Obama's crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/20/194513/obamas-crackdown-views-leaks-as.html#storylink=cpy <comment><USER2> reminds me off the Hermann Goering quote from the Nuremberg trial in 1947.

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

<comment><USER3> That's a bit simplistic, no? Sure, you might only come back to your farm in one piece, but what if the alternative to going to war is never coming back to your farm? What if it means leading a life that is far worse that what you currently have?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, what if indeed? Germany attacked Poland allegedly in self-defense, with exactly those arguments, can't wait for the mushroom cloud blah blah _blah_.

So are we talking about there actually being the need for self-defense, or about self-defense as pretext for self-destruction of the many for the gains of the few? The few existential threats the US faces seem mostly to be inside of it.

<comment><USER5> They probably didn't say "mushroom cloud"

<comment><USER6> Bush did ,that's the point.

<comment><USER5> The Germans, going into WWII, did not. The term was coined later, and the devices it's meant nowadays to imply were developed later. This is, of course, an accident of history and I wasn't making a deep point, just having some fun, but I do think you missed my point which was that threats of a mushroom cloud _in particular_ would be a difference not a similarity between the two situations.

<comment><USER4> "Mushroom cloud" to me basically means "we don't have time to think, because then it will be too late!". In that sense, there is exactly zero difference between Goebbels, Bush and Obama. They just outwardly behave less like total pigs in ascending order, but the rationale is the same. "Finance us, and finance us murdering you and people all over the world, or it will be EVEN WORSE."

The daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador pretending she's a nurse and that Saddams's soldiers are throwing newborns on the floor just because they can, Powell with his slides telling the UN some trailers could be weapons laboratories, and that Saddam must be attacked immediately, it's all the same to me... it's not really about nuclear weapons, whatever works is used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was common in Eastern Europe and USSR during the purges - they were "Enemies with a Party Ticket".

It is disturbing how easily this rhetoric comes.

<comment><USER8> While I could understand why the vast majority of the government is in favor of this, or why the mainstream media is with the government, too, however disappointing that may be, what is most saddening is that there are a lot of people out there who agree with them, too, maybe not the majority but even 40% would be a very scary number.

Even in the most ruthless dictatorships there were a lot of normal people who supported their leaders, the surveillance and police states. That's the scariest part about this. If so many people believe in such ideas, it can take several decades to turn away from that, just like if you would live in a "communist" or "muslim" state, you'd know you're probably not going to see a _true_ democracy in your country in your lifetime, even if there's a revolution.

If US becomes a surveillance state and abuses are common, and people just learn to "live with that", instead of protesting [1] before it's too late, it's going to be very hard to fix that later on, and it's going to have to become a lot worse for every single person, before things even _begin_ to change, and that will take many years.

[1] - [http://www.restorethefourth.net/](http://www.restorethefourth.net/)

<comment><USER9> And how do you plan to stop the next terror attack?

<comment><USER10> I don't. We could have a 9/11 type event every year, and it would still not be as big a problem as automobile accidents. If we're going to live in a police state, I would hope the police state would focus on major causes of preventable death, like disease and automobile accidents. Terrorism in the United States is not a serious problem worthy of this level of concern.

<comment><USER9> This is like saying lets have a lottery every year that picks 3000 people and send them over to the middle east.

My point is people have to be pushed to answer the question on how to tackle terrorism to take this debate in a constructive direction. Ofcourse governments will do dumb things but the terrorism problem is a hard one.

<comment><USER11> The terrorism problem is a manufactured one. You want to fight terrorism? Fine, your budget is proportional to the budget we use to solve other types of murder based on the number of lives it costs us, and you can use the same methods. If you don't agree you'll have to distinguish terrorism from other types of murder in a defensible way, otherwise we should be treating them equally.

<comment><USER12> What is this obsession with body counts? To bang again on my favorite drum, many, may more Americans were dying of polio or coal mining accidents in 1941 than German or Japanese bombs. That doesn't mean it was stupid to enter World War II.

Obviously those who have chosen to deliberately kill civilians in spectacular ways are not right now a danger akin to imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. But will it really take a dirty bomb, a successful mass infection/poisoning, or god help us a nuke to stop this silly argument?

It's bizarre to me that one of the anti-anti-terror arguments of choice reflects that hilariously dystopian scene in the film _Brazil_ , wherein the staff and patrons of a restaurant that has just been bombed attempt to paper over the incident by completely ignoring it, as innocent people suffer and die.

<comment><USER11> >Obviously those who have chosen to deliberately kill civilians in spectacular ways are not right now a danger akin to imperial Japan or Nazi Germany.

Obviously. Which is the point.

>But will it really take a dirty bomb, a successful mass infection/poisoning, or god help us a nuke to stop this silly argument?

These are movie theater plots. "Mass poisonings" are a very poor attack vector because as soon as they're identified they get publicized and people stop consuming the adulterated product, which minimizes the impact. Spreading infection has similar constraints, is difficult to contain (i.e. the attacker can't prevent it from spreading to his own family/country), and it is vastly more difficult to obtain weaponized infectious materials than poisons.

And dirty bombs are a media fabrication. Here's the money quote from Stratfor: "By its very nature, the RDD is contradictory. Maximizing the harmful effects of radiation involves maximizing the exposure of the victims to the highest possible concentration of a radioisotope. When dispersing the radioisotope, by definition and design the RDD dilutes the concentration of the radiation source, spreading smaller amounts of radiation over a larger area."[1]

[1] [http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100421_dirty_bombs_revisite...](http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100421_dirty_bombs_revisited_combating_hype)

Which leaves The Bomb. But terrorists can't build nuclear weapons. States can barely do it. So if your concern is nuclear terrorism, the solution doesn't require you to catch the terrorists, all you have to do is limit the availability of weapons grade material. Which is a completely different problem with completely different solutions that don't involve domestic surveillance or foreign wars, is required to prevent state-level nuclear proliferation regardless of terrorism anyway, and mostly just involves being the highest bidder if weapons grade material ever becomes available on the black market.

