Semapedia - <AUTHOR> http://en.semapedia.org/ <comment><USER2> I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that in order to ride the current wave of science-fiction-as-reality I'll need a smartphone.</comment>


Are you reading Onion or Salon.com? Then you might be a threat to the U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/20/194513/obamas-crackdown-views-leaks-as.html#.UcW7LRbi5QQ

<comment><USER2> The submitted title is a bit linkbaity. The quote which it is culled from:

 _"It's about people's profiles, their approach to work, how they interact with management. Are they cheery? Are they looking at Salon.com or The Onion during their lunch break? This is about 'The Stepford Wives,'" said a second senior Pentagon official, referring to online publications and a 1975 movie about robotically docile housewives. The official said he wanted to remain anonymous to avoid being punished for criticizing the program._</comment>


Enabling innovation isn't magic (Adobe) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/enabling_innovation_isnt_magic.html

<comment><USER2> > On the iPad, it looks like developers won't be able to write applications in > Java, .net, Python, Ruby, Perl, or any number of other languages (including > Flash).

Aren't there cross compilers for some of this? And why can't you use the Flash-to-Objective-C cross compiler Adobe themselves made for the iPad?</comment>


My Teenage Son Does Not Know How To Mail A Letter - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2013/05/27/my-teenage-son-does-not-know-how-to-mail-a-letter

<comment><USER2> Well, let's face it for real and realise that this is a good thing. Physical letters dying is a good thing for us. We don't need to consume more paper for interpersonal communication.

Let me plug (shamelessly) an online letter-writing service that my friends and I have created:

It's called bubbles: <https://bubbleideas.com>

We bring true letter-writing experience on the web. It's basically email with doodles, handwriting, ordinary paper like behavior etc. 100% online, supported on iPad/Wacom Pentab and the desktop... :)

While certainly one can't get the smell and fibrous touch of physical paper, but we do go as far as possible to bring letter-like expressions - visual, format-wise and emotional connect on our service.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yet another high cost social signal that people woe over the loss of.

Kramer had it right. Good riddance.

<comment><USER4> > Good riddance.

Probably from cost perspective, but from emotional connect point of view it certainly is a loss[1][2].

[1] [http://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_brencher_love_letters_to_str...](http://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_brencher_love_letters_to_strangers.html)

[2] [http://www.ted.com/talks/lakshmi_pratury_on_letter_writing.h...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lakshmi_pratury_on_letter_writing.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> He probably also doesn't know how to use a sliderule or churn butter.

</comment><comment><USER6> It wouldn't be very surprising if the vast majority of teens who do not know how to write a letter have parents who do not write letters themselves.

That said, it seems surprising to me that the topic of 'where does the mail come from and how does it get to where it is going' would have come up at least once in 18 years of childhood given that mail shows up at homes every day.

When I was teaching middle school several years ago, my 6th grade students didn't know about long distance phone calls. I took it upon myself to give a basic explanation about phone calls, switchboards, and even things like 10-10-321.

</comment><comment><USER7> Teen here. I don't see how this is considered a bad thing. I've never needed to mail a physical letter before. We're experiencing a shift of paradigms. Physical communication is dying.

<comment><USER8> It's just one of those "Oh God I'm getting old" moments.

When you realise that the person you're talking too wasn't born when Star Wars was released - well, ok. But then you find out they were born after "Little Mermaid". There's that xkcd about "Little Mermaid" being closer to man being on the moon than to today.

You know they don't know what a shared party line is. (I lived in a village. There was one phone line, shared between several houses. They used phased switching to make the correct phones ring. When you picked up the handset you either got a dial tone or you got someone else's conversation.) Okay, that's ancient, they don't know it. But then you realise that they don't know what an acoustic coupler is, and they've never dialed a number but punched it in on buttons. And then they were born around the time I got my fourth cell phone (Motorola StarTac).

You know they don't know what Compuserve is. Or what AOHell is. Or why InternetTV and midi signatures make some grown men cry. But then you realise that they've probably never used a real smtp client, only webmail. Yahoo! has never been big in their lifetime - they can't remember when buying yahoo stocks was the punchline in a timetravel movie.

I was raging today because I found out that Intel has some network drivers that are 2 GB. But I remember the time when a mouse driver was 10 MB and I thought that was too much.

<comment> qu4z-2 2GB? Seriously? Wow. Maybe I'm old, but I still feel like 10MB is too much for a mouse driver...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Parent fail, assuming the kid was given gifts. Never wrote a thank-you note and mailed it?

<comment><USER10> I've given two very small gifts to kids (a 3 year old and a 12 year old) - both sent me hand-written thank you letters in the mail. I was _shocked_. I guess I was also shocked that the 3 year old had her own stationary. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't mind the loss of letters so much.

I'm kind of worried that we don't properly archive and release emails.

What happens to my email if I die? What happens to the email of FAMOUS_SCIENTIST if she dies?

</comment><comment><USER11> I am 30 and I've sent my last hand written letter 15 years ago.

<comment><USER12> I'm in my mid-thirties and I sent my last handwritten letter last week.

I write on Crown Mill writing paper, which has a great feel against the fingertips, using a mid-range Cross fountain pen. People often express their appreciation at receiving a handwritten letter on quality paper, written in a smooth, flowing ink and cursive handwriting. It gets remembered.

<comment><USER4> Kinda same here. My own handwriting is my favorite font.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My Teenage Son Does Not Know How To Shoe A Horse

</comment><comment><USER14> 23 y/o I usually have to google how to send a letter and fill out a check.

</comment><comment><USER15> "My lazy father never taught me how to mail a letter."</comment>


'Perhaps the most important isotope': how carbon-14 revolutionised science - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/10/most-important-isotope-how-carbon-14-revolutionised-science <comment><USER2> > The discovery that carbon atoms act as a marker of time of death transformed > everything from biochemistry to oceanography – but the breakthrough nearly > didn't happen

This is a silly statement that's a pet peeve of mine; this breakthrough was inevitable, given the state of science and technology. The only aspect that wasn't certain was who'd discover it first and exactly when. If not Kamen, it would have been someone else, and not too long after.</comment>


Facebook silently re-enables firehose for surveillance firm - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90219826/why-did-facebook-re-friend-a-data-firm-that-raised-spying-concerns <comment><USER2> Is anyone really surprised?</comment>


ReacctNative vs. Flutter for Cofounders - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fredgrott/react-native-vs-flutter-for-cofounders-90bd2db63d3b <comment><USER2> The part about refresh rates melts my brain.

> In short words I am talking mainly about the UI-refresh-rates. You know its > bad when Google introduced a build.prop feature in the Kernel to force > hardware refresh rates because Samsung and other OEMs were asking for it to > be able to match hardware that has 90 Frames per second or higher refresh > rates(samsung has 960 FPS on its higher devices including the camera refresh > rates and Apple currently on its higher devices is still at 240 fps)

What is this about? You start talking about screen refresh rates and then somehow completely unexpectedly transition over to video recording frame rates? Then show me a comparison of the Samsung Galaxy S9 and the iPhone X regarding slow motion video quality?

This article could be a bit more structured in its argumentation and your frequent typos both in the headline of this submission and personal website give off a weird vibe. At first that made it seem to me like you don't really know what you're talking about.

I'm sure that you _are_ competent at what you do, like the things you work on (I care about Flutter, UX and productivity with ADHD as well) and hope you take this as advice rather than an insult.</comment>


Steal the Code - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/2010/10/steal-the-code/ <comment><USER4> This is usually how I go about learning a new area of development. I think through the problem, get an idea of how it might work, maybe even write some code, then go spelunking on github & google to see how other people solved it.

Sometimes I'm surprised to find my method was spot on. Other times I find someone who already iterated the solution a few times and I can jump over those mistakes to a more mature solution.

Learning to read other people's code and quickly get the gist of how it works and recognizing patterns is crucial in becoming a proficient programmer.

</comment><comment><USER5> _hammering things out on your own is great. That's almost an entirely different class of learning, and it works well in the majority of cases._

I am deliberately taking this para out of context to point out how learning by "hammering things out" is something to be discouraged highly, especially to the young professionals. Sure, Advance work require breakthrough, _but it cannot happen, unless you know/read/learn from your peers, in any field of work._ Future of any field, is always based on the shoulders of the past work.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've long been considering putting together a directory of projects whose code is fantastic for learning from. There's just too much code out there, and it would be nice to see lists of "great iPhone code to learn from", "effective and architecturally sound Ruby on Rails projects that scale", etc. This would really require some assistance from the community, but long term I think it would highlight code from quality hackers, and improve the status quo of programmers out there.

