The Price of Modern Life Is Depression and Loneliness? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/festival-of-dangerous-ideas/the-price-of-modern-life-is-depression-and-loneliness-96a2367f3460 <comment><USER2> He quotes 2 scientific research papers as claiming 'spending large amounts of time online for social purposes may increase social distress and have negative impact on self-esteem.' or similar stuff.

But look at the details, the first article is about correlation, not causation. [http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/21685655](http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/21685655)

Stopped reading after that.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's ridiculous how this statement gets so popular online.

This "Look Up" video has 46M views [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY). Whatever post on this subject gets viral [https://twitter.com/ducu/status/464018491738431488](https://twitter.com/ducu/status/464018491738431488)

"The modern technology (read 'facebook') keeps us from interacting face to face, so it makes us lonely and depressed. It was so much better _back in my day_ when we were playing ball, we were bumping into each other on the streets, and we were definitely much happier." \- Such a load of crap.

These lonely people liking and sharing such nonsense are obviously online, and they are probably keeping in touch only with their school mates, or work colleagues at most. Imagine how lonely they must have felt if they could only interact offline, with just a small fraction of their current facebook friends, based solely on _geography_. Because that was the main criteria for human connection before the internet.

When instead we should get in touch with the people sharing our interests, regardless of where they are located on the map. That is one thing we can only do online, and this kind of human connections would give a sense of meaning in our lives.</comment>


If IFTTT and AWS Lambda had a child - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/hJ-KRbp6EO8 <comment><USER2> ...? What's the punch line?</comment>


The Danger When You Don't Know What You Don't Know - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2010/05/the_danger_when_you_dont_know.php

<comment><USER2> Gödel's theorem in particular lends itself to this sort of thing. For more mathematical schadenfreude, I like Franzen's "An Incomplete Guide to its Use and Abuse" [http://www.amazon.com/Godels-Theorem-Incomplete-Guide- Abuse/...](http://www.amazon.com/Godels-Theorem-Incomplete-Guide- Abuse/dp/1568812388)

Hackers will be interested especially in the rather weak attempts to use Gödel to make all sorts of silly inferences about artificial intelligence and the nature of mind.

Probably no scientific result of the 20th centry, except maybe the theory of relativity, has been used by so many to prove so much while understanding so little.

</comment><comment><USER3> You are right, he is wrong. All abstractions and metaphors are leaky.

Was there something else?</comment>


Show HN: ChalkStory App – Draw fun animated videos and share with friends - <AUTHOR> http://www.chalkstory.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> ChalkStory is a unique social media app that allows you to record what you draw, but also allows you to pause you recording and continue to draw in order to create animation. It's therefore a mixture of live drawing and flipbook style animation. The editor is designed specifically for story like videos, and allows you to switch between scenes using the 'Clear All' function. Videos have a 90 second limit, and once completed you can save your videos and forward to friends who also use the app. Users are also able to lock their videos, so recipients are unable to save or forward.

I love other social media apps like Snapchat and Instagram, but found I had limited content to share with friends with working in an office all day. That's when I came up with the idea of ChalkStory, which allows you to have banter with your friends, without being limited by your surroundings.

Any feedback/enhancements regarding the app would be gratefully received and I hope you enjoy.</comment>


Why Apple's Swift Language Will Instantly Remake Computer Programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/07/apple-swift/

<comment><USER2> Wow. It's really too bad what Wired's editors did with this headline. The story is not nearly as bad as they made it sound.

<comment><USER3> Are you sure about that?

" _Google unveiled a language called Go in 2009, and though it was designed by some of the biggest names in the history of software design—Ken Thompson and Rob Pike—it's still struggling to gain a major following among the world's coders. But Swift is a different animal. When it's officially released this fall, it could achieve mass adoption with unprecedented speed, surpassing even the uptake of Sun Microsystems' Java programming language and Microsoft's C# in the late 1990s and early 2000s._ "

I didn't note any mention of the fact that Objective-C and now Swift are (to a first approximation) the _only_ ways of writing apps for Apple's major products. Go is struggling? They're comparing it to Java, a language intended for universal use, and it hasn't been released yet?

<comment><USER2> It's not a _great_ article, but the author had access to Chris Lattner, who is a legit bad-ass that I enjoy reading about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Swift is a neat looking language. I haven't gotten to play with it yet, but I have read Apple's "The Swift Programming Language" cover to cover and I come away with a few concerns.

My biggest issue with Swift is that there often seem to be too many ways to do things. I'm fine with having options, but when there are literally 4 or 5 different ways to accomplish the same things it's going to require development shops to come up with rigid standards about how to do things. Many shops aren't going to know that this will be an issue until later, when trying to integrate the work of different developers / teams on a large project.

The upside of this level of flexibility is that it allows you to quickly port code from nearly any language into Swift since it supports the features of almost every modern language. The downside, of course, comes when starting a new project: you have a lot of decisions to make about how functions will be called, objects instantiated and referenced, etc. If you don't make those decisions up-front, peoples' preferences will take over and you'll get a lot of spaghetti code. I'm not looking forward to starting a project in Swift, that's for sure.

From a technical perspective, I have no complaints: Swift is flexible and powerful without being weighed down by the kludges that Objective-C forced you into. But I definitely see small dev shops having a big advantage with Swift in the beginning: it'll simply take the big guys too long to get their act together.

<comment><USER5> > My biggest issue with Swift is that there often seem to be too many ways to > do things.

This is my biggest issue with the Apple libraries in general. It's an artifact of the software's bloodline running back to the 80s.

<comment><USER4> Yeah but I get it with libraries: you've gotta provide compatibility so preserving old ways of doing things is fine. With a new language like this, it's just making one of the biggest problems with Objective C even worse.

<comment><USER6> Apple has never cared about backward compatibility. They kill off libraries and APIs like unwanted kittens. Yes, it makes everyone sad when they do it, but the API still goes into the burlap bag and then into the pond. They continue to break software with each now OSX release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > With Google Go, there was no real incentive to use it

I don't like the comparisons to Go in this article. I'm an iOS developer who has dabbled in Go, and I'd actually argue the opposite.

For me, there is little reason to immediately switch to Swift. I can still use ObjC, and in fact, I'd expect problems when switching to Swift.

Go, however, had many incentives to learn. Easier deployment, speed, concurrency, etc.

As usual, Wired has over simplified the argument

</comment><comment><USER8> > Chris Lattner spent a year and a half creating a new programming language—

That's not as bad as JavaScript, but most good languages take longer than that.

Swift doesn't look _bad_ as such to me at a quick glance, just not novel. It's a "why-bother?" language rather than a "ack, no!" language. If C# version 1 was "The Microsoft proprietary version of java" is Swift v1 "The Apple lock-in on current practices" ?

<comment><USER9> From looking through the article, and what's available online (Apple page and Wikipedia), it looks like they took most of what folks like about interpreted languages and just moved them into a compiled form, married to a decent debug / testing environment.

It also has a bit of Perl, in that its written so that patterns conform better to English speaking patterns. For example, they use the "let" keyword to do constants like:

      let appleSummary = "I have \(numberOfApples) apples."

and they use Javascript-like simple concatenation operators like:

      str = "hello,"

      str += " world"

And like Perl, I also like that associative arrays / dictionaries are top level:

      let people = ["Anna": 67, "Beto": 8, "Jack": 33, "Sam": 25]

After that, it mostly looks like standard evolution. They've taken many of the top, or high use programming patterns of the current day for i-products and rolled them into libraries or main functions to speed up development.

It could be good. I do like Javascript and Perl, which look like they had a child with Objective-C. And that article has a point that its only main competitor is Obj-C, which is not much of a fight. Now if they'll only allow you to develop and build on non-Apple hardware.

<comment><USER10> I don't consider the "let" example to really be very Perlish. The real power of Perl in it's natural expressiveness is to more closely map speaking, and thus _thinking_ patterns to how the algorithm is represented. For example, postconditionals, which allow a single statement to be conditional based on a condition that immediately follows it. This is a natural way people express themselves ("do X if Y" or "do A unless B"), but it is wisely restricted to a single statement as the alternative is less common, less clear. The fact that swift's let statement sounds like common English when spoken aloud is only superficially similar to Perl, IMHO.

Additionally some sort of hash/associative array/map data structure at the top level is (thankfully) common at this point.

I haven't followed swift too closely though, so maybe there's other stuff that I would consider more aligned with the spirit of Perl.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Swift might take over the Apple world, maybe. It is pretty much useless anywhere else.

<comment><USER12> and I imagine Apple will want to keep it that way.

Swift will be used as a competative advantage or lock in, depending on your level of scepticism.

<comment><USER13> This is quite a weird idea, really. Even if Swift were open sourced (and it looks like it may be at some point: [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.clang.devel/37...](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.clang.devel/37217)), would it _really_ be all that dramatically useful on, say, Android? Good luck making your GUI app through the JNI. There are a few Objective C apps on Android, but they're pretty much universally games (there's a Spritekit port).

