Stephen Fry hits out at 'infantile' culture of trigger words and safe spaces - <AUTHOR> http://attitude.co.uk/stephen-fry-hits-out-at-infantile-culture-of-trigger-words-and-safe-spaces/ <comment><USER2> There's a lot to unpack in this phenomenon. The most interesting question is - why now?

I think that safe spaces / micro-aggressions may come from the perfect storm of a) a generation that was conceived after a period of widespread crime and social uncertainty, leading parents to coddle them and try to protect them from the world [see 'helicopter' parenting'], b) the self-esteem movement [everyone wins prize], and c) increasingly feminized primary and secondary education. The number of male teachers has dwindled rapidly over the decades.

I don't want to appeal to gender stereotypes but I remember seeing some research that indicated that while boys in a playground situation were more physically aggressive and directly confrontational during disagreements with each other, girls tended to have higher incidence of shunning and social exclusion - emotional/relational aggression.

Maybe we shouldn't be surprised to see safe spaces / micro-aggressions as a strategy to shut down unpleasant situations (ideas) rather than confronting them as ideas. These strategies are essentially forms of shunning and avoidance.

Regardless of how one feels about the veracity of these gender stereotypes and how they apply to the sexes, the strategies are real and they are a significant difference from what we've historically had as cultural values in the US and UK: "we're all strong enough for dissent, it's about more than our feelings."

<comment><USER3> It's not a result of coddling (or only a bit).

Certain groups realized they could gain power by being offended. Once you create that incentive, unchecked, it's game over.

<comment><USER4> "Happy Holidays!" instead of "Merry Christmas!" certainly seems to offend a lot of people. So does saying "I'm an atheist" in many part of the US. Or, outrage for saying "we need the same types of gun ownership restrictions that then-Governor Reagan pushed for California."

The most recent outrage seems to concern transsexuals using something other than the cisnormative bathroom.

You did mean to include those forms of outrage, right? Because to me those still look like "game on".

<comment><USER3> I know you're being sarcastic, but I _DID_ mean to include those.

The right is just as guilty of this outrage game as the left; in some areas the coalitions are such that they gain power from it. In more left-leaning situations, the outrage power swings left.

I detest both. I want people to be able to say things without constantly being threatened with firings, no-platformings, and blacklists.

<comment><USER5> In 32 states it is legal to fire a person for being transgender. In practice people get fired illegally for attempting to unionize the workforce. Or for complaining about violations of labor laws. Or for being gay. Or for having the wrong political views. People get fired for expressing themselves all the time. And since business leans conservative right people on the left face the brunt of this discrimination. Free expression has never been without consequence in the United States or anywhere else.

Any serious talk about free speech should focus on the core issue: people in power abuse their power to punish the powerless when they express themselves in the wrong way. Students have practically no power or influence in society. So even if these "SJWs" are entirely unjustified in their actions the impact on society is utterly negligible. This is why the panicky reaction in the linked article about student activists repressing free speech is so comical. If anything, the student activists increase free speech by giving a platform to those people who would otherwise go unheard.

<comment><USER6> Ironically, by pivoting the discussion to systemic power differences as justification for large groups of students to disallow smaller groups of their ability to voice their opinions by passive-aggressive force, you are supporting the conceptional framework that in large part allows the abuses of power, which can be aggressive force, you oppose. If it is wrong for the powerful to prevent the less powerful from speech, then it is wrong for the large to prevent the smaller from speech even the majority against the minority. The 'core issue' of free speech has never been the opposition of those in power with the speech of a majority, even a localized majority, but the empowerment of every individual to speech regardless of their opinions popularity or any of its other attributes, except for those who cause tremendous harm. If it is wrong for the government because it is more powerful to abuse their power, it is wrong for the group because it is larger to abuse their size to limit others. I think the cause of this whole situation is due to the conflation of speech meant to harm other persons (i.e yelling fire, inciting a riot) and speech that causes subjective discomfort or intellectual disagreement. One is a crime, and the other is the heart of every civil discussion.

<comment><USER5> I'm pivoting the discussion so that we can look at the actual consequences of (putting limits on) speech, instead of categorizing "free speech" as a silly absolute. I showed how true unlimited libertarian free speech doesn't exist and cannot possibly exist in an unequal society. This is separate from Free Speech as a legal concept. The government should never silence dissenting voices, no matter how abhorrent. In this sense I'm a free speech absolutist.

It makes no sense to blindly apply free speech principles based on majority/minority. By that logic we ought to amplify the voices of neo-nazis and other undesirables simply because they're a minority that would otherwise go unheard. To the contrary, I believe we're better off banishing them from the campus instead.

I completely disagree with your characterization of hate speech as speech that causes "subjective discomfort". Specific types of speech can do a lot of harm to e.g. individuals who suffer from mental illnesses or PTSD. So organizations have to choose. Either you ban the speech that will predictably harm individuals or minority groups, or you allow all speech (including hate speech) and the more vulnerable people will be forced to leave to protect their mental health. That's the reality of the situation. I don't think this is a difficult choice.

In practice free speech restrictions on college campuses don't restrict scientific work or scientific debate (in the broadest sense), so I don't think there is any cause for concern.

<comment><USER2> > It makes no sense to blindly apply free speech principles based on > majority/minority. By that logic we ought to amplify the voices of neo-nazis > and other undesirables simply because they're a minority that would > otherwise go unheard. To the contrary, I believe we're better of banishing > them from the campus instead.

There would be some hope of that if university students and admin had the slightest awareness of the 'Streisand effect.' They don't and they end up raising awareness of speakers and ideas they are scared of. It's comical. Free speech wins eventually, and that's net positive.

<comment><USER5> Hold on, isn't it true that for every type of protest the protesters have to explain what they're protesting against? If you're correct then every protest should backfire because of the Streisand Effect.

In reality, people protest because it works, even though they have to draw attention to the behavior they want to put an end to. The hope is to persuade the majority that they are righteous and the other side is in the wrong. That's how you get change. Sometimes the protesters mess up and end up looking bad. Then they lose credibility. That's OK, because then a different group of activists will stand up and continue pushing forward.

Safe spaces, micro-aggression theory, and other progressive concepts are quickly becoming mainstream, and they're definitely here to stay.

<comment><USER2> > Safe spaces, micro-aggression theory, and other progressive concepts are > quickly becoming mainstream, and they're definitely here to stay.

Until the next generation rebels against them. It's already happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's an interesting link in the story to something out of the university I attended ([http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/03/student- accused-o...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/03/student-accused-of- violating-university-safe-space-by-raising-he/)) that I think sums these issues up:

 _According to the association's rules, student council meetings should be held in a "safe space environment"_ …This includes "refraining from hand gestures which denote disagreement", or "in any other way indicating disagreement with a point or points being made".*

That's just utterly baffling to me. I don't understand how any form of real debate can be had when participants are subject to being excluded for actions like, say, shaking their head in disagreement.

This entire issue seems to reek of a desire to stifle debate under the weight of bureaucracy, to save having to consider complex issues. Naturally, this will involve the kind of selective enforcement of rules that is such a hallmark of corrupt legal systems worldwide. I like to think that there will be enough rebellion against this from inside student bodies that we'll reach a more sensible compromise, but who knows?

<comment><USER8> My concern is how little this prepares people for life in the real world. How well prepared will those students be when they enter a workplace for the first time and have to handle disagreements?

EDIT: deleted "bigger". It's a concern, not a bigger concern.

<comment><USER9> Sadly, too many workplaces (Github being the most famous recent example) are succumbing to the same institutionalisation of coddling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This problem of 'triggering' and 'safe places' has been something I've recently become acutely aware of. It seems to have strong ties with the 'Social Justice Warrior' and I can't help but feel it is detrimental to a liberal and free, loving and open society, despite trying to champion it.

I call it oversensitivity, Fry calls it infantile. I don't disagree with him. It's a childlike lack of acceptance of the world, followed by an attempt to shape the world into something they are content with, displaying childlike reactions when the world doesn't heed to their demands. Unfortunately this behaviour supported by a community of people who also behave the same way, or at least, feeling a moral sentiment behind the actions of the other, support them believing their actions are noble.

If you pretend rape, race, homosexuality, transgenderism etc don't exist by not allowing these words to be spoken, or acts and circumstances to be portrayed, you create the environment for these facts of life to rot in the mind of society.

It's healthy for us to talk in society, just as it's healthy for individuals to talk about their issues - it's unhealthy to pretend they don't exist.

<comment><USER4> A lot of people think it's important that people warn about potential spoilers. (SPOILERS: Vader is Luke's father, and Bruce Willis' character in "The Sixth Sense" is actually dead.) Aren't spoiler free zones a form of safe space, and the word "SPOILER" itself a trigger warning?

A friend in the Army told me about one of the training exercises which simulates a car roll. Some people who have been in a car roll get a panic attack if they go through the simulation. The instructor said that if anyone had been in a roll and felt that way then they would be excused from the exercise.