Any such thing already exist?

<comment><USER7> As a programming novice, I think that's a great idea. (I haven't seen anything like it... the closest might be stack overflow, where the best solutions generally get voted to the top, but it tends to be fairly narrow in scope.) It would be especially great if some or all of the code was annotated with something like docco <http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've found this to be an excellent method of learning patterns through different languages.

This approach only truly works if you understand what you're doing after you've 'borrowed' code. If you just blindly copy down the concepts and paste where you need them without understanding why that block works the way it does then you're not going to be up shits creek when it comes time to debugging that part of the application.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have been doing this a lot more recently. I try to find smart programmers who run highly organized, designed, and maintained little projects and read their code, or step through it in a debugger. I am learning JS this way. I then try to use their ideas in some way or copy them to take that ownership step. Great post.

</comment><comment><USER10> Another way to phrase this: read other people's code.

Reading code is important. Programmers should read code all the time.

</comment><comment><USER11> I posted the beginner's version of this over on the Hackety Hack blog the other day. In my mind, this is one of the greatest advantages that Open Source has to offer: the ability to learn how things work, by looking at them, taking them apart, and utilizing it in your project.

This is also why I'm a BSD (well, WTFPL...) kind of guy, over GPL. Feel free to take my code, and use it however you'd like. The thought of someone making bad software because they couldn't follow my lead due to a licensing issue makes me sad.

<comment><USER12> Copying the _concepts_ in a piece of code doesn't fall under the restrictions of copyright, so the license is irrelevant; there's no copying of the actual code involved here.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but there's still a reason why "clean room" implementations exist.

Regardless, I was talking about straight-up copy/paste, I should have been more clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would agree with you, in regards to HTML, CSS, & JS. Im a semi-web developer ,and I like to look at markup of some of my favorite devs, to see how they did a certain layout, or how they made that cool effect, etc... good post

</comment><comment><USER14> "Good artists copy, great artists steal".

quotation from Pablo Picasso

</comment><comment><USER15> AKA "learn by example."

</comment><comment><USER16> The FreeBSD ports tree is a great place to steal code.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have been trying to teach myself programming for a couple years now, because I got sick of getting a great idea and then having to 1) explain it to the development team, 2) waiting for development 3) iterating through modifications.

So as a new programmer with no ambition of paying another fortune for 'university training' I entered the rabbit hole of learning from online resources, videos and books.

The signal to noise ratio is abominable, simply because a new programmer doesn't know stink-code from unstink-code. Horrible, exploitable examples of all languages flourish on high traffic sites and sites that rank high for "$language tutorial". these get re-pasted on 10,000 s of sites and become 'the way it is done'. You might get some comments in the original post that the author didn't properly secure the code, but rarely will you get that commenter to show the proper way to do it.

The gap between 'hello world' and real programming resources is only getting worse, and it affects the quality of Internet programming in general.

You can find a 1000 great tutorials on making cool online forms and widgets using jQuery - but they almost ALL will add the caveat "obviously for sake of brevity i'm not sanitizing data - you will want to take care of that". well, maybe we don't need any more tutorials that don't go into the details securing your data, because I'd venture to guess many newbies (like myself in the beginning) will download the demo script and upload it to our shared host and say 'done'. That leaves a lot of vulnerable low hanging fruit that is then re- copied by more people entering programming, and perpetuates the stinkcode that is so ubiquitous that it becomes 'standard'.

This leads to another problem newbatroids will face - seeing the same type of applications in tutorials built by the same language over and over. JavaScript (and the awesome jQuery library) is NOT simply an easy way to make cool photo sliders. We sure don't need any more tutorials on making cool photo sliders and other UI candy with client-side programming languages and libraries that have immense power to do other things-very very cool things. The lack of compelling, interesting examples of what JavaScript can do really limits the overall advance of web development, since newbatroids don't know it's not just for making Fancybox widgets or cool rollover effects or menus and aren't shown the real power of the language. The problem is that these are very common entry points for new programmers. JavaScript can be an incredible tool to teach programming since it's everywhere - free - and full of problems that must be fixed which teach the new programmer the difference between stink and unstink code. Crockford's series of videos and books really opened my eyes to the bigger picture.

Another problem newbatrons will face is the inability to decouple UI and 'design' from the programming logic, and by necessity then needing to learn how to do both - which starts to really - really - really - suck after a few big projects. It's easy to say 'split your code into a model, view and controller', but a newbariffic probably isn't a part of team and is hammering together some frankenstein-esque 'thing' made up of photoshop slices, PHP code (maybe formed into functions) and probably cut and paste jquery UI plugins from online resources. maybe they have experienced the fun of the nervous breakdown when a client is asking for heavy modification of a wordpress template and wants it to be pixel perfect with proper typography, and cool features that lead our young programmer into hacking away at variable-quality plugins that may or may not break on the next update.

In terms of online free resources/tutorials, it's huge. But there's also a vast gap between the proverbial 'hello world' and real deal programming. I would venture to say many new programmers start with a WAMP like environment, tool around with Wordpress or some other easy publishing platform and then find themselves really struggling to make the leap to 'proper' programming.

For one, I would like to see you smart guys help out us wannabe-programmer marketing turds by showing us how to set up a proper development environment - and i mean everything from the machine i run locally - and the software i use to make software - to 'cloud' based hosting to explaining at least where to start conceptually so i can do my own informed research. Do tutorials in real- world development environments. use linux and the command line. force newbatronics to understand how to properly code from 'hello world' and not even allow a messy windows based environment or plug and play platforms unless that's clearly as far as the programmer wants to go - and for many that's far enough.

Probably the most informative exercise I did was building a web app - <USER2> trying to hack it from as many ways as i could imagine. I spent a great deal of time learning about client-side security by continuously hacking my own applications and trying to anticipate how a skilled hacker would utilize the seemingly infinite attack surface exposed by bad client-side programming - <USER3> was amazed and horrified at how easy it was - and mobile hasn't even really hit yet, but hold on to your hats with that one. but that exercise taught me so much about programming in general, that it changed the way i conceptualized 'programming'. I thought it was about objects and functions and operators whatnot - but realized how much of it is policies and structure and scope. That could have been stressed more in my opinion from the popular online programming sites, but i guess it's easier to get traffic with the headline '50 mindblowing jQuery photo sliders' rather than 'stop using global variables and learn about function scope'.</comment>


Nuclear deterrence is limited by geography - <AUTHOR> http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1204122/nuclear-deterrence-the-revenge-of-geography/ <comment><USER2> Jeffrey Lewis often has smart things to say, but sometimes his articles make no sense, at least from a technical, on their face, perspective. If nukes really do fly, whether they fly over Russia or not is totally irrelevant. At a minimum, given only a heading, Russia would see that only the far east could be conceivably attacked, which is not a threat to the Russian nation, or its nuclear deterrent, and would not be the action of a power trying to attack Russia. In reality, satellites and radars would also be able to measure velocity, and this, even only with satellite and without radar, would make it clear that the target was NK. Russia might lodge a protest about its airspace being violated, but this would be comically minor compared to the rest of the diplomatic issues to be resolved after an actual nuclear attack.

<comment><USER3> Would the missile be in the atmosphere at the time it passes over Russia, or would it still be in space? I hit up Google and it wasn't helpful in answering this question.

If it is still in space, I'm not sure that Russia really has much ground to stand in, with regards to complaining.

<comment><USER4> This really has nothing to do with the altitude of the missile. Any ICBM that the US sends over Russia without talking with them first would be an extreme provocation, and would give Russia justification to do whatever they wanted (hopefully WWIII wouldn't result, but lots of other bad things could happen). This is not the same scale as North Korea test firing a missile over Japan (and look how nervous Japan got). Pre-coordinating a strike with Russia removes the time advantage that ICBMs have over bombers, and it would be a rare situation where Russia would give permission to let an American nuke overfly its territory.