It doesn't really change the story for developing cross-platform apps at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty bold headline, fortunately the story was decent. With that said, as someone who develops JavaScript for a living Swift is very inviting. I've tried and failed many times to wrap my head around ObjC, but it never stuck. In messing with Swift the last couple of weeks, I find myself pretty comfortable and happy the barrier-to-entry is rather low.

</comment><comment><USER6> I know, I'll create another programming language. Now you have N+1 problems, none of which address the systemic problems with the Apple ecosystem. The problem was never JUST Objective-C (although it sucks pretty hard). Apple is REALLY struggling for a win here.

<comment><USER15> I think 'struggling' is the wrong word. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/13/fun- numbe...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/13/fun-number-apple- has-twice-as-much-cash-as-the-us-government/)

<comment><USER6> He who dies with the most cash wins? It's definitely a nice position to be in but money obviously doesn't think up new products.

What was the last true innovation from Apple? I claim it was the iPod. The miniaturization of music. Everything since the iPod has been purely derivative of that miniaturization theme.

They've ridden the "Miniaturize all the things" wave hard (and successfully) by adding more features like accelerometers, GPS, faster chips, more colors, etc. to keep the fanboys horny but nobody has been really impressed with a new iDevice for quite some time. Apple is getting stale.

Apple needs a new hardware win that shows that they haven't exhausted their idea bank AND that they still have the marketing savvy to make people want what they've got.

Apple has NEVER been a software company. They are definitely struggling if Swift is the best new things they could come up with.

Where's the hardware?

<crickets>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, had no idea that this was a personal "skunkworks" project by Chris! Very impressive (and gratifying for him, I'm sure) to have such a thing embraced by the highest levels of management.

</comment><comment><USER17> Will this language ever work to write Linux software? (Or Windows)

<comment><USER18> In theory yes, but in practice no. It's constructed around a solid core of the Objective C object model and runtime. Rudimentary open source versions of these exist, but they are _very_ rudimentary. The value in those technologies is all concentrated in the Coacoa and Coacoa Touch libraries and frameworks, which are proprietary to Apple.

Trying to use these technologies on another platform would be like trying to develop software using the core of the Python language with none of the standard library or external libraries (imagine they were implemented in another language you couldn't port). Or like implementing just the C# language on another platform, without any of the .NET libraries. It's possible, Mono did just that, but they had to re-implement almost the entire .NET infrastructure from scratch, a task many orders of magnitude greater than just duplicating the language itself.

<comment><USER13> > In theory yes, but in practice no. It's constructed around a solid core of > the Objective C object model and runtime.

Not sure I agree. You won't be making a Cocoa UI in it or anything, but if they open source the compiler and modifications to the Objective C runtime, along with the standard library (which is really light right now; you have to use Cocoa for very simple things), it should be useful enough, with GNUStep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Bullshit title. It's because of cheap tricks like that that I stopped reading The Verge. It only lacks the "other languages hate it!"

</comment><comment><USER20> I love that LLVM is relegated to "the basis of swift."

Also a $100 entry ticket to a beta IDE/compiler might hinder said adoption.

<comment><USER13> Xcode 6 is free, now: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/07/apple-launches- new-swif...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/07/apple-launches-new-swift- blog-offers-xcode-6-beta-for-free/)

<comment><USER21> Sorry, i can't find a download for Linux, so how is this supposed to take over the world? :(

<comment><USER22> You're not alone, people have been asking that about Linux for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > But even if Swift remains an Apple-only Oh I would love code Swift on other > platforms, what could possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER24> am i the only person who hates the fact that i have to pay $100 pa for the right to put my own software on my own iPad - language be damned? @#$#@ that. i'm taking my tablet needs somewhere that let's me feel as though i've purchased it, not borrowed it from Steve...

<comment><USER25> You sound like a Free Software zealot and GPLv3 fan, congratulations and welcome to the club!

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) [https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/gplv3-lockdown](https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/gplv3-lockdown) [http://faif.us/cast/2014/jun/19/0x47/](http://faif.us/cast/2014/jun/19/0x47/)</comment></comment>


Do dysfunctional families breed entrepreneurs? - <AUTHOR> http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2009/09/23/do-dysfunctional-families-breed-entrepreneurs/

<comment><USER2> _I've found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider 'hard- core' entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self- identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing._

he believes that a quarter of people in a group warrants correlation?

<comment><USER3> Whether there's a correlation depends entirely on the proportion you find in the general population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've worked for a child of a dysfunctional family. The company was run like a dysfunctional family.

On the whole, dysfunctional families are poor preparations for _anything_. That's why they are called dysfunctional.

The one thing I could maybe agree with -- in a dysfunctional family, sometimes the children learn to take on responsibility and budgeting at an earlier age. Maybe they learn to challenge authority. That may be an 'advantage' over some pampered brat, although a dubious one since it leaves less time and resources for studying or hacking or other growth opportunities. There are less damaging ways to learn responsibility.

</comment><comment><USER5> At the town drunk's funeral, both of his sons were there. One was the president of the local bank and the other was the new town drunk.

A bystander asked the bank president how he turned out that way.

He responded, "With a father like that, how else could I turn out?"

He asked the same question to the drunk who responded, "With a father like that, how else could I turn out?"

<comment><USER6> Nice that they turned out so "well", but I think the real measure isn't their title and this cute story doesn't convey much information about the men. My father came from a large family, at the head of which was a drunk father. All but him followed in the footsteps of their father.

However, having said this, I've often thought that extraordinary people (and you often find the heads of companies are extraordinary) often came from environments that were extraordinarily harsh. I always thought that if the harshness of the childhood didn't break them, it would make them super strong or driven compared to people that had "normal" childhoods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recall sometime around my 2nd or 3rd year in college someone remark that students go into engineering mostly from "blue collar" families. I never thought about it before that of course who would want to work so hard at engineering when you could go to law or b-school instead. Much later, I recalled when in high school, I was offered a scholarship in dramatic arts from a top school. I was very certain when I rejected the proposal that theatre would be a horrible way for me to earn a living. I was 17 at the time, how was I to know that as an adult people would commonly tell me I remind them of Tom Hanks and look like Robin Williams?

I'm not sure that being from a tough or financial disadvantaged background makes one more appropriate or better at being an entrepreneur. However, it may make it so your apparent options direct you to being an entrepreneur.

Two traits I find commonly lacking in entrepreneurs from tough or financial disadvantaged background are 1 - discipline and 2 - access to capital. I think both these attributes are more indicators of entrepreneurial success than anything else.

<comment><USER4> Your last sentence is phrased as a double negative. Do you mean to say that entrepreneurs from disadvantaged backgrounds often lack discipline and capital?

<comment><USER7> yes, of course. sorry, the above bad sentence structure has been edited/fixed ;)</comment></comment></comment>


Brexit: What's on offer for EU nationals - <AUTHOR> For European HNers living in the UK, what are your plans, after more details[0] have emerged?<p>[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/26/what-is-on-offer-for-eu-nationals-after-brexit-the-key-points <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: [https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/26/what-is- on-...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/26/what-is-on-offer-for- eu-nationals-after-brexit-the-key-points)</comment>


Ask HN: How do international web apps handle payment through Paypal? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking at Paypal's Website Payments Pro programme, and they require the business to be situated in the US.<p>How do I charge my clients - seamlessly without sending them to paypal's site, given that I am located in Jamaica? <comment><USER3> Try <http://www.2checkout.com/>

This is one of the most FAQ on HN. Spend some time searching and you will find more useful answers - <http://searchyc.com>.

</comment><comment><USER4> You may want to have a payment processor as a backup solution, they will provide their own APIs to their services. Relying on PayPal alone can be risky.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you recommend any that might work for me? I am international - <USER2> specifically.

I am yet to find a payment processor that will work for me, other than Paypal.

I am launching a SaaS app that bills monthly recurring.

Thoughts?</comment></comment>


This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10. - <AUTHOR> http://crashie8.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm the author that discovered this bug - and went way out of my way to tell the Internet Explorer team about it. I uncovered the error while working on a client's SharePoint site and figuring out why a certain page always caused their computer to freeze up.

The most amazing part of this exercise has been analyzing the traffic trends. This page gets a crazy amount of traffic in Japan and China - I still can't figure out why.

It has also been a remarkable insight into the dysfunction that is Microsoft; I'll hear from some random Microsoft employee twice a year who became aware of the site and wants to fix it, after pointing to the closed "not a bug" thread on MSDN they all vanish (apparently keenly aware of how atrocious the IE team reacts to external interest/support.)

<comment><USER3> I don't even bother reporting bugs in IE anymore. They never fix them.

Yesterday I ran into errors "String is undefined" when trying to augment String.prototype. Testing for undefined got me "undefined is undefined". Turns out it was a variation of a known issue they deem so unlikely that they won't even bother to fix it. (The issue is this one: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/gg622929%28v=VS.85%2...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/gg622929%28v=VS.85%29.aspx?ppud=4) ) If anyone wants to know the fix: you have to set the innerHTML of the parent element of the iframe to '' before detaching that element from the DOM. That actually stops code inside the iframe from running.

What I also love is the arrogance with which they suggest solutions, like on the page I linked: "If your application uses a programming pattern that is affected by this issue, you may wish to consider not removing the iFrames from the page."

