8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/el-paso-8chan-4chan-mass-shootings-manifesto.html <comment><USER3> I think that technology has brought us some truly marvelous things. But they also enable us to avoid casual social contact while enabling us to withdraw from meaningful social contact.

Online anonymity permits endless Sybil attacks -- helping turn communities' frustration from anger and rage into violence. I'm guessing/assuming that 8chan is an anything goes censorship free community (like 4chan was/is?). And maybe it's not explicitly in support of racist ideals but instead refuses to condemn any ideologies or discussion. But because of other communities' moderation, they likely become one of the bastions of the racists. So even if their ownership never had any interest in hate speech, their platform becomes a de facto mechanism for its spread.

As much problems as anonymity causes I sure don't think that some new Real World Identity driven Internet would be a good idea. But sites with next to no content moderation seem like a bad idea. Not that I can imagine a resolution, really.

~~

I imagine how frustrated I might feel if I didn't have some kind of daily work or creative task to keep me busy and fill me with purpose. If I felt depressed I might be willing to blame it on someone. If everything I read said that in fact there is someone to blame, I wonder: would I be able to see through that? Would I stand up and say 'no, that's wrong: those people aren't the source of our problems'? I like to think I would. But I've definitely caught myself (long after the fact) buying into BS groupthink/hivemind conspiracy hogwash.

<comment><USER4> > I'm guessing/assuming that 8chan is an anything goes censorship free > community (like 4chan was/is?). And maybe it's not explicitly in support of > racist ideals but instead refuses to condemn any ideologies or discussion

More or less. More so than 4chan.

8chan is like Reddit (and unlike 4chan) in that it allows anyone to set up a subcommunity that they can moderate however they like. Only illegal content (and nude/sexual images of children, and certain spam) isn't allowed at all. Individual boards may be moderated very tightly.

There are all kinds of boards there, even for communists, and for Muslims. They're scrupulous about allowing even things they don't like.

/pol/ is the board where these manifestos keep getting posted. The shootings generally get celebrated there. It's actively moderated, as visible in the moderation log: [https://8ch.net/log.php?board=pol](https://8ch.net/log.php?board=pol)

But /pol/ is not just any board. I stopped paying attention after the Christchurch shooting, but at that time, it was the only large global board, a board owned by the administration. Global site volunteers, who are normally only authorized to handle illegal content (aside from roles they have on other boards) were allowed to moderate /pol/. The site owners set the rules and policies for the board and appointed its ordinary (non-global) moderators.

/pol/ became a global board after its previous owner mismanaged it and the administration seized it. The community was already like that, and if the administration tried to change things locally people would just flock to a different more permissive board. But I think 8chan is a little more than just a platform in this case.

<comment><USER5> Think about that for a min. Racism is allowed, but not Spam.

They will allow Racism, but actively moderate out Spam.

What type of joke is this? There is no hiding behind it, they intentionally and actively allow it to become a breeding ground for violent racists.

It's like what in the world did you guys imagining Al Qaeda recruiting msg boards l look like.

"No Al Qaeda msg boards have people claiming for death to Americans".

And 8chan boards are also doing the same thing. It's disgusting, but people are desensitized to how absurd it is.

<comment><USER4> > They will allow Racism, but actively moderate out Spam.

Reddit used to be like that as far as I know, and though there's plenty to criticize I don't think Reddit was intentionally set up to become a breeding ground for violent racists.

8chan's policy about spam is very different from how a policy against racism would look. What it in practice means is that if someone posts the same suspicious link on a hundred boards they may be hit by a global ban instead of leaving the mess for individual board owners to clean up. Even very principled proponents of free speech usually don't mind that.

There's no guarantee that spam will be cleaned up, it just doesn't get the protection of it being up to the board owner. For a long time 8chan didn't even have a functional anti-spam system. It's a practical matter foremost.

A rule against racism would be much more thornier. It would have more edge cases, and it would have to be enforced more consistently. It would be a lot more work and it would be more arbitrary. And it would go against the sensibilities of the original founder, who's a libertarian (I don't know if he's racist).

8chan wasn't created to be a breeding ground for violent racists. It was created to be a make-your-own-forum website with minimalist rules. For the first year, before gamergate drove more people to it, it was just that. In July 2014 an innocent roleplaying board was the most popular: [http://web.archive.org/web/20140701141242/https://8chan.co/b...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140701141242/https://8chan.co/boards.html)

<comment><USER6> A global ban for promoting genocide or murder doesn't seem too complicated

<comment><USER4> It's still more work, because some people will get upset that they're not allowed to promote genocide. It still has edge cases (I've seen some hairy examples from Facebook moderation guidelines). It's also still more of a free speech issue than deleting spam is.

That doesn't mean such a ban would be bad, but it is complicated, and someone who doesn't like genocide might still not want it.

<comment><USER6> I think I sort of get it now.

Moderating spam is easier. Apparently it's hard to tell between "we should kill these people" and "these people are being killed" due to a language barrier sometimes, and it's hard to automate.

But wow. You all think "let's kill these people" somehow has more value than "buy my shit/here is a malware link", nice. downboat away

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My friends and I used to visit the *chan sites when we were younger. Sometimes the discussions there were good e.g. if you browse the exercise forums.

But then one of my closest friends killed himself silently. That was when I realized that these sites are no jokes. Some of the people there have fallen so deep into the pit of hate and depression. Nowadays I don't even link nor share the name of the sites to my younger friends where I see the early signs of hate growing. My personal belief is that all of this is happening due to a lack of a proper father figure for boys growing up, making them socially illfit, making them outcasts and making them blame everything on immigrants and so on when they can't find a girlfriend or friends.

<comment><USER8> I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed. What it is exactly, and why its happening, is really hard to tell. We cant see the forest from the trees.

But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here.

<comment><USER9> I think it's essentially draws back to the incel/hikkomori phenomenon. You never see young men in relationships doing these kinds of things...whether it's a white right wing mass shooter or an Islamic suicide bombing. People seem to want to pin these things on ideology, because that's the reason the perpetrators themselves give for what they do. But it seems more likely to me to be a reaction to a life they view as having no future, by which I mean no prospect of a successful romantic relationship with the opposite sex.

<comment><USER10> I don't think the Christchurch shooter was an incel, apparently he had pictures on social media partying with women. And he killed 50.

<comment><USER11> He didn't seem to have a successful social life.

I don't want to spread any more content about him by sharing links or quotes here, but I think it's important to dispel the suggestion that he had a well- functioning social or relationship life.

Media interviews with people who knew of him all indicate that suggestion is false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We could talk about how this is largely a mental health problem. A lot of depressed young men do stupid risky stuff with no concern for their own well- being. I know a few guys who have wrapped their cars around trees. I bet most shooters were just throwing in the towel in a more hateful and dramatic way.

I see the main issue as a marketing problem for psychology. Men are focused on solving problems, and I'd bet they see psychology as a bunch of talk-therapy (like it's portrayed on TV shows and movies). Women might want to talk about their problems to find some kind of scapegoat, but men would often rather solve them. The ironic thing is, modern therapy is often quite problem-solving focused.

A related issue seems to be that a lot of these guys can't talk to women. As in, they can't ask women out. It's rarely their personalities or looks (look at domestic violence perpetrators if you want to see how awful you can be and still find a girlfriend), it's often that no-one wants to tell them how to ask women out (except on certain dark corners of the internet).

Recognising and addressing these kinds of problems means humanising them though. We can humanise Palestinian terrorists and drug dealers, but can we really humanise depressed and nerdy young men? I dunno.

<comment><USER13> It's not a mental health problem. It's a propaganda problem. These people aren't clinically insane. They are just enveloped in hatred. In particular dehumanization propaganda brainwashed them into seeing others as not even human.