I suffer from acrophobia. I would like some warning that the hotel I'm going to stay in (Hyatt Regency San Francisco, I'm looking at you) has a large open atrium and glass elevator for my room on the 8th floor.

Do you think these are childish and oversensitive reactions? Perhaps. But if so, why call out "Social Justice Warriors" as being unique? If not, what's the difference?

The point isn't that plot twists, car rollovers, and glass elevators don't exist, nor that rape, race, homosexuality, etc. don't exist. It's that some people have been raped, and talking about rape unexpected may lead to unexpected emotional reactions.

Now that I think about it, a few years after 9/11 I was in Sweden taking a Swedish course. It was a 9/11, so the teacher thought it would be an interesting topic for the class. Completely out of the blue, I started thinking about what happened again, and broke out crying. And it's not like I had a close connection to NYC or any of the people involved. I figure if a reaction like that can happen to me, then I can well see how others would be more strongly affected by more personally directed trauma.

Nor was it something I wanted to talk about more at that point. The teacher quickly switched to a different topic, since the goal wasn't to talk about 9/11 but to learn Swedish. It certainly doesn't mean that I want to pretend that 9/11 didn't exist, so I don't think you can make the conclusion you did.

Again, you might say that I'm oversensitive or childish. _Shrug_ At some point how do you know you aren't sensitive enough?

Don't take that to mean that I require warning before anyone talks about 9/11, or that there be some sort of "safe space" for me. I am neither proposing that nor defending it, only arguing against the validity of your proposition that people want safe spaces and trigger warnings as a way to "pretend rape, race, homosexuality, transgenderism etc don't exist by not allowing these words to be spoken, or acts and circumstances to be portrayed, [and thereby] create the environment for these facts of life to rot in the mind of society."

<comment><USER11> Your examples are good, but to be accurate to the argument at hand you would expect it to be okay for all car roll simulations to be banned, or optional for anyone and for all glass walled elevators to be covered up everywhere. It's not the fear or the offence that's being debated, it's the change in society to accommodate the fear or the offence that's the point.

<comment><USER4> There are multiple arguments "at hand". The one I refer to is beaker52's argument that a call for trigger warnings and safe spaces is due to a childish rejection of the real world. I disagree with that conclusion, for reasons I gave.

I think you are talking about a different argument?

Personally, I see direct parallels to the current call for "safe spaces" to older calls for non-gendered job titles, prohibitions on the casual use of racist slurs, the student protests against Kissinger appointment to Columbia which lead to the university cancelling his appointment, and more. I can't point to a time when there wasn't a debate about a "change in society to accommodate the fear or the offence".

It all seems more of outrage about "kids these days" and "things were more meaningful when I was your age" than anything else.

Is that the argument at hand that you refer to?

<comment><USER12> >It all seems more of outrage about "kids these days" and "things were more meaningful when I was your age" than anything else.

In most cases, that's exactly what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A very spot-on claim. Your exposure to this largely depends on the circles you (have to) socialize with but you can observe little bits of it everywhere. I would guess individuals would tend to avoid this kind of behavioural control and thus see less of it if they have a choice, so it's not necessarily regarded as a problem in the general public. There's a loud crowd of proponents for this kind of behaviour and that is working its way into the fabric of the society behind the curtains.

Moreover, the example linked to in the article¹ is sickening and feels outright revulsive. That is the very slippery slope of all slippery slopes: you are left to wonder what indeed could possibly come next?

¹) [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/03/student- accused-o...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/03/student-accused-of- violating-university-safe-space-by-raising-he/)

<comment><USER14> But the only difference between this kind of thing and the manipulation and framing of debate by the press - including the Telegraph - is the level of journalistic sophistication used to shape the argument.

It's interesting the debate was about "anti-semitism", because so far as I can tell that has become a code the UK press uses for anyone who thinks that Israel may not necessarily have the moral high ground in its dealings with the Palestinians.

The nonsense about safe spaces and whatever is reprehensible, but it's actually less reprehensible than one-sided public debates where right-wing politicians are given space to attack anyone who thinks politicians should make their tax returns public for "immature populism", but attacking a left- leaning leader for the way he eats a bacon sandwich is mature and responsible journalism.

[http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/06/sun-ed- miliband...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/06/sun-ed-miliband- labour-mail-telegraph-election)

The point being that politics always seems to be a nasty business full of nasty people being nasty to each other, and everyone else they can get away with being nasty to.

Maybe student politics is a symptom of that, not a cause.

<comment><USER15>
        It's interesting the debate was about "anti-semitism",
        because so far as I can tell that has become a code the
        UK press uses for anyone who thinks that Israel may not
        necessarily have the moral high ground in its dealings
        with the Palestinians.

Which is ironic considering that the word simite applies equally to both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To characterize this as "the regressive left" is really dead-on. My view is that this is inevitable in a culture where no real progress is made on big problems—attention naturally turns to ever-smaller slights, and those begin to carry the weight of the big, unsolved problems. The next step is nihilism and reactionary tendencies. I wouldn't be surprised if the counterparts of today's "regressive left" in 20 years are brown-shirt fascists.

As Eric Hoffer has said, these kind of people don't hold real convictions beyond an unquenchable lust for redemption for what they perceive as the injustice of the empty, ruined landscape of themselves.

</comment><comment><USER17> The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is forested with flowering gardens from people who purposely stifle and opress others, to present a single biased viewpoint, in the name of "safe space".

I think personally tatchell and fry have been too generous and provide too much benefit of the doubt against the people who stifle open and full dialogue in the sinister name of trigger word or safe space.

</comment><comment><USER18> Safe spaces should be handled the same way as religion. If you provide safe space, you should provide it for EVERY trigger. That would practically eliminate it.

A few examples:

Many of my relatives died because of marxism. My grandfather was in jail, because he was capitalist and employed 5 people. I can not be around people who approve any form of class warfare or class privilege. And I find cultural marxism triggering!

My ancestors were slaves. In fact even word "slavery" is named after "slavic" people. By using that word, you are condoning slavic people to be slaves and that is TRIGGERING ME!

<comment><USER19> But they're not triggers because you're not actually triggered by them, as opposed to a person who was raped not appreciating rape jokes because it makes their PTSD real bad.

As much as I disapprove of the caricatureizing of the concept of not being a rude person and the extreme positions that are being taken by the students, I feel it's still important to recognize they are young adults navigating these heavy concepts of balancing censorship and unacceptable behavior that deserves derision such as shouting slurs at people. Being condescending and dismissive of the entire concept just comes off as a rather extreme reaction to young people being what they've always been and exploring the society's boundaries that they live in and seeing what negatives they can change in their own circles. Once they actually get out of university I'm sure it'll be fine, as every generation has been one way or another.

<comment> barry-cotter He's condescending and dismissive of the entire concept because actual PTSD triggers are not the point of trigger warnings. They're barely even marginal examples of trigger warnings. Trigger warnings are about suppression of speech.

Religious students don't get trigger warnings for courses that treat their views as anywhere between foolish and evil. Classical liberals don't get trigger warnings for their sociology, cultural anthropology or social psychology courses, despite the fact that all those disciplines have faculty that are overwhelmingly leftist. There's a great deal of diversity of opinion in those departments but it's diversity of leftist opinion.

People aren't stupid. Trigger warnings aren't used in a way that has any correspondence to PTSD triggers. They're used as a stick to beat political opinions of the losing faction with, currently the right.

<comment><USER19> Wow, this is completely different than my understanding and viewing trigger warnings being used. They were used to simply say "hey I'm going to talk about this, if you don't like it you might wanna leave, I'll let you know when I'm done".

Could you explain further some examples of trigger warnings IRL that you've dealt with, because I assume there aren't widespread studies about this sort of thing and you seem to have a vastly different experience than mine. I'd like to understand it.

<comment><USER20> A lot of these conversations about these concepts seems to me to be made by people who have 1) never been triggered emotionally in a situation, public or private, 2) have never actually participated in safe space discussions. Outsider perception/view.

The discussion is primarily about how people perceive the idea of a safe space over the actual experience of it. I don't think it's very useful, it just reinforces peoples' perceptions of others without actually engaging with those peoples and concepts/experiences directly.

<comment><USER15> Everyone has been triggered emotionally in a situation. I can't believe that anyone can even get through childhood without experiencing an emotional trigger of some sort. I think we can all relate to this.

As for safe spaces, this is fine if we're talking about a room at university, but if we're talking about making a university itself a "safe space" then forget about it. It's a public place where people have to live their lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If there are words that "trigger" someone, it's a clear indication that inner work must be done (i.e. meditation, therapy). Unfortunately, it seems many people are unwilling to do that. Instead, they want the world to accommodate their pain, which only makes it worse.