<comment><USER4> Exception: if the crash is a non-null access violation, please report to MSRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the most shocking thing is when you follow it through to the MSDN bug discussion—and you find people blaming the author for writing invalid HTML.

Apparently IE doesn't need to follow the robustness principle. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle>

<comment><USER6> This isn't a case of "Robustness principle". Not _crashing_ on invalid input is just plain old decent programming, not to mention secure programming. Programs should not crash on invalid inputs, period. "Robustness" as in the robustness principle refers to trying to actually _process_ invalid data and go make a guess at what the functionality should be.

In fact, you can make quite a case that "robustness" as defined that way is responsible for the horrible mess that HTML and cross-browser compatibility is these days. For instance, if you improperly close tags, or overlap tags, IE (and others I assume) will dutifully go about trying to figure out what you meant: being very "robust" in their interpretation of input outside the spec.

By implementing behaviour outside the spec (being "robust"), you are implicitly extending the spec, and every other browser has to implement unspecified behaviour in the same way.

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of one of my first jobs. I needed to convert some data into a odd file format based on 100 or so pages of documentation and upload it to an FTP. Problem was the first version I wrote caused their system to crash...

Fun times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> === Evil Idea ===

Everyone create a script on all your websites that randomly implements this bug on some but not all pages (definitely not landing & home pages) then watch as little by little millions of users think their IE is broken and messed up and start using other browsers. A few sites alone wouldn't make a difference but over the course of its life even websites with normal amounts of traffic build up 30,000 unique visitors after a few years. Combined that would do some damage to IE's stability. Yes it's evil because you're deliberately crashing innocent people's browsers but aren't they evil/foolish for deliberately using IE and making us work harder to support it?

Sometimes users have to learn things the hard way.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does not crash IE10 on Release Preview 64-bit. Neither desktop or Metro version.

<comment><USER2> I updated the page (which I hadn't touched since mid-2011) to say it doesn't crash the current RC of IE10. Hopefully people will stop flaming me on Twitter now...

<comment><USER4> AFAIK I think it was fixed with the move to an interoperable quirks mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow. I guess Microsoft is still the pinata.

I write web-based software. Every day.

I have made every browser crash and become completely non-responsive, many times over. Chrome. Firefox. Opera. All of them.

Now, this is mostly through JavaScript, when I do something stupid by manipulating the DOM the wrong way or some other funny thing. I fix it and keep going. Because breaking the browser is bad.

Want to report it to the vendor? Great. Fine. Making a website dedicated to the crash? Waaaay too much time on your hands.

<comment><USER11> I can say the same but there's a clear gap in how seriously the vendors take it: it's been a _long_ time since I've crashed any browser other than IE. The closest I've come a couple of times was getting Firefox to use enough memory that I killed it rather than waiting for it to page.

If you are crashing them as often as you claim, you should be filing security bug reports - every other browser team will respond quickly to non-Flash crashes.

<comment><USER4> And if the crash is a non-null access violation in IE, please report to MSRC. These do get fixed in the next security update.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Didn't crash IE10.0.8400.0 in Windows 8 Release Preview 64-bit.

<comment><USER13> Can confirm this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't see why it's such a big deal. Ya I mean it's kind of a dumb thing to cause a browser to crash, but I am sure any browser has a dumb thing here or there that will cause a crash.

Seems like we're just trying to pick on IE here.

<comment><USER15> I'd agree. On a side note, took me about ten seconds of googling to find HTML/Javascript that reliably crashes firefox (but does not crash IE8). I expect Chrome would have similar cases where there could be something that causes crashes (at least, there are bug reports asserting this).

(FYI here's some HTML/JS for the Firefox bug... Resizing the browser caused the issue to manifest in Win7 with FF 13.0.1:)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "[http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd>](http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd>);

](http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml>);

<title>Test</title>

(edited to acknowledge that this is a JS bug). And for the downvotes, at least provide a reason and/or a discussion.

<comment><USER16> Uh yeah, it's really easy to find code that crashes browsers with open bug trackers. Just go search them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is this a big deal? It's amusing that it is such a simple chunk of HTML, but I was under the impression that it's not terribly difficult to DoS the average browser.

I accidentally discovered some very simple HTML that reliably crashes Outlook whenever you try to view or preview the message a while back. I reported it and I think they eventually fixed it.

<comment><USER18> How do you DoS chrome?

<comment><USER17> I don't know. Maybe Google is so good it's impossible (or at least limited to one tab). But I suspect it's still possible if I'm allowed to use commonly installed plugins. I think I could make a Java applet that consistently crashes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What was the problem? was it the unclosed <form> tag?

<comment><USER20> Looks like the crash doesn't happen if you provide the </form> tag, so that looks like it.

Edit with more info: Looks like removing any of the markup prevents the crash. "Removing the CSS, the div, the table, etc all cause this code to not crash IE"

<comment><USER21> The minimal variant with which I repeated the crash was:

                       <form id="b">
                       <input type="text" name="test"/>

Removing the second td is enough to make the html not crashing on IE 9. The "crash" manifests itself in some kind of an infinite loop (one thread jumps to 100% CPU and stays so). Then the "recovery" mechanisms kick in, reloading the page, blocking again... :) Can anybody reduce it even more?

<comment><USER22> Removing the TR's produces the same results. Change div to p still results in the crash, but removing that level entirely doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Crashes tab in IE9 9.0.7 Win7 x64. That's it. The rest of the browser is fine.

</comment><comment><USER24> On IE 9 on Windows 7 it just causes the tab to load forever. Maybe the bug has been patched?

<comment><USER25> I have the same setup and clicked "recover" when the option came up, and it crashed the browser then. IE9 is still open, but the cursor is stuck on <\--> and clicking anywhere does nothing. I don't even get the "this program has stopped responding" message.

Closing it in any of the normal ways is failing, I had to do end task.

Successive attempts to load the page don't even need for me to click anything for it to crash hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can't be the only one that saw this, and immediately thought "Wrap this in some browser detection code, and display it in a tiny iframe if you're using an inferior browser..."

No? Anyone? Guess I'm wearing a black hat today.

<comment><USER27> If it only crashes IE, and you want to punish IE users, why bother wrapping it?

<comment><USER28> So that you can embed it in all of your pages secretly and get users to switch from IE to pretty much any other browser that actually follows web standards for implementation.

<comment><USER27> Right, but why write a wrapper that detects the browser for it? Just ... include it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In IE 9.0.8112 (Win 2008R2) the tab is kinda stuck but the rest of the tabs work fine

</comment><comment><USER30> I accidentally created another bug that also crashes every single version of internet explorer. It's related to putting a filter: progID into an element modified by javascript.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does stuff like this make any one else think of "I cannot by played on record player X" from Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach?

<comment><USER32> It shouldn't. The record and record player was an analogy for statements and formal systems of sufficient complexity. This example would be analogous if html/css formed a Turing complete system, and the job of a browser was to decide whether or not the markup for a given page halted. This is just an example of a fixable bug with rejecting what should be obviously invalid input.

The corresponding analogy would be if the Crab's record player broke any time a particularly bad pop song came on. It could tell by looking at the song whether or not it would break, but the designers didn't bother to fix it because no one wants to listen to bad pop music anyway.

<comment><USER31> But what about the tension between features (completeness of system? Or ability to reproduce any sound?) and robustness (lack of contradictions? No sounds that would cause its own destruction?)

The analogy seems to fit there, enough to make me smile anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It froze up Chrome on my PC for a few seconds also.

</comment><comment><USER34> So I just checked in IE9 and it works fine...

(using 9.0.8112.16421)

</comment><comment><USER35> Not crashing win 8 consumer preview.

</comment><comment><USER36> >This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.

That headline sounds disingenuous and somewhat flamebaity given that 10 is still in development _and_ the latest public version available on Windows 8 does not crash.

<comment><USER37> It also doesn't crash IE9 on my Windows 7 PC or Windows Phone. I don't think most people have actually tried the page in IE9.

<comment><USER38> Crashes the tab for me: IE 9.0.8112.16421, Windows 7 Pro (v 6.1 Build 7601: SP 1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is indeed shocking. I cannot recall a time in which I was subjected to using software which contained a bug. I sincerely hope this does not become a trend.

<comment><USER40> Who is subjecting you to use IE?</comment></comment>


Compiled CSS in JavaScript Same experience with no runtime cost - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/atlassian-labs/compiled-css-in-js <comment><AUTHOR> Make sure to check the docs out at [https://compiledcssinjs.com](https://compiledcssinjs.com)</comment>


14,000 domain names were registered related to Corona in the last two months - <AUTHOR> https://dofo.com/search?s=corona&contains=corona&create_min=2020-01-01&sort=create_date-asc&page=1&page_size=25 <comment><AUTHOR> 8,000+ domain names were registered with the word "coronavirus": [https://dofo.com/search?s=coronavirus&contains=coronavirus&c...](https://dofo.com/search?s=coronavirus&contains=coronavirus&create_min=2020-01-01&sort=create_date- asc&page=1&page_size=25)</comment>


Admins Who Used - <AUTHOR> http://jpmens.net/2014/10/23/admins-who-used/

<comment><USER2> You're joking, but actually it looks kinda good for people who might be learning Linux...</comment>


Ask HN: How are your startups weathering the economic crisis? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering if there is a large effect on startups due to the economic crisis. <comment><USER2> Original startup is dead, but I think that's mostly because it was a marginal idea, my cofounder quit, and without my cofounder, I didn't have all that much passion for it.