If you go to places with decades long conflicts, you'll see this mentality on display everywhere. So it's not a mental health issue. All these people aren't insane. They are just really convinced that some other people are the enemy and that those other people are not even worthy of existing at all and that their life is worthless.

<comment><USER11> I can agree that it's not a problem of mental health in the sense of diagnosable conditions like major depression, schizophrenia, etc.

But it is linked to the inability of people to achieve positive life outcomes - i.e., healthy friendships and intimate relationships, satisfying and well- paying jobs, and a sense of community engagement.

This kind of deep hatred only develops after you've spent enough of your life absent of acceptance and love.

There currently isn't an obvious path to a better life for people in this situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone have an idea of how big 8chan and 4chan is in terms of users?

Just from the visible activity in there I can see they must be massive.

I think Slate is incorrect in describing them as expression of traditional neo-nazism. To me they are quite their own thing. Born out of Anime culture and gaming-culture becoming a playground for role playing, trash talking, trolling, real-life pranks degenerating into what it is now ...

To me they are very hard to understand. You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi. How does that work psychologically?

<comment><USER15> You start out by making relatively innocent jokes about jews, and notice that certain portions of the anglosphere left and right really respond to this. Not only do they tell you that you can't say that, they also shower you with threats of violence. Successful troll is successful. So you go a bit further, start moving into actual anti-semitic jokes, conspiracies. Still just for the lulz, but it gets an even better reaction. Meanwhile, your image board/irc buddies, the only people in your life who treat you like a real human being, keep egging you, some of them pointing to the reactions you're getting as proof that there's some kind of underlying truth behind the jokes. "Yeah, sure, the protocols of the elders of zion isn't real, but look at the reactions you're getting for what amounts to lazy trolling! And from people with actual power - political power, media power, financial power..."

I think you can see where it goes from here - the road to hell isn't always paved with good intentions, but when turning around means accepting that the people who hate you are right, what are you going to do?

<comment><USER16> If you think this is all just playing devil's advocate and trolling there is something deeply flawed about your assumptions about how these people(alienated young white men) experience modern culture and politics.

<comment><USER14> I think it there is a lot of things going on at the same time.

Mental health issues, loneliness, social issues such as homelessness (living with your parents) and unemployment (underemployment, declining living standards), teenagers seeking borders and deliberately going for things that their parents does not approve, people seeking political change by first destroying the existing world.

But still it is hard to understand how it has gotten to the state it is today. This attack, the Christchurch attack are directly related to the chans. If Breivik was 5 years later, he would probably be there as well.

Plus other things are coming out of these boards that seem to start as practical jokes but ends up having major impact: Hyping of various cryptocurrencies, QAnon ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One feels compelled to point out that, despite 8chan being a breeding ground of hate, threads by mass shooters are typically removed in minutes and threats or manifestos containing identifying information are forwarded to the authorities, with at least one known incident being prevented by them, a planned shooting at Bethel Park High School.

Which, frankly, is the surprising part since I don't know why any sane person would set foot there. I visited once a few weeks after its founding and it had already degenerated to the point most regular users probably deserve to be on some kind of government list. Going there is just asking for trouble and I would urge anyone curious to look for screenshots instead of actually visiting the website.

<comment><USER18> > despite 8chan being a breeding ground of hate, threads by mass shooters are > typically removed in minutes

So, it is ok that people promote and help mass shooters as far as there is no direct connection the day of the attack?

> Going there is just asking for trouble and I would urge anyone curious to > look for screenshots instead of actually visiting the website.

Is a screenshot of hate speech promoting hate less than a rendered HTML page?

I will imagine that an Islamic extremist site will be closed within minutes of gaining notoriety. Why are we sparing white-nationalist propaganda?

<comment><USER19> You'd be imagining wrong. Cloudflare left up ISIS websites because they said it isn't their job police content.

<comment><USER20> You know, I don't necessarily disagree with Cloudlare's take on "we shouldn't be the internet police", but do find it kind of funny that their ideology and approach conveniently aligns with being the absolute cheapest and laziest approach to the problem.

<comment><USER21> Which is every corporations modus operandi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Personal Reasons and Thoughts: My whole life I have been preparing for a > future that currently doesn't exist. The job of my dreams will likely be > automated. (...)

It's only mentioned in passing but this may be the most relevant part for HN to discuss.

<comment><USER16> Migration, automation, and the meaning of life in the new western world.

Someone should write a book for white males, sadly we keep leaving this discussion to neonazis and white supremacists online instead of having it ourselves in the public realm...

<comment><USER23> Jordan Peterson comes to mind. But even he gets labeled as an """alt-right""" even though he is super moderate when you actually listen to him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A focus on the mediums through which these shooters express their views misses the forest for the trees, which is that this is fundamentally a political problem.

There is an ascendant political ideology in the United States, and in the West more broadly, that is rooted in a fear that White supremacy is being eroded by immigration and demographic change, and that violence against minority populations is an acceptable response to these changes.

This ideology is promoted by the President and prominent members of the Republican Party and the party-affiliated media; government goon squads are used to harass and ethnically cleanse those populations; and "lone-wolf" paramilitaries terrorize them directly, while allowing their "respectable" enablers and ideological supporters some degree of plausible deniability.

The solution to this problem doesn't lie in technology or communication platforms or mental health awareness or anything like that. It lies in organizing politically to defeat the supporters of this ideology and take power away from its proponents.

<comment><USER25> \- Even if by Sybil attacks that ideology is numerically irrelevant, the media amplifies their message and drowns out other messages. Bernie was attacked by centrists for doing an interview on Fox News, it's not just the Republicans contributing to the current state of affairs.

\- For Trump to support neo-nazis he doesn't even need to praise them (even though he does it anyway), just selectively unenforce their actions. Inaction can be a political statement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The theory seems to be that white supremacists just naturally wish to commit violent hate crimes and that white supremacists use 8chan to indoctrinate more followers.

What if it turns out that white supremacists primary wish is to have their arguments heard by society, but society has instead cast them out and refuses to let them post elsewhere so they can only post on 8chan, and that some of them, mentally unstable, react to being outcast in extreme ways?

I'm not arguing that they have any good points or that we should give them a platform. I'm certainly not arguing that any of their actions are justified. But if this second view of the situation is more accurate, it suggests a solution to the problem that the first view completely misses. How could we tell the difference?

I'm thinking of something more akin to this: [https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man- convinc...](https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man- convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes).

I have to admit ignorance though, I have not read any manifestos (the Christchurch one is illegal for me to read) I am quite unfamiliar with 8chan (I've heard people talk of 4chan and checked it out once when researching the supposed "white power" OK hand symbol hoax) and do not live in America presently so perhaps this speculation is offbase, and I'm happy to be corrected.

<comment><USER27> So you basically have no idea what you're talking about but want to talk about giving a wider platform to nazis?

<comment><USER26> I said "I'm not arguing that they have any good points or that we should give them a platform."

Also, admitting ignorance doesn't mean I have "no idea". I've read a bit of psychology on this topic, and feelings of being rejected by society are very powerful motivators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Despite the attention these cases get, the US murder rate is half what it was in 1980 [https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/murder- rates](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/murder-rates)

<comment><USER10> Murders are frequently family and gang related. Mass shootings of random people are a different thing altogether.

How many murders in 1980 were of people that the killer did not know personally?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What's even stranger to me is how "normal" mass shootings have become

<comment><USER3> Apparently this marks US Mass shooting #250 for 2019 (this was the 215th day of the year).

[1] [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/08/03/el- pas...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/08/03/el-paso-walmart- shooting-250th-mass-shooting-this-year/1913486001/)

<comment><USER30> Worth considering the varying definitions of mass shooting can inflate the count beyond what people may think of when they read "mass shooting".