>It's bizarre to me that one of the anti-anti-terror arguments of choice reflects that hilariously dystopian scene in the film Brazil, wherein the staff and patrons of a restaurant that has just been bombed attempt to paper over the incident by completely ignoring it, as innocent people suffer and die.

I don't think anybody is arguing that there should be _no_ response to a terrorist act. But why can't the response be to bring the terrorists to justice as international criminals, and not to let it change the fabric of our society?

<comment><USER13> " _dirty bombs are a media fabrication_ " ... I don't know about this, once you factor in Green hysteria about radiation. I suspect a dirty bomb in e.g. Germany would have amazingly disproportionate results compared to the actual threat.

In the US, we'd probably do what they did in NYC after 9/11 WRT to the excessive claims of danger from asbestos, say "never mind" (after cleaning up hot spots). And "don't eat dirt" and the like, but who knows?

Elsewhere I've touched on how I'm not as sanguine as you over the real nuclear threat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That raises the question: who is US after all? Is it the officials or is it the people?

<comment><USER15> Ive tried to stop myself from forming opinions of the residents of other countries by the actions and rhetoric of their political leaders, whether elected or otherwise. I would hope others do the same and don't believe the actions of DC to be anything more than an exaggerated and often inaccurate caricature of the American people.

<comment><USER16> I've quickly changed my mind about this sort of thinking. It's a nice little "get out of jail free" card for everyone. We should be held responsible for our government's actions, at least to some degree (especially in a democracy). How many of us _really_ sacrifice significant resources and time to causes that would make the country/world better? How many here spend more at the bar than they do in charity every month? How many spend hours consuming media but don't take the time to keep educated about politics? What's the turnout at major primaries? Ten percent? Twenty?

It's easy to say, we shouldn't judge the people of the country because it feels good to us and, in reality, most people are rather decent. However, I think it should be the opposite, we should all be ashamed of ourselves for letting ourselves get bought off for a little convenience and comfort. We're all guilty to varying degrees. We should step up and accept that. The first step towards recovery is admitting you have a problem.

<comment><USER15> I can see your point, but at the same time I have to look at the situation most people are in.

Sometimes people are truly in the minority, say for instance a gay man in Jamaica. He could essentially sacrifice his life to try to move the needle on his countries tolerance level, or he could be discrete and live his life. I'll be the first to cheer on the former, but I don't believe that its my place to judge the latter for inaction.

I don't believe that its right to hold people responsible for their governments actions while much of the world lacks freedom of movement, and those in power have nearly all the tools at their disposal to hold onto that power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A bit off-topic, but related: there's also a huge increase in the number of federal agencies who are outfitting their own SWAT teams. (This type of service, if really needed, could be delivered by the FBI or local law enforcement)

SWAT teams traditionally have been there to diffuse potentially violent confrontations -- to reduce violence. But in the last decade or so [correction: three decades], we've seen a change in the nature of SWAT. Now the teams are being used increasingly as shock police forces, bringing an escalated level of violence to a situation in order to overwhelm any possibility of danger to the officers or general public.

Seeing guys like the FDA, DOE, or EPA with their own SWAT teams is a bit unsettling, to say the least. One wonders where this will all stop.

<comment> big-jdx Does that tie in to the recent stories about the Feds buying so much ammo? So many indicators lately that are disturbing.

*edited to add link

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/03/11/1-6-billio...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/03/11/1-6-billion- rounds-of-ammo-for-homeland-security-its-time-for-a-national-conversation/)

<comment><USER18> The numbers that were given were contracts that allowed them to purchase up to that amount of ammunition at a given price over 5 years. The actual quantity purchased last year was more than an order of magnitude less than reported.[1]

[1][http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&...](http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=9cde768f-bb3a-4fd9-8176-1745c21519c2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> one must ask, why does the US have enemies?

<comment><USER20> More over, why so many perceived enemies who are US citizens? Why is the US government treating its own citizens as enemies of the state?

As a non American, I take a perverse sort of comfort from that idea that it looks like the US government is as scared of its own people as it is foreigners. At least we foreigners and American citizens are in it together.

Truth is, we are enemies of US government behavior, not the United States of America or its fine people. We critical non Americans are actually arguing for America to be better, not worse. We want it stronger through fairness, justice and, well, just plain decent behavior. Not through cowardice, fear, and the bullying fist. Just imagine how powerful the US could be if the rest of the world actually liked and respected it, rather than feared it. People who fear you are not friends, they are people who will bite back the second they can.

However, what I'm not sure of is whether or not the US government is actually as the majority of Americans want it. It is a democracy after all. I realize that democracy is distorted by money and vested interests, but TBH, given what we know today about all that, surely the American voter cant use that as an excuse any more. All those nasty lying attack ad campaigns, the distortion of facts, etc.... we all know how that works. So, surely Americans cant be swayed by that sort of thing? Would it not be a bit daft to know you are being manipulated, but still go along with such manipulations? So, cant people vote smart?

I dunno.... Its all a bit of a mess.

Oh...... why so many enemies? Fear.

<comment><USER13> We've got an entrenched ruling class that's very distinct from the bulk of the county, who are remarkably inept, and who's interests are very much not those of the rest of the country's. This includes the Republican Party establishment, GOPe as some are starting to label it.