That said, I believe trigger warnings are essential because even when the inner work _is_ being done, healing takes time. Even a lifetime. We need to be cognizant and empathetic of this.

<comment><USER22> > I believe trigger warnings are essential

I kind of agree but there is a practical problem...

I know several persons who were killed in motorcycle accidents. Their relatives still grieve years and decades after the events. Should every article or TV show contain a trigger warning "This movie contains action involving motorcycles"?

I know a couple whose young daughter drowned in a swimming pool. They haven't recovered from this a decade later and they are quite sensitive when it comes to swimming and swimming pools. Should every movie and book have a trigger warning in front "Warning, somebody drowns in this movie"?

I know a couple who divorced and she is still crushed by this and she hates when somebody talks about mariage and get anxiety attacks. Should every movie contain a message "Warning, this movie contains at least one wedding"?

The house of a close friend of mine burned down and because of this she has severe anxiety about big and open fires. Should every movie contain a warning about fires?

Is it save to talk about pregnancy? There are tons of people who had several miscarriages or they are physically unable to even get pregnant.

Can I talk about my (almost) perfect childhood? There are more than enough kids who grew up in toxic and abusive environments.

The point is that people get scared and scarred by literally everything. It's not just rape, violence and war but also dogs, alcohol, shouting, snakes, loud music, ... Almost everything justifies a trigger warning for some people so the question is: What is worthy of a trigger warning and what is not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What. Universities stifling free speech? Please educate a person fairly clueless of daily issues in UK and USA - is this really happening at a scale?

<comment><USER24> Yes, unfortunately.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/12022041/How- political-correctness-rules-in-Americas-student-safe-spaces.html)

[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/how- camp...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/how-campus- activists-are-weaponizing-the-safe-space/415080/)

<comment><USER23> "...student had asked a colleague not to use the word 'violate' – as in ''does this conduct violate the law'' – because the term might trigger distress".

Oh lordy. For a moment there I thought I was reading an issue of The Onion.

<comment><USER25> "It is thus demonstrated that the perpetual motion machine of the first kind [redacted] the First Law of Thermodynamics..."

<comment><USER26> "We [redacted] the first barrier of the organism".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > [ American Civil War was the ] most bloody Civil War in human history

From Wikipedia :

American Civil War : Total 705,000–900,000 + dead

Chinese Civil War : 1.5 million + 250,000

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I raised an eyebrow as well when I heard this. The Russian Civil War also had millions of casualties.

<comment><USER28> Maybe as a percentage of total population it would be true?

<comment><USER29> Not even close. The An Lushan rebellion killed several percent of the entire world's population.

<comment><USER30> To be clear, it may have killed as many as 1/6 of the human population [0].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion#Death_toll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion#Death_toll)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Forgive me if this has already been said, but I think the entire issue of safe spaces, micro aggressions, trigger words, privilege, and so worth, is about one thing: POWER.

I believe those involved believe they have been historically, and continually, victimized, by the system, citing whatever majority they wish to define as their oppressors. All of the political correctness, and hostility towards free speech and expression, is a way for those groups to exert power over their "oppressors", and give them a feeling that they are in control. It's all about power.

This is not to say that their concerns are unjustified, but the method in which they seek justice lies more in power and retribution than healing and cooperation towards a better society.

</comment><comment><USER32> Does this culture of trigger words and safe spaces really exist out of the Internet? Is it an US/UK thing? I've never encountered it in my life.

<comment><USER33> No, not really. This is a case of right wing white males finding some phony thing to get upset about and battle against. Exactly what they accuse "SJWs" of doing.

<comment><USER34> You know, singling out "white male" as a group that has some kind of agenda is already "US/UK thing".

<comment><USER33> Give me a break. The people complaining about SJWs, safe spaces, etc. are 99% white males. I am a white male myself.

<comment><USER34> That's because in other places that's not even a thing. Nothing to complain about. Therefore it is an US thing (and less so UK).

<comment><USER33> Ugh, give it up already. If you're a white male like me you've almost certainly never been victimized for your gender or skin color.

I face only positive employer, police, etc. biases. Being a minority is actually hard in this country. I have no patience for playing the victim card when you were born on third base.

<comment><USER34> You don't get it. German, French men are white males too, but I don't think any of them would describe themselves as 'white males' the way you do. Russian, Bulgarian, Finnish, whatever. The idea of adding your race or skin color to your gender in day to day speech is weird pretty much anywhere apart from US.

> Being a minority is actually hard in this country.

What country would that be? /s

De facto patriarchies exist all over the world, but that doesn't mean that they consist of 'white males'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I remember a speech Christopher Hitchens gave a few times about this, and I generally agree with him. Suggested reading for all:

[http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2014/09/30/christopher-...](http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2014/09/30/christopher- hitchens-freedom-of-speech-means-freedom-to-hate/)

The real point is that saying "I'm offended" doesn't give anyone the right to shut up anyone else. We have freedom of speech, not freedom from speech. The recent move in the US to push hate speech laws is an egregious attack on our foundational principles of free speech in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER36> There are a few interesting statistics that may or may not be relevant. I'll try to make a case that they are.

First, we live in one of the safest times in human history. The number of wars is at an all-time low.

Second, over the last couple of decades, a couple of _billion_ people have seen their standard of living rise due to trade and commerce.

Third, the internet and social media is isolating people much more than they ever have been. Growing up in the upper-middle-class in the U.S., if your people don't like what some other people are saying? They're basically invisible.

Finally, colleges have lost their way. What used to be about preparing folks for a career is now a club for making friends of the right type. They used to be responsible to parents and society. Now in many cases they are direct service organizations for kids seeking a "college experience"

You put all of this together and you create a bunch of 18-year-olds that can be as closed-minded as many 80-year-olds. After all, they've never really had their beliefs challenged. And why should they start now?

There's a re-factoring of higher education that has to happen regardless of this particular issue, and it can happen none-too-soon. But parents of teenage kids should feel responsible too. It's your job as a parent not only to teach values, but to let your child explore new ideas and learn to defend their opinions using logic and civility. If you're 10 and refuse to talk because your feelings are hurt, that's one thing. But if you're 18? You missed something really important somewhere in your upbringing.

ADD: I am reminded that of one of the last big pushes for civic education and critical thinking was in the 1950s. This is when the famous "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in the U.S. (If you don't know why this is important, consider yourself lucky.) During the Korean War, when the communists captured soldiers, many times they didn't torture them. Instead, they "educated" them.

It suddenly occurred to a lot of people that if you're 18 and can't articulate why your opinions are important -- and defend them -- then you're vulnerable to just about any new idea that comes along. That's the real travesty here. When I hear about kids not wanting to hear ugly or challenging ideas, my first thought is how totally vulnerable these folks are to just a little bit of indoctrination. To be that way _and_ attending a major university? It's a travesty.

If this is the quality of their experience, they shouldn't worry about repaying their loan. The colleges should be refunding the money back to the lenders.

</comment><comment><USER37> What I want to know is where are the University leaders in all this? the board of guverners or exec committee or whoever who should speak up and tell these pathetic, entitled little shits to grow the fuck up and learn to deal with people with different opinions.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wouldn't care about the mainstream's willingness to self-censor if it hadn't spilled over to the academia. There is now a range of studies that are verbotten. Also seems to be an american issue. Please don't export that one :)

</comment><comment><USER39> I'mma just leave what eevee said the first time Fry got all offended about people being offended

>I love Stephen Fry, really I do, but this oft-repeated quote is bullshit and he is perfectly demonstrating why that is. What he's really saying is this: everyone else's feelings don't matter, but his do, because he frames them as universal rules of discourse rather than feelings.

[https://eev.ee/blog/2016/02/15/everyones-offended-these- days...](https://eev.ee/blog/2016/02/15/everyones-offended-these-days/)

</comment><comment><USER40> The internet greatly magnifies the perceived prevelance of this "infantile culture". I think most people do not see this effect hardly at all in day to day life, but love to get enraged about it online. It's a fad that's going to blow over when enough people get tired of being upset/vindicated by it, not some crazy Orwellian scenario.

</comment><comment><USER41> Stephen Fry is president of a UK mental health charity - Mind. They've released a statement about some of his comments.

[http://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/statement-on- step...](http://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/statement-on-stephen-frys- comments/#.Vw011tQrK03)

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh, by the way, I can highly recommend the channel RubinReport on youtube ( [https://www.youtube.com/user/RubinReport](https://www.youtube.com/user/RubinReport) )

He has lots of good stuff and that interview with Fry there seemed to be a bit rushed, normally Rubin is calmer and more prepared.