Thinking of doing a new startup, in a more clearly-defined pain point with more immediate profit potential. But I'm seeing how job apps go in this market; I need more time to scope out the market and do some prototypes anyway.

When this crisis was first starting back in 2007, I said that "recessions force honesty upon businessmen. The marginal businesses get flushed out, forcing people to focus on useful stuff." That's as true now as it was then, even if my own startup was one of the marginal ones.

</comment><comment><USER3> In case of a starup that doesn' require so much money to run, like <http://www.quotag.com> it's not the recession that affects them most, but the moods of customers. I mean, in the pre-funding phase there is not much to screw up :)

</comment><comment><USER4> 8 out of our 13 IT ppl (developers, tester, BAs) are made redundadnt

www.linkme.com.au

</comment><comment><USER5> Awesome - up about 15% from last month and about 22% from August.</comment>


Bing executive: 'We have caught up' to Google in search quality - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/06/bing-vs-google.html <comment><USER2> I still see Bing regularly come up with lousy search results. The other day I did a Bing search for "FM100-6", and none of the top 10 hits were relevant: [http://www.bing.com/search?q=FM100-6&go=&form=QBLH&#...](http://www.bing.com/search?q=FM100-6&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n&sk=&sc=1-7). Google, on the other hand, had exactly what I was looking for in the all of the top 5: [https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=FM10...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=FM100-6)

This happened frequently when I tried using Bing exclusively.

<comment><USER3> Interesting that for FM100.6 Bing algorithm ranks 100.6 more relevant than the literal 100-6, almost as if it doesn't know what to do with the "-" character. Using "Field Manual" instead of "FM" gives results closer to what you were looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Two sites that I've put up in the past 6 months have yet to be crawled by bing (it indexed the main page of one, but has absolutely nothing for the second), despite it indexing links pointing to those sites and me submitting them to be indexed months ago. They are both completely distinct, unrelated and on separate servers. Meanwhile, google started crawling them immediately.

Interestingly, on the one that eventually got the home page indexed by bing, the bulk of the content is still not linked from the main page, but can be fully crawled via deeper links people have posted elsewhere. Google crawled it via those links, Bing still only sees the front page.

</comment><comment><USER5> This seems like a fabulously awful marketing message. Every time they say it, they concede that Google offered superior search quality up until now. If they're going to compete on features, like "entertainment search" or pretty front pages, they should neutralize the concern about results quality, not turn it into the entire horse race.

<comment><USER6> Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

I like it, in the same way as the Domino's ads that admit their pizza used to suck.

<comment><USER7> But in both cases, the product still sucks. Saying that your product has "caught up" gives the customer a greater incentive to question any future improvements and any other marketing material coming from your organization.

After Domino's said they did better and after a taste-test I discovered it was still worse than Papa John's, I mock the Domino's commercials and will never visit a Domino's again. Same with Bing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://www.google.com/search?q=(5+MBps)*(2+hours)>

<http://www.bing.com/search?q=(5+MBps)*(2+hours)>

And that's why I use google

<comment><USER9> <http://www.bing.com/search?q=999999999999999-999999999999998>

[http://www.google.com/search?q=999999999999999-9999999999999...](http://www.google.com/search?q=999999999999999-999999999999998)

And that's why I use bing

<comment><USER10> Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=999999999999999-9999999...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=999999999999999-999999999999998)

<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(5+MBps)*(2+hours)>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FTA: "We've got a lot of work to do," Mehdi said during his presentation. "It's not like people wake up in the morning, and say, 'Dang, I wish I had another search engine.' "

This is the problem with Bing, not anything technical. Why start a business built around a service that you don't think anyone wants? A product which beats the market leader in one or several clearly defined niches has a chance in the long run, but no one wanted Bing except Microsoft. It was and is a product looking for a market. It would take catastrophic failure at Google for Bing to split the market.

I am not rooting for one team or the other, nor am I against diversity in the market. I just think the quote above reveals something about the product development process at Microsoft that I'd be wary of if I were an employee or investor.

<comment><USER12> It's like the iPhone (or the Mac, for that matter). No one knew they wanted a better search, until an _obviously_ superior search comes along.

So I wouldn't say it's hopeless for Bing at all. There are so many ways that search could be different from Google's current results...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In other news I am now a good lover.

No, it is just one of those things that isn't the case until other people tell you it is.

<comment><USER14> _Jessy? Hi, it's me. I'm just calling to let you know I finally caught up to your boyfriend in love making quality._

I wonder if she'll consider making the switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since when is a PR statement news? Obviously he won't say anything negative.

</comment><comment><USER16> Meanwhile Google search results are going back to the Altavista days thanks to dumbing it down to help newbs and so many SEO sites. Very often I have to put quotes and plus signs in searches or else Google will just tell me something similar (not just a simple "do you mean Y" link.)

There's a need for a better search engine or a google management shake-up.

</comment><comment><USER17> Compare "We have caught up" to "We took longer, because we wanted to get it right". I think Steve Jobs delivers it even better, but I am too lazy to look up the exact sentence. Both is saying the same thing, but the second version (in Steve Job's variant) can make the competition look bad.

Bing needs to work on their marketing...

<comment><USER18> I think the two versions are both fairly honest, though, and wouldn't be if reversed. Microsoft has had an inferior search project for a long time and is playing catch-up with Google. Apple simply took a long time getting the device to market, but when they did, it was completely game-changing.

<comment><USER17> Their implementation of multitasking, to which that sentence was referring, still seems to be inferior. Or let's say different, for diplomacy - yet they make it sound as if they are ahead.

<comment><USER18> Oh, I thought it was the iPad. Misremembered. At any rate, Apple really did wait to release their implementation. They didn't have inferior multitasking for years. They could have stuck in a very poor implementation to begin with (the OS has always supported it), but they did indeed wait on it.

<comment><USER17> All I am saying is that Bing could improve their marketing by rephrasing certain things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They have certainly set the bar on some things, and met Google in others.

One thing that has made it easier for them is the decrease of Google's search quality.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought Bing was a "decision engine" and Google was a "search engine".

Isn't this comparing apples to oranges, metaphorically speaking?</comment>


The computer girls (1967 issue of Cosmopolitan) - <AUTHOR> http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/07/28/normalizing-female-computer-programmers-in-the-1960s/

<comment><USER2> There are a hundred usability reasons why sharing text in images sucks, so here's a transcript (I've taken a couple of minor liberties for the sake of clarity):

The Computer Girls By Lois Mandel

A trainee gets $8,000 a year . . . a girl "senior systems analyst" gets $20,000—and up! Maybe it's time to investigate . . . .

Ann Richardson, IBM systems engineer, designs a bridge via computer. Above (left) she checks her facts with fellow systems engineer, Marvin V. Fuchs. Right, she feeds facts into the computer. Below, Ann demonstrates on a viewing screen how her facts designed the bridge, and makes changes with a "light pen."

Twenty years ago, a girl could be a secretary, a school teacher . . . maybe a librarian, a social worker or a nurse. If she was really ambitious, she could go into the professions and compete with men . . . usually working harder and longer to earn less pay for the same job.

Now have come the big, dazzling computers—and a whole new kind of work for women: programming. Telling the miracle machines what to do and how to do it. Anything from predicting the weather to sending out billing notices from the local department store.

And if it doesn't sound like woman's work—well, it just is.

("I had this idea I'd be standing at a big machine and pressing buttons all day long," says a girl who programs for a Los Angeles bank. "I couldn't have been further off the track. I figure out how the computer can solve a problem, and then instruct the machine to do it."

"It's just like planning a dinner," explains Dr. Grace Hopper, now a staff scientist in systems programming for Univac. (She helped develop the first electronic digital computer, the Eniac, in 1946.) "You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it's ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are 'naturals' at computer programming."

What she's talking about is _apititude_ —the one most important quality a girl needs to become a programmer. She also needs a keen, logical mind. And if that zeroes out the old Billie Burke-Gracie Allen image of femininity, it's about time, because this is the age of the Computer Girls. There are twenty thousand of them in the United _(cont. on page 54)_

</comment><comment><USER3> Whether or not you think this is tremendously important, it is.

We could easily unleash almost twice as much human potential of the human race we are right now in coding, and engineering and science in general, if we go back and inspect all the hideous details and biases inhibiting girls and women from pursuing scientific and technical interests and positions of authority.

( _Almost_ twice as much, since a few women have managed to emerge with amazing technical superpowers from a still very sexist and sexist-tolerant society.)

For a very long time I had faith in how far we had progressed in sexual equality in American culture. But very many experiences over the past many years have convinced me overwhelmingly of how very far American culture still needs to go before every girl and woman has a level playing field at EVERY STAGE of educational and professional opportunity.