For more details, this article is the best initial exposition I've found, "America's Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution", " _The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party — and its vision is revolutionary._ ": [http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas- ruling-cla...](http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class- and-the)

See also the expanded monograph: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Ruling-Class- ebook/dp/B0040JHNZW](http://www.amazon.com/The-Ruling-Class- ebook/dp/B0040JHNZW)

And the "revolutionary" bit, of an American nature, not at all in the violent French tradition, explains why the TEA Party et. al. has to be suppressed at all costs, and why the GOPe wasn't and still isn't interested in stopping it per se (e.g. the IRS has not changed its policies). We are existential threats to the GOPe, as e.g. Republican ex-Senator Richard Lugar knows as he's now spending more time with his family.

<comment><USER13> And the author weights in on the current NSA controversy: [http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/06/23/the-ruling-class- co...](http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/06/23/the-ruling-class-consensus-on- domestic-spying/)

The author is an old school Cold Warrior, so I'm not dismissing his dismissal of e.g. traffic analysis and the general utility of the NSA's current methods out of hand, I'll have to read it carefully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I suggest that, on the question prominent in this thread, "what should the US do about terrorism and the claimed excesses of the NSA", there is now an answer that is unavoidable, rock solid, quite clear, maybe crystal clear, even if it does not address all concerns.

Here in logical steps is the unavoidable answer:

(1) Due to whatever in history before 1776, the US founding fathers gave us the Constitution. Soon they gave us the Bill of Rights. In particular we have the Fourth Amendment.

(2) Congress, the FISA 'court', the Intelligence committees of Congress, the president, the NSA, etc. may have done this and that, but there are claims that the Constitution has been violated.

(3) Law suits are being brought claiming that the Constitution has been violated. Apparently there will be suits from Google, EFF, and the ACLU, and there's little to stop more suits from being brought. It appears that quite generally lots of lawyers will be burning midnight oil, word processing, filing cases, etc.

(4) Very likely some of these law suits will make it to the steps of the Supreme Court, be taken in by the court, studied, argued, and decided. If the Constitution has been violated as clearly and strongly as it is easy to guess from the recent news, then the court will likely strike down at least some of the laws that enabled the violations. Really, for this process, nothing can stop it now -- not the president, the NSA, the FISA court, Congress. People can argue this and that, that we need what the NSA has been doing or we don't, but still the Supreme Court will take this issue and address it.

(5) The founding fathers made sure that the Supreme Court was not just a bunch of kids playing tag on a playground. Instead the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the US) is about as serious as anything in this solar system. The court is absolutely, positively 100% aware of the Constitution, their role in defending it, and threats to it. Arguments of short term expediency, the threats of Boston loser wackos with backpacks with pressure cookers, Jihaders with chembio in public places, or well funded efforts to sneak a nuke into a major US city will not be seen as repealing the Bill of Rights or even one comma in the Constitution. And the SCOTUS is just awash in power, both in principle and in practice, to strike down as unconstitutional whatever parts of the Patriot Act, the FISA court, etc. they conclude, with considerable study and wisdom, is appropriate.

The process of (1)-(5) has now started and will move forward "with all deliberate speed" which might be 1-2 years.

In simplest terms, the SCOTUS can, yes, understand the threats of terrorism but can understand with much greater concern the threats to the Constitution. The SCOTUS has no choice but to pay essentially all their attention just to the threats to the Constitution.

It's the process: The Executive branch is supposed to follow the laws and, really, can't change the laws. If the laws are too limiting for the important work of the Executive branch, then have Congress pass some new laws. We did that. If the new laws are unconstitutional, then bring suits before the SCOTUS to have the unconstitutional laws struck down. We're now in the process of doing just that. The SCOTUS has to protect the Constitution and can't change it. If the Constitution needs changing, then that's 2/3rds of the House, 2/3rds of the Senate, and 3/4ths of the states.

So, in 1-2 years we will know. The smart money is on the Constitution coming out whole. And the chances of an amendment to the Constitution are as usual from slim to none.

So, where will the SCOTUS defending the Constitution leave Congress, the Executive branch, the NSA, the FBI, local police, etc.? They will have to put their thinking caps on and find ways to protect the US from the Jihaders within the Constitution. Or the Executive branch will find more ways to violate laws and/or the Constitution, and then there may be more leaks, law suits, etc.

Whatever, and it may take time, in this mud wrestling the Constitution stands to come out whole. Thank you founding fathers.

Did the founding fathers see this coming? Absolutely. Been there; done that; got the T-shirt, 200+ years ago.

Or, we need to defend the US. One of the best parts of the US is the Constitution. So, it is logically impossible to defend the US and trash the Constitution. Instead, in defending the US, it is in particular necessary to defend the Constitution. For also defending the rest of the US, that's a problem we have to work to solve; I have no doubt at all we can solve it.

In simple terms, the problem is not finding ways within the Constitution to stop the Jihaders. Instead, the problem is stopping intellectually lazy, empire building bureaucrats and CYA politicians from using the Jihader threat as an excuse to trash the Constitution, build empires, and CYA.

<comment><USER22> I am sure you meant well but I found your write-up somewhat scattered and lacking a logical conclusion supported by prior points. This is easy to do if one is writing with passion. I've done it too.

If your point is that we will ultimately be protected by the Supreme Court, I think you are wrong. This is the same Supreme Court that enabled Obamacare, a law that allows the Federal Government to force every american to buy something. And, if you don't or don't pay a penalty the IRS will come after you. Beyond that, this is a law virtually nobody read and, per Nancy Pelosi we had to "pass it to find out what's in it". I can't remember a greater perversion of authority in my adult life.

