it, and apparently you need 3rd-party apps to do it...

Now, interestingly, I could imagine kids doing it rote if someone just tells them how to install the an access-4chan app etc. For example, a couple of years ago I watched in horror as a 10yo friend of my kids demonstrated how to download an app (not from the app store) that would create a vpn to stop the app-store from being able to connect and discovering and uninstalling all the pirated games this kid then proceeded to install for my grateful kids! And her hands flew over the screen, tapping away and typing in English, which is a language she didn't speak let alone write in! Amazing rote. And very scary to tidy up after her!

So yeah, kids will probably circumvent this kind of thing even if parents can't.

<comment><USER12> >I stare at my iphone and start to wonder where I get to change my dns settings...? So I've just spent five minutes poking around and I haven't found it yet. So I've just googled it, and apparently you need 3rd-party apps to do it...

Took me about 30 seconds. Settings -> Wifi -> Tap the info icon for the network you're on -> Configure DNS.

<comment><USER13> WiFi - yes. For cellular net it wa completely impossible for last 10 years, until Apple finally came to its senses hence Cloudflare's app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just found out that Reddit banned /r/watchpeople for the same reason [1]. I believe all these censorship attempts only makes it worse - we're experiencing the Streisand Effect at its best now.

[1] [http://fortune.com/2019/03/15/reddit-banned-watch-people- die...](http://fortune.com/2019/03/15/reddit-banned-watch-people-die-new- zealand-mosque-video/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Deplatforming was always a bad idea that puts fundamental freedoms at risk. Now that it has come to telecoms, something has to be done to denounce this trend and stop it. When large privately-owned platforms (e.g. Twitter) or low- level utilities (telecom companies) take action to censor information, it has the same impact and carries the same risks as a government doing it. It stifles expression, exchange of ideas, and imposes personal morality on a broad set of people.

<comment><USER16> Twitter is the modern day equivalent of a printing press, they can choose to print whatever they'd like, or not - trying to liken them to a common carrier is in my opinion absurdity.

The man who owns the press, controls the speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ridiculous. "Hate speech" didn't kill 50 innocent people, a goddamned lunatic with an automatic rifle did.

As Mark Steyn has remarked on this latest moral panic, "Less speech inevitably means more violence - because, if you can't talk about anything, what's left but to shoot up the joint?"

<comment><USER18> Similarly, if you argue speech can be a form of violence, you can easily justify the use of violence against speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find the chans interesting. The back and forth between the clans, whoever they represent, mixed with some curious independent posters gives a small picture of what's lurking out there in the darkness. In the private minds. Mostly it's role playing I think.

<comment><USER20> >Mostly it's role playing I think.

It's way past that point. It's kind of ridiculous anyone could even entertain the notion that people are just joking around on these forums at this point.

How many more white supremacy terrorist incidents do we need to quell this myth?

<comment><USER19> If the vast majority of the posters weren't passively posting nonsense and memes there's be oceans of blood and guts in the streets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Called it three days ago [1]. My prediction is the UK is next and the list of sites will be even longer. This horrible event has become a bittersweet gift to politicians who have been waiting for their chance to coerce ISPs into blocking a few more web sites on their "naughty lists".

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19402858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19402858)

</comment><comment><USER22> It's hard to get out of ones bubble on this.

From the govts view, they are acting to contain sectarian violence long enough that their society can find a stable equilibrium after a shock.

I don't think appeals to the principle of freedom of speech are meaningful against acts of censorship because it is a tactical response in a perceived crisis and not something that happens under ideal conditions where they can afford to be held to principles.

However, tactical approaches like clumsy censorship signal a deeper weakness that risks exacerbating sectarian resolve in all parties.

Cynically, the solution here may have been to rate limit content they didn't want instead of blocking it outright, which is insidious, but toward the desired outcome of defusing the spread of violence, people who want the content can get it without having to position themselves against the authorities (become outlaws) to do so, while removing it from casual observation. Reddit's quarantines, and Twitter's shadow bans mitigate some of the virality of reactions. Tagging traffic to these sites for slow path processing would have been trivial, and blocking them was an unforced error.

Societies need to respond to events like these by demonstrating unity and strength, which may mean acts of extraordinary tolerance - and not with tactical approaches that make them seem weak and vulnerable to an insurgency.