This is extremely important for every single one of you. If you're an American male programmer or engineer or scientist today, keep in mind always that almost half of your potential awesome colleagues or awesome employees aren't there working with you because they faced obstacles you might never have imagined.

Please, everyone, make it better and treat every single person the same way in every way from now on.

<comment><USER4> Where are all these obstacles you refer to? You're immediately jumping to the dogmatic conclusion that if there are less women in computer science right now, it _must_ be because someone else is setting up obstacles to hold them back. But we don't actually know this to be the case.

It may instead be down to a lack of interest. It may be because the best and brightest programmers are all hackers who have been obsessed with computers since age 12; that's the kind of person you need to be, it seems, to keep up in this field, and that's a very male profile. Are we to cry "discrimination!" if it turns out that 12 year old girls are genetically predispositioned to prefer socializing with friends, over intrinsically loner activities like tinkering with computers?

It may even be a matter of aptitude. It's well known that although males and females, as groups, have roughly the same mean IQ scores, males have a greater variance in their scores. This means that if you look at the extremes of low or high intelligence, you'll find more males than females in either direction.

<http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm>

Programming is not only an intellectually demanding career, but your potential as a programmer seems to correlate with your intelligence more tightly than in most other occupations. And if you take the group of people with an IQ higher than x, with x >> 100 (or lower than x, with x << 100, for that matter), you'll generally end up with more males than females. This may be taboo to speak of, but we shouldn't let dogmatic value judgments cloud a discussion about empirical truth.

So what am I saying? I'm not claiming to know why there are more males than females in computer science. If there is some sort of hidden institutional misogyny keeping women from succeeding in this field, then of course that's a bad thing and should be fought. But we can't just leap to the conclusion that anti-female sexism must be the cause of this discrepancy when there are other possible explanations we haven't ruled out.

We must treat everyone as equals, in the sense that we give everyone the same _opportunities_ regardless of gender. But that doesn't mean we're necessarily doing something wrong if, at the end of the day, we don't have an even gender distribution.

<comment><USER3> No we wouldn't need to try to balance genders in any given profession at the end of the day if everyone had completely equal opportunity at every stage of intellectual and educational and professional growth. But if you think we're anywhere near that point you are living in a self-serving shell and haven't educated yourself at all about this.

<comment><USER4> But that's _exactly_ what you're arguing:

> We could easily unleash almost twice as much human potential of the human > race we are right now in coding, and engineering and science in general, if > we go back and inspect all the hideous details and biases inhibiting girls > and women from pursuing scientific and technical interests and positions of > authority.

In other words, women are in a minority in this field, therefore someone _must_ be oppressing them.

> But if you think we're anywhere near [the point of everyone having > completely equal opportunity] you are living in a self-serving shell and > haven't educated yourself at all about this.

I'm of the opinion that modern young men and women have equal enough opportunities in education and in the programming job market that a lack of opportunity probably is not a primary cause of the gender gap in computer science, any more than I think a lack of opportunity for men accounts for the predominance of women in education for example. You keep talking about discrimination but you still fail to provide any evidence; if you want us to believe there is a legitimate gender discrimination problem here, the burden of proof is on you to show that it actually exists. At the moment all you offer is hand-waving.

<comment><USER3> I guess default perception of burden of proof, prior to sufficient learning on the topic, has a lot to do with life experience, and I'm not going to spend my Saturday night looking up citations for someone who is wrong on the Internet, especially when they could easily find them themselves if they were actually interested, but I am certain if you are able to discuss it with woman friends who trust you, in any of a wide variety of professional fields, they will be able to tell you enough experiences they've had to, at the least, shift your perceived burden of proof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like an article about my mom. If I recall correctly in the late 50/60's she was a secretary at Virginia Power in Richmond. She took an aptitude test for programming, along with others, and did well then began a 30+ year career programming on/for mainframes.

</comment><comment><USER6> Still the original computer girl...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace>

<comment><USER3> Wow. This is a fascinating article. Thank you so much!

<comment><USER6> If you think that is interesting, read this book:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374223130/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374223130/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=littdidd-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0374223130)</comment></comment></comment>


The Adventures of Marissa Mayer - <AUTHOR> http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/adventures-marissa

<comment><USER3> Ah, geek celebrity. While publicly Google is viewed as a meritocracy, working there you quickly realize that it's very much a hierarchy of intimidation and arrogance. You may have great ideas, but if you really want to be successful you need one of the Google engineering celebrities to back your play. These "chosen ones" aren't in their position because they necessarily have the best ideas; in fact, many of the good ideas at Google are never explored because folks with social influence express doubt. Marissa Mayer isn't the only one in engineering, she's just the most famous.

As the company increases in size, the meritocracy of ideas fades and being a good politician becomes more important. While it's not the primary reason I left after five years, it was certainly a consideration.

<comment><USER4> There's a grain of truth to what you say, but it's misleading to attach it specifically to Google.

 _Whenever_ you're doing something for somebody else, they're going to want to see two things from you: 1.) that you understand their problems and concerns and 2.) that you're doing your due diligence to address them. It doesn't matter whether it's Google, some other big corporation, your own startup, or a consultancy. If it's your startup, your _customers_ will want to make sure that you understand their problems and do your due diligence before they fork over their money. If it's your consultancy, your _clients_ will want the same.

I've found that teams that understand this, grok Marissa's way of thinking about the world, and are willing to put in the legwork to iterate on their ideas and make them as good as possible have quite a bit of latitude to do what they want. Those that just spit some <div>s onto the page and come unprepared tend to be the ones that gripe about how Marissa blocks them from getting anything done. Many of the teams I've seen that had problems with Marissa also had _terrible_ UIs, and I'd really hate to inflict them on the user.

In many ways, this is just another way of saying the same thing you did - <USER2> you want to be successful, you need one of the decision-makers to back your play. But that's the case _anywhere_. I've been fond of saying that entrepreneurship is just trading one boss for many bosses - it's great if you hate your boss, not so great if you hate your bosses. Which is a good reason to pick a company or market whose bosses you fundamentally agree with.

Also, speaking as someone who let his startup die because pretty much everyone with social influence over me expressed doubt - if you give up because of what other people think, it'll severely limit your ability to get anything done. If senior executives don't like your project, the best thing to do is listen to them, figure out if they have a point, and if they don't, go do it anyway. The worst thing that happens is that they fire you, and then you're in exactly the same boat as if you quit to found a startup, except that you've been learning about the problem domain while drawing a paycheck the whole time.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. I 100% concede that the onus is on you to sell your ideas and rationally respond to criticism, even when the criticism seems irrational.

That said, my point was simply that it's a myth that to be successful at Google is to just have good ideas. You have to play the social game as well, as it's an environment where reputation plays just as much a role as innovation.

For what it's worth, I didn't mean to attach this specifically to Google. It happens at every large company, almost by default. It's just that many folks are surprised to find that Google is so "corporate", especially many Googlers that started straight from graduation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's unfair to men that the technical press ignores our sex appeal, bulging crotches and foresting chest-hair, and focuses instead on the tiresome minutia of our work and accomplishments.

<comment><USER6> Except Lou Montoulli: [http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20129755,00....](http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20129755,00.html)

<comment><USER7> Just remember that he invented the blink tag.

<comment><USER4> Supposedly, that's only half true:

<http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag>

<comment><USER7> Shrug, I asked Marc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note: the article is from 2008. I thought it was more recent. Still doesn't take away from the content though.

<comment><USER9> Interesting side note that when this article was originally published it was under the title "Googirl" which, it was pointed out, had a pretty strong nsfw meaning ([http://valleywag.gawker.com/362143/googirl-article- vanishes-...](http://valleywag.gawker.com/362143/googirl-article-vanishes- from-web)).

It was quickly pulled from the site and reposted with the current, more boring title.

<comment><USER4> Other interesting side note: if you search for [googirl], 3 of the top 4 results are about Marissa. The remaining one is the urban dictionary entry with the snippet "A whore that enjoys and/or loves the taste of cum." Oops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aaah.. the subtle sexist bias even in Marissa comes through. From the article:

Indeed, Mayer invokes her mother a lot, which makes sense, given her steadfast devotion to the ease of the end user.

</comment><comment><USER11> Another Marissa Mayer article that boils down to "hey look, a girl!".

<comment><USER12> It's depressing that the article has to start with an exposition of her looks and dress.

I've never read an article about a male luminary that focuses so much on looks.

<comment><USER13> I think they discuss her clothing because it's cool and interesting. I mean, almost every article about Page & Brin mentions their clothing, it just doesn't take as long to communicate "Short-shorts and a t-shirt." Also, the article makes a case that her appearance is relevant:

 _"Marissa is surprisingly pretty in person," says Valleywag blogger and editor Owen Thomas. "That in itself is a rarity in Silicon Valley, and you'd have to be naïve to think that doesn't color people's views of her."_

<comment><USER12> Looks are almost always relevant to people's opinion of you. That's true for men and women, but it's only in articles about women that it seems to be pointed out as if to undermine their accomplishments.