I am sure there are other examples but IANAL.

<comment><USER23> There is a stark difference, though, between a law which merely (allegedly) distorts economic behavior, and one that affects privacy. The former is only vaguely addressed in the Constitution, in the form fo the 9th and 10th Amendments, and even then the Commerce Clause gives the federal government much power in this arena. The latter, however, is very specifically addressed in the 4th Amendment, and there is no catch-all like the Commerce Clause that would undermine it.

<comment><USER22> True enough. However, something like Obamacare has the potential to cause both massive economic destruction and massive violations of privacy. I mean, the government --the IRS!!!-- will have access to your health data. Sit down and think about what they could learn about anyone by connecting the dots between your Internet, phones and health databases as well as those of the people connected to you. I don't see much good coming from this. I hate to take a paranoid stance but I sure feel, rightly or not, we are living through a pole shift. Our country is being mutated into a beast few of us might recognize as the USA in the future. This really saddens me. I hope I am wrong.

<comment><USER21> You see clearly, like seeing Godzilla rising from the East River and about to come ashore. And you are 100% correct.

"All we need is another man like Richard Nixon again" \-- sung to the theme song of 'All in the Family'. So, Tricky Dicky had an "enemies list" and wanted to use IRS data. If he had had IRS data, NSA data, CIA data, FBI data, and Obamacare data, we might not have a country now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Denying the right of "We the People" to know what is being done in OUR name is anathema to the ideal of "the consent of the governed."

Unfortunately there are many who believe that because of the ethnicity of the POTUS he can do no wrong. I spoke to a neighbor yesterday who is a staunch Obama supporter and he parroted the Cheney line completely. When I mentioned the Bill of Rights he justified the spying as a necessary evil.

If the 4th Amendment is to be abrogated then it should be amended to reflect the current state of affairs.

There goes that fabled _" Moral High Ground,"_ again...

If the government was _really_ concerned with our safety alcohol would be outlawed. Compare the statistics regarding deaths attributed to _" terrorism"_ and deaths attributed to alcohol.

<comment><USER25> Can you specifically mention what "ethnicity" the president has that prevents criticism of his behavior?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if we will see a non-corrupt America within our lifetime.

<comment><USER13> That's way too binary of a wish, there hasn't been a "non-corrupt" America pretty much ever. I mean, go back and look at the Hamilton-Burr feud, or the etymology of gerrymander: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Etymology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Etymology). The guy signed the Deceleration of Independence....

It's more a matter of degree, and pervasiveness. By many measures we're still a largely uncorrupt nation, but I find it difficult to believe that if what's happening at the top isn't stopped that it won't filter down a whole lot. Although e.g. the Japanese are an example of a largely uncorrupt people with eternally "corrupt" rulers, going back many centuries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I guess I no longer need to pretend that Obama is pretending to be an a-hole in order to get re-elected.

</comment><comment><USER28> >But R. Scott Oswald, a Washington attorney of the Employment Law Group, called the Obama administration "a friend to whistleblowers," saying it draws a distinction between legitimate whistleblowers who use internal systems to complain of wrongdoing vs. leakers, who illegally make classified information public.

Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Peter Van Buren, and William Binney didn't seem to think that those "internal systems" were effective. Judging by their treatment, I can't blame Edward Snowden for not deciding to become another body amongst foundations.

<comment><USER13> At a less dire level, look at the early Obama administration treatment of _Inspectors General_ (IG, try [https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+inspector+general&oq=o...](https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+inspector+general&oq=obama+inspector+general)), i.e. the guys who's official job it is to expose problems. We're pretty sure that's why the IRS IG didn't even do an investigation, just an "audit" (really), with unsworn testimony with people's supervisors in the same room.

Anyone who makes this " _a friend to whistleblowers_ " claim is simply not living in the same universe I am.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is Bill Clinton speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative - whose spouse, from all accounts, will most likely be running for the office of President in 2016 - on NSA Security Leaks and Snowden.

      "They (NSA) have prevented a very large number of harmful actions"

      "I don't see any alternative to trying to track all these groups
      around the world who are trying to wreck the ordinary operations
      of life in America and probably kill a lot of people. I am not
      persuaded that they (NSA) have done more harm than good"

In an increasingly uncertain world, the opinion among most American leaders and figureheads, on either side of the aisle, about the need for increased domestic and international surveillance, has already calcified.

For better or worse, they are overwhelmingly in favor of it. The debate being precipitated here and in mainstream media is largely symbolic.

It is time for privacy advocates to leave their dens and organize formally ( as in politically ) to advance their agendas. Washington only understands political clout whether it is a PAC or a lobby group.

Grassroots organizations will always go the way of Occupy Wall Street without formal leadership and a political consensus - lots of Zuccotti drama and nothing to show for it except for your obligatory iconic pepper spray photo.

You can mobilize politically in formal ways or bask in the warm glow of all the emotional outrage being voiced now and get your iconic photo spread.

Guess what?

The riots in Brazil have one too:

[http://25.media.tumblr.com/a3b0bc19184f467fb7a70a2df6ee81a5/...](http://25.media.tumblr.com/a3b0bc19184f467fb7a70a2df6ee81a5/tumblr_molaxlscWT1r44q44o1_1280.jpg)

and nothing will come off those riots either. Wanna wager a candy bar?

Let's check back 3 months from now and I bet things will have gone back to where they were without any concrete action taken and the crowds going back to their usual quotidian lives.