</comment><comment><USER43> Stephen Fry is a childish buffoon. How are we taking anything he says seriously? Most public discourse happens online, and I see the opposite of Political Correctness taking the forefront, and Racism and Nationalism on the rise. The people who cry "stupid SJW!" or "go to your Safe Space you liberal cuck" are the same people who cannot handle a shred of criticism about Institutionalized racism, or the rise of fascism in modern society. I am pro free speech, people should police themselves before they use profanity or insults, I rather they identify themselves than hide in the shadows. I am a white male, since that bit of information may matter to someone (considering the context of the conversation), and when I speak out about institutionalized racism people say "You're pathetic, you're such a cuck wallowing in your white guilt, kindly stfu". Or if I defend Muslim war refugees or Muslim Migrants, I'm told "You stupid cuck, you just want your girl to get raped by those terrorists, they are going to take over, and impose Shakira(sic) law" (not to mention the rape mob thing ended up being incorrect, still parroted daily on reddit as fact).

</comment><comment><USER44> A recent discussion about this between Sam Harris and Johnathan Haipt is a good piece about this. Haipt is a professor and he talks about why now. I'm seeing the perfect storm of coddling and often enabling leftist faculty and administration, expensive universities, helicopter parents all comes into play.

<comment><USER4> There is no perfect storm. Those complaining about the helicopter parenting of today forgot that their grandparents complained about how "kids these days" expect things given to them on a silver platter. The phrase changed, which makes it _seem_ like the concept is new. But it isn't.

When this came up before ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404752](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404752) ) I found quotes like a 1960 PTA magazine:

> 'I've known a lot of kids who were treated like little heroes. Afterward, > they expected everything to be handed them on a silver platter— and it > wasn't. They couldn't adjust.' "Beyond any doubt, the boys in Williamsport > last week were treated as ...

A Boys' Life article from July 1937:

> We want to teach them not just to sit back and expect things to be handed to > them on a silver platter but with confidence, based on their training, to go > out and get what they want. We need to stiffen a moral flabbiness that has > been affecting our youth.

Life Magazine, March 29, 1949:

> We have reared a bunch of weaklings in our young marrieds of today. Too much > has been handed to them on a silver platter without their having had to work > for it, and they lack the intestinal fortitude to meet life as a challenge.

Nor is there some recent spurt of left-wing faculty. I think faculty is more centrist than, say, the 1960s. I'll cherry pick [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/08/politics](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/08/politics) as the first page which agreed with me ("Professors lean left, but major new study of faculty views finds more centrism and less radicalism than critics of academe see -- with growing moderation among young academics.") YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Yet another case of mistaking language for reality. When you think about it, hasn't that been the culprit in humanity's folly for so many thousands of years? Derrida is probably upset somewhere ...

</comment><comment><USER46> A lot of instances of "no platforming" is just someone refusing to participate in an event if someone else is present (usually because the person doesn't like the other, or their politics). Everyone has a right to not take part in an event if they don't want to. It's not a threat to free speech if someone has conditions on their attendence.

I'll bet Stephen Fry has conditions on whether he attends events (perhaps around money or expenses). If he won't turn up to my house in another country on his own expenses, is he trying to shut down debates? No. Get over it.

<comment><USER47> _A lot of instances of "no platforming" is just someone refusing to participate in an event if someone else is present_

This implies that some other instances are not, but then you dismiss them all as if they all were just refusals, which makes your post seem self- contradictory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> "NSFW" is a trigger word. Should we ban that?

<comment><USER48> There's plenty of votes to do exactly that.

On the right, well we all know why

On the left, because it overwhelmingly victimizes women (some truth to that, of course, there's some truth to the rightist argument as well)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think safe spaces are good. They keep people in their cages.

</comment><comment><USER49> Ayn Rand reminds me of this. It's everything I learned in kindergarten. What it means to be selfish, why its good, etc.

It's infantile. Most go on to First Grade, where they learn to share and the benefits of sharing with others. You learn, you grow.

If you hide or act like this, it just seems like a lack of education to me.

</comment><comment><USER50> Every generation takes what the previous generation set in motion and expounds on it. This is obvious when looking at things like extreme sports and technology. The irony is that the "infantile" behavior he is complaining about is just the cultural neoteny of the last generation being adopted by the next and extended a bit. There is a trend on shows like Dave Rubins to blame liberals for this. I think it has nothing to do with political affiliation and is just a side effect of modernity. Just complaining about trigger warnings shows a lack of priority and is a bit infantile. There is global warming and nukes to worry about. :/ see....irony.

<comment><USER51> imo it's basically kids starting at a young age getting told how special of a snowflake they are and always getting what they want.... and once they grow up they still want to have their ways

<comment><USER52> I believe the core of the problem is as you described. But then there's a lot of political gain being made on top of it. Universities are at risk of seeing their education throughput diminished.

<comment><USER53> I wonder what the best way to tackle it is? At some point surely these folks will have to accept the real world around them that everyone else lives in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> To me, its all about 'control'. Despite what the article says, the UK does NOT have 'free speech' (see 'hate speech' laws). In fact, the only place it does exist is the US - aside from the 'yelling fire' example.

So in the US, I am free to call anyone any name I so choose. the control aspect comes where a group of people are _looking_ to be offended, if not by language, then by something else more innocuous (i.e. dreadlocks, etc...). It is a butt-hurt-culture that feeds on itself. If one of their own says something not in-line with the party, they turn on that person - and this in turn keeps people in line. the EXACT opposite of liberty.

The _ONE_ group where its okay to willfully attack is the "straight, white male". (lets see how _that_ statement is received). People don't want _equality_ , they want to feel like a special snowflake who is above everyone else. Just don't dare to say or think anything that's outside the 'party line'.

"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it..." ~ Evelyn Beatrice Hall

"... unless you say something i don't agree with, then you're a racist, bigoted monster and must be destroyed." ~ every SJW ever.

<comment><USER55> "Despite what the article says, the UK does NOT have 'free speech' (see 'hate speech' laws). In fact, the only place it does exist is the US"

You mean like how the FCC bans some words on Telly?

<comment><USER54> I mean the fact that if you call someone on the street an ethnic slur, you will be arrested (in the UK/EU).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Pretty funny coming from a guy who flounced off twitter because he didn't like what people were saying to him.

I guess for Fry, who has devoted whole books worth of self-pitying screeds to how tough his life is due to his problems with mental illness, offense is something he should be allowed to give without limit, but something he should never be expected to accept.

<comment><USER57> There is a vast gaping chasm of difference between leaving a place that you don't like because there are things you don't want to hear (aka flouncing off Twitter), and wanting that place to be censored so you can go there without hearing those things (aka safe spaces).

If you believe that people should be free to say things without fear of censorship, even if they're things that you don't like, then "safe spaces" are a really bad idea.

<comment><USER58> > If you believe that people should be free to say things without fear of > censorship

You can believe that but also still believe that people shouldn't be free to cause wilful offence under the protection of "free speech" (which, as we all know, isn't guaranteed anyway.)

<comment><USER59> Free speech law operates on a complete different level than safe spaces. Law has careful designed constraints, while the definition of safe spaces is what ever anyone feel should be restricted in _their_ social environment.

Commonly, free speech is limited where someone is encouraging violence against a person or group (hate speech), or when there is measurable harm done to a person (defamation). Being triggered because someone voice a different view about a political subject is neither hate speech or defamation, but it is something which "safe spaces" has recently been made to restrict.

<comment><USER58> > Being triggered because someone voice a different view about a political > subject is neither hate speech or defamation

I haven't been following this very closely which is possibly why I haven't seen an example of this "political triggering" claim. Do you have some examples?

> Commonly, free speech is limited

I think you're talking about the governmental limits on free speech there - private individuals and institutions have no such constraints and can limit whatever speech they want (within the bounds of legally-mandated discrimination, obviously) because (as I understand it, I'm not a US lawyer) they're not bound by the First Amendment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Programming with Lazarus, a Brief Introduction - <AUTHOR> https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/tutorials/intro/ <comment><USER2> I've been playing around with Lazarus recently. It's a pretty nice way to knock up a GUI, and it compiles to a single executable, which is great. Which makes it kind of ironic that Lazarus itself is such a giant pain to use as a portable application. The Windows installer is packaged in such a way as to make it a pain to extract without running it, and even then I had to resort to Cameyo to make it work reasonably. Seriously, if anyone from the project is reading this, can you put some effort toward making this not such a giant pain?

I've also discovered that I'm not really a fan of Free Pascal as a language. Particularly maddening is not being able to assign an intermediate value to a variable in order to make code more clear without first declaring it at the top of the procedure.

Overall though, I really like it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding the installers, try this page that makes installing much easier:

[https://www.getlazarus.org/setup/?download](https://www.getlazarus.org/setup/?download)

That is the purpose of the get lazarus website, to make installing and customization easier.

Regarding variable declaration, part of the Free Pascal design is that you must declare things first before you can use them. Declaration must be separated from implementation code. This means you must all declare variables, with their types, before you use them in a statement.

      var
        S: string;
      begin
        WriteLn('Please enter you name:');
        S := ReadLn();
        WriteLn('Hello ' + S);
      end;

<comment><USER2> >Regarding the installers, try this page that makes installing much easier

Ugh. So my choices are: use the installer, or build from source. How Linux of them.