<comment><USER13> I know it's subtle, but I think this article put those quotes from other publications at the beginning in order to shoot them down. Quotes like this:

 _For gossip websites like Valleywag, Mayer is an easy mark... and (so they say)... uses her looks for publicity._

are followed in the next paragraph by:

 _Mayer manages 150 product managers, who direct the efforts of nearly 2,000 software engineers; levels criticism and praise with the same cool gaze; and is an arbiter of much of what goes before Page, cofounder Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt, who trust her as their gatekeeper. Just about everything that goes on at the Mountain View company, which is more valuable than the U.S.'s three largest traditional media companies combined..._

OP seems to be undermining the other publications which were undermining Mayer. The substance of the article refutes the pettiness of Vallywag et al.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Surely one of the most unimpressive, boring people in technology. Her distinction: she was in the right place at the right time.

<comment><USER4> I'm as put off as anyone by all the excess publicity she gets, but your comment doesn't really do her justice.

Marissa is very, very sharp. She can rub many people the wrong way (including myself) because she's almost always completely certain that she's right. However, she _is_ right a good portion of that time, certainly more than most people I've met. And when she's wrong, she'll always listen to data that proves her wrong, and the issue gets dropped. I can respect that.</comment></comment>


5G Just Got Weird - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/standards/5g-release-16 <comment><USER3> 5G doesnt seem like its enabling anything fundamentally new. The talk of any "killer app" based on having more throughput or on these optimizations always feels like demand generation and slightly inauthentic.

Are there any technologies enabled by these techniques that are not possible today?

<comment><USER4> Last mile for fixed rural wireless broadband seems like the obvious one. Today, this is generally done with either LTE or various proprietary things (or if you're particularly unlucky, satellite). 5G should allow for greater total bandwidth, reducing the impact of contention.

And on the other side, it should be helpful for very dense urban usage. Try using LTE in a large city's central train station at a busy time and see how you get on.

But yeah, not revolutionary, but should make existing LTE applications less awful in some scenarios where they struggle.

<comment><USER5> Starlink is going to dominate this. Cellular can't economically scale out to meet the vast rural coverage. There are still plenty of towns that don't have basic coverage even now, and to think that suddenly they're going to get 5G equipment... seems unlikely. Meanwhile, the Starlink satellites are up and base stations are in testing. Once they approve and start building out their ground stations, it's SpaceX's business to lose.

<comment><USER6> IIRC Starlink can handle about 2gbs per 50 sq miles due to frequency bandwidth limitations. That's a few hundred subscribers. It's not going to make an impact in any but the most rural areas.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Wow, that sounds like a huge limitation, no? The number of people living in places _that_ sparsely populated must be very limited, how does it make economical sense to launch that huge number of satellites?

<comment><USER7> Google says there's two million satellite internet users. At $50/mo, if SpaceX can grab all of them, which seems well possible, that's 1.2 billion income a year, even assuming that the improved service doesn't result in anybody else switching from bad rural internet to Starlink.

A fifth of the US population lives outside of big cities. That's not a big fraction, but it's a small fraction of a very big number. Being able to capture that market even for a decade would basically bankroll SpaceX's Mars goal by itself. And that's not even looking at other countries.

<comment><USER8> > A fifth of the US population lives outside of big cities. That's not a big > fraction, but it's a small fraction of a very big number. Being able to > capture that market even for a decade would basically bankroll SpaceX's Mars > goal by itself.

That's about 25 million households, or about $150 billion gross revenue (not profit) over a decade at the price assumptions you give.

If SpaceX's public estimate of total Mars program cost of $10 billion was reasonable, that might plausibly fund the program. But it's highly dubious that that is even on the right order of magnitude.

<comment><USER7> Eh, don't underestimate the savings from reuse that's actually practical and not cost-plus. I think SpaceX have demonstrated the economic case for their approach with the F9. And once SpaceX demonstrate they can put cargo on Mars, NASA'll have to get in. Plus people may actually pay to migrate. If you think those numbers are unrealistic, look at SpaceX's posted total costs for their rocket development programs. I think the message is more "every space agency has ridiculously overpaid for decades."

<comment><USER8> > Plus people may actually pay to migrate.

Sure, but "rich people's vanity may help finance the program" (and NASA will help finance the program, etc.) doesn't anything to support "satellite internet will finance the program _by itself_ ".

<comment><USER7> No, I mean if cost is as stated. I'm saying cost as stated is plausible if you account that flights may be sold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As I've learned more and more about 5G (which is a nebulous term, really, but what I mean specifically is the planned upcoming releases of LTE 16 and 17, as well as the features of LTE 14 and 15 that users have yet to take advantage of) I've become convinced that it's going to transform how so much of the world is designed.

5G technologies allow for more devices to send more data using less power. This is achieved using a huge variety of new technologies. For instance, with beamforming, the tower sends a directional signal to your phone based on its location instead of broadcasting an omnidirectional signal. This uses less power and supports for more users.

What consumers see is much higher data rates for the same price, which doesn't seem that important. But on the industrial side, there will be offerings that allow for low data rate, low power applications at cheaper and cheaper prices.

<comment><USER10> > As I've learned more and more about 5G

Out of curiousity, what's a good source of information on 5G? I assume the standard itself is not the easiest thing to digest so I'd appreciate your input.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the 3GPP or ITU standards can make for a dour read. Probably best to look for sources that you find engaging. You can start with something that gives you the basics, and/or just go straight to the vendors ─ who provide a plethora of white papers, case studies, industry insights etc.

[https://5g.systemsapproach.org/index.html](https://5g.systemsapproach.org/index.html)

[https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g/5g-for- consumers](https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g/5g-for-consumers)

[https://www.nokia.com/networks/5g/](https://www.nokia.com/networks/5g/)

<comment><USER12> Stranger, your links above were very helpful for me in formulating my company's strategy in 5G. we are a big well known player. How can I get in touch with you for a more in depth conversation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not exactly on topic:

There have been a few HN submissions in the past linking to papers concerned with the effect of 5G on insects.

As a layperson I was not able to evaluate those papers. But if anyone knows if there was any kind of consensus reached about that, or even if this is something that anyone serious is concerned about, I would appreciate the pointer.

<comment><USER14> My anecdote data. I'm living in Kazakhstan and there's an interesting observation. We used to have lots of cockroaches in houses, especially when houses were not very clean. It was, I think, before 1995. It seems the same with our post-USSR neighbour countries (Russia, and so on). I used to live in such a flat, where lots of cockroaches were running in the kitchen at night. I remember as a child that we tried different chemicals to fight them, but with little success. And it was similar for many other people.

And at some point they were just gone. From everyone's house. It was not just one day, but we just understood that there are no cockroaches around.

It's still possible to find them somewhere, I guess, but that's a rare event. Something's changed.

Some people think that's because chemicals finally became effective and eradicated them. And some people think that's because of cellular networks which appeared everywhere around that time. I never found definitive answer, just speculations.

<comment><USER15> lol! You still find cockroaches around regardless of wi-fi or 4g signal

<comment><USER16> Clearly he doesn't. Do you?

<comment><USER17> I live in Madrid, which is a fairly clean city compared to other places I've lived. We have loads of roaches, especially in the summer. We also have absurd 4G and Wifi coverage. I can only connect to the 5ghz Wifi band at home because 2.4 is saturated by the neighbors. There are still roaches where I live...

Funny thing, in the house where I grew up, I saw the same phenomenon as GP. We had constant roach infestations in the kitchen, and after years of different chemical treatments, they were suddenly gone for good. Always attributed it to an effective chemical or a random biological process. Still see them in other places in the city nevertheless.

Why are we even entertaining this on Hacker News though? Show me the papers, GP's anecdotes or mine are worthless.

<comment><USER16> Better to counter an anecdote with an opposite anecdote than to downvote or shutdown. To some people being shut down proves they are right. Countering like you did provides a natural way to show the weakness of anecdotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > In defining V2X for 5G, Seo says the most challenging thing was to provide > high data throughput, reliability, and low latency, both of which are > essential for anything beyond the most basic communications. Seo explains > that earlier standards typically deal with messages with hundreds of bytes > that are expected to reach 90 percent of receivers in a 300-meter radius > within a few hundred milliseconds. The 3GPP standards bring those benchmarks > into the realm of gigabytes per second, 99.999 percent reliability, and just > a few milliseconds.

Did the previous standard lag behind or is this improvement truly this ridiculous?

<comment><USER19> This is what a quickly developing field feels like.

Say, in 10 years from 1985 to 1995, personal computer CPUs developed from 80286 @12MHz and 134k transistors to Pentium MMX @133MHZ and 3.3M transistors, with at least 100x improvement in integer performance alone, to say nothing about FPU and the vector unit (MMX). And another similar jump occurred in next 10 (well, 11) years when Intel unveiled the Core line of CPUs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> >5G for cars to communicate with each other

That's pretty good news. Even a simple "sharp braking" type coms between cars has decent potential to save lives beyond what can be achieved with radar & the like.

<comment><USER21> How do you avoid bad actors in these scenarios? Sounds ripe for general havoc, targeting specific people etc

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I could see someone have button to transmit hard braking on demand for tailgaters.