Source:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-JdjIxjeUs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-JdjIxjeUs)

<comment><USER13> Clinton is the same guy who tried to press us into using key-escrowed encryption systems like the Clipper Chip ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip)) and his IRS was notorious for auditing anyone who committed personal, in your face _lèse-majesté_. You mention his wife, she of the "vast, right wing conspiracy"; these are not people who've _ever_ been good on these subjects. For that matter, not that it wasn't largely bipartisan to begin with, but the reason the PATRIOT Act passed so quickly in such detail was it was a wish list left over from Clinton's administration, where it had been pushed without success.

<comment><USER30> You may not like Clinton but _tons of people do_. Ignore that at the peril of the political goals you try to advance.

But either way, the point is that Clinton's opinion is going to be a decent bellwether as to the general opinion. I think spitx is right on target on how to advance change (or at least, what to avoid).

<comment><USER13> Sure, "tons of people do", they're by definition part of the problem, since they explicitly or implicitly support these types of thuggishness, as long as it's directed at their enemies.

We on the other side mostly want to be left alone. Their side isn't willing to do that, which is why we're sliding towards a hot civil war.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


JS/HTML5 GameBoy Color Emulator - <AUTHOR> http://grantgalitz.org/PokemonCrystal/

<comment><AUTHOR> Found the code: <https://github.com/grantgalitz/GameBoy-Online>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Warning, there's sound that comes with this emulator, so you better turn down your dial. :/

</comment><comment><USER2> is there an online rom that i can use to test the emulator?

<comment><USER2> wow that's awesome, I thought that it didn't work but I just left it on a tab and then went back to it after a while then randomly clicked around and it started working.

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny how most people don't know this site exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> OMG Pokemon!!!!

<comment><USER4> lolwut</comment></comment>


Millennials Don't Stand a Chance - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/millennials-are-new-lost-generation/609832/ <comment><USER2> This is about USA.</comment>


Ukrainians Awake to 'Nightmare' of Trump Victory - <AUTHOR> http://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-reactions-trump-victory/28106405.html <comment><AUTHOR> Am aware of HN guidelines, but am posting this because the human dimensions of the story -- and the fact that Ukraine is emerging startup hub -- seem to outweigh the "pure politics" aspects.

<comment><USER2> No nightmares. It's result of propaganda, which pictured Trump as pro-russian, so some, which are susceptible to propaganda, are in worry because of war with Russia.

I, personally, welcome republicans. Ukraine is republic, by Constitution.</comment></comment>


Basecamp on the iTunes App Store - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id599139477

<comment><USER2> This is some of the best visual design I've seen in any iOS productivity app. Nearly every other "work" product uses a skeuomorphic "list on a sheet of paper" approach or an ultra-chrome, "this is a high-tech product" look. Basecamp has found its own visual voice, which I think works really well.

</comment><comment><USER3> According to the devs, it's built with RubyMotion[1] <https://twitter.com/qrush/status/299984920066002944>

[1]: <http://rubymotion.com>

<comment><USER4> Interesting. At the latest Rubyconf a few months back the Thunderbolt labs guys stated they didn't think RubyMotion was quite ready for production apps. Perhaps it is now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does this work with Basecamp Personal?

<comment><USER6> Yes!</comment></comment>


iOS 4.3 Not Providing Nitro Engine To Web Apps Launched Full Screen? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/03/15/report-apple-sandbags-home-screen-web-apps/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29

<comment><USER2> The article itself is basically a wrapper around a Hacker News post where this was previously discussed. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317804>

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry; missed this yesterday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When a public component uses one JavaScript engine over another it is probably not a bug or an oversight. My guess is it is an internal dependency and scheduling issue at Apple. The team behind UIWebView is probably downstream from the Safari/Nitro team and they didn't get the new bits in time to ship with 4.3. Full screen mode may well depend on UIWebView and not the Safari app components.

</comment><comment><USER4> Previously discussed here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317804>

</comment><comment><USER5> Since it's not present in UIWebViews either, sounds like a bug that it's only available to Safari, rather than a grand conspiracy theory. UIWebViews are pretty important to a lot of native app development.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If this is anything more than a bug, it's really troubling. There is really no possible justification for not allowing full screen web apps to have access to the Nitro engine.

</comment><comment><USER6> Or maybe yet another case of Apple doing it because "they can"?

I noticed that people have tweeted this to Gruber but he hasn't mentioned it in his blog yet.

</comment><comment><USER7> I do believe it's a timing/team issue but what a bad decision. Why in the world is Safari and UIWebView using different code bases?</comment>


Former Mozilla CEO raises $35M in under 30s for his browser startup Brave - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/brave-ico-35-million-30-seconds-brendan-eich/ <comment><USER3> Yesterday's discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453344)

<comment><USER4> This article has way more info than a tweet though, so I wish HN didn't tag this as [dupe]. Although the link to the old discussion is useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll say this much, Brave has done a marvelous job of branding this advertising middleware platform as an ad blocker and privacy protector.

Look at question 15 in their FAQ. [https://brave.com/FAQ.html](https://brave.com/FAQ.html) They're gathering much more information than regular ads are able to, and they're using that information to push more highly targeted ads at you. That's the business model. All the handwaving about how that information never leaves the browser is irrelevant; it's still being used to push ads at you.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, that FAQ's way out of date. We won't do anything other than what other browsers do for history, anti-tracking (see Apple's announced on-device machine learning for third-party cookie blocking exception management), etc. in baseline Brave without users opting in. Any machine learning ad matching code will be a separate open source codebase and downloaded component.

<comment><USER5> That's good news, and represents a significant change for the better compared to the last time I took a serious look at your company. I still find the whole ad replacement concept problematic, and I wish your marketing materials were a bit clearer about which ideas are current, which planned, and which abandoned -- but making it opt-in does go a long way toward allaying those concerns.