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact- checker/wp/2015/12/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact- checker/wp/2015/12/03/obamas-inconsistent-claim-on-the-frequency-of-mass- shootings-in-the-u-s-compared-to-other-countries/?utm_term=.60ada5099c1b)

The US is a large company and there are more guns than people. There's a lot of opportunity for people to snap and go on a rampage, unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> Even if they consider "3" to be "mass" it's a bit alarming.

<comment><USER9> The problem though is that numbers aren't really the salient characteristic here. If some gang kills 5 members of another gang, that's not really a "mass killing" in the sense that this El Paso thing was.

<comment><USER31> Not ideologically, but very much in the sense that the state has lost control of ensuring the safety of its citizens, which is what it boils down to at the end of the day.

There are very straight-forward steps to be taken to reduce both gang violence and the fanatic mass shootings, and they're not being pursued.

<comment><USER9> Ya sorry. They are definitely in certain senses the same thing. But in others they're not. I think when thinking about causes the random killings are important to consider as a group though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Saying that "XYZ media outlet is a normal part of mass shoothing now" is a hypocrisy, because 1. the real problem you should be focusing on is why "Mass shootings are a normal part of the society now", 2. hate can and will be "farmed" in the next outlet, if we ban one.

You could go as far as outlawing anonymous internet access (require identity in all online actions), but people with these intentions would still find a way to congregate and develop/use a specific language to evade detection and control.

We really need to start looking hard at what causes pressure build-ups in our society and start working on alleviation of these, because while the side effects of anti-depression medication may act as the last-mile enabler in these special cases, it's not the core problem and as such will deflect our attention from solving the core problem/problems. (I'm not touching the gun- control issue. E.g. in London or Japan, they will kill you with a knife. Tomorrow it may be a chemical weapon. Etc.)

In my experience the biggest problem is paradoxically the lack of communication from the side of the government to the side of the people. Many controversial programs can be explained in a common language so that an information vacuums aren't created and then filled by "conspiracy theorists". E.g. _clearly_ explain the logic behind immigration policies (democrats), explain the logic behind fiscal policies (the FED, the ECB), the logic behind taxation rates, and so on.

I'm not saying that governments are perfect or that there is zero truth in some conspiracy theories, but I see the lack of information flow be the biggest issue because it causes people's disbelief in their governments' actions and that breeds all sorts of problems.

</comment><comment><USER33> They should monitor 8chan for manifestos and get alerts for PDF attachments.

> _It was originally posted on 4chan, later to 8chan._

> _In each instance, community members denounced the man's intentions and > informed LEO._

<comment><USER34> the fbi literally pays people to post in threads about mass shooters.

<comment><USER35> Citation needed?

<comment><USER36> I can't speak to the accuracy of this, but a quick Google search suggested [0] which linked to [1], which says:

> What is notable is that next to the "Anonymous" user label on some of the > posts is a "(You)" marking:

> As it turns out, this text is to let the user know that they are looking at > their own posts! This means that Special Agent Rod inadvertently exposed > himself as 8chan user ID "8f4812" by including these screenshots as his > supporting exhibit.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/c1nnsn/fbi_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/c1nnsn/fbi_agent_accidentally_reveals_own_8chan_posts/)

[1] [https://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/fbi-8chan/](https://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/fbi-8chan/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The 4-page manifesto posted yesterday: [https://egbertowillies.com/2019/08/03/patrick-crusius- manife...](https://egbertowillies.com/2019/08/03/patrick-crusius-manifesto/)

<comment><USER38> Has that been verified as actually being his? Twitter reports were saying that it was a hoax and hasn't been attributed to the El Paso criminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There was a time that it was difficult for me to understand how it was possible that governments in the middle east were supporting domestic terrorism. It was difficult to imagine how normal people were supporting the killing of fellow citizens.

Now, that I see this same trend unravel in the USA it becomes easier to understand. I have seen for the past decades the shifting of what "conservative" means. Extremists were always there, that I knew. But, it has been scary to see how moving what normality is toward the extreme has happened. News, in USA case Fox News, have validated the extremist's views creating an equivalence between "both sides".

In Europe there are similar movements, but, it has not been televised so much. Except, maybe, for the rise of extremism in the United Kingdom.

As interesting it is from the political perspective, it is dishearting the amount of suffering that it is causing. The political discourse is not used to agree in a way forward for society but as a battleground. And, again, news outlets share its part of fault. Diminishing investment in education probably is even more to blame.

The response is not to be angry, but to be calm and help society to value well-intended discussions over sensationalist posts and news headers.

I hope that it is not too late, the last time that xenophobia was not stoped it cost over 80 million lives, this time it will be way worse.

<comment><USER39> The reason why extremism is having more trouble taking root in Europe is because there's less inequality there. Where inequality is highest, terrorism is highest.

<comment><USER40> I doubt it's that one dimensional. One could point out that making things equal results in (edit) even more terror (as most former communists countries prove). Of course that reasoning would ignore the Scandinavian "exception".

<comment><USER39> It is actually that simple, because it is a fundamental part of social psychology. In primitive cultures, when one man amassed too much wealth, he'd give it away for two reasons: one: it brings him prestige as a benefactor, and two: it prevents disgruntled members from killing him.

We're socially wired to keep things "fair", and when very unfair things happen, we have an almost religious feeling of righteous indignation. If someone is cheating society, we want to punish them and set things right. This is why there's a tendency towards lynch mobs, or their modern twitter equivalents.

Equivalently, when someone feels excluded from the basic things he sees others enjoying freely (food, sex, shelter, leisure), he also feels this injustice, and will want to lash out, punish, and bring justice back to his society. If he's excluded for long enough, or to an extreme enough degree, he'll stop associating himself with that society, and possibly even consider replacing it with a better one. Of course, not everyone who feels the bad end of inequality is going to take up a gun and start shooting, but the less emotionally stable you are from your circumstances, the greater the risk. These "manifests" are a last-ditch effort to be listened to, respected, and included. I'm not talking about listening to whatever weird bullshit they're spouting; I'm talking about listening to their pain and humanity.

The sad part is that many justice systems are designed to exclude those convicted of a crime, thus excluding the most vulnerable, who need inclusion the most. It's one reason why you have such high recidivism rates in societies with more vengeful justice systems.

Inequality is a form of exclusion, and we're wired to fight it. Fighting terrorism is fighting the symptom rather than the cause. The harder you hit them, the harder they fight back, because they've got nothing left to lose that they care about, and they have "righteousness" on their side.

<comment><USER41> That is the most succinct well thought out reasoning on this phenomenon I have ever read. I wish there was a way to stop this rather than have "rich people should share", because that just seems really unlikely :<

<comment><USER39> All societies drift towards inequality. We can't avoid that because our rules and laws are imperfect, and people will take advantage to control a bigger slice of the pie. That's fine, so long as we have corrections from time to time to redistribute wealth and power (such as the wealth giveaways that primitive societies practiced, or debt jubilees in more complex societies).

Historically, when inequality goes on for too long, social unrest takes root and gradually grows worse, divisive factions and subgroups grow, "little battles" take place, and, if untreated for too long, revolution breaks out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> According to gunviolencearchive ([https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/](https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/)), there were 251 mass shootings in the USA since the beginning of 2019. I don't know if this number is correct, but I just can't understand why guns are still allowed in USA.

<comment><USER43> The American right believes that it needs guns to protect itself from the government and is terrified that the left will come to take its guns away.

This has gotten more and more extreme to the point that they are now basically against any gun control laws including restrictions on machine guns or any sort of background checks.

<comment><USER44> > This has gotten more and more extreme to the point that they are now > basically against any gun control laws including restrictions on machine > guns or any sort of background checks.

You are aware that ownership of machine guns is both _extremely_ restricted and rather expensive, while almost all legal gun transfers require a background check, right? (The transfers that don't require a background check are private sales in certain states) Or are you saying that people want these restrictions to be rolled back?