You apparently don't get this, but I don't actually want an installer to make it "easy". I'd rather it be simple. Give me a damned zip file containing the program and its dependencies, and make the tools support relative paths (or environment variables). Is that too much to ask? Yes, apparently.

> Regarding variable declaration, part of the Free Pascal design is that you > must declare things first before you can use them. Declaration must be > separated from implementation code.

Yes, I know. That's precisely what I don't like about it. It disincentivizes using variables to hold intermediate values for clarity purposes.

<comment><USER3> > You apparently don't get this, but I don't actually want an installer to > make it "easy". I'd rather it be simple. Give me a damned zip file > containing the program and its dependencies, and make the tools support > relative paths (or environment variables). Is that too much to ask? Yes, > apparently.

Do you find that a lot of software on Windows conforms with the way you think software installation should work?

I see "portable" versions of software in zip files sometimes, but always pretty small apps. This kind of packaging probably peaked in popularity prior to the introduction of Windows Vista. In the UWP era things are only more likely to trend away from this.

<comment><USER2> Actually yes, most software does. Notable exceptions include a lot of Microsoft software, unfortunately. They used to be better about it but they've become exceptionally lazy about it lately. Unix culture's "hardcode all the paths" influence I expect.

And popular does not mean good. In fact, it is often the opposite.

<comment><USER3> > Notable exceptions include a lot of Microsoft software, unfortunately. They > used to be better about it but they've become exceptionally lazy about it > lately.

I don't believe I've ever used a Microsoft product that offered installation via zip files in addition to installer. What are some examples?

<comment><USER2> Oh, if that's what you meant then no, lots of stuff isn't offered that way (though a lot of stuff is, and when it isn't you can often just take installers from various software and open them with 7zip to extract their contents without issue). However the entire Sysinternals suite is portable, and old MS software would at least give you the option to install to any directory of your choosing (after which you could usually move it around without problems). Newer software from MS pretends that this is possible, but really often just installs a tiny portion of the software in the chosen path and dumps everything else into the hardcoded default one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would it be wrong to say this is essentially a cross-platform implementation of WinForms? It reminds me of the workflow for WinForms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you are wrong. The control library that allows this is based on Delphi's VCL or Visual Class Library. The VCL was design in large part by Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C#. Hejlsberg helped design the VCL before he worked at Microsoft.

When Hejlsberg was hired away from Borland to work at Microsoft his first placement was to work on Visual J++. Microsoft was sued and lost because they were incompatible extensions to Java. These extensions were designed in part to support their own VCL like framework for Java, and resulted in a fragmentation the Java community, or so the Java suit claimed.

After the Visual J++ debacle, Microsoft decided to create their own Java like ecosystem, which is what .net was or is. The first few iterations were made quickly and featured Winforms as you mentioned. Winforms was very much influenced or based on the design of the VCL, with the help of Hejlsberg.

The Lazarus library (LCL) has the mostly the same class structure and same class methods as the VCL. So in summation, Winforms was inspired largely by the VCL, and the LCL is a close copy of the VCL.

<comment><USER4> Cool, I had no idea! So it'd be more accurate to say that this is a cousin to the predecessor to WinForms haha.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feedback our Startup Garmz.com - Start your own fashion label - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
i know several HN members have a family and/or professional background in the fashion industry so i am really keen to get feedback :)
We do Garmz.com Garmz.com is essentially a webpage where you can start your own fashion label.
What we basically do is we provide online portofolios for upcoming fashion designers (think fashion students or young fashion designers).
They can upload their fashion designs and get feedback votings etc.
If we see demand for a product WE do the actual production and sell it in our webshop and in partner webshops.
We launched the very first version of our platform  - nothing but an upload button - middle of june and recieved uploads from all over the world within the first week. (Hongkong, India, Brazil, USA, Kanada, Australia, Vietnam, All over Europe - like in a Bad Hollywood Startup Movie but for real)
We launched the Design pages end of July and recieved above 10k votes within the first few weeks.
The day before yesterday we published the very very first product and made it available for preorders.
We had the first pre-orders coming within the first hour we tweeted about it. But of course the payment system was broken. (GeekHighFive)
We are now shipping new products regulary and depending on pre-order we decide to do serial production for the stock or not.
We completely focus on the designers and try to do the products as good as we (or the industry) can.
The label in the back of the product is the label by the designer. We discuss the full prototype process with the designer to make sure we can realize the product in a way he imagines it to be. We share the revenue per piece with the designer (5% of shop price) but keep all the risk to us.
What we really want to do is to enable fashion talent.
We strongly believe that there are people out there with the ideas of the future of fashion and not the market possibilites to actually get them to the customer.
The Team is part tech geeks, part fashion production and part economics. The HQ is currently based in Vienna but will move to London within the next months. The products and prototypes are produced in bulgaria. Prototypes are done in house by our team members.
Link: http://www.Garmz.com
TL;NR: crazy startup tries to change fashion. Does crowdsourcing of fashion labels and their designs. Does actual production. Shares profit with the designer. <comment><USER2> Known you since ooooooh 1.5 years so I've seen your development. Impressive.

How's your network with fashion events and conferences, magazines and newschannels - would be a strong driver of fresh talent.

What other sales channels than own webshop have you thought about?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Known you since ooooooh 1.5 years so I've seen your development. Impressive.

Thanks Appreciate. Disclaimer to YCombinator - fdebong is squating our office today ;)

> How's your network with fashion events and conferences, magazines and > newschannels - would be a strong driver of fresh talent.

Its hard work but we try to build it up. If anybody has contacts that might help please send me (or them) a short info. Thanks upfront!

> What other sales channels than own webshop have you thought about? We are in > talks with other webshops. Currently its crazy future talk but we are very > sure we can adapt to their cost structures (2011) and even go retail (2012).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://www.Garmz.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great opportunity for the designers for they can acquire a sense of what the market needs. Also, I am sure designers have a better chance of visibility using a service like yours than setting up their own online stores.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for that feedback

you nailed it down :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, you do marketing, production, distribution but only take 5% of retail price?

Sounds too low at first glance.

<comment><AUTHOR> the designer gets 5% we need the rest to cover the costs of the above mentioned + profit

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Garmz was my fav company at Seedcamp this year. Looks & sounds like it's moving forward well -- congrats.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks a lot :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slick UI and really neat idea! Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Make XfCE 4 look like a SGI O2 workstation - <AUTHOR> https://securitronlinux.com/debian-testing/make-xfce-4-look-like-a-sgi-o2workstation/ <comment><USER2> See also the stuff from Maxx Interactive, e.g.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/b8cv8f/maxx_maxx_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/b8cv8f/maxx_maxx_interactive_desktop_v20_indigo_release/)

<comment><USER3> Oooh, that brings back memories of college</comment></comment>


How to Be a Rocket Ship: Be More Productive One Minute at a Time - edouard-harris https://medium.com/@edouard_harris/how-to-be-a-rocket-ship-b348df5351c <comment><USER3> Well, tell you what, that's not the metaphor I was hoping to see. Rocket propulsion gets more efficient in flight because the rocket gets lighter as it burns its fuel: same punch, less mass to move. What I _figured_ I'd see here was the same notion applied to software work. Namely, building up small efficiencies in an organization will have compounding effects. What are those? Well, percentage point improvements to build systems, slow, careful work to cut down on resource consumption in software systems, etc etc.

This was... different. Achieving maximal time efficiency -- "goofing off for 5 minutes every day adds up to 3 more full days of work per year" \-- is sacrificing long-term sustainability for short-term, uh, presence, I guess? It's certainly not that your work is better when you micro-manage your time, even in the immediate term. The mind needs play time to make associations between ideas, to keep up one's well-being. Three more full days of work a year don't mean anything to anyone if to _get_ those three days you're left a shambles.

In short, rockets don't work this way and neither should anyone else.

<comment><USER4> You first paragraph describes an article I really want to read!

<comment><USER3> Heh, I misunderstood you at first and spent five minutes searching for a good, introductory article on propulsive efficiency equations.

<comment><USER5> Careful there, goofing off for 5 minutes every day adds up to 3 more full days of work per year. That's a big deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Choosing to work instead of goofing off for 5 minutes every day adds up to > 3 more full days of work per year. That's a big deal._

You know what else rocket ships do? They burn out.

<comment><USER7> Not if they are spacex :)...they come back and recover

<comment><USER8> yea, you can do it if you keep just enough fuel to get back on the ground and take a good break and some spa and refueling afterwards

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> More worship at the altar of optimally-filled-time which misses a larger point - research _consistently_ shows that the "goof-off" time is where our brain goes to work on the real hard problems.