<comment><USER6> Could you do me a favor and point out any more old junk on the site that you see? We scrubbed but clearly missed FAQ items, too much eng work not enough mktg, lol. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm amazed there's been no mention of HNs favourite angry rant topic: Brave is a browser built on electron. And no, I do not mean webkit.

<comment><USER8> A browser built on a browser sandbox, what could go wrong! Can we go deeper?

<comment><USER9> It has its appeal. An interface made in html/css/js is customizable and programmable from a user's pov. Only the performance can be annoying, but sometimes its not too much of an issue, as Visual Studio Code demonstrated.

<comment><USER8> Firefox had XUL for a long time, which is imo a better solution for building structured user interfaces compared to raw html.

<comment><USER9> I tried modding Firefox once. Maybe its the tools required that are not really well made, but XUL felt like a mess to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm going to give Brave a try as my primary browser for a week and see how it goes. So far so good.

<comment><USER11> It wasn't that bad when I used it for a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There needs to be a fairer distribution of the tokens if they want this to succeed. This is because token holders become the ambassadors / evangelists for the project.

There's probably a lot of disappointed people who missed the crowdsale - <USER2> means the project would have a lot of salty opponents now.

</comment><comment><USER13> Brave is wonderful. Whenever I encounter a site with bad advertising, or a paywall, Brave skips right around it. I really like the idea the browser puts forth that you can have some say over where advertising dollars go. It's a little clunky but hopefully that will get better with time.

</comment><comment><USER14> yeah, I'm really looking forward the browser where I can pay to do the things I do now for free.

<comment><USER15> I'm certainly willing to pay if it means producers don't have to bug me with patreon links and shitty ads at every opportunity!

<comment><USER7> But they still will. They'll still have to bug people who don't use brave. You think they're going to recode their sites to recognise brave and hide everything away? You'll get the same experience as you do right now with an ad blocker, except you'll be paying for it while the majority of people don't. And then in a few years brave will go belly up and you'll be out of pocket, and the internet will still be full of intrusive ads

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > "in under 30s"

Sheez FFS, someone learn how to write headlines. I was trying to figure out what that mean. 30 is not a dollar bill denomination? All the donations were under $30? What?

<comment><USER17> I agree. I was actually under the impression that he raised $35MM from people under the age of 30.</comment></comment>


The RISE and reach of Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/rise-of-javascript/

<comment><USER2> Where has it not reached? I wonder if they browse web pages from the ISS!</comment>


IRC Netiquette and You - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/codemouse92/irc-netiquette-and-you-doa <comment><USER2> I found IRC through an online game many years ago in my teens. There are times I am amazed how much could be done with none of the bell and whistles chat platforms have today.

I'd agree with most of the rules, though I wonder how many more people will ever need to learn them. Unfortunately, IRC is a fading medium. There will be those who always stick with it, but they will be growing fewer in number every day.</comment>


PayPal.Me - <AUTHOR> https://www.paypal.me/ <comment><USER2> Paypal, sort out the problems you've had for years on your main site:

* Incredibly slow page loads * I have to login twice each time * If I browse too many pages, the query string gets so long my requests fail * It goes on and on

<comment><USER3> Good on you for listing your gripes with them. Too often I see people complaining about PayPal in general but I've managed to miss actual reasons before now.

<comment><USER4> Normally it's because their account is suddenly closed, without any reason given, and no correspondence is entered into.

Also they're happy to support hate groups, but blacklisted wikileaks.

<comment><USER5> Yup, this.

Things like getting your funds frozen by Paypal when you're a legitimate business and handed over a fuckton of documentation and proof of legitimate orders to prove it. Which then destroys your cashflow, which means the typical 'pay in 30 days' that is extremely common in business 2 business transactions gets messed up because Paypal froze your money. You can't pay your supplier, your order doesn't come in, meanwhile you've been shipping your product to your customers despite the fact all the revenue from these orders is getting insta-frozen, and now you're starting to actually get legitimate issues of customers not getting their product because you can't pay your supplier for new product and can't ship to your customers, which makes Paypal clamp down ever harder to 'resolve these issues before we unfreeze the account', which of course is an issue they created and an issue that can't be solved because they're kidnapping your money.

So now you need to find external financing (we're not talking about Amazon here, but commonly 1 or 2 people selling products from their home, the internet's mom & pop stores) to fund the supplier's order, then ship, cancel customer's orders so you can prove to Paypal you can ship to every placed order (who leave negative feedback, understandably), and see customers cancel orders themselves (more negative feedback), and then unfreeze the money, pay back your financier, place another order with a supplier and hope to regain lost customers.

And that's the simple story, the true story is extremely frustrating and much more complex with cashflow being frozen for 6 months while you're trying to keep your business alive. Not everyone wants to recount it every time they want to criticise Paypal.

Now if there were legitimate concerns, cool. But as nailer said, you can find tons of stories of people who ran into these issues for no reason and without a reason given, without due dilligence and without the type of 'reasonably swift' (i.e. days or at most weeks, not 6 months) recourse & resolution of frozen cashflow you need to run a business without going bankrupt.

A tip, if anyone ever does a product launch with Paypal, call them beforehand. Launching a product and selling in a spike the first days/weeks (i.e. extremely typical for virtually every launch ever) is a red flag for Paypal.