Similarly, if Russia shot an ICBM over US territory at any altitude, the US would freak out and be justified in sanctioning the crap out of Russia. Unfortunately, the US is not in the way of any of Russia's targets (unless the target is the US), so it's mostly a one-way consideration.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure they'd be upset, but the USSR was the first country to overfly other nations with a man made object in space. I doubt they'd do anything other than yell about it? It's not like they could effectively sanction the US.

I am not an expert in these matters but, if I understand correctly, they can tell velocity and direction to see that it's not going to hit then. I'm not sure that it enters their airspace, however.

Are there any treaties or international laws regarding this? Again, Google is not being helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Incidentally, there's actually a map projection where all "great circle" routes (shortest paths on a sphere, ie missile paths) are straight lines. It's called the gnomonic projection, and it could have been used to illustrate the Russian-overflight issue more clearly.

Although it's limited to only showing half of a sphere at a time, so it doesn't solve the problem of illustrating a southern around-the-world route. An azimuthal equidistant projection centered at the launch site or target would work for that.

<comment><USER6> The existence of the gnomonic projection isn't very surprising, as it's just the perspective projection used by all artists to go from a spherical field of view to a flat plane. That way it's also easy to understand why it can't handle more than half of the sphere.

<comment><USER7> To the grandparent poster: A gnomonic projection is not the most useful for these particular maps, because the distances are so long that distortion starts getting out of control.

Better would be some kind of azimuthal projection centered on North Korea (azimuthal equidistant perhaps), with other segments (those not including NK as an endpoint) drawn as the appropriate great circle arcs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The big unmentioned thing here is that what would Russia do to respond to an ICBM flying over them _from the South_? If they have an engage-on-detection doctrine, is that only pointed north towards the US or would it still apply from something originating from NK?

In essence, does Russia become a similar defensive blanket for the US?

<comment><USER4> No, one of the first things that is considered when deciding if an unknown missile is hostile is to look at its point of origin (comically abbreviated POO). If a missile originates from NK, then Russia would first assume it is headed for the US. They would need to gather trajectory information indicating that the missile was heading for a Russian target before they did anything. They would be pissed at North Korea for starting WWIII, but would probably just let the missile fly overhead and try to take advantage of the political situation later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain in simple language why we still think nuclear deterrence is a good idea? Is any nation on Earth myopic enough to think that responding to a nuclear attack with a nuclear escalation is a viable strategy?

Making North Korea easier to hit by US nukes won't make them step down. North Korea is scared senseless and backed into a corner (they've been at war with the US for the better part of a century and preparing for an invasion by an enemy that is several times their size), trying to scare them further won't prevent them from doing anything stupid.

Maybe I'm missing something but this sounds like it's only concerned with maintaining American military dominance rather than guaranteeing peaceful coexistence or at least the continued existence of the human race. Nuclear weapons are neither necessary nor sufficient to win a war against North Korea. If the conflict were to ever go nuclear, nuking North Korea won't make the country back down -- it will only alienate China, South Korea (or what's left of it) and Japan. Not to mention the entire International Community.

<comment><USER10> Nuclear deterrence has been a controversial topic for 50 years. There have always been arguments for nuclear disarmament instead.

I took the point of this article to be that the ICBM portion of the US triad does not work on NK since a missile must overfly China or Russia.

I personally don't think there is much risk of war with NK. NK has everything to lose and nothing to gain by starting any sort of war.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since we have Trump on board, the post might be even more interesting with a slide 10: let South Korea/Japan go nuclear, in face of the political issues.

<comment><USER4> The US doctrine on nuclear stuff is (paraphrasing here) "if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself." There are very few countries that we trust enough to hand over a job as important as nuclear deterrent. Australia would be a much better choice from an allied perspective but their military is much too small to be a real deterrent against China. Combining Australia, Japan, and South Korea might be an effective deterrent, but we still don't trust Japan and China will never let a nuclear South Korea happen.

Letting Japan have nuclear weapons is many decades in the future. The US monitors/controls the development of the JSDF very closely. They were only recently [1] allowed to have an "aircraft carrier." (edit 2: This presupposes that Japan even wants nuclear weapons. They, of all countries, would think twice about something that has destroyed two of their cities- also the "peaceful" application of nuclear power has devastated the area around Fukushima. New Zealand has a strong anti-nuke sentiment and they were only used as a test site.)

South Korea is so close to China that their defensive reaction time is effectively zero. The same goes for China's reaction time from a South Korean missile. China would be extremely upset (to the point of sabotaging missile installations) if we were to allow South Korea to develop nuclear weapons. Imagine if China allied with Mexico and started helping them with a nuclear program. The US would go apeshit. (edit: Rather than make up a hypothetical, just look at the Cuban Missile Crisis to figure out how crazy it could be. Why did I not just use that example in the first place?)

The US wants to control its own nuclear weapons and would rather lease bases from allies than to let the allies have their own weapons. This increases the perceived security of the weapons (from being stolen), as most military commanders believe that their own base is a much more secure place to keep nukes than someone else's base. Whether or not this is true is up for debate. Manning your own defenses instead of an ally also increases your perceived defensive readiness. Most commanders also believe that their own troops are better prepared than someone else's troops. Whether or not this is true is also up for debate.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hy%C5%ABga- class_helicopter_de...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hy%C5%ABga- class_helicopter_destroyer)

<comment><USER12> _and China will never let a nuclear South Korea happen._

It's possible, although highly unlikely that the RoK could go nuclear in a manner similar to Israel, and in essence, China wouldn't have a say. Never say never, just based on the strength of opposition.

<comment><USER13> Israel can do that because it always has the US at its back and it doesn't really care what Iran or Egypt think.

South Korea, on the other hand, cannot hope to enjoy that kind of support (can you name one prominent Korean-American politician?), and China is its biggest trade partner.

That is, South Korea has little to gain and a lot to lose by developing nukes.

<comment><USER12> They have the same thing which any country has to gain from a nuclear arsenal; a near guarantee against outright invasion. As for Israel they did it, like Pakistan and India, because they could, and once they had no one could stop them. That's pretty much why the DPRK wants them, although they'd probably sell the tech too.

<comment><USER13> North Korea wants nuke because (1) they're genuinely afraid of American invasion, and (2) they're already an international pariah so additional sanctions mean little. They have something to gain from nukes, and not much to lose.

As for South Korea, it can bulldoze over North Korea with conventional weapons. It doesn't need nukes to defend against North Korea. On the other hand, China has so much firepower that having a few nukes won't tip the balance much, so nukes are not much useful against China either.

Now consider that South Korea is practically an island country, heavily dependent on trade. Almost all its neighbors will vehemently protest a nuclear program, and its economy will suffer greatly. AND it will increase tension in East Asia. And probably provoke Japan into its own nuclear program. Just what we need.

Frankly, as a South Korean, I cannot think of a single desirable outcome that can follow a nuclear program. If we're serious about national defense, what we really need now is not nukes but a powerful navy that can secure our trade routes.

<comment><USER12> _As for South Korea, it can bulldoze over North Korea with conventional weapons. It doesn 't need nukes to defend against North Korea. On the other hand, China has so much firepower that having a few nukes won't tip the balance much, so nukes are not much useful against China either._

Sure, but they'd have turned Seoul into a series of shallow craters however, and you should assume that China would use the DPRK as a proxy in another shooting war. Meanwhile having the credible ability to destroy a few major Chinese metropolitan centers probably has more of a deterrent effect than you are admitting.

<comment><USER13> We don't need nukes to deter China (or any other country) from an all-out invasion. We already deter them by being a small, heavily populated and industrially developed, largely monocultural, and largely mountainous country, which has half a million soldiers and is only accessible via sea or through one of the world's most heavily fortified border. Invading South Korea will cost any country more than Invading Iraq cost America. It's simply not worth it.

That's not saying South Korea is invincible, or there aren't any ways China can apply military pressure.

A much more realistic scenario is like this: some Chinese patrol ships suddenly find a need to "protect" Chinese fishing boats from being "harassed" by South Korean coast guards patrolling its EEZ. In such a case, nukes won't help, because what are you going to do with them, bomb Beijing? Can you imagine what would happen to KOSPI index if a South Korean politician so much as made a joke about using nukes?