<comment><USER23> Regulate security measures eg signed messaging where only manufacturers can get certificates? Maybe combine it with license plate so it's traceable to a person?

<comment><USER24> So the attack will then be to hook into the car's on-board computer and tell it to send the falsified message with a fake plate number, and let the existing cryptographic code handle the signing. Alternatively, dump a legit cert once (e.g. by detailed examination of one on-board computer), then put that into the malicious hardware that sends falsified messages.

This is "the DRM problem", but in reverse. There is no way to give an end user a device that can send cryptographically-protected messages while also guaranteeing that they can't generate messages other than the ones the manufacturer wants them to send. One can make it very, very hard to do so, like with TPM/trusted enclave hardware, but when the potential consequences are people dying in car crashes, and the motivation to send false messages is so high[1], it's just an awful idea, because it will absolutely be misused, and people will die as a result.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication makes this even worse. At least with a tower intermediary, there would be some sort of forensic evidence stored outside of the vehicles involved.

[1] The ability to manipulate traffic in order to get to one's destination faster would be a huge selling point for a lot of people.

<comment><USER25> There is also no way to stop someone throwing rocks at passing cars. People will die as a result. The deterrents in both cases will be the same: humanity, liability and law enforcement.

<comment><USER24> Most of the people who will use malicious signals won't set out to actually hurt other people. They'll just use them to make tailgaters' cars brake quickly, or manipulate traffic in some way that benefits them, like the people in the late 80s or early 90s who figured out that putting strobe lights on their car roofs would let them make some city signals turn green for them. There are far, far more people who would be interested in that sort of thing than would be interested in the electronic equivalent of throwing rocks.

It's the unintended consequences that will generally kill people, like causing a multi-car pileup because the tailgater whose car was forced to brake was being tailgated themselves.

There will be very little way to enforce laws against that kind of activity, because there won't really be any forensic evidence at all.

There is no good way to do this. Even assuming a 100% flawless implementation of a "trusted enclave", people will just buy an ECU from a scrapped car, hook it up to a device that simulates the right sensor input to generate certain vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and stick it in the trunk of their actual car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems a poor taste title considering the conspiracy theories around 5G that have actually got engineers physically attacked and threatened.

Click bait is one thing but poor form in this context and publication.

</comment><comment><USER27> Good article but I continue to feel like for whatever use cases 5g is fit to serve, it seems likely to be a limited technology, used only by heavyweight giant companies. Unlike other communications bands, there is no intent to make any of this at all consumerly accessible.

<comment><USER28> I think, the general idea is to make this very accessible. But obviously, there will be a price to pay: buy this Matebook - no Wifi, but hey you can get this very sweet, data-limited 5G plan for only USD50 a month. Get an unlimited plan for USD300 a month. Or: buy this car, with superfast 5G V2V – oh, there's a USD1000 licenses included; well, nevermind. (and remember, some companies would have liked to use Wifi for V2V, which is freeish...)

<comment><USER29> I thought V2V was going to use redundant, multi-media, communications - <USER2> as modulating a car's lights' LED PWM to provide a low-bandwidth signal to other cars within line-of-sight, while also using some analogue of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for longe-range communications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wow, those are really cool technologies.

That said, the unlicensed spectrum thing sounds absolutely awful. Sorry your wifi will suck because your local telco decided to beam 5GHz to your neighbor, and your AP understands that as "collision" at best, and "weather radar" at worst.

I thought that was thrown out of the plan, with torches and pitchforks? With DFS wifi is already super crammed, and now "right of way" managed spectrum people want to land grab it for profit? That's so not cool.

</comment><comment><USER31> The idea of vehicle to vehicle communication is a bit frightening. Imagine the obscenities and insults you yell at other drivers, are now able to be communicated directly to the object of ire.

<comment><USER32> And reading this a smirk came on my face, yo tesla open a comm channel to that car.

<comment><USER33> Are we getting Star Trek comm channels?

"Tesla, hail the Hyundai behind me!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There's so much messy stuff with 5G from nearly the very beginning. And I like it less and less.

I'm nobody in the domain of wireless physical protocols, so I wouldn't know, of course. But does it actually even make sense to mix up peer-to-peer and peer-to-tower communications within one protocol? Why would you even want that? To be able to do all this stuff on the same frequencies? Having (more- or-less) same chip for everything, regardless of if it needs close-range and/or global network communications not only disgusts me "politically" (privacy issues, totally absent transparency, you know all that stuff), but also means more complicated, more expensive tech where you could do with cheaper one. And doing everything there is to do wirelessly on the same frequencies means these frequencies busy as fuck. Wouldn't you actually want the opposite for the protocol you hope to become the ubiquitous high- throughput cellular network protocol? It seems like it would make more sense to send 2 identical messages (or even to use 2 chips, if need be) on different frequencies if you actually need both for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER35> Can we change the title. As is, it's just click bait.

</comment><comment><USER36> Reading through this, it doesn't sound like the people involved considered the amount of outright misuse some of these features are likely to enable.

Haven't we already seen bad actors _will_ misuse mobile tech to track our movements, spy on people, (etc) on a wholesale scale?

This seems to be wilfully charging down the road of making it worse?

<comment><USER37> I bet that the concerns of the average user are not really what 5G committee members thought was most important.

<comment><USER36> Fair point. :)

Unfortunately though, they really should.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> 5G communication fine. But trust? I don't want my car accepting information from untrusted cars or roadside infrastructure.

It will be interesting riding a motorbike through these years.

</comment><comment><USER39> > Private Networks

> [...]At those scales, 5G could function essentially like Wi-Fi networks.

Now that's going to get interesting, I hope. Will we finally see a reliable alternative to 802.11?

<comment><USER40> I thought 11ax is meant to be finally reliable?

<comment><USER39> I was talking more about the alternatives. Bluetooth can be used for networking, but personal experience hasn't been very positive with reliability and range. LiFi never really took off. And honestly, another alternative doesn't come to mind...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Maha-pudma The privacy implications for this actually horrifies me.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Millimeter waves means it will be possible to build a network just for an > office building, factory, or stadium. At those scales, 5G could function > essentially like Wi-Fi networks.

LTE was already using a whole lot of frequencies adjacent to Wi-FI, and I'm sure similar bands would be a critical part of making a private 5G network since you want to go through minor obstacles. Millimeter-wave on the other hand could be useful for speed but I bet it _wouldn 't_ be a critical part.

</comment><comment><USER42> I expect and hope that 5G makes it possible to have virtual environments with many participants, very high resolution, low latency, and high frame rate.

While there is something human and nurturing about getting a hug or shaking someone's hand, very high quality shared virtual spaces will open up many business and social opportunities. Endless possibilities...

</comment><comment><USER16> Someone debunk this for me please: [http://www.5gappeal.eu/about/](http://www.5gappeal.eu/about/)

Edit: I'm legitimately looking for good sources on this. Not trolling.

<comment><USER43> An easy way to debunk it is to point out that the RF power spectrum of a typical 5G device is basically the same as a 4G or 3G device. The battery sizes are the same! It's not like suddenly every mobile phone is hooked up to a Tesla battery and got water cooling so that it can put out kilowatts.

The difference between 3G, 4G, and 5G is largely the _protocol_ , not the radio power!

The reason we can have 5G now, and not twenty years ago, is largely due to Moore's law. It is now possible for embedded and mobile devices to have sufficient computer power to "talk" using much more complex protocols than was practical before. They can use better encodings, more complex symbols, smarter echo and multi-path detection, clever error-correction, complex scheduling, etc, etc...

All of this efficiency actually serves to _reduce_ the amount of time the radio is "on", because more data can be sent in the same amount of time. That's what "higher spectral efficiency" means! Arguing against 5G is to say that their preference is the older, less efficient, and more RF polluting standards like 3G and 4G.

(Mind you, first-generation 5G devices eat more battery, but that's largely because they're right on the edge of what's possible for the logic component. Using the latest and greatest 5nm technology saves little or no power, and it'll be the next-gen 3nm process that will truly unlock the power savings. There was a similar transition with 4G from 3G.)

However, such arguments with such people are futile. They didn't arrive at their position through evidence or logic. They got there entirely as an emotional, tribal reaction to what they see as an external group entering their boundaries without their permission.

<comment><USER34> But it would mean (pretty much by the intention of 5G) many more such devices in proximity of every inhabitant of your downtown area, right (Edit: actually, now that I read it, this seems to be the main point of the "appeal")? Also more of closer-range towers pretty much everywhere, no?

> the protocol

Physical protocol, so it doesn't really debunk much. Different wavelengths, different modes of sending/receiving. I seriously have no idea if there is or isn't any reason to be concerned about that, and it wouldn't surprise me very much if it eventually turns out that this isn't all just crazy people mumbling. After all, there's no conclusive data and there's much more initiative to support 5G than to fight it, so if there is somebody talking sensibly about some real dangers, I expect that I wouldn't hear about them for way too long, since they would be lost in the noise.