<comment><USER43> > Or are you saying that people want these restrictions to be rolled back?

This.

As far as I am aware, the NRA is now believes people should be able to own fully automatic weapons although that wasn't always their position.

(And they obviously are against restrictions on semiautomatic weapons since their California division had sued the government about them.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> People seemed to have invented writing to keep track of grain inventories, and to record for all eternity the great moral decline of the world caused by the doings of the author's political enemies, and if only they had the tools to stop the Bad Ideas from spreading, why, we could all live a utopian existence of pure harmony.

<comment><USER46> The first dictatorship to crack the secret of the mind will be the first eternal regime, in all likelihood.

For a certain definition of eternity, at any rate.

<comment><USER47> What do you think Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and 1 or 2 others have done?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's not just 8Chan. Violence is now normalised across a range of sites. Here's Breitbart:[https://twitter.com/EJGibney/status/1157809158902681600?s=20](https://twitter.com/EJGibney/status/1157809158902681600?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER49> 4chan and 8chan are cancers upon the internet. The sites themselves and their community members spew toxicity, hate, cynicism, and revulsion wherever they turn up. They revel in trolling, harassment, and offense for the sake of offense. This, as recent events demonstrate, often extends further into deep- seated hatred and racism. I don't know if it's an intrinsic side effect of the 100% anonymous culture or just just the way they developed over time, but there's no denying that they serve as a perfect breeding ground for this kind of indoctrination and degeneration.

They're perfect feedback loops - the more time one spends in such places, the more strongly the mindsets they proclaim become rooted and the harder it is to break away. People go in feeling alienated and rejected and stay stuck there, finding a perverse connection in their inability to connect and interact with the rest of society in a positive manner. As a result of fixating on the things that set them apart and consuming endless torrents of content from people similarly afflicted, it makes it even harder for them to escape the feedback loop. Mental illness is rampant among the users there, and instead of people afflicted with it being helped or guided into acceptable patterns of interaction, they're mocked or worse yet praised for the negative behavior they exhibit.

I've seen this happen to several friends first-hand. One of the most dangerous and destructive things that I've noticed is a disconnection between ideas and reality that comes out of a broken concept of "irony." A common claim is that people started these communities as places where they would "ironically" pretend to be racist or mentally ill, and as a result they attracted _actually_ racist and mentally ill people who ended up taking over the community from within. I think things go a step further: that people who "ironically" take part in hate speech, homophobia, and other bigoted belief systems end up slipping into believing them themselves. Or rather, the line between irony and reality itself dissolves over time after constant exposure, often at the exclusion of all else.

I don't have any ideas for solutions to the problems that these kinds of communities create. Their very design makes eliminating the issues or cutting out bad actors completely next to impossible, and no amount of cleanup work after the fact is going to eliminate what is clearly a deeply-rooted and persistent system. Any attempts to exemplify the sickness of their community will be seen as attacks and just make their beliefs deeper.

</comment><comment><USER50> It was recently revealed that 8chan is funded primarily by selling sex tourism-themed audio books on Amazon. To my knowledge, Amazon has still not answered requests for comments, nor have they discontinued funding.

Here's the article: [https://popular.info/p/exclusive-how-money-flows-from- amazon](https://popular.info/p/exclusive-how-money-flows-from-amazon)

<comment><USER4> Jim Watkins owns a lot of things, including 2channel ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel)), a pig farm, and a VPS/VPN/webhosting provider. It's unlikely that those audiobooks are the biggest source of income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Good thing I've got banned on 4chan for a whole year

</comment><comment><USER52> So is Facebook Live

</comment><comment><USER53> This ian't the sort of topic that I normally comment on, but today's events have been particularly disturbing, so I thought I would share what I have experienced.

I have seen two very different people that are very close to me radicalized and turned into full-blown white nationalist, violent tinfoil-hat types.

In the first case, my brother (let's call him Bill) struggled with uncontrollable anger and violent outbursts for his entire life from the getgo. I've been told that that could be linked to a near-suffocation event that happened to him during birth, though I suspect that may be neither here nor there.

Because of his behavioral issues and a terrible juvenile "corrections" system, he spent the majority of his life from the age of twelve through 25 in juvenile detention, jail, and eventually prison. He was in some of the most violent prisons in the United States, and joined a "white power" gang largely for survival. He regularly espoused the exact views detailed in the manifesto on a regular basis whenever he was out. However, after a few years out he sort of naturally came to the conclusion that his whole ideology was bullshit and abandoned it. At present, he no longer holds those views.

In case 2, a friend (who I will call Bob), had never been in trouble, never had any family trouble or any serious trauma, started spouting the exact same stuff as Bill used to. He was about 26 when this started, and it was an enormous surprise to _everyone_ he knew. I, being extremely curious by nature and very close to Bob, spent dozens of hours trying to get to the root of what was going on with him to absolutely no avail.

The important thing with Bob is, his answer to every question about "Where are you getting that?" was a simple "I read it on 4chan/8chan and I believe it." Every. Single. Time.

I realized a couple things. First off, Bob was gone. Every conversation with him was just him repeating *chan talking points over and over again. No amount of appeals to humanity could provoke a novel thought. He kept to his points religiously, and he made it exceedingly clear that he was trying to recruit as much as he could.

Secondly, Bill had originally found himself in his situation through systematic dismantling of his humanity, whereas Bob was doing it purely for uh, internet street cred? Bill was able to face the real world after leaving prison and make his own decisions, but Bob carried something (in my opinion, specifically regarding this issue of radicalization) far more insidious around in his pocket. The approval he craved from the chans was something that had to be sated daily, which made (and continues to make) him a terrifying person to be around.

My point is that from firsthand experience with people from two very different backgrounds that I am very close to, the 4/8/whatever chans are far scarier when it comes to indoctrination than most people could believe without seeing.

TL;DR This issue is far larger and more impactful than nearly anyone would care to admit, and sites like 8chan will likely have an unpredictable and indelible impact on many, many people's lives until it is acknowledged and addressed.

<comment><USER49> ^ This is a really important comment - both of these cases are perfect examples of the issues with places like 4chan and 8chan.

I find the case of Bob particularly important to recognize since people like him - people who are by every definition radicalized by violent, hateful, and destructive ideologies - often don't seem that way from the outside. They can carry out normal, successful lives while still harboring these extreme views and internalizing them very deeply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I believe the World Wide Web is largely positive, but the results like this is truly inevitable.

> _Or more simply, we're experiencing the "disruption" of computing that was > promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of > this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what's a "good" outcome vs a > "bad" one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum._ \- an > HN user previously told me.

The computing pioneers dreamed the Internet would enable the free and fast flow of information, create decentralization, promote democracy, freedom of speech, and liberate us from all the old forms of political control. In the beginning, things were great. The emergent of the Free Software Movement, the Cypherpunk Movement, and early online commmunities such as The WELL ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL)) or Usenet all seemed to prove the idealism of the Net. Even today, it still keeps unleashing human creativity. And even when the tech is increasingly used as tools of oppression, arguablly, the Net still significant improved the autonomy of individuals and encouraged free thinking.

One core tenet of personal computing and the Net is empowering individuals, "we the people". The pioneers of the Net were revolutionary, they wanted to make the world a better place by digitizing the human society. Unfortunately, whoever was playing with computers and the Internet in the 1980s-1990s were elites. They have received extensive academic trainings, and/or came from the middle class. So the element of populism in the hacker culture played a positive role. And crucially, the development of the Internet was done in parallel of globalization and the economic boom of 80s neoliberalism, so there was no major social conflicts as well.

But after 2008-2010, this populist idea started to show its dark side - <USER2> (1) all the people and all their dogs have been connected to the web, (2) a tendency of disintegration of the global economic and political order is coming - the same populism stopped playing the original very-positive role. It has became clear that, any idea can by popularized and supported by a free Internet, or propagated more easily (e.g. flat-Earth, anti-vax, extremism). David Perell called it "the disappearance of the Overton window". Also, all individuals are empowered, including marginalized groups, malicious attackers and psychopaths.