I still fail to see the utility of nukes. Any national leader has to be batshit insane to consider invading South Korea, and if they are already that insane, I don't see how having a few nukes will suddenly cause them to back down. (Don't be fooled by North Korea: they're carefully cultivating the _image_ of a batshit insane trigger-happy country because it benefits them.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Surely I am missing something. Nuclear subs and Space deployments make these slides moot.

<comment><USER15> Space deployments are banned by the Outer Space Treaty [1]. Slide 3 mentions Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) which was not banned by the Outer Space Treaty but subsequently by SALT II. Interestingly enough the US never ratified SALT II [2].

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_System#The_FOBS_and_SALT_II)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Brilliant slides and explanations. I really hope that President Trump understand the nuance here. Sigh.</comment>


What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/magazine/teenagers-learning-online-porn-literacy-sex-education.html <comment><USER2> Thank you for posting this. This is a topic that I've long been fascinated by but never knew anything about. I'm way in the older end of the bell curve of age distribution of Hacker News readers, so I've personally experienced how pornography has evolved over the past thirty (or so) years, i.e., ever since I became curious about sex and turned on by naked women. And without a doubt the "hardness" and easy availability of pornography today is in a completely different universe to the sort of pornography I was consuming when I was thirteen years old. There's no escaping the fact that pornography must do _something_ to children's and teenagers' minds, in terms of expectations about sex, their own self-esteem, or whatever, and I've often wondered what these effects are.

Moreover, and moving on, now that I'm a new father with a two-year old daughter, I cannot even _look_ at pornography without feeling queasy. The full nastiness of the activities, production, what obviously goes on behind the scenes, etc, hits you in the guts and is truly sickening.

<comment><USER3> Is there "no escaping" that conclusion? Maybe it's wrong for the same reason that "violent movies make kids violent" theory was wrong: people know how to distinguish reality from fantasy/entertainment.

<comment><USER4> > people know how to distinguish reality from fantasy/entertainment

So you think 15-year-olds who never experienced sex know how to distinguish reality (sex with a real partner) from fantasy (porn). Where would they have the knowledge how real sex is from?

<comment><USER5> From talking to their friends, or older siblings, or parents about their experience. By watching non-pornographic films where sex scenes are more realistic. By reading online accounts from other teenagers or adults. By talking about it in sex ed class. By reading articles in the newspaper such as "What Teenagers Are learning from Online Porn".

Moreover, the 15-year-old doesn't need to know what real sex is like in order to suspect that porn is fantasy. "Snakes on a Plane" is not treated as a documentary by people who have never travelled on a plane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am on day 81 of a 90 day porn reset. It's been hard at times but my real life sexual experiences seem greatly improved and I plan to continue abstinence from porn after the reset period ends. Seeing that I can modify behavior by setting attainable medium term goals has made me excited to tackle some other personal challenges too.

The site [https://www.yourbrainonporn.com](https://www.yourbrainonporn.com) is what got me interested in trying to quit. Lots of good information there if you are interested.

<comment><USER7> I wonder which one is better:

1) Quit Porn 2) Stop Masturbation

Any ideas?

<comment><USER8> I've tried quitting either for years, very much addicted. Or at least a very strong coping mechanism.

If you're anything like me, it's more or less impossible to quit one and have the other. Watching porn will eventually lead to masturbation and vice versa.

I've recently tried taking the half-measure of exclusively audio pornography (/r/gonewildaudio) - in an effort to see if I notice any changes in my perception of women or anything. Been on it exclusively for a few weeks now and I feel the same. If anything, I'm more tired since it takes much longer without the visual stimulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My mother is a retired police officer who sometimes worked on homicide investigations.

She once pointed out to me that the way police work is portrayed on TV series is very different from what police officers do when investigating a homicide. And with good reason: If TV showed an accurate version of how murders are solved (or often enough not), it would be really, really boring to watch. On the other hand a real-life murder investigation can be quite harrowing because somebody actually died by the hand of another person. That element is very hard to reproduce, which is why death is portrayed so banally in crime programs.

The relation between porn and real-life sexuality is strikingly similar, is it not?

<comment><USER10> Yes, and I think that is the most important point about porn: it has very little to do with actual sex, it's not even supposed to be realistic.

The best way I've seen that explained is car chases in movies. They are made to look exciting, but they are also very obviously unrealistic.

Once you understand this, you can look at porn as an entertainment product and nothing more, which I think is the healthy way to approach it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Honestly, like all addictions, it starts having an impact when you start depending upon it for pleasure and substitute parts of your life with it. _That_ tends to happen when your life in general is not working well, or you're caught in situations of chronic stress and unhappiness. So the real long term strategy here would be to elevate the general quality of our lives and our interrelationships with each other, which would make porn pretty much a mildly amusing curiosity at worst. But when endemic stress predominates in society, good luck trying to prevent people from falling into one addiction or another. It's like plugging a boat made of Swiss cheese.

<comment><USER12> The article is not about addiction

<comment><USER13> In fact, the article explicitly points out there's no scientific evidence for "porn addiction" existing in the first place.

<comment><USER14> Well, the article states that the claim advanced by one of its subjects that there is no such evidence is a fact.

There is, however, considerable evidence that compulsive pornography use and other compulsive sexual behaviors, at a minimum, have many addiction-like features, though there is considerable debate about both the criteria to consider non-substance-use compulsive behavior as addiction and how particular compulsions fit any proposed criteria. Portraying the state of the science as "no scientific evidence of pornography addiction" is both strictly false and substantively misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The insistence of parents to control their children via censorship and other means, as well as view them as some perfect child is more harmful than any porn.

The fact that the article itself and comments to the article talk about kids learning about such things _from other kids_ and websites instead of their parents is pretty much case and point.

There is no downside to talking to your kid about sexuality and other things at, say, 10. Common rebuttals to such an idea is usually centered around the false notion that if _the parent_ doesn't speak of it, then the child will never know. This couldn't be any more false.

<comment><USER16> "Censorship" here is a big scary word for very basic common sense parenting: recognizing that kids of different ages, personalities, and emotional maturity are not ready to be exposed to some things.

I agree with your assessment that parents should talk to their kids more about difficult topics at all ages, in an age-appropriate way, of course.

But you can take this too far and end up with the idea that parents should be fine with their kids seeing any kind of sexual, violent, or other disturbing content no matter their age or maturity level.

<comment><USER17> But why is that too far to assume a child can be exposed to the same things as an adult, ask the same questions, etc? There's this concept that if a child is exposed to something too early it will corrupt their morality or sensibilities and I just don't see it.

<comment><USER16> I'm not a child psychologist or mental health professional, so I'm not sure what to tell you, except that it seems reasonable to me to think that just _maybe_ exposing kids to certain types of materials before they have the experience, emotional maturity, etc, to process those things can be incredibly damaging. And I _really_ doubt that trying to avoid my 3 year old daughter watching violent pornography is going to harm her, but yeah, I don't have the data. Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.

<comment><USER18> Your 3 year old daughter is definitely the demographic in danger of her school mates introducing her to violent pornography, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Fewer teenagers have early sex than in the past (in a recent study, 24 > percent of American ninth graders had sex; in 1995 about 37 percent had), > and arrests of teenagers for sexual assault are also down. But you don't > have to believe that porn leads to sexual assault or that it's creating a > generation of brutal men to wonder how it helps shape how teenagers talk and > think about sex and, by extension, their ideas about masculinity, > femininity, intimacy and power.

I am tired of seeing issues framed this way: "Despite the objective evidence, my ideology drives the view that it must be making men _brutal_ and compromising women's _power_ "

> For years, Gallop has been a one-woman laboratory witnessing how easy-to- > access mainstream porn influences sex. Now in her 50s, she has spent more > than a decade dating 20-something men. She finds them through "cougar" > dating sites — where older women connect with younger men — and her main > criterion is that they are "nice." Even so, she told me, during sex with > these significantly younger nice men, she repeatedly encounters porn memes: > facials, "jackhammering" intercourse, more frequent requests for anal sex > and men who seem less focused on female orgasms than men were when she was > younger. Gallop takes it upon herself to "re-educate," as she half-jokingly > puts it, men raised on porn.

This article seems more like activism than inquiry to me. The foot feels heavily on the scale. I believe the topic deserves better than this.