Sure, if all your startup does is crank out CLs, optimize for that. But I'd wager that unless you're solving bigger problems than "more code!", your startup is not going anywhere. (Don't get me wrong, there is a phase when all you want is more code, but it's a very short moment in the life cycle)

Oddly, Knuth comes to mind: _Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered_

</comment><comment><USER10> > hack your hamster brain and trick it into working harder

If you need to 'hack' and trick yourself into being productive, try find another line of work or just take a break.

I'm not knocking this approach - all of us are wired differently and this method may squeeze another line of code out of an under-stimulated brain - <AUTHOR> there's something decidedly anti-'flow' about conditioning sips of coffee around how often you save your code.

Instead something like the Pomodoro method, 5 minutes of play at the end of every 25 minutes of work, might be more effective with less mental overhead: don't trick the hamster. Cede 15% of each hour to him/her while the rest of the time is work.

<comment><USER11> We had a big revolution in management a couple decades ago when we realized we couldn't just work people like robots. Why are going back full circle?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's non-trivial to calibrate your work habits and psychology for maximum _sustainable_ productivity for different tasks. "But but flow!" someone might say. To which I'd respond: even flow has its weaknesses. Get flow-greedy for writing software, and you'll find yourself working late, eating crap, and not exercising.

And it's different for different work. The mentality you need to be a good student is different than the one to be a good salesman, which is different from that required to be a good husband, etc.

What I can say with confidence, though, is that it makes a notable difference. A long time ago I read an article linked here that talked about "stacking wins." Consistent success can deliver crazy rewards, because so many (more than in the past, I feel) areas of our lives are subject to vicious/virtuous cycles.

</comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't anyone else shudder at how honestly they express productivity as a simple brain chemistry hack? Is work supposed to be a Skinner Box?

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm a huge fan of the Pomodoro Technique. TL;DR I do _nothing_ but work - <USER2> email, no Twitter, no Hacker News, nothing - for 25 minutes and then take a mandatory 5 minute break. During that pause, I give myself complete permission to do whatever I want as long as it's not the thing I'd just been working on. Although it's probably not for everyone, it works brilliantly for me. There's a lot of research showing that the unskippable break gives your brain a chance to consolidate memories and your subconscious to pick away at new ideas while you check your Coinbase account. I also don't feel any guilt at all about taking breaks because I know they're good for me and that I've earned them.

The blog proposes the diametric opposite of Pomodoro, and I would probably be able to sustain that slog for about two weeks before having a breakdown. I am highly skeptical that anyone can work like that regularly while maintaining high productivity.

<comment><USER14> I am doing pomodoros (30min increment) without timing my breaks works for me as well and is easier to implement. So, I can do long break or no break depending where I am.

<comment><USER13> Honestly, I do that a lot too. Five minutes is an ideal I try for, but it's just as likely that I'll find something in Slack that I need to deal with right away and it'll turn into 15-20 minutes.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I never found forcing break time being effective. However, forcing work for a set amount of time is working for me marvelously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has anyone considered that maybe the human biology is actually smart enough to figure out whether you should/shouldn't be focusing on something at a given time and that there might be negative effects to trying to scam it into doing what you (your boss) want (wants) all the time?

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't like the notion of "hacking my brain".

First, it can create long term unwanted needs, such as requiring you to treat yourself for every little achievement. This could lead to a lot of things - weight gain, guilt, or all kinds of addictions (coffee, games..)

Second, I think that improvement is achieved by slow and consistent practice. "Hacks" are... well, hacks. They aren't supposed to be used over and over again.

</comment><comment><USER17> "You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day — unless you're too busy. Then you should sit for an hour." -Zen proverb

<comment><USER18> Let's not forget the most important thing that I personally resisted for over a decade of my working life before legitimately giving it a try: allow yourself the opportunity to get 8 hours of sleep per night. You won't always get it, especially if you're a parent, on-call, or a thousand other reasons. But I went from being a person who "only needs 5-6 hours of sleep" but was always running out of time in the workday to someone actively seeking out new challenges because my work (and personal) time were spent so much more efficiently and pleasantly by default. Seriously, if I could go back in time and slap my mid-twenties self for ignoring this, I would.

<comment><USER17> Also hundred times this when you have kids. Sleep is important. It is much easier to get angry when you are tired. I sometimes wonder what good is there in not going to sleep when you are tired. Sometimes I sleep after lunch for twenty minutes. Sometimes even full cycle - one hour and half, but this is rare. It makes a difference - you are more fresh and although it may seem like a loss of time, it actually pays back quickly as you are not struggling with tiredness during your whole afternoon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> To the moon with you then, worker bee.

</comment><comment><USER15> Taking sips of coffee throughout the day is actually an awful idea, btw. You should drink it with meals or at least drink the cup at once, otherwise you're gonna be exposing your teeth continuously to an acidic beverage without giving them time to remineralize.

<comment><USER17> Better separately. Coffee blocks digestion of nutrients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For some reason I get the most done when I decide to do nothing. It's like I relax, get in the flow and can really work. On the other hand the faster I try to run the further behind I get.</comment>


Ask HN: Which React Native tutorials should I take? - <AUTHOR> Most of the tutorials I've found seem to not use ES6 - is this important? <comment><USER2> ES6 classes and stateless components (aka arrow-components) are now standart things. You can continue use React.createClass, but may be this will be deprecated (however, I'm not sure about it)

For learning RN... they move fast, better is to create pet project from fresh RN generator (CLI: react-native) and go on.

</comment><comment><USER3> no, it's not. I actually enjoyed working with React ES5 "classes" more than ES6 (but I had to switch cause of work standards)</comment>


Ask HN: Does Flattening the curve only benefit 0.5%? - <AUTHOR> Assumptions- 4% of people with coronavirus die, pick any number you'd like, but the specific number isn't important. 12% of people on ventilators live.
If you flatten the curve, you give hospital access to everyone who could potentially die. This means 4% times 12% = 0.48% lives are saved by flattening the curve.
Services like oxygen are not exclusive to hospitals, so they do not benefit by flattening the curve.
My question is, are there any other benefits to flattening the curve? <comment><USER2> First off, if you extrapolate the 0.5% estimate to the general population that could get the disease (let's just say 60% before herd immunity kicks in) that is one million people in America. I'm not sure if another reason is needed other than not having one-million people die in a very short amount of time.

\- Survival from the disease is likely to be dependent on hospital capacity. It is reasonable to think that outcomes would be better if hospitals were not overworked. The only place in the United States were hospitals were truly overcrowding (and it is still not nearly as bad as it could have been without flattening) was New York. You can see how many people died at home (either due to unrelated health conditions that they couldn't get treated for or having covid but not being able to go to the hospital). [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/corona...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/coronavirus- deaths-new-york-city.html). Read stories or talk to nurses/doctors in your life about triage care.

\- Treatments could improve significantly over time. For example, ventilators may not even be the recommended course of action for many cases. It is not likely we will have a miracle cure, but some treatments could help. [https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/coronavirus- disea...](https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/coronavirus-disease- covid-19/uchicago-medicine-doctors-see-truly-remarkable-success-using- ventilator-alternatives-to-treat-covid19)</comment>


How much money successful entrepreneurs started with - <AUTHOR> https://www.lendingtree.com/how-much-money-successful-entrepreneurs-started-with-article <comment><USER2> Some people were in debt and they took the paramount and stupid risk of starting a company and it paid off for them with huge returns. Congrats you pointed out some lottery winners.

What should also be mentioned are founders who go into even grater debt and destroy there lives attempting to create companies when they are not financially stable. Get your self in an position where failing won't ruin your life (like worst case scenario you end up back in your moms basement) but seriously, if you are in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, statistically a startup will ruin your life.</comment>


Old marketing with new tools - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/old-marketing-w.html

<comment><USER2> _Inertia is one reason that techniques like these aren't done often, but the real reason is fear._

I think there are 2 reasons, one for those of us who understand the technology and one for those of us who don't.

Some of us worship the technology instead of the customer. The technology has gotten so cool that it has become the star instead of the tool to service the real star.

The rest of us don't understand what the technology is and what it can do. A perfect example...

We went to our favorite restaurant Saturday night and it was dead. Excellent food, concept, and service. Across the street from a 10,000 student university. The owner greets every customer and remembers most of us. He even asks how my mother is doing. Everything is homemade, healthy, and delicious.

He complained that he was swamped for lunch, but dead for dinner and didn't know what to do. After 2 beers, I suggested:

\- When it looks like it's going to be a slow night, tweet your regulars with a 2 for 1 discount.

\- Email "Buy Lunch, Get Dinner That Week" coupons to your regulars

\- Establish a Facebook presence with daily specials at the local university

\- Offer free wifi during happy hour

\- Advertise on one of the "10 Buck Dinner" sites

\- Build a database for college student "meal tickets"

To which he said, "You could do all that?"