I've been observing various online trolling culture and fringe reactionary political movements for a few years. Mostly 4chan, but I think it applies to the web in general. While I don't agree with their intentions or motivations, but I found it's an extremely interesting phenomenon and pretty post-modernist in itself.

* The cyclist behind an anti-cyclist Facebook group

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731220](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731220)

* Recommended comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731914)

Here's a story: a biking hobbyist used his spare time and launched an influential anti-bike movement on Facebook. He posted numerous sensationalized commentaries, posters and memes to demonize bikers, including the various "data" and "charts" for the "bikes are a great threat of traffic order" propaganda, and occasionally advocated violence towards bikers in forms of half-jokes. He also proposed political reforms to introduce restrictive and/or discriminatory traffic laws for bikers. Soon, his campaign has gone viral and attracted a large number of supporters who drive cars. Well, not all bikers follow the traffic rules and some problems surely exist, but they are only as bad as the average day-to-day traffic and usually not seen as something people need to act upon, but this campaign exaggerates it, radicalized it and polarized the issue and created lot of hate. What is his intention then? His only intention is laughing at this fact: he was able to manipulate the car drivers easily and even create a raged populist political movement with a mere keyboard.

We hardly know who's behind the populist political movements online, but this is a well-documented case, and I believe it can be a representative sample which largely reflects the origin, emotions and motivation of the 4chan-like "for-the-lulz" trolling culture. Also, I can immediately point out the similarities to the populist reactionary political movements: the nationalism propaganda used many of the tactics the biking troll has used. Also, Russia is accused by the media to create an army of bots on social media, such as pro- LGBT, anti-LGBT, pro-life, pro-choice, religion fundamentalism, atheism, nationalistic, liberal, etc, with the intention of creating polarized argument and social conflicts in the United State.

On the other hand, the "for-the-lulz" trolling culture itself, even can be used as propaganda, is not propaganda in itself. It is a form of complicated web culture. It's basic definition is "doing some pointless activities to make others to suffer, and laugh at it", but it stands for a lot of things. It has a reactionary, or anti-establishment element, as previously mentioned, but it also includes: (1) cultural jamming, similar to the 70s counter-cultural movement (see those hoaxes in Fight Club), (2) It understands the art of exploiting a vulnerability in the system for one's own advantage, similar to parts of the hacker culture, (3) Also, it has a somewhat nihilist, post- modernist component, sometimes artistic (The Game was popular on early 4chan: once you remember playing it, you lose it), and (4), it reflects the worrying, helplessness and alienating aspects of modern life, and as an entertainment against them using humor and hate, then finally (5) a populist movement. It's core logic is: everyone, look how evil/degenerate this thing/person is, the justice needs to be done! Sometimes, it can be a legitimate popular movement and serve the right purpose, e.g. Occupy Movement, but other times, it's just a bunch of angry mobs lynching people. For example, a list of people on Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Especially, when I grasped these points, I found things went pretty stupid when, for example, the mainstream media started reporting Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol in 2016. Yes, it has connections to reactionary political movements, but itself is only a symbol of the trolling cultural. When the media reports it, it actually gives it a platform of exposure, and encouraged trolls to use it as a genuinely political symbol, and personally I think it makes the issue worse.

What I'm trying to say is, to solve problems like this, we must study and understand the entire machinery of it, including the underlying social- economical basis of this conflict using sociology and psychology, and to provide social solutions to the problem. However, the only proposal the mainstream media (or us, as online members of online communities) has right now is "Twitter and Facebook should ban hate speech", or "we should not feed the trolls", which hardly touches deeper problems.

Also, when the important argument for Internet freedom is that they bring democracy and equality no longer works, should the Internet be free and open? Should we still protect and promote the freedom speech? I firmly believe the answer must be YES. However, if we left these problems unaddressed and only "ban them", the answer is going to be "no" soon.

Furthermore, I think that stochastic terrorism can not be 100% eliminated without creating a police state, which is more harmful than a few terrorists. Lone-wolf terrorism is a feature in modern life, we can only enhance our understanding of sociology to partially reduce the harm.

P.S: Watch _Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex_ , its plot has a surprising deep discussion of the consequences of a hyperconnected humanity, meme culture and random terrorism is an important theme in the show, and contains great inspirations.

\----

Appendix:

David Perell's excellent 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" [1], examines and analyzes the current chaos in politics, business and education, and concluded that it was caused by the transformation from a information- deficient to a information-rich society, and has a similar argument just like mine.

Also, if you want to understand more about the trolling culture and its mechanism, I recommend "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture", by Whitney Phillips, published by The MIT Press.

[1] [https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going- on](https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on)

</comment><comment><USER55> I believe the solution is more systemic; part media, part economic:

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

</comment><comment><USER56> ...how have things gotten objectively worse for young men?

<comment><USER57> It's very hard to find a partner nowadays. In the past, people dated within the local community, so women were limited to their local dating pool. With the advent of online dating, women can afford to be choosy and pick from guys all over the country, if not even all over the world. As a result, many men that would have found someone in the past are going to be lonely nowadays.

Now, the obvious reply to that is "but online dating is for men too, look at all these guys meeting a different girl every day". This applies to a very small minority of men. The confident, attractive types with great bodies. An average woman will still get lots of attention on dating website and have a lot of guys to pick from, an average guy won't really get any attention on such websites.

<comment><USER58> > This applies to a very small minority of men. The confident, attractive > types with great bodies. An average woman will still get lots of attention > on dating website and have a lot of guys to pick from, an average guy won't > really get any attention on such websites.

I don't know where you live/what dating pool you have experience with, but here are some contrasting anecdotal observations from NYC:

1) Straight women I know here get way more swipes than straight guys, but lots of straight guys will swipe indiscriminately and immediately unmatch, or will send extremely lazy or off-putting, salacious messages a ton of the time. It's not everyone, but it's common enough to be extremely obnoxious and discourage straight women from swiping right on guys or messaging them. They get more swipes, but more of those are noise.

2) Straight guys will get way fewer matches, and straight women will tend not to message them first/respond very often. This encourages some guys to swipe indiscriminately (see above), though my straight guy friends who are more measured have far more success.

3) Attractive/hip people tend to date each other. The hot guys aren't out there dating less attractive women/taking them out of the dating pool for less conventionally-attractive guys.

4) I've seen awkward, conventionally unattractive straight guys get tons of dates online. It seems a bit harder than if they are conventionally attractive, but none of them seem to have any trouble finding dates.

5) Some of my friends have unrealistic standards for their partners, whom they expect to be more attractive, socially graceful, fashionable, intelligent, and/or wealthy than themselves. These friends either reject everyone they might have a chance with on dating sites or complain about their partners.

6) I've seen plenty of really hot women with homely men and vice versa in couples I know. I can't say I've noticed that women have an easier time than men "dating up" in terms of conventional attractiveness. It seems like conventional attractiveness is just a starting point, but good presentation, social graces, and wealth markers can push overall attractiveness arbitrarily far in either direction.

It probably varies a lot from place to place, but in my slice of NYC, it's not particularly dominated by conventional attractiveness, and overall outcomes seem similar across genders (despite the swiping behavior differences noted at first). Standards of conventional attractiveness also vary widely of course.

<comment><USER59> I don't know how far it generalises, but a lot of my early 30s female friends complain about how hard it is to find a long term relationship.

Dates are easy to get, but explicitly looking for a long term thing puts off a lot of guys because it's just not the expectation. There is pressure to hold off on deep conversations or say you're just looking for fun when that really isn't the case.