<comment><USER20> "I'm not saying that {insert hyperbole here}, but you might wonder how {insert tangentially related topic here}"

My favorite kind of reasoning!

<comment><USER16> Except that's not the reasoning at all. They're saying:

"You might think that A would cause B, but the data doesn't show that. However, it's reasonable to ask if A does have any effects other than B."

<comment><USER20> Let me rephrase it for you:

"You might think that {something} would cause {the outcome that fits my, and the audience's agenda/preconceptions}, but the data doesn't show that. However, it's reasonable to ask if there's _something_ going on, right? Also, feel free to quote the first sentence in clickbaity titles and social media posts! If you repeat it enough times, it will actually become truth :)"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree with the general sentiment but honestly this is just the worst kind of article. It's superficial and yet also felt emotionally exploitative

Sorry but I guess I'm annoyed because I spent a lot of time working through this specific topic recently and had to wrestle with very some interesting questions:

What is real and what is fake? Why did we create these fantasies and what draws us to them? How much of our culture is fantasy? What if the fake is more "real" than the real? What does that imply for the future? How does pornography hold up a mirror that reflects us? Why is America so scared of reality?

But instead all the article gives us is: porn kills intimacy and reinforces gender roles, plus some weird obsession with facials.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think this is an important topic for teens to understand and be able to openly talk about with their parents or other trusting grownups.

As grownups, I think we start to ignore hoping that kids will be able to figure out on their own without realizing what lasting effect it will have on their future relationship

</comment><comment><USER23> The impression I've gotten is actually that women's demand for rough sex (and "kink" more generally) outstrips the number of men that enjoy it. I don't know to what degree it's related to porn, but ... if you're worried that porn is making _men_ too into choking for the real-world sexual climate, I don't think that's true.

</comment><comment><USER24> I told my wife that our 3rd grader had most likely seen porn at school. It turns out I was right. She had several friends in the 5th grade, and about 90% of the fifth graders have smart phones.

My math was simple: if you give 10 twelve-year-olds unfettered internet access, at least one of them will find porn, and that one will show it to their friends. If any of them have an older sibling, the odds just go up.

<comment><USER25> This is a great reason to avoid giving smartphones to kids, and a big reason we haven't. It's important for them to not have to deal with things they aren't mentally, physically, or emotionally ready for yet. They need to be kids right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > The clips tend to be short, low on production value, free and, though > Pornhub

True as opened with "tend to be" but such a poor description of Pornhub in an article meant to help parents understand pornography. For example, the company behind Pornhub owns many production companies and paid sites. High production value clips promote those sites as do does the advertising.

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

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

[http://www.jonronson.com/butterfly.html](http://www.jonronson.com/butterfly.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> My oldest son recently developed a porn habit in secret, and the things we saw in his search history showed a clear progression from googling "boobs" and "nudity" to "pissing" and "bondage".

Pornography isn't even close to what it was 30 years ago when you for the most part only saw it in nudie mags that your dad had (or friend had who stole it from his dad). Today, kids have easy access to a wealth of horrifying and bastardized hard-core pornography.

But not only that, the ads and search results and images that show up for the more innocent things will _lead them_ to the more awful things, because they're just readily visible and accessible right there.

To be honest the only solution we have found is twofold: to change our wifi password to disable internet on all devices (he was sneaking his Nintendo 3DS into the bathroom for 2 months to look at porn on it) and to proactively start teaching them that life is more than a constant quest for more and more intense pleasure, and that if you allow yourself to give into that base mentality, you are throwing away a good portion of your future that could be filled with meaningful real relationships and legitimately joyful times, in exchange for maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain until you die.

<comment><USER27> Why do you think you need to prevent your son from watching porn, especially to the point that you need to completely remove his access to the Internet?

<comment><USER25> Once he started doing it, everything in his life declined. He stopped having healthy relationships with his siblings and his friends at school. He started to be much more angry and even sometimes violent, and when we examine the situations in detail, we see that none of it is justified, and he's always the one saying everyone is out to get him when he is actually the one doing wrong. He's become a lot more arrogant and a lot more reserved at school and obnoxious at home. His grades at school declined sharply. He's developing a narcissistic personality, and won't participate in things that he doesn't personally see any value or benefit in, even when everyone around him tries to convince him it's a good or worthwhile activity. Overall he's declining in mental and emotional health.

<comment><USER28> First, how are you sure it's correlation and not causation? Perhaps he's being driven to porn/developing the habit as self-medication?

Also, as to your previous point that it will lead to "harder" stuff, a recent study says no. Yes, there will be more opportunity and exploration of the topic, but that's something that will happen eventually to all individuals. It isn't studied very well, but at least this initial one says we don't naturally become more tolerant and require "harder" pornography over time. [https://www.lehmiller.com/blog/2018/2/5/can-you-build-up- a-t...](https://www.lehmiller.com/blog/2018/2/5/can-you-build-up-a-tolerance- to-porn)

<comment><USER25> There is more to it, and it's hard to pinpoint cause and effect. He did have issues that existed before the pornography habit. But they worsened significantly since the month he started looking at pornography regularly. I do believe that his pornography habit has lowered his mental and emotional intelligence by a noticeable factor. I also look back at when I was his same age, and see my own struggles as very similar to his. So I could be mistaken with some of the internal presumptions I've made about him, but the external ones match up almost exactly.

<comment><USER28> OK, fair enough. Hope you guys figure out an appropriate intervention plan then. Is going to a therapist on the table? Sounds like there's something deeper going on and just cutting off the porn doesn't usually solve it in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What teenagers are learning from online porn is simply that the behavior of "shutting myself alone in my room with a computer" leads to (simulated) sexual satisfaction. This is in contrast to every generation before them which learned that the behavior of "being sociable / gaining status in society" leads to (non-simulated) sexual satisfaction. So a million young people learning to shut themselves away from the outside world, I wonder how that's going to work out for the West? I say West, because China bans porn.

</comment><comment><USER30> > _Like the GIF he saw of a man pushing a woman against a wall with a girl > commenting: "I want a guy like this."_

How can you be sure it was a girl commenting? An account with a girly name was commenting.

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone knows where I could find info about the curriculum?

</comment><comment><USER32> The availability and ease for this type of content is scary especially when children are more connected than ever. Pornography kills love (Edit: [https://fightthenewdrug.org/how-porn-kills- love/](https://fightthenewdrug.org/how-porn-kills-love/)). Love is extremely important for human beings and civilizations. It drives art, philosophy, faith, religion, etc. It is love that produced great works throughout history.

I read some where there was going to be a TLD for porn (.xxx I think). I wish they did that and all the porn content was only on that TLD. Then browsers can easily block all porn for underage viewers. I know I would do that for my children until they are adults and I believe they can make their own decisions. There is a level of maturity and education one needs before exposed to this type of content.

Personally I find it repulsive and I try my best to avoid it as best as possible. Sadly it creeps into TV shows and movies nowadays.

<comment> Tech-Noir > I read some where there was going to be a TLD for porn (.xxx I think).

There were ideas about that for years, maybe even in the late 1990s, and eventually about 5-10 years ago it was set up.

Ironically, many in the "porn industry" were strongly against it; I think more to do with the company running it, though, than the idea of being confined to an online ghetto.

Most porn still remains on .com or on country TLDs and few people have probably even heard of .xxx, let alone visited a .xxx site. Now there are hundreds of new general TLDs, several more are porn related (.sexy, .porn) that basically nobody uses.

> Sadly it creeps into TV shows and movies nowadays.

I'm not a fan of depictions of simulated sex on TV/movies, since it's often for shock/viewing figures and/or holds up the plot, but I think irresponsible gun usage, torture/violence and military propaganda, which occur far more often than sexual content in TV and movies, are much worse for kids in particular to be exposed to.

<comment><USER33> I would actually prefer a world where the TLD in a domain name had actual semantical value, but except .gov, .edu and a couple others that opportunity is lost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 Most of this resonates. Just as the article points out, porn is one of the most accessible ways of getting mostly servicable, if greatly skewed sex education, in the sense of being able to consume it from the privacy of your own home, away from adults and peers, and be exposed to a variety of actual situations that depict sex acts. This makes abstract lessons about condoms and bananas -- but maybe not periods and pregnancy -- more concrete, especially as you're at the age when you're trying to figure out what you want emotionally. And that's even if you got a school lesson about condoms and bananas at all.