</comment><comment><USER3> If you don't read the article, at least read the last paragraph:

      Inertia is one reason that techniques like these aren't
      done often, but the real reason is fear. We use technology
      to insulate us from our customers instead of bringing us
      closer.</comment>


Cloud Computing - Streaming Video Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.dperry.com/archives/news/dp_blog/my_feelings_on/

<comment><USER2> The elephant in the room of this whole OnLive games thing is, why the heck are they bothering with video games?

If they have a technology that's capable of remoting games (which are some of the most demanding consumer applications imaginable), then the whole "Linux vs Mac vs Windows" debate is moot. If it can remote 3D, fast action games, it can remote whole OS's with ease. That's surely a 100x bigger market than games.

That, to me, casts huge doubts on their claims... it's like someone claiming they've solved cold fusion and are using it to power really strong, long- lasting flashlights.

<comment><USER3> You can already remote OSes with ease, and have been able to for years. VNC, X11 etc. It's not particularly fashionable, but PC hardware is so cheap you might as well buy a new one. You can easily spawn an instance on EC2 and connect to it, but those machines don't have state-of-the art GPUs.

The problem they're trying to solve here is that a new gaming PC can cost a couple of thousand dollars, and you have to keep it on the bleeding edge of expensive hardware to play the latest games. It's typical that even the most avid gamers simply can't keep up with all the consoles and PC hardware.

<comment><USER2> Most OS remoting solutions I've seen are only just usable. I can remote into my Mac Mini into the living room and even that doesn't feel quite right. A 3D shooter, with this kind of latency, would be almost unplayable. And that's just to my living room!

If they can get games to play well on the average DSL connection, they can get OS's to feel 100% local, not laggy, like the average VNC session. I'm sure there'd be a big market for that kind of technology, outside of gaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been thinking about the OnLive business model and the difficulties with the technology/bandwidth and this is what I reckon they are going to do:

Sell it to DSL/Cable companies.

I sorry I just don't believe that the system will work if it is hosted in some nebulous cloud somewhere, and I suspect that the ISPs will go bonkers about the amount of traffic that it generates - if the ISPs aren't getting a payback.

Obvious answer - the ISPs sell it as a service to their customers and colocate the equipment at their exchanges.

<comment><USER5> Better yet, sell it to restaurants, bars, etc. for those completely noddy trivia and keno games.

That's about the only place I can see it really succeeding. I don't want to play even an RPG with laggy, video-compression-artifacted graphics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As complete an analysis of the difference in latency between OnLive and a local game as I can be bothered making is:

\- player input to server: ping/2

\- game engine + rendering: same as local

\- video compression: worst possible is 1/framerate

\- first video bit back to player: ping/2

\- whole frame back to player: worst possible 1/framerate

\- decompression + display: worst possible is 1/framerate

So assuming video compression, decompression and transmission are all as slow as they can be thats a total of ping + 3/framerate. So they can rightly claim a perfectly smooth 30 frames a second performance, but the latency could be ping + 100ms worse than a local game. The best case latency approaches the ping.

I doubt the compression and decompression is much faster than 60 frames a second, although the transfer time could be quite low in the case of a connection good enough to do HD sending SD. So a more realistic estimate might be ping + 2/60 or ping + 33ms, where a good ping is ~20ms(?) to your ISP or well peered server location. So assuming things work quite well you're looking at >50ms latency. I think that'd be a fairly unsatisfactory experience.

<comment><USER7> OnLive claims to have compression time down to 1 millisecond. I'm not sure how long decompression takes, but it would be more accurate to say "the latency will be ping + 1ms + decompression time worse than a local game".

Anyone have stats on latency for decompressing 720p video?

BTW: Local game latencies for 30fps games are often (30ms/2 average time between controller input and controller sampling) + (30ms gameplay&physics processing) + (30ms CPU-side graphics) + (30ms GPU-side graphics) + (30-90ms TV signal processing) >= 135ms.

I had a chance to play Mirror's Edge through OnLive at GDC. They were claiming a 50ms ping to the server for that setup. I choose that game because I am very familiar with it and it is a very demanding. The extra lag was noticable, but still playable.</comment></comment>


Quant Investor Cliff Asness Hasn't Smashed His Screen This Year Yet - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/quant-investor-cliff-asness-hasn-t-smashed-his-screen-this-year-yet <comment><USER2> > I'll still wake up sweating once a year, worrying that we've just gotten > lucky forever

You have to appreciate his candor.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cliff Asness is the Jose Mourinho of quant finance: past it, stuck angrily defending one way of looking at things, the fault's always elsewhere and rooted in people not looking at it in terms of a particular investment methodology he asserts.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not taking anything away from the content, I have such trouble reading light text on dark dark (black in this case) backgrounds! After a few lines, I have light/dark rows burned into my eyes. After a page, I give up.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention all the quotes fading in and out of the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> history repeats. filled with algorithmic trading systems that never lasts. unless maybe hft and arb and market making.

</comment><comment><USER7> "I'll still wake up sweating once a year, worrying that we've just gotten lucky forever"

For good reason. It's amazing the amount of intelligence and effort that gets wasted in finance. (Other fields too of course.)

<comment><USER8> >For good reason. It's amazing the amount of intelligence and effort that gets wasted in finance. (Other fields too of course.)

Whenever I hear someone say this, I never see an explanation for why it's actually a waste. People are usually just jumping on the 'finance is evil' bandwagon. Well, capital markets are vitally important to the global economy, and the presence of investors like AQR are a huge reason why markets are as efficient as they are.

<comment><USER9> Google employs 70000 people, when in fact they could do what they do with just 700. (If they bothered to _actually_ hire the top 1% of developers.)

Operating with 1% of peak efficiency seems insane, until you understand that Google doesn't hire people to make products, they hire people to increase their market cap.

This is a delusional system that is opposite of 'market efficiency'.

Eventually the system will collapse in a horrific crash and we'll start over with something that doesn't violate common sense or laws of physics. For now all you can do is grin and take it.

<comment><USER10> This doesn't make any sense. Imagine you have the 7,000 best employees and your ops are smooth. You are told that #7,001 will net improve the business. Are you delusional to hire that person? Or do you think that a profitable 7001th person does not exist?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UnConj - <AUTHOR> http://clojure.com/blog/2011/11/22/unconj.html <comment><USER2> Just wanted to communicate how amazing it was to have two of the authors of The Reasoned Schemer (Dan Friedman, William Byrd) there this year. At the first Clojure/conj I was opening up its pages for the very first time. To find out that such a powerful computational model can be described in about ~200 lines of Scheme was a shocker. To find out that it is also efficient was just unbelievable. I'd been doing Clojure for two years already I don't think it really hit me what Lisp had to offer until I spent nearly 6 months understanding those _mere 200 lines_ and reimplementing them in Clojure.

Having Dan and Will around to bounce ideas off at the Clojure/conj was simply incredible. One thing I've disliked about the miniKanren system is that many finite programs do not terminate depending on where the recursion occurs. Dan & Will have been working on that problem for _8 years_.

Being the unprincipled fool that I am I decided to tackle this problem head on. Over the past weekend I implemented a version of miniKanren that not only terminates now for an incredible number of programs (it implements fair conjunction), but it does so without sacrificing miniKanren's excellent sequential performance when you so desire it.

So for me, yes modern programs should be written in Lisp. We don't even know what modern programs should look like yet :)

<comment><USER3> So that's where core.logic came from? I just went and bought TRS so that I can figure out where you're coming from with that.

<comment><USER2> Yes core.logic is an implementation of miniKanren. Soon as Dan Friedman and William Byrd confirm my approach to fair conjunction is solid, I plan on integrating fairKanren to be followed by cKanren which will bring powerful constraint solving facilities into Clojure.

<comment> cgrand-net Do you mean fair conjunction like in "Backtracking, Interleaving, and Terminating Monad Transformers" or something else/new?

<comment><USER2> I don't think so though I'm not totally sure. That paper isn't really about logic programming in general - no vars, no unification.

<comment> cgrand-net I think you're right and I had the stupids the other day: what this paper describes is simply your conde (né condi). No?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> t-crayford Super amused to see my work on clojure-refactoring mentioned there. I don't work on that anymore (nor do I think clojure is the right language for me these days).

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. What language do you think is the right language, if I may be so bold? :)

<comment> t-crayford I think clojure is close in some regards, but running on the JVM really hurts me these days (startup time _really_ hurts TDD as I do it). I also think clojure has too much syntax (for a lisp), and am not convinced modern programs should be written in lisp any more (though that's hazy).

At the moment I use Ruby, which is much less frustrating than clojure ever was. (I seriously love the shit out of rspec).

Last but not least: stacktraces.

This isn't to say I think Ruby is better for all tasks etc, just that it fits where I am right now. Clojure is probably better for people with differing tastes to me.

<comment><USER4> >> and am not convinced modern programs should be written in lisp any more (though that's hazy).

Can you elaborate or recommend me some reading that support this point?