'sometimes I just tell the guy on the first date that I'm looking for someone to settle down with. I've never gotten a second after that'

Getting ghosted by mr right for the twentieth time and wondering what is wrong with you seems as self esteem destroying as not being able to get a date at all.

I guess tinder just wrecked dating.

<comment><USER60> Funny thing: I've also heard the opposite complaint from a lot of people!

But it's true, most people really go to Tinder expecting only dating and one night stands.

However, when you're upfront and tell guys you want to settle down you're filtering them, so I guess it's working as intended?

Maybe putting that info in your profile would make it harder to get matches, but at least you'll won't have bad surprises.

EDIT: Another choice is to just keep quiet during dates and probe the guys subtly. Works for some people.

<comment><USER58> Yeah, people who are completely direct about what they want in both their profile and communications tend to have a much better time on apps. I try to put things in my profile that will be charming to people I might like and alienating to people I wouldn't, and it works very well. You have to have some standards and filter out obvious bad matches quickly. Since you're not dating in your social circles, you don't have the advantage of a pre-vetted dating pool, so you have to just recognize that most of the people you see won't be a good match at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Its a normal part of me looking up manifestos and videos that other media sites dance around when I want to know what happened.

I'll browse a twitter thread for a good 30 seconds after being made aware of a mass shooting, if everyone is congratulating each other for not saying someone's name and not posting the gopro video I'll just go straight to 4chan or 8chan.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is so weird for me. This keeps happening and I just don't get it.

The __chan* boards are still some of the few places on the internet for people to actually _learn_ something. I went to university, but I feel I only got an education when I started reading and 4chan.org/lit was where I went to learn. This was in my mid-20s - this is where I learned about things like Middlemarch, The Book of Disquiet, If On A Winters Night a Traveler, etc. This ([https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/sub](https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/sub)) is amazing and can be found nowhere else.

It's also an anonymous board with people who are quite clearly angry and in pain. Since it's anonymous it prevents backlash for hateful ideologies, but it also means that these people can't be found to be reached and helped. But clearly, the solution can't be to allow hate to be public just to help the haters. It's a sad catch-22.

<comment><USER62> I can relate to what you're describing, 8chan's /tech/ is the reason I picked up C and am dabbling in a bit of Rust and how I learnt about free software and Richard Stallman. You could literally just get rid of /pol/ and 8chan would be measurably better, most non-/pol/acks hate them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Reddit is also a big part of it but as long as Steve Huffman aka spez gets the sweet money from Thiel he is fine with having lots of blood on his hands. He probably is one of the godfathers of alt right now.

What is the blood of innocents worth when you can make money? Nothing.</comment>


Rain simulator for pluviophiles - <AUTHOR> http://pluvior.com/raindrops.html

<comment><USER2> Oh man, as a southerner stuck in California, I cannot tell you how much I miss rain. And especially thunderstorms[1].

(if you want a few recommendations) I love how the drops wipe away the moisture on the "window"; in my experience the droplets won't fall perfectly straight: they get perturbed by the smaller droplets on the window (what they're wiping away). Subsequent drops in the "tracks" left by earlier drops will fall faster, since there aren't any smaller droplets to hold them up. They also speed up as they get bigger, and wind will cause them to move together.

Can I get a thunderstorm?

Also, thank you — I'd long forgotten the name of the song and the artist; I'd been looking for "Primavera" by Ludovico Einaudi [2] for a while now. (another Ludovico Einaudi piece was on the page)

[1] I would have never guessed that a place "couldn't" have thunderstorms; I've been in Silicon Valley for four years now, and there's been barely anything that passes for a thunderstorm. (For anyone in the bay area going "we have thunderstorms, sometimes!"… it isn't the same.)

I've occasionally wondered if people in the south aren't more religious because the weather (the south has thunderstorms, hail, tornadoes, the bay area has… lots of sun.) isn't literally putting the fear of God in them.

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmxFAT581T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmxFAT581T4)

<comment><USER3> Boodler [1] is an open-source system for generating soundscapes. It comes with a hour long thunderstorm soundscape [2] that grows and then fades away.

The author of Boodler also has an iOS app [3] specifically for the thunderstorm.

[1]: [http://boodler.org/](http://boodler.org/) [2]: [http://boodler.org/package/com.eblong.ow.storm/](http://boodler.org/package/com.eblong.ow.storm/) [3]: [http://zarfhome.com/pocketstorm/](http://zarfhome.com/pocketstorm/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The switches are really confusing for me: white = on, cyan = off, which the opposite as I expected. The night/day toggle also seems broken - "Night" always get underlined.

Firefox 38.0 here, if that matters.

Nice stuff otherwise :)

<comment><AUTHOR> My fault, thank you for notifying us, kind regards

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe ombrophile (Greek ὄμβρος 'rain storm') is a more sensible derivation than pluviophile (Latin pluvium 'rain') -- although it looks like people on the Internet mostly use it in a technical sense to describe plants or forests.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very nice!

It would be even nicer - although none of the ambient/white noise generators I've seen so far does that - if one could control the intensity of the rain or make it do that little thumping sound when rain drops hit the window.

Don't get me wrong, though - this _is_ very nice! Especially as it's a cold- ish, rainy day outside where I live.

<comment><USER7> That's why I built Storm Sim. It's in the App Store.

It dynamically generates the audio based on the samples you select and in advanced mode you can adjust the variance, frequency, looping, etc.

I made two huge mistakes based on bad assumptions (it was my first iOS app)

1: that you wouldn't want to edit the storm while it was playing. I have the code working now to do live updates and should be releasing it soon.

2: that people would care more about the audio than a fancy UI since you spend the vast majority of the time listening (not looking). Boy was I wrong! I still haven't gotten a good designer to help me tidy it up.

If you like it don't buy IAP in the free version - you can get the same stuff for $4 cheaper in the paid version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really cool. I love rain. The droplets are great. Consider desaturating the Manhattan at night photograph some to make it look more "rainy." Example: [http://i.imgur.com/apg5CwK.png](http://i.imgur.com/apg5CwK.png)

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds good. I am a pluviophile. Is this any different than, for example, rainymood.com, rainycafe.com or rain.simplynoise.com, among others? No offense meant. Just curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Made for fun, choose your favorite one.

<comment><USER9> Cool. Thanks. Again, nice job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can you go into more detail about the raindrop "simulation" on the window? I love the idea, but it seems like they larger drops are just moving random distances at random times, clearing a path as they go.

That's a nice first approximation, but it would be cool to put some real dynamics in there. For instance, I noticed they are not "absorbing" droplets as they fall; if a smaller droplet rolls over a bigger drop, the bigger one just disappears. Also, the movement for smaller drops should be initiated when another small drop randomly falls into the surface. This should be a poisson process, and I could be wrong but I feel like that's not what's being used here. Lastly, the distance a drop will roll should depend on how "dry" the path is that it travels, although that one seems pretty hard to simulate!

<comment><USER11> Pretty sure this is just [https://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/](https://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks good, but why do you limit the Night version to 10fps? The JS profiler shows you're explicitly doing nothing on 5 out of 6 frames.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean to make the motion more smooth?

<comment><USER12> I mean in `animateDrops` you check if `timestamp - lastExecutionTime < speed`. You set `speed` to 100ms when you call `engine.rain`.

Because of this the motion is jittery, updating at about 1/3 the rate of smooth video and 1/6th the rate our eyes can perceive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can you please make a favicon, so people can delete the title of the bookmark so that it takes up less space

<comment><USER14> You can usually edit the titles of your own bookmarks.

<comment><USER15> Yeah but favicon appears next to the bookmarked page's title in browsers. If there's no favicon you can't say which page the bookmark leads to after deleting the whole title to save space :-)

<comment><USER16> I use the "I hate your favicon" extension for Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/i-hate-your- favico...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/i-hate-your- favicon/laggbmpbikikiablknnppgglelkncemk)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very nice. Does anyone have a recommendation of a good rain in video game? The genre - racing, shooter, RPG, or even a demoscene - I don't mind, I just want good rains and thunderstorms!