As for just how skewed porn is, and how much it influences tastes and posturing of its impressionable consumers, is something worthy of more study. While one must be careful to suggest that adult human societies are still shaped by primitive patterns descendant from ancient, hypercompetitive eras lest we erase many years of social progress, societies of adolescents -- especially captive environments like school, camp, and social networks -- show less nuance, and more base urges that are products of either nature or nurture.

Notably, school is a captive social environment in which social competition can develop, and the proliferation of social networks extends this captive environment outside of school hours and into the middle of the night. The youth experience largely consists of top-down busywork about school-selected abstract topics vaguely about adult life, while being exposed to a shifting social landscape in which real events happen with real impact on their immediate surroundings. Sex is one such event, and everyone's still figuring things out.

When you're not actually sure what you want, because lots of things appeal in theory, but you're not sure if that appeal will translate into practice, a confident partner is compelling in ways that go beyond their gratifying presence in porn. They can be your guide and encourage you to engage in the things you want to do, while easing around the ones you don't. Older, attractive, sociable people, who often have more sexual experience (by virtue of their attributes) can project this confidence and match younger partners, despite in many places laws against the contrary. If the relationship remains mutually beneficial, the resulting experiences will allow the bottom partner to gain confidence of their own to apply with future partners, and enables them to explore their preferences.

Meanwhile, adolescents seeking close-in-age partners are faced with a conundrum: project confidence, or admit that they're unsure? The latter, for many, is untenable. A tactic that has developed to project carefree nonchalance instead, to mask deeper conflicts with plausible deniability and a dose of youth-transcending nihilism. This has made "chill" a socially acceptable byword for winging it. This is the territory of mindgames, of unspoken consent (or lack thereof), and a lowkey desire to impress the other -- behaviors that many will retain into adulthood and create more problems then.

It's imperfect choices all around: either have real experience from prior encounters to project confidence, lean on porn and hearsay muster up artificial know-how, engage in a vague slow-motion game where one effectively becomes a recipient to a series of events and one-thing-led-to-anothers, or admit all of this is making your head swirl but watch as the person you like makes headway with someone who was sure a few weeks later?

It always boils down to information and communication. Porn is information where alternatives are not nearly as illustrative, and it enables a vocabulary of communication in a world where talk with adults is a both-ways taboo, talk with peers is a social risk, so most communication isn't verbal. Porn enables vernacular literacy in these matters, while other instruments don't. Of course, it's produced for a different audience, but porn and other artifacts of intimacy produced for (and by) a more relatable audience is illegal, so it's the next best thing.

</comment><comment><USER34> moderators please make an exception and unflag this. its a very important social topic to discuss here.

</comment><comment><USER35> that it takes 10 minutes to get a plumber round?

<comment><USER36> Comedy gold. Nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why is it so common to see people draw parallels from porn to behavior, but then not do the same for other form of video. It was only ~20 years ago that video nasty was a major concern and people thought that TV and film was a major caused for crime and violence, only to be categorized later as mostly pseudo science and moral hysteria.

If porn teaches kids about masculinity and femininity, should we not claim the same thing about romantic drama or comedies? What make porn so special that teenagers can't determine what is real or false, but a romantic drama where every character has exaggerated gender behavior and roles is perfectly clear that it is fake and where naturally no teenager will be effected?</comment>


Real World Comparison, GC vs. Manual Memory Management - <AUTHOR> http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20

<comment><USER2> I've had very similar concerns about GC vs. Manual memory management for games. It's good to finally see some sort of quantitative research and investigation, rather than people throwing around their opinions.

It's interesting that GDC is so much faster than DMD, especially given DMD is supposed to be the reference implementation. But then he is using plenty of optimization flags with GDC.

I don't know what sort of GC D uses, but incremental or generational garbage collection would probably be better for smoothing out differences in framerate due to GC rather than running an entire GC cycle every frame.

It's actually a pretty impressive game for only 3 months; I'm sure I couldn't code a 3D game with particle effects and that sort of lighting from the ground up in 3 months.

Overall for a performance hit of 4ms per frame, It would probably be worth using a GC when you consider all the errors and issues it would eliminate from game development. For me personally it would totally be worth it developing small independent games. Maybe not so much for AAA games where performance matters.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting comparison, but it should be noted that DMD uses pretty much the simplest possible GC (non-generational conservative mark-sweep).</comment>


Exclusivity contracts are killing entrepenenurs - can we kill them? - <AUTHOR>

Exclusivity contracts are killing the entrepreneurs in this country. My past two ventures have hit hard roadblocks due to entrenched players having exclusive access to provide goods and services to large companies.
Here are the kinds of exclusivity contracts I'm talking about (the examples I ran into deal with smaller players, but in spirit this is the kind of thing I'm talking about):
* AT&T is the exclusive provider of iPhone. If you wanted to start a cellular network, you could not provide the phone that most people want.
* Ticketmaster is the 'exclusive' provider of tickets at all major venues. If you wanted to sell tickets, you couldn't at these places.
* Sony pays Konami to only publish a game (Metal Gear Solid 4) for their Playstation 3 platform.
* VISA and Mastercard pay stores to only provide their cards and exclude other cards.
* Google paying myspace to be the sole search provider for their web site (and MS doing the same with facebook).
In my perfect world, ALL of these contracts would be illegal because they artificially raise the barrier of entry for entrepreneurs like us. It is not the 'market' ie, customers deciding which service provider is the best and most innovative, it is the businesses themselves negotiating the best rate and putting smaller players out of the competition.
In my opinion, the above is no different then Standard Oil promising the rail road companies a paycheck each month for a discount on shipping costs (which is one of the main reasons they were identified as a monopoly that needed to be broken up). In fact, I don't think Standard Oil should of been broken up, they should of changed the laws so that it becomes easier for competitors to enter the market place (which they did as well - make rail road companies charge the same rates to everybody, etc.).
My question to hacker news - is there any basis to bringing up a case with the DoJ, name all the companies above in the suit, and get rid of these moronic 'exclusivity agreements' once and for all? Or does the company have to be an obvious monopoly (ala Standard Oil/Ticketmaster) and even then is the only recourse to break up the company (which is incredible stupid)? <comment><USER2> There are also exclusive deals in our industry...and they've been aggressively pursued by the second most popular product in the field--such that ~20% our biggest potential customers probably _can't_ buy from us until their contract ends, even if they wanted to. But, it's not something I would want to try to solve with legislation. All contracts (exclusive or otherwise) have an end date--your job as an entrepreneur is to recognize this, and be prepared to wait it out, with other aspects of your business filling in the gaps.

In the case of tickets: Go after the smaller venues. Make people happier-- people _hate_ Ticket Master. Seriously, you don't get a universally accepted moniker like "Ticket Bastard", if your customers are satisfied. The landscape can change dramatically in two or three years as those exclusive contracts start to fall off. If another ticket seller has built up the relationships with the small acts and labels as they grew up, there could certainly be a window in there. Proper business development in a field like that is far harder than the technical side of things...and so I suspect what kills alternatives is just that Ticket Master has mastered the business development side of the equation. So, you'd have to master that, _plus_ provide better customer service and more fair pricing, in order to beat them. The exclusive contracts came later for Ticket Master--after they were already the far ahead leader in the field.

In the case of video games...so what? How does that hurt anyone? There are hundreds of new titles being released this year for PC, Wii, and X Box 360, why would one (I guess really popular) title being exclusive to PS3 be all that big of a deal? It's certainly no problem for game makers, who will have better sales of their similar games on other platforms. And it'll probably only marginally hurt MS and Nintendo (who also have exclusive games to make up for it). And who says Konami wanted to invest the resources required to build their game for the other platforms? Maybe it doesn't make business sense for them to do so. Are you going to force Konami to build games for every game console? Who determines what is a game console? Can I put up a website selling Linux "consoles" and force Konami to port to Linux because I want to play cool games on my Linux desktop machine?