So, really, I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss any "dangers of the 5G" activists, even if they aren't saying anything very conclusive right now. I seriously don't know if there can be anything to be worried about, but I am pretty sure that anybody who could possibly conduct any studies on that, will allow only studies with "good" results. I kinda have some trust issues, when it comes to dealing with large corporations.

<comment><USER43> > Also more of closer-range towers pretty much everywhere

Which generally _decreases_ the required RF transmit power, because of 1/r^2 scaling laws.

> Physical protocol

Not _really_. If you read through the 5G spec, it's mostly about upping everything. If before there were a few packet sizes, now there are more packet sizes for more efficient packing. If some encoding topped out at, say, QAM64, it goes to QAM1024 now, but only at short range.

Most of the above was constrained by client-side silicon protocol processing, not radio technology.

It's vaguely similar to H.265 vs H.264. They're not _fundamentally_ different. The newer encoding just does... more. More block sizes, more transforms, etc...

> I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss any "dangers of the 5G" activists

You really should be that fast, in the same way that you are fast to dismiss Flat-Earthers. The 5G conspiracy nutjobs have _zero_ interest in evidence, or science, or facts, or any of that stuff.

> I seriously don't know if there can be anything to be worried about

If you have no understanding of the technology or the physics, don't comment.

Seriously.

The hard-core conspiracy theorists are kept going by a surprisingly large group of ignorant people who don't know any better.

Telecoms towers have been burnt to the ground. Staff have been physically assaulted.

This is the same idiocy as the people attacking volunteers distributing vaccines.

If you want to reduce your personal health risk from mobile data technology, then simply stop texting while driving.

If you want to reduce your cancer risk from radiation, use sunscreen.

But please, stop supporting the "concerned Facebook mom" group.

<comment><USER34> I'd seriously rather support them, than people like you: individuals, who have basically nothing to support their claims that "everything will be ok", but sincerely believe that everybody around must be a "conspiracy nutjob" and must be wrong by default. Just because I like to err on the safe side, and people like you are more dangerous for society than these nutjobs (simply by virtue of being paranoid).

<comment><USER43> Don't take international flights then, you might fall off the edge of the Earth.

> basically nothing to support their claims

I studied physics and I read the 5G standards manual.

Have _any_ of the 5G conspiracy theorists done either?

Have you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I hoped 5G would be like 4G but with much more speed, lower latency, and more area covered by one antenna.

But it seems it won't deliver.

<comment><USER45> It's hard to deliver both higher speed and longer range, because higher frequencies don't reach as far and don't penetrate walls as well.

<comment><USER44> But what I read about 5G is that its range is comparable to wifi.

Why do they do that?

<comment><USER45> AFAIK, the speed is >gigabit fast, but to achieve that speed you need to have super high frequencies and hence smaller range.

To me, it seems inconvenient as a replacement for 4G. However it is also being used for other applications; like self-driving cars[1].

[1]: [https://www.cnet.com/news/5g-could-make-self-driving-cars- sm...](https://www.cnet.com/news/5g-could-make-self-driving-cars-smarter- commutes-safer/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This might be a good time to scrap it all and start from scratch!

</comment><comment><USER47> 5G will make Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, BLE, and NFC obsolete.

<comment><USER48> I could see wi-fi (even if I don't believe it) but how would this compete with BLE/NFC/Bluetooth? It's not like I want my wireless earbuds or my apple pay to go up to the internet and then back to device i'm using it from, right?

<comment><USER49> "Sidelinks will allow 5G-connected vehicles to communicate directly with one another, rather than going through a cell-tower intermediary."

<comment><USER50> I bet google wont implement that part... Just like they didnt implement ad-hoc wifi

<comment><USER51> Wifi direct is definitely implemented on android, not sure what you are specifically talking about?

<comment><USER50> Look at this thread: [https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36904180](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36904180)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Uhh, I'm not sure what that was but I tried to access that site via Tor and on the particular exit node I was on I got back a "418 I'm a teapot" response. Yeah, it got weird.

<comment><USER53> Well, it's probably a teapot!

> The HTTP 418 I'm a teapot client error response code indicates that the > server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Can we skip 5G already?</comment>


Show HN: Founder's Mastermind Segmented by MRR - <AUTHOR> https://tuemilio.com/founders-mastermind <comment><USER2> 10k MRR grouped with 100k and 1M ARR seems odd. Is that just because they are more rare and you don't want groups with 1 User in them?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have the same question. I need to collect some data to make a proper segmentation. This is the firstshot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting idea.

Is this going to be one big group for each segment or separated into even smaller groups?

What kind of medium will be used to communicate? Slack?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am surveying these questions. Groups will be probably max 10 people and in Private Telegram groups.</comment></comment>


The HN tax?  FTC mulls taxing online news aggregators - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/4/ftc-floats-drudge-tax/ <comment><USER2> If you read the actual report they're quoting ([http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/jun15/docs/new- staff-d...](http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/jun15/docs/new-staff- discussion.pdf)) you'll see, as usual, that the _Washington Times_ is being totally dishonest.

First, the report is simply a list of proposals news industry people have made about how to save their businesses, not new FTC proposals.

Second, it isn't a tax -- it's simply talking about news providers providing licenses for their content to news aggregators.

Third, the FTC isn't even talking about changing the law to create new legal rights against news aggregators. What they're actually talking about is removing antitrust barriers to news providers getting together and starting a joint licensing scheme.

In short, this is less than nothing.

<comment><USER3> Straight out of the source document -- "Nonetheless, a compulsory license places an effective tax on certain conduct."

A tax by any other name is still a tax -- and if these ideas are enacted there would be an effective "news aggregrator" tax.

<comment><USER4> Regardless, the opening paragraphs of the source document make it clear that these are NOT formal policy recommendations.

<comment><USER3> Agreed the source document labels itself as "POTENTIAL POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS TO SUPPORT THE REINVENTION OF JOURNALISM".

So I don't see why the bashing of the Washington Times Editorial as "TOTALLY DISHONEST" -- which CLEARLY makes reference to the "May 28 Draft proposal" in the first paragraph.

It's obvious that this represents a fairly accurate portrayal of the FTC's existing thinking and deserves to be scrutinized.

<comment><USER5> The Washington Times are being totally dishonest because this not a FTC proposal, it is not a draft proposal either, it is just a summary of issues that are to be discussed in future meetings with the press and various roundtable discussions etc.

"It's obvious that this represents a fairly accurate portrayal of the FTC's existing thinking and deserves to be scrutinized."

No that is not obvious. Try reading the document. On the contrary, it is obvious that at this stage they are just throwing ideas at the wall. There is absolutely no indication that the FTC has endorsed any of these ideas or that they even came from FTC personnell (the document actually suggests that many of the ideas came from external sources).

If you do not like any of those ideas please comment on them (the document provides a link for that).

But if you are going to hold the FTC responsible for everything that gets mentioned in one of their discussions with the public as if it is their plan and idea, the FTC and the government will just stop having discussions with the public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if the Washington Times editorial board even bothered reading the FTC document:

[http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/jun15/docs/new- staff-d...](http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/jun15/docs/new-staff- discussion.pdf)

There is no question that this is a newsworthy topic. But it is ironic that journalism of such poor quality is being used to defend the current journalistic system.

I think the editorial is a bit of an over-reaction. Consider the following statements from the FTC document-

We note that this draft does not represent final conclusions or recommendations by the Commission or FTC staff; it is solely for purposes of discussion, in particular at FTC roundtable discussions to be held on June 15, 2010, at the National Press Club.

-and-

We anticipate that different participants in the roundtables at which this document will be discussed will criticize some or all proposals, improve others, and add ideas of their own. The purpose of this document is precisely to encourage such additional analyses and brainstorming.

</comment><comment><USER3> The fact that the FTC feels that journalism NEEDS "reinventing" indicates a bias.

Journalism is reinventing itself with market forces alone and doesn't NEED the Federal government to "fix" it.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that all media, including some of the biggest proponents of the free market (News Corp) are clamoring for the FTC to somehow save their asses. So the FTC figures they have to do something.

It may be a good idea for some people like you to send in comments to the effect that the FTC does not need to do anything. The problem with roundtables and public comments often is that people that need to scratch an itch are more likely to go to them, which means that they may result in skewed conclusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As the discussion at [http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/05/29/ftc-protects- journalis...](http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/05/29/ftc-protects-journalisms- past/) points out, the FTC folks didn't listen to the folks who they asked to comment. In particular, that document contains a number of false statements about what various news biz.

"Yes, the omission of reporting and facts from the FTC is downright shocking. I sat in their hearing room and told them we found news sites making a sustainable living. Others who were doing it were there."

"There was no doubt about what I said: The Batavian is advertiser supported and its profitable and growing (heck, we've doubled revenue since I was in DC with the FTC)."

</comment><comment><USER7> As a listener to NPR, I don't agree that there is a bias toward government spending programs. This, to me, gives more credance to the poor writing in the article. If the writer believes there is a bias, then provide reference to some articles that support their statement.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Washington Times... not to be confused with The Washington Post, folks.

<comment><USER5> It should not be confused with a newspaper in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Look like not every news agencies is involved in some sort of conspiracy to create a news cartel supported by government tax dollars.</comment>