<comment><USER18> The video game that first came to mind was the opening segment of Metal Gear Solid 2. Something about the rain in that first part of the game was done perfectly. I've placed a video of the opening scene below.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukh7C9zkXGc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukh7C9zkXGc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Note for rain-fans: a 'pink noise' generator can make a sound which, while not quite like a recording, should make you feel the same rainy feelings. :)

<comment><USER20> If pinknoise will suffice, then sox[1], (free, cross-platform, opensource), lets you generate your own (amongst many other things). The following will play for 8 hours, but you can remove the time completely to run indefinitely:

          play -n synth 08:00:00 pinknoise

[1]: [http://sox.sf.net/](http://sox.sf.net/)

</comment></comment><comment> david-given If you like this sort of thing, don't miss Andrew Plotkin's procedural soundscape generator, Boodler; the one-hour summer storm is particularly epic. (Pocket Storm is also now available as a standalone iThing app.)

It's at [http://boodler.org/](http://boodler.org/).

</comment><comment><USER21> Good job, although having everything blurred until a drop hits the window makes me feel I'm in the shower.

</comment><comment> marshall-lee First of all I should say that it's really a good thing!

But please fix a bug with fullscreen mode — It resizes incorrectly when I press F11 (Chromium 42.0.2311.90).

It's also worth to add more photos! Or just change them periodically — every week, for instance.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the next week, photos and sounds will be changed every day or two, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If people are looking for similar things, there's also [http://calm.com](http://calm.com) from Alex Tew of Million Dollar Homepage fame.

</comment><comment><USER23> It would also be great if we could have chance to see lightnings with some(I don't know how) light effects on the picture when it is on. Just an idea.. Great job by the way!

</comment><comment><USER24> I've heard a couple of other sites like this, is there a googlable term for them? A directory? Soudscape site? The rain sound loops a bit too often in longer listening.

<comment><USER25> I've been using [http://naturesoundsfor.me/](http://naturesoundsfor.me/) as they let you mix a bunch of sounds and control the relative volumes of each. I've settled on 40% "Creek" and 70% "Rain" for sleeping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me of [http://giant.gfycat.com/DaringMetallicBovine.gif](http://giant.gfycat.com/DaringMetallicBovine.gif)

</comment><comment><USER27> If you listen to this when its already raining its like your roof has a leak. True story.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to make you feel uncomfortably)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love the raindrops running down the fogged-up window :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To change the sound of rain, choose the NIGHT mode.

</comment><comment><USER29> Meh: asoftmurmur.com</comment>


What are the coolest startup culture hacks you've heard of? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-are-the-coolest-startup-culture-hacks-youve-heard-of/answer/Jonny-Miller?__snids__=119958189&__nsrc__=2

<comment><USER2> Slightly off topic:

I use to be an avid Quora user until I got sick of the circle-jerk and became offended by some of their privacy-invading practives. I deactivated my acount--- _deactivated_ , not deleted, because deleting is not an option. Deactivation is basically temporary (they keep your data, and you even get notifications stored).

Anyway, did this happen to anyone else: when I clicked the link, it automatically reactivated my account.

<comment><USER3> If you want your account deleted email email@example.com with a request and it'll be deleted entirely.</comment></comment>


How Math Can Defeat Bullies - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/how-math-can-defeat-bullies/397061/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> This is a story of a person who's never been bullied.</comment>


Hungary No Longer a Democracy – Freedom House - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/06/hungary-no-longer-a-democracy-report-239807 <comment><USER3> Expel them from the EU and NATO. Europe must take a hardline on this or other countries will follow Poland and Hungry's path.

<comment><USER4> It takes a unanimous vote to admit or expel a country (minus one in the case of expelling), IIUC. The EU couldn't kick Hungary out because Poland wouldn't support it.

It's the same reason a theoretical independent Scotland wouldn't be admitted – there's no way that Spain would want precedent set that a country can split off and then rejoin the EU.

<comment><USER5> So the more corrupt and undemocratic the European Union gets, the more constrained the remaining democratic members are from acting on it?

Who came up with _that_ structure?

<comment><USER6> > Who came up with that structure?

Inherent complexity.

You see, it's hard to know in advance all consequences of today's decisions. A person or a political body may have all good intentions, yet with time passing, rules which seems unambiguous and good suddenly are viewed in another light. Many rules can be applied technically correctly, but contrary to the ideas there were when the rules were created.

Sometimes the consequences are seen - there's just no way to avoid them, short of skipping the rulemaking. Sometimes they are not. It seems like legislation, while on the surface similar to software making - only for humans, not computers - in reality works with critically different constraints. That is, computers are relatively easy modeled as systems with clear set of states, while human societies are not.

One may play with the idea to require to attach to every law at the moment of enacting an informal, but complete, as it is feasible, explanation for why the law is created, what its intent and limitations. This will probably won't always work; it may shift problems elsewhere with application - <USER2> - of laws though.

Coming back to your question - do you see this scenario you described as visible and deserving attention at the time EU rules were made?

<comment><USER7> Considering Spain was not a democracy until 1975 and the first EU parliament election was in 1979, I'd say the possibility of an undemocratic state in Europe was not unforeseeable at the time of its formation.

<comment><USER8> > Considering Spain was not a democracy until 1975

History of Spain reports more than fifty general elections before this date, starting at 1810. Is a fact well documented and impossible to ignore, unless you want to rewrite the history of the country in the last 200 years for some reason. The universal concept of democracy, of course, has changed with time but this was not exclusive from Spain.

[https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Elecciones_en_Espa%C3%B1...](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Elecciones_en_Espa%C3%B1a#Cortes_de_C%C3%A1diz_\(1810_-_1814\))

<comment><USER7> So we're just going to gloss over the 36 year Franco dictatorship?

During the 1800s most of europe was under some form of monarchy or dictatorial rule. Its not a relevant timeframe for this discussion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android, evolvability and Comcast - awinter-py http://abe-winter.github.io/evolvability/2017/04/23/android-evolvability.html <comment><AUTHOR> My advice to a new Android developer:

1) The way things are done in the docs is often _wrong_ on fundamental levels. Using libraries from the android team for _e.g._ network comm is often _wrong_ , even if it's "new and friendlier" (nope).

2) The docs are often outdated. Also their examples are always for _exactly not_ the case you need. 100% of the time.

3) Stackoverflow posts are often outdated.

4) You _will_ eventually hit a years-old bug that's been marked "obsolete" in Android's bug tracker. It isn't. There will be a billion workarounds for various Android flavors in the comments. There will be a _patch_ for _Android itself_ with pleas for them to apply and release it. They will not have. The Android team hates you.

5) Don't expect libraries for Google services to be better on their own damn operating system than they are for Javascript.

6) Just use all of Square's Android libraries and development practices. Retrofit, flow, and so on. [0]. In the best of all worlds Google would shutter the Android SDK/libraries team, acquihire Square, and hand it over to them.

[0] [https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/simpler-android- apps-w...](https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/simpler-android-apps-with- flow-and-mortar-5beafcd83761) (sorry, medium post :-( )

[EDIT] 7) the interfaces for many of the more complex UI elements seem to have been made by the interns. Don't be surprised when you have to resort to reflection to _style them_.

<comment><USER2> Based on your post I can't ever imagine wanting to develop Android apps.

<comment><USER3> Or any software ;)

But it's "situation normal" for most software development activities, no?

<comment><USER2> Is it? And if so, I can see the reluctance amongst some to call us a proper engineering field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not saying Android development or Java are that great but this guy spent two weeks on it. That's not enough time to get a feel for the environment. It doesn't matter what the language is, if you drop a developer into a completely unfamiliar one they will feel awkward annoyed and lost for at least a couple months.