<comment> t-crayford Like I said, I'm hazy on that point, and don't want to say anything further in public right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any chance of having recordings of these talks posted online?

<comment><USER6> They will be. Im sure that the will pop up on HN when the are out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd really like to see a ClojureCLR Swank server for emacs/SLIME.</comment>


High frequency security bug hunting: 120 days, 120 bugs - <AUTHOR> https://shubs.io/high-frequency-security-bug-hunting-120-days-120-bugs/ <comment><USER2> $40k in bug bounties in 120 days seems pretty good! I always wondered if someone could make a living off of bug bounties.

<comment><USER3> Hi, OP here,

The total amount was just under $80,000 in 120 days. The table reflects payouts for bugs I was able to disclose, there are a fair few bugs worth >7k that I wasn't able to include in that table. Some platforms/programs explicitly asked not to be listed there.

<comment><USER4> I just wrote a comment in another thread about bug bounties being cheap. Assuming you work 8 hours a day, your hourly salary would be $83,3. Wow!

Do you think your frequency is somewhat maintainable? I myself dream about working full time with bug hunting but have only gotten to a point where I report a few bugs on a hobby basis. To me it feels weird skipping my consultant salary for small payments and sometimes even a "good job dude, here's a t-shirt".

<comment><USER3> I wasn't able to maintain the frequency after 120 days. I had started the project and was hoping to do 365 bugs in 365 days, however I stopped at 120 days after I had realized that continuing at such a rate would lead to significant mental health issues.

In addition to that, I work full time and participating in bug bounties was/is purely a part time endeavor of mine. Perhaps if I worked full time on bounties I could keep up. Not entirely sure how it would work out, but it would be a risky journey at first nonetheless.

<comment><USER5> Would you be willing to further explain your mental health concerns? Was it a worry of burnout, undesirable hyper-focus on bug finding, or something else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He, that's the most literal implementation of 'move fast and break stuff' that I've seen to date. Kudos to the OP for having the stamina to both work a full work week _and_ do this on the side for almost 4 months, for most people either one would be enough to reach reasonable limits.

On another note, and still on-topic, the fact that you actually could do this full time is a nice testimony to the quality of the software that we put out collectively, it really should not be this easy. It _also_ gives you an idea of how many applications out there are simply waiting to be hacked, or alternatively, how many of them have already been hacked. Chances are that not-so-nice people have been doing the exact same thing as the author.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great work, though I wish this blog were published after the redactions were updated so the findings could be really public.

In particular, I really like this:

 _" When you submit bugs, remember that you aren't actually entitled to anything. Unfortunately, that's how bug bounties work. It's a sellers market. If a program doesn't pay as much as you'd expect for a bug, just don't participate in that program again. What's the point of causing drama over a bug or two? Who is the magic internet man who's going to buy your exploit for $1,000,000 using magic internet money (bitcoin) that those Hacker News users keep on referencing? If anyone knows who this person is, do tell me! There's no such thing as a "union" for bug bounty hunters nor an easily accessible secondary blackmarket that pays for your bugs in a company."_

Fascinating. It's almost as though a successful security researcher and bug bounty participant is saying the same things Tom and I keep saying here, despite a constant hoard of people outside the industry who believe web application bugs are worth anything on the black market.

For anyone who would like to replicate this success, know the following:

1\. _The Web Application Hacker 's Handbook_ is your friend. It's outdated but it's still the best foundation. Follow it up with _The Browser Hacker 's Handbook_ or _The Mobile Application Hacker 's Handbook._

2\. You can optimize for exotic vulnerabilities in Google, Facebook et al which pay the highest bounties or you can optimize for low hanging fruit in companies which are just opening up a bounty program. The longer a company has a bounty program, the less of a chance you'll successfully XSS them in a day of assessing their web applications. Optimizing for finding security vulnerabilities serially in the highest paying bounty programs requires a much greater level of skill, vulnerability intuition ("what did the developers not think about or consider here?") and patience.

3\. To do this seriously, learn to recognize vulnerabilities as contextual faults in the the way a particular software's implementation matches the developer's design expectations. Try not to think of vulnerabilities as classifications, like XSS, CSRF, IDOR, etc. For a first pass to find low hanging fruit it's helpful to proceed this way, but for more advanced work you want to look holistically.

4\. If you want to specialize in application security at the binary level (sandbox escapes, memory corruption - vulnerabilities in operating systems and major OS applications), you'll want to learn reverse engineering. Start with _Hacking: The Art of Exploitation_ and then proceed to _Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering_ or _Practical Reverse Engineering._ You'll also want to read _The Art of Software Security Assessment_ and _Security Engineering_ alongside those, to develop excellent source code auditing and binary penetration testing skills. Frankly you should read those no matter what you do in security.

5\. It's very possible to earn a competitive tech salary just by finding vulnerabilities and reporting them (or selling them, if that's your bag, but, _critically_ , you won't be selling website bugs). However, it's difficult and time consuming. It requires an orthogonal skill set to straight development, and while it might not be more time consuming it will certainly _appear_ that way while you're doing it. Like much of security work, bug bounty hunting consists of long periods of research and analysis, during which you might feel like you haven't made any progress. This is interposed with brief moments of inspiration and a final moment of euphoria when you finally break something after poking at it for days or weeks or months.

You can earn a lot by finding lots of bug bounties, or you can do it by finding a few serious flaws in widely used "foundational" software in a year (think browsers, Flash, Rails, Windows, etc.). The latter method requires less context-switching, so if you can swing for that it's the way I'd recommend. All you need is three or four bugs in an OS or browser to match a Bay Area median salary.

As always, I'm very happy to help anyone who would like to get into security professionally.

<comment><USER8> Dylan,

I'm a software engineer. Let's say I wanted to transition into security with the eventual goal of consulting for web / mobile application security.

1\. Would going through the books you've recommended here and practicing a good path to get me to there?

2\. Could you elaborate more on your second to last paragraph? Say I found a Rails vulnerability. How would I monetize that? I interpreted your statement as saying do lots of bug bounties or fewer not bug bounties.

<comment><USER7> Hey Christopher,

1\. Yes, working through those books would get you to a position at any of the best consulting firms for security. As Thomas will tell you, they used to ship some of the books I mentioned to candidates to prepare them for interviews at Matasano :). Those books will teach you everything you can learn from books alone; the rest is just up to practice.

2\. If you find a Rails vulnerability, the most straightforward path to monetizing it is reporting it directly to the Rails core dev team and registering for a CVE number recognizing you as the researcher. Once the vulnerability is patched, report the fact that you found it and it was patched to Hackerone's Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) program. The IBB program rewards researchers for reporting serious flaws in major software used around the internet.

Your interpretation is correct. I use "bug bounties" colloquially to mean web application vulnerabilities, but technically Hackerone's IBB is a bug bounty.

The point is that web application vulnerabilities are worth less as a general rule than vulnerabilities that impact a plurality of websites, due to things like vulnerability half life.

Hope that helps!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could you automate this?

Could you have some scripts running that automatically try various attacks on sites, present the results, or does each attack have to be hand crafted?

<comment><USER7> You could certainly _try_ , but no off the shelf software, commercial or open source, could fully replicate what the author did. It's sort of the golden dream of the security world to fully automate this work to intelligent scanners like Acunetix or Fortify.

When doing this work I personally find it helpful to frame vulnerabilities as areas in development where an engineer's mental model and design expectations were inadequate (or simply flawed). This is in contrast to the way most automated security scanning software implicitly understands vulnerabilities as lists of things that are known to go wrong.

Both are helpful perspectives, but the reason why humans are much better at the actual work is because the former encompasses the latter without missing the more abstract issues.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that in order to do this, you'd probably need to design an excellent machine learning system, preferably with supervised learning, and train it to classify vulnerabilities in source code and applications by running through the same things successful security engineers do. Depending on your definition of automated this would probably start to border on AGI in order to be really effective at fully removing all the schlep work.

If I had to guess, I'd say the first company that will develop anything realistically close to this will be Hackerone or Bugcrowd. They are the companies with the most data, and they have already started working on machine learning systems that can classify bug bounty reports as likely signal or likely noise in production. I could even see a very long term Uber-esque plan where they attempt to replace their bug bounty participants with systems developed on their training data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the best advice in that article is this:

 _At all times, when someone found something in an area or program I didn 't find, I took it as inspiration. Viewing colleagues and friends in bug bounties as competition is purely counter-intuitive as it doesn't really help any parties and leads to even more severe burn out._

</comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr he did bug bounty work on the side and made $80,000 in six months.</comment>


Nickd: Airplane mode. - <AUTHOR> http://thedata.cc/post/4730535558/airplane-mode <comment><USER2> Airplane mode is a vague label.

I use airplane mode solely for saving battery life when my device is near me as I rest.

I like "Interesting person mode" -- that's a nice perspective!</comment>