Which means for anyone doing a pre-order, well you're fucked if you get unlucky. Plenty of stories of people doing a legitimate pre-order campaign with customers willing to wait say 2 months on the product. Halfway through your pre-order campaign you think 'alright I'm at $60k right now, I'll probably make it to $100k. I'll start to order from my supplier about $80k's worth for now to be on the safe side. You pay $25k of your own money upfront'. Campaign is over, you reached $100k, your supplier is busy, you call him up to adjust to $100k, and tell him you'll pay the remaining $75k right away. Turns out all your money is frozen. Supplier won't ship, Paypal won't unfreeze the money for months. You inform your customers, they're sad. 3% of them files a complaint with Paypal for a refund, which now means that 100% of Paypal's feedback from customers about you is negative, seeing as you haven't been able to ship to anyone yet.

You might think well good, Paypal protects its users from fraud (despite a total ignorance as to how normal pre-orders work, thereby screwing over their users), but this stuff happens to people who've done business with Paypal for 5-10 years. It happens to companies with solid internet reputations that takes 5 seconds to review on the internet or with a phonecall whether they're legitimate.

And that's the 'normal' stuff, i.e. selling a videogame, a bracelet, a usb charger etc... But if we get to the really controversial stuff, like omg sex on video, I know I should use the p-word but I'll just say it, porn... did that get censored? Well then you're out of luck with Paypal entirely, which is insane.

<comment><USER6> Also worth noting that their terms are pretty seller- and user-hostile. You described some of the seller-hostile instances above (here's another [0] from a few years back).

But they've also rolled out some pretty user-hostile stuff in the past year. At one point, they were set to roll out a new privacy agreement that included permission for them to robo-call you at phone numbers that you hadn't provided to them (with no mention of how those numbers were obtained).[1]

[0] [http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/paypal-shreds-ostensibly- ra...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/paypal-shreds-ostensibly-rare-violin- because-it-cares/) [1] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/05/paypal-claims-it- will-allow...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/05/paypal-claims-it-will-allow- customers-to-opt-out-of-robocalls-and-texts-permitted-in-new-policy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Based on my previous paypal experiences, I would rather send my money with any of the other money platforms that are out there.

<comment><USER8> Square or Stripe?

<comment><USER7> Every friend circle uses a different service, but its mostly facebook or square. No issues with either!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Deja vu?

For those of us who have been around a while, we might remember this as being PayPal's original purpose in life. I remember paying back friends for lunch using PayPal and feeling like we were living in the future.

Only later did PayPal move into the merchant space more seriously. Maybe my memory is poor and they launched with merchants at the same time but it took a few years for me to ever purchase anything with PayPal, it was all between consumers before.

So ya, welcome back PayPal?

<comment><USER10> I remember when PayPal was x.com. You'd tell people you could send them money via text message and they'd say, "What's a text message?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's fun to get in on services early and have the choice of a username: [https://www.paypal.me/more](https://www.paypal.me/more)

<comment><USER12> Tell me about it: [https://www.paypal.me/signup](https://www.paypal.me/signup)

It looks like somebody already grabbed [https://www.paypal.me/login](https://www.paypal.me/login)

<comment><USER13> I grabbed [https://www.paypal.me/pages](https://www.paypal.me/pages) \- suprised it worked considering [https://www.paypal.me/pages/faqs](https://www.paypal.me/pages/faqs), [https://www.paypal.me/pages/terms](https://www.paypal.me/pages/terms) and [https://www.paypal.me/pages/1337](https://www.paypal.me/pages/1337)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I attempted to sign up with a 50 character 1Password-generated password, and was told that passwords cannot be longer than 20 characters.

I can't see any reason for this other than that they're storing them either encrypted or in cleartext.

Use with caution.

<comment><USER15> Normally I'd cry foul but 20 alphanumeric characters (roughly 64^20, or 1e36 combinations) is more than sufficient.

<comment><USER16> The issue is not the 20 characters, but the underlying reason for it. There's no technical reason they would need it unless they were storing it insecurely.

Granted it's possible they're limiting it to 20 for a nontechnical reason, but I have some 40-character passwords in a password manager. Long passwords are not only reasonable, but this is a giant alarm bell if they even imply they might be storing them insecurely.

<comment><USER9> What are you talking about? Taken to its logical conclusion you would have sites support passwords up to a million characters or else it is a sign that they are insecure. Having some limit is perfectly sane.

I also find it a bit "armchair quarterbacky" to be calling out PayPal on security practices. They've been around the block a few times, and though I certainly don't love them, they aren't making rookie mistakes like not-hashing passwords or the like.

You are just spreading FUD for no discernable reason. 20 characters while not the epitome of greatness, isn't a sign of the end times.

<comment><USER17> "armchair quarterbacky" would make quite a good password, but unfortunately it's 1 character over their limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sorry about that...PayPal.Me isn't available in your country.

<comment><USER19> I love how you can't even see FAQ or About pages if you're not in the supported country. That's Google Play Store level UX.

<comment><USER20> Even if you are in a supported country, when setting up a page, the "Learn more about our fees" page is a 404: [https://www.paypal.com/%7BcoBrand%7D/webapps/mpp/paypal- fees](https://www.paypal.com/%7BcoBrand%7D/webapps/mpp/paypal-fees)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It´s available here in Germany and I feared that fees would apply for every transaction but learning from the FAQ, when transferring money between friends/family this is actually free. Given, that in Germany, transactions between banks are free too, the whole cycle of shifting money should be also free for Paypal (omitting costs for running the service of course). I am looking forward to trying it out, it might be much nicer than giving someone the IBAN and letting him handle the transaction via the bank.

<comment><USER22> An alternative in Germany (or any country adhering to the IBAN/BIC numbering system) is cringle [1]. It uses direct withdrawals (Lastschrift) or wire transfers and does not require the other party to have a cringle account in order to receive money, according to their website.