<comment> awinter-py (author here). You're right that it takes more than a month to get a handle on tricks tools & quirks in a new language / buildsystem.

That said, if you drop me in a dumpster I can tell immediately that it's a hot day. The forum content around the android problems that I had show that the same problems have been cropping up for years with no improvement.

I don't doubt there are real reasons for the rigidity of android interfaces. Could be that the underlying system is written in C and doesn't interface easily with java. Could be limited staff and high legacy support requirements.

<comment><USER5> No experience on andriod, but I really enjoyed your analogies. Fun to read.

<comment> awinter-py Thanks! Your acoustics business looks awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Speaking of those terms and conditions, I was really surprised to see this in there:

>You may not use this SDK to develop applications for other platforms (including non-compatible implementations of Android) or to develop another SDK. You are of course free to develop applications for other platforms, including non-compatible implementations of Android, provided that this SDK is not used for that purpose.

Older versions of Android Studio were under the Apache License 2.0, but they seem to have changed that sometime in 2015.

</comment><comment><USER7> If this post gains traction, its title will probably be changed to "Android, evolvability & comcast" since that's the title of the linked article.

So here, for posterity, is the original post title, which made me chuckle:

      If you like calling comcast you'll love android studio

<comment> gingerbread-man I'm usually in favor of replacing "flashy" titles, but this is a good one. The analogy fits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have many complaints with java, but this:

"Java is pretty bad at producing portable one-liners. In my opinion that's because of the public/private feature (completely unnecessary), "

was the point, when I stopped taking him seriously.

<comment> awinter-py I'm sensitive to the argument that public/private rules improve maintainability of libraries by shrinking the exported API. Maybe, but that's a maintainability argument, not a usability/reusability argument.

It's hard to predict which part of your program developers are going to need. Also, 'private by default' prevents the gradual modularization of code that happens in languages lacking visibility rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amen! I find Android programming excessively verbose and convoluted. I thought Google was supposed to be staffed by geniuses. The whole thing feels designed by a committee - like something Microsoft would put out. Why didn't they use Python? (Yes I've tried Kivy - meh)

<comment><USER10> > Why didn't they use Python

Are you seriously suggesting using 50x the processing power as a native program on a mobile phone?

<comment><USER11> Did he even ever develop a single complex UI app (or any app actually) in Python?

<comment><USER9> he did :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Java problems the author complained about can be addressed by switching to Kotlin.

I hope Google gives Kotlin 1st class support in android studio and even pushes it as the default language as it is more pleasant to use in my experience.

Not sure single file creation of an Android app (with a user inferface) is possible/advisable though since the separation of view concerns and logic concerns can come in handy. Gradle can be confusing to a first time user but Android studio does provide a GUI for managing dependencies.

<comment><USER13> Kotlin is pretty cool generally, but I'm not so sure it would help the problems of Android development that much, since most of your time will be spent dealing with the plain-Java Android classes and how Android expects you to do things. You'd have to rearchitect the whole Android system in it to really make a difference, and if you're doing that already, it probably doesn't matter that much what language you're doing it in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm so looking forward to his follow up post when he starts trying to develop an iOS app with Xcode and Objective-C.

<comment><USER15> I think you mean with XCode and Swift which I love but you just feel like XCode doesn't like it's new friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I never could put my finger on it till now, but this is why I found Android dev frustrating.

<comment><USER17> As someone who has had to deal with Assembly in the 80s for development projects, Java sounds and works great!

I guess it depends on your experience, attitude and point of view.

<comment><USER10> Better than assembly in the 80s is not a high bar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The solution is called React Native.

\- Single file app: Check

\- Super fast rebuild: Check

\- Dynamic language (high reusability and one-liners): Check (Use ClojureScript to take this even further)

<comment><USER19> There is something seriously wrong with our industry. How can this even be suggested as a solution?

<comment><USER20> Because Facebook has thrown tens of millions of dollars towards getting a unified cross platform method of having 60fps rich mobile apps. Because managing an app of more than trivial complexity on iOS and Android is massively expensive. Because this approach offers the most leverage with the least trade offs of performance, development overhead, and future viability.

And because live coding mobile apps with a REPL is epic.

<comment><USER19> These are all developer centric points. What about users? Android already needs huge batteries, make everything run JavaScript and they'll need to be even larger. And forget computationally heavy apps? The hardware android runs on doesn't exactly have the best JavaScript performance.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure you understand what react-native is... The app your users use isn't running javascript, it's not Facebook Cordova. You use javascript to compose the app, there's no javascript in the app you deliver to the users.

<comment><USER22> Pardon my incredulity, but if you use React, how can you not know that it uses a JS runtime? While it's not as bad as Cordova, you're hardly doing your users any favors in terms of performance by using React.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Parts of this definitely resonate with my experience; there's a reasonable amount of high-level documentation about fixing specific Android build issues, but nearly nothing describing how the system _actually_ works. Lots of StackOverflow answers exist saying "add xyz to your build.gradle file" but there's a dearth of anything describing what the real build process for an Android app is. (For various reasons I didn't have to deal with a lot of the actual app coding, so the XML layout systems were less troubling to me than the author).

> When I get the call from G's android team to build a better buildsystem

I can only hope that this is "when" and not "if" ;-) I can't believe the current system can't be improved upon though...

</comment><comment><USER24> I stopped taking the author seriously when I saw that he was using ListView. Maybe that's a factor of poor documentation, but there's no reason to use ListView (and the are many reasons not too).

I'll admit there are issues with Android, but reducing them to the same tired arguments against Java is just lazy (and lack of config files?).

[Developing for Android for close to 8 years]

<comment><USER25> So what do you use to display a scrollable list of items?

<comment><USER26> RecyclerView

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A lot of the complaints seem like nice-to-haves.

As in, it would be nice to have a better build system, but if you work in Android Studio, you don't need to know what gradle is. (Like visual studio devs not knowing much about msbuild.

It would be nice to have a less verbose language than Java, but the IDE is starting to do a lot of this syntactic sugar work anyway.

</comment><comment><USER28> Man, I knew this was a troll when I clicked the link. I'll briefly vent my spleen and get on with a substantive comment.

I get real tired of web soft boys coming into native and complaining about how complicated it is on the metal. This stuff is hard cause you're not just churning html. It's harder work than writing a web page. Sorry.

Specifically, mobile is resource constrained in a way that server-side work just isn't. Your render thread is a _hot thread_ , and you better not jam it up. That one singular concept is the underlying cause of so, so much of the obfuscation and confusion associated with mobile development.

But that's the gig.

No, switching to javascript won't fix it. Switching to javascript will actually make it much worse, as the kinds of industrial grade tools available to make concurrency manageable (though prone to removing fingers from script kiddies or the unwary), to manage memory, to deal with a database directly, to deal with bluetooth devices, on and on are wholly unavailable, or worse still, are abstraction libraries that require you to fluently deal with both your javascript interface and some _really_ deep native interop libraries, lest you be entrapped in cut-and-paste script kiddiehood.

I could go on at length about the myriad pitfalls and difficulties associated with mobile development, but the simple fact is that doing something cool is _hard work_.

<comment> awinter-py Then don't switch to JS, switch to C++ as the primary dev language. The performance-sensitive parts of the OS are already in C++ and the NDK exists, so this isn't that big a jump in terms of support from the android maintenance team.

C++ is not slower than java on constrained hardware, also is more respectful of memory. Is it harder to use? I don't think so but I may be in the minority here.

<comment><USER28> C/Java interop is pretty painful still, and the tooling for native debugging in android studio is notoriously unreliable. (I hear it's better now, but I haven't had to get into those libs recently, so I can't say definitively. Last go round I had to roll Eclipse to debug ndk libs. Yeah. Eclipse.)</comment></comment></comment>