VISA and Mastercard. So what? AmEx does it, too. It's a credit card. It's not real money. Are you saying every company should have to extend credit to everyone, as long as they have some card in their pocket? Diners Club? Discover? Despite the fact that all cards have different contracts with different terms, and different processing rates. Many businesses don't accept AmEx, for example, because it is significantly more expensive to process. An exclusive contract is merely another aspect of this competitive landscape--it goes on far behind the scenes, of course, since consumers generally have no idea how credit cards work or what it costs when they use a credit card, but it's still just multiple companies trying to figure out how to one-up each other in the market while still making money.

Websites...again, so what? There are billions of websites, and like over 9000 new ones going online every day. Exclusivity on one is not a big deal. And it makes no sense for MySpace or Facebook to have multiple search providers...so who're they hurting by entering an exclusive contract? Nobody. In a year, maybe two, maybe three, you'll get another shot at that site. Contracts are temporary, and tenuous, things.

Your perception of what is fair seems a bit off-kilter with a competitive capitalist economy (which is _required_ for any of us to do the things we want to do). Contracts, exclusive or otherwise, are fair play. If someone were offering a better deal, in all of these cases, the next time the contract term expired, things would change. There's nothing perpetual about any of the situations you've mentioned, and nothing to prevent competition.

The things I have a problem with are much more difficult to deal with: power companies have monopolies enforced by local governments, phone companies and cable companies have monopolies or duopolies over the last mile for broadband, broadcast television stations have practically permanent licenses to operate on their frequencies based on 50+ year old deals (though this got shaken up by the move to digital, and new ranges were opened up and auctioned off), trucking companies have practically free roads while railroads have to build their own (but, railroads have some grandfathered in land that they got for free 100 years ago to even things out a little). If you want to talk anti- competitive look to industries where the same major players have been in control for 50, 100, or more years.

So, while I do think AT&T is a dangerous animal that has way too much control over the government, and should not be trusted, it's not because they have an exclusive deal with Apple. AT&T is dangerous and anti-competitive because they have the government in their pocket, and they can pretty much do anything they want. The last mile in many parts of the US is owned entirely by AT&T, and 90% of independent ISPs have shut down because of this fact. A few cable operators have strongholds, and are defending them reasonably well, and so there is the appearance of competition. But in any given city--even here smack dab in the middle of silicon valley--there's usually only one or two broadband providers, and it's usually AT&T and/or whatever cable company serves the area.

Likewise VISA and Mastercard...the credit industry is hostile to consumers, and resistant to further competition (newest credit card to enter the field is, I guess, Discover...but it spawned off of the Sears card, which had existed for years), but not because of a few exclusive deals with retailers. It's difficult to enter the field because of the regulatory environment...and while it seems like the card companies should oppose the huge regulatory barriers to working in their industry, in reality it just raises the cost of entry. The established players pay, say, 1% of their revenue to deal with regulatory overheard...but a smaller company entering the industry would find that they have to expend 25%. The same effect happens to small businesses with regard to taxes and payroll and such--my business pays a far larger percentage of revenue for these tasks than Google or MS. In more regulated industries the differential becomes prohibitive to the smaller businesses even existing.

So, the answer is: No. There is no basis for bringing up a case with the DoJ in any of the instances you mentioned (probably even Ticket Bastard). And, no. Breaking up the company in the current political climate is simply not likely. Look to the Microsoft case from a few years ago for an example of how things will play out (here and in Europe). Fines, promises to not do the naughty things any more, etc. Breaking up a company is considered an unnecessarily disruptive operation these days. And, there are _very_ few, if any, companies that meet the level of monopoly that AT&T had when it was broken up (even AT&T today, after re-merging all of its parts back into one evil ugly whole again in recent years, is nothing like T of old).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a two way street. In some cases, exclusivity helps entrepreneurs if they're savvy enough to land those types of deals.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a great idea until _you_ decide that you want a contract to be exclusive provider for X.

I currently have a product that I sell to a single customer who spends $1,000's/year with me and he packages it up with other stuff and resells it (kinda like AT&T/iPhone, dontcha think?). Under your "perfect world," his competitor can come to me and _force_ me to do business with them whether or not I want to.

</comment><comment><USER5> No. Those companies don't have monopolies. Take your first example, consider this, and then extrapolate:

AT&T isn't the only cell phone network provider in the market, or even a dominant one.

Apple isn't the only smart phone vendor in the market, or even a dominant one.

Together, AT&T and Apple dominate only a market for Apple's own branded product. Apple could simply choose not tell iPhones at all. It's hard to see how anything the two companies do together restrain trade. You do not have a right to redistribute or enable Apple's own products.

Ticketmaster has been the subject of repeated antitrust inquiries, and has survived --- rightly so. Ticketmaster is under increasing threat of obsolescence by companies like Live Nation, which are vertically integrating (for instance, by signing record contracts with artists) and changing the business model.

Etc, etc, etc. You have a better chance of boiling the ocean than of reconfiguring capitalism to improve your startup's chances. Look elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> you can make an 'opposite' service to break exclusivity

for example, a site that compares different insurance policies/companies, etc

in my case (not from the US), i wanted to sell mutual funds and claim 1% marketing fee :) ... i even passed mutual-fund-manager-certificate-govt exam (just in case, also out of curiosity)

to my surprise (6 months and 1 web app later), only bank is allowed to sell investment packages to individuals (for security reasons)

so not only i cannot take 1% cut (i'm not a bank), banks also do not want to deal with unproven small fry

eventually, i changed my site into site that compares various mutual funds (tables, graphics - love jquery+flot)

but alas, most of them performs below the index; so comparing them shows how bad the funds actually are

anyway i ended up making it a non-profit site ... users love it and i got various feedbacks applicable to my other web apps</comment>


How domain experts create diagrams, and implications for tool design [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://wodenimoni.com/assets/chi-20-natural-diagramming.pdf <comment><USER2> HN's automatic anti-clickbait thing made this title hard to understand… you might want to add back the initial "How".

<comment><USER3> Added back now. I had to take out "conceptual" but I think it's implied anyhow.</comment></comment>


I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/i-played-fortnite-and-figured-out-the-universe/559940/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> "At the same time as I've been playing this game, I've been making my way through a popular science-fiction trilogy written by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu, and the books have spun my evenings with Fortnite into a deeper, weirder dimension." :)</comment>


Microsoft Puts Office on Web to Fight Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-28/microsoft-to-release-web-based-office-as-it-fights-off-google.html <comment><USER2> _Software will cost small businesses $6 a user each month for a package with programs like Office Web Apps and Exchange e-mail software, Microsoft said. For an additional $12 a month, companies can add a full version of Office, including Word and Excel programs._

Versus Google Apps for free, up to 10 users and you get the full Docs suite.

I think this can work.</comment>


Ask HN: Best 65" smart TV that doesn't spy on you / doesn't show ads? - <AUTHOR> I'm shopping for a new TV (prefer 4k, 65") - any suggestions? Thanks! <comment><USER2> You're asking for a 'smart' product that respects your privacy, which generally isn't something that exists for the consumer market. Your easiest option is refusing to give your TV an Internet connection and doing things your own way instead (input from a computer or other small device you can actually control easily). If that's not an option then you can mess around with firewalls or VLANs and so on for it, but it's still quite a bit of effort.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hear Sceptre is a Non-Smart TV brand from Walmart.

[https://www.walmart.com/ip/Sceptre-65-Class-4K-2160P-LED- TV-...](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Sceptre-65-Class-4K-2160P-LED- TV-U650CV-U/48874705)

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know if such a thing exists.

But I remember Vizio got hit with a huge fine for spying on viewing habits and had to make everything opt-in in response. So they might ironically be your best bet, despite a terrible history before this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Probably a monitor of the same size.

Unfortunately they also tend to be significantly more expensive than TV sets.</comment>


Big data, Google and the end of free will - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c <comment><USER2> Complete hyperbolic garbage. Data, given a big enough set, is just a reflection of reality. You might as well claim we have a religion of our eyes and ears.

Given huge sets, much like reality, almost anything can be "proven" at some sort of local scale. It's not a religion or a cult or a new god. It's just observation.

Second, data is a recording of past events, and has surprisingly limited ability to predict future outcomes. There is a narrow window for the most instinctual tasks where it works well and there is a Tom of value there -- but it comes no where close enough to be meta-cognitions ability to give you free will.

<comment><USER3> 'Given huge sets, much like reality, almost anything can be "proven" at some sort of local scale.'