<comment><USER23> > I don't think appeals to the principle of freedom of speech are meaningful > against acts of censorship because it is a tactical response in a perceived > crisis and not something that happens under ideal conditions where they can > afford to be held to principles.

This bizarre idea that principles are only relevant under "ideal conditions" is part of the problem. We can't afford _not_ to hold governments to principles, _especially_ under non-ideal conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ban all the popular toxic websites including facebook, instagram except maybe google and other actually useful sites.

If a website adds no value / negative value to people's lives yet is used by a significant number of people for a significant amount of time every day it should be banned or time limited in my opinion. A bit similar to cigarettes or sugary drinks.

Who decides? The government does based on recommendation by the judiciary. Its their job to legislate

No one is stopping you from registering a new website so please dont argue freedom of speech.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm wondering if it's legal to block sites in Australia simply because "we feel this is the right thing to do"?

</comment><comment><USER25> Everyone is okay with restrictions on freedom of speech when it comes to child pornography. But restricting 8chan is suddenly too much?

I'm curious where we draw the line and what the criteria is. It's clear we need a line, since we shouldn't encourage the proliferation of child pornography for example.

But should we tolerate a community that had a "Brent Tratton Appreciation Thread" on the day of the NZ shooting? [1]

[1] [http://archive.fo/xmftv](http://archive.fo/xmftv)

<comment><USER17> It's because there's no situation in which you (I hope) or I could conceivably be accused of being child pornographers. It will never affect us and the people it _does_ affect are the worst of the worst and are identified as such by police.

I have mild conservative sympathies and get accused by idiots of being a "Nazi" depressingly frequently. It's screamingly obvious that the rush to clamp down on "hate speech" is in reality criminalising political dissent. Which is absolutely guaranteed to lead to more violence, not less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why don't they remove cloudflare protection on 4/8chan?

<comment><USER27> Who is "they" and why should "they"? Both websites act in according to US law, should we punish every site that participates in your definition of wrong think?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> They and others should permanently block 8chan. TBH if NZ/AUS started DDOSing it I'd be fine with that too but I doubt we're there yet.

The others I don't agree with long term (4chan is 4chan, Zerohedge is moronic but mostly benign, liveleak is concerning but I get why they did it) but 8chan is just cancer.

I get freedom of speech, but there has to be a limit _somewhere_. Those animals would drop nukes for funsies if they had the opportunity.

<comment><USER29> Then you dont get freedom of speech.

Defending rights isn't easy.

<comment><USER30> Most of the world is fine with their version of freedom of speech. The extremist version from the US is rare, and causes huge amounts of harm.

US business owners need to wake up to the fact that their products are seen as publishers, not pipes, and that publishers in most of the world are regulated.

<comment><USER31> Can you explain how US free speech causes harm?

<comment><USER4> The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville was the sort of fascist rally that other countries would categorically refuse a permit to. The US does not, in general, refuse permits under the assumption that a group (even a group with a violent ideology) will turn from a peaceable demonstration to a violent riot. Federal, state, and local law is heavily bent toward assumption of good faith.

Charlottesville had several injuries and one death.

<comment><USER32> An overweight woman died from a heart attack.

Meanwhile over here we have a dead German every day on average. If I were to name the ethnic origin of the murderers I would get sued.

This goes both ways.

<comment><USER4> I take it you're contradicting the coroner's report that Heather Heyer died of a blunt-force chest injury? Given that the driver of the car was convicted in her murder, you may want to walk that back.

<comment><USER32> Sure. And when a "new German" stabs an "old German" in the heart and kills him, he died of "causes unrelated to the injury" to quote one of our coroners, 6 hours (!) after the attack. These things aren't worth the papers they're printed on. A tool in the hand of politics

[1] [https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article181477442/Obduktionse...](https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article181477442/Obduktionsergebnis-22-Jaehriger- in-Koethen-starb-an-akutem-Herzversagen.html)

<comment><USER4> ... probably also worth noting: not unlike the US, crime metrics on immigrants in Germany suggest that as a population, they're less likely to commit crimes than native Germans.

[https://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2016/may...](https://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2016/may/11/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-germany-now- riddled-crime-thanks/)

<comment><USER32> politifact, sure. Last year, there have been 28 rapes or sexual assaults in my city. According to police reports, witness reports and phantom photos, 26 of those are not from Germany. In the end-of-year reports, that number is close to 0. Funny how that works. because double-citizenship, acquittals, people never being caught, unknown identities.. you pick one</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>