I don't think you're right, I think that some things aren't tractable to this kind of analysis. Obv. Godel type things, but if you believe in freedom of will and an open universe then a lot of other things. For example, the path of true love, the next line of a poem, the summer after next's hot fashion trend.

More importantly (less) international events, earthquakes, solar flares.

Fractals, chaos and incompletness.

<comment><USER2> You can prove it retrospectively but you can't predict it in the moment was what I was trying to say.

<comment><USER4> Given enough data, while you can't predict exact actions, you can predict general trends with good accuracy. For example, given your complete post history and metadata about those posts and your views of HN, someone could fairly easily predict what subjects you will upvote, what subjects you'll comment on (and a good idea of the tone of your comment), and so forth.

We're creatures of habit, and once you have enough information to identify those habits, you can do a pretty good job at predicting what we will do. Heck, with the little data I have access to, I can be pretty sure which articles I will see comments from big posters like jacquesm and tptacek, and what their comments will contain. I can't predict every story they will comment upon, nor the exact details of the comments, but at a higher level it is definitely predictable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article keeps confounding free will with authority over society, and morality itself. But these are all different (see footnote * ).

Harari complains that "Dataism" (and email) makes us "... tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands". But individuals always were just small parts of a great ecosystem that nobody understands.

But even with SMTP, we are still big enough to live our lives well for ourselves and loved ones. We can also try to improve society -- but the results will be small and unpredictable.

He shows the same confusion of indivdual freedom with social control when he says:

> in a humanist society, ethical and political debates are conducted in the > name of conflicting human feelings,

Well that's a pity, because in a liberal society, they should be debates about human _rights_. Your feelings about gay pride or religion should not give you authority to control others, but your rights might set some bounds.

As far as I can tell, Harari has learned that modern biology is starting to see life and the mind as an information system. He accepts this science, but doesn't like it. So he tries to build some confused link to the Big Data giants.

Now there a good reasons, well known at HN, to disaprove of those guys. But Harari's reasoning is not even wrong.

*: e.g. The RC church emphasises individual free will, claims its own temporal authority, and teaches that God is the ultimate moral authority.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not certain where the haters are coming from. I thought it was well written and extremely interesting.

Sure - there are current limitations, and being able to predict what hasn't happened yet is certainly difficult.

What was interesting to me though, is many of our most important choices in life have happened 1000s of times before. Should I buy this? Should I marry this person? What school should I go to or what career should I pursue? These are all questions that can, on average, be better answered with available data than potentially just following your gut. This is the position of the article, and I tend to agree.

While the mystical nature of the totality of the machine we are cogs in seems hyperbolic or unnerving, at a practical level it makes sense to model your interactions with the world that way. Taking that stance, the comparison to religion and humanism should be easy to follow, and reflect on. When are you "dataist"? When are you "humanist?" You'll learn a lot about yourself simply asking that question.

Which makes for a great ending to the article - do you know yourself? Better than algorithm? Maybe not in all cases, and the data shows thats not necessarily a bad thing.

<comment><USER7> > well written

Seemed full of non-sequiturs to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please tell me exactly which algorithm, hyperparameters, processing chain and data sources are able to make better decisions than humans in ethical matters - reliably, consistently and with no regard to who is running the algorithm. What kind of questions do you want to answer and what kind of structure do you expect the answer to have?

You can't answer, because the candidate algorithms are trade secrets, "under active development" or can only be run when babysit by trained specialists? Then it's just a giant "Computer says no" where the implicit assumptions and biases of a relatively small group of humans sold as "objecive" or even "superhuman" by putting some layers of indirection between them and the public.

</comment><comment><USER9> The big metaphor for life, mind, the universe, god, keeps changing. It was animals/spirits, then it was clockwork/machines, then it was information/data, and this article is a reflection of that. We keep thinking we are on the cusp of ultimate understanding, until our metaphor maxes out and we realize we're not.

I believe the next metaphor will be ecology. The notion that an information processing agent can be understood in isolation from the ecology in which it operates (both in terms of energy/mechanics and information) is getting harder and harder to sustain. And the ecologies we humans rely on are dying quickly. We'll need to turn that around sooner or later, by insight or by force.

<comment><USER10> > The notion that an information processing agent can be understood in > isolation from the ecology in which it operates (both in terms of > energy/mechanics and information) is getting harder and harder to sustain

That is my main objection to the Chinese Room mental experiment. A room is not embodied, so it can't learn like us. But an AI agent could be embodied and develop intelligent behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article is hyperbolic in the extreme and doesn't really reflect the reality of these systems.

However. It is an important read, in my opinion.

Because this is well rendered and well formatted summation of the rhetoric people use to argue against scaled analytics and the collection of data. Understanding the counter arguments and motivation behind this article is a good step to interfacing with people uncomfortable with these ideas.

<comment><USER3> I think it's important because it flags that there is a school of thought (that the author doesn't side with or against) that denies humanism and theism and instead owns that observations and calculations are a better way of understanding our place in the universe than empathy with the human spirit or the purpose of a divine spirit.

This is an inversion of science's place in ontology and epistemology (I hope I've got the spelling that indicates theory of knowledge, not vaginal surgery), previously science has not spoken about our inner lives and destiny, now people believe that it can say everything.

This is a shift that has happened twice before so it's quite something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > For the past few centuries humanism has seen the human heart as the supreme > source of authority not merely in politics but in every other field of > activity. From infancy we are bombarded with a barrage of humanist slogans > counselling us: "Listen to yourself, be true to yourself, trust yourself, > follow your heart, do what feels good."

I'm just reading a book by Norbert Elias ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Elias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Elias)), who, when writing about his theory of the "civilizing process", stated exactly the contrary. More exactly, he's saying that we only listened to our hearts/true self/passions back when we were "un-civilized", like in the Middle Ages, but after the State monopolized the use of force and the collecting of taxes and after the "société de cour" formed people had to suppress their passions/heart and had to "rationalize" their external actions.

</comment><comment><USER13> typical article of someone really smart and educated that want to talk about something he doesn't really understand, but he doesn't know that.

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh my, the end of FREE WILL ?!!?!?!

<comment><USER15> It was all fine until this moment in history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We've had free will debates here on HN before, and the submitted story is usually quickly debunked as pompous and arrogant pseudo-intellectuallism. A flavour of jaded post college nihilism. Fatalistic points of view can jump off a cliff if they find their circumstances so constrained, and without option.

<comment><USER3> I guess you believe in free will?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is dang the only moderator? How many dangs does an HN need? - <AUTHOR> I'm sure many people on HN have tried to understand the business issues behind running a web community. YCombinator has a number of reasons for the existence of Hacker News, but two things are clear to me: it is beautifully moderated and it has been a powerful, positive force over the years.
I sometimes disagree with dang's individual actions. He has scolded me and threatened my membership a couple of times. This is either because he has no sense of humor (my version) or because my comments did not meet community standards (the actual reason; I was kidding before and happily defer to his wisdom). By the way I have submitted this using a throwaway account so dang doesn't know my real identity. I don't want him to feel bad if he has to moderate me in the future.
I have clear evidence that dang is doing just what he should be doing. I am apparently much further to the right than the average HN reader. Since people just as left as I am right complain about his moderation from time to time, we know he's doing his job just fine because both sides are equally unhappy with his meddling ;)
HN as a whole is an incredible resource. I literally could not ask for a better moderator than dang. I would love if someone could answer some basic questions so I could do some back-of-the-napkin calculations for hiring a moderator for a site.
How many active participants does HN have? Say, people who have posted in the last year?
How many people have read but not posted in the last year?
How many comments are posted per day?
Is dang the only moderator or are there others?
Is moderating a full time job for dang? (Surely it must be!)
Does dang have to read every submission? Every comment?
Isn't moderating a site like this a job just ripe for burnout? Is there any way to keep an experienced mod while avoiding burnout?
Knowing this will help me know if I'd have to hire 1 moderator per 1,000 members, 100,000 members, or what. <comment><USER2> sctb is also a moderator.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sctb](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sctb)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thank you</comment></comment>


Show HN: At-a-glance personal aviation weather for Android - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.realcasualgames.shouldifly

<comment><AUTHOR> Also available on iOS: [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...
And on the web: http://shouldiflytoday.com
Thanks for any feedback!</comment>