[1]: [https://www.cringle.net](https://www.cringle.net)

<comment><USER23> Cringle transactions are only free since very recently. Prior to that they wanted something between 10 to 20 cent per transaction. Even worse they seem to need six days for your transaction. (It's three days per transaction and they transfer it to their own account in-between)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What happened to the story of PayPal handing over users' phone numbers to robocallers? [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/06/03/paypal- robocall...](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/06/03/paypal-robocalls)

Did it turn out to be true? I haven't deleted my account yet, but I haven't made new purchases nor signed any new agreements since then. Especially since there may not even be a guarantee that they won't do it to people with "disabeld" accounts.

Edit: I just registered the .me account for my regular name, so I won't have someone posing as me or getting payments from people who've confused the owner with me, as a precaution.

</comment><comment><USER25> paypal is by far the worst payment processing system that I have ever used...

<comment><USER26> Why?

<comment><USER27> Terrible site, slow load times, history of poor security. Disenfranchised workers and a bureaucratic nightmare. Along with a history of freezing assets of popular projects for no reason. (wikileaks donations for instance).

[http://www.paypalsucks.com/](http://www.paypalsucks.com/) [https://www.aboutpaypal.org/](https://www.aboutpaypal.org/)

<comment><USER26> I agree that the site isn't great, but I'd still call that above average, especially nowadays. Load times are fine for me (using O12). Poor security? (other than not having two-step authentication)

The rest of the things just comes with it being a huge corporation that pretends it's not a bank I guess. Funny thing if you search for PP here

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=paypal&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=paypal&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Didn't they have some "controversial" privacy policy change recently?

Anyway, I still see it as the lesser evil of the widespread totally-not-a-bank payment processors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Tried /reddit, /cocacola, and my first name - all taken. Got /sjg, my initials, but now I want to go back and get /rocketships, since that's my domain. Damn! They only let you have one!

</comment><comment><USER29> Just to test, send me money: [https://paypal.me/martino](https://paypal.me/martino)

Edit: Thank you for your €0,10 kind stranger!

<comment><USER30> Looks like they forgot to test for negative values. I put in -200.00 and it seems to have withdrawn the money from your account without problems ;)

<comment><USER31> Looks like they solved that, it now disallowed inputting a dash. I wonder if that's just client-side though.

<comment><USER29> kedean... it was a joke...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ahh I tried doing this with Stripe and Stripe Checkout on StripePal.com but they wouldn't let me do it because money services businesses aren't allowed :(

I really like this concept though. If I wasn't paranoid about frozen assets I would be happy to use it.

</comment><comment><USER33> They really need to vet these signups, just got, [http://www.paypal.me/official](http://www.paypal.me/official)

<comment><USER34> They need a more complete word list. They specifically disallowed "paypal" and "bitch", while allowing "official", "pay", etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> So its like Square cash but owned by PayPal? Thanks but no.

</comment><comment><USER36> Paypal owns Venmo (via the Braintree acquisition). How is this not cannibalizing on Venmo (whose primary existence is around sending money btwn friends)...?

<comment><USER14> The Venmo team is a different team, located in NYC instead of California, has a brand that people actually like, something something middle managers. This kind of nonsense is standard issue from eBay and I don't think it would have changed in a month of separation.

<comment><USER37> Venmo has a team in SF now, and eBay doesn't own PayPal anymore.

Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense. This seems like a lower-friction flow, especially when requesting money from people who have never heard of Venmo – not everyone trust a payment processor they've never heard of, and PayPal has much broader awareness than Venmo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It doesn't show error messages when a transaction fails, it just does nothing. I had to look at the JSON response to figure out it was denied.

</comment><comment><USER39> paypal.me/ramen. The new microfunding service for poor oss devs

</comment><comment><USER40> What is the purpose of this? It's not exactly difficult to transfer money using your banks website or "paym" to mobile?

This seems to be a solution in search of an actual problem

<comment><USER10> I am guessing you are outside the U.S. because here it's actually a still a real nuisance to transfer money between banks.

There are plenty of attempts to solve this problem though. Square Cash, Venmo, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> paypal.me/support is available!

<comment><USER42> no longer!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is iCloud a sustainable offering? - <AUTHOR>

I can understand how Google and Facebook offer their products for "free". They aren't free: users' online habits are sold to 'relevant' advertisers. One of sJobs selling points about the iCloud services was that it was going to be ad-free. Specifically, he talked about Mail being ad-free but his disdain for ads can easily be extended to the other parts of the iCloud suite.
On the surface, it seems like this is a way to attract users to the iOS/MacOS platform. In addition, once users have an Apple ID, they could easily access iTunes, iBooks, i$Consumable, thus generating more revenue. Is this a sustainable model though?
Part of the business equation here is to ask how much more revenue would be generated from offering iCloud. For the person that would use iCloud purely as Dropbox+ (i.e. myself) it seems like this would result in a loss for Apple. From a business perspective, you can't really justify iCloud if people who were going to buy books, music, etc. would have bought them regardless of iCloud. While iCloud is compelling for the user, it doesn't seem as compelling from the business side. Further, can Apple really deliver on this promise of 'free for everyone'? How would you evaluate/critique iCloud? <comment><USER2> This is obviously purely speculation but...

1\. A lot of the newer Mac users are more or less probably like me. I use to be a hardcore non-Mac type of guy (I didn't want to use the term PC; too broad). I started with the iPod. Then the iPhone. Through the experience, it made me want to try the Mac, especially since for the first time ever, I had friends that were Mac users. Eventually in 2007, I became a Mac guy all of a sudden. The point of that story is others took the same path. A great offering by Apple to enhance the experience does indirectly translate to more revenue for them if the experience is going to convert them to other Apple products and services.

2\. iCloud does charge for iTunes Match and while Jobs never said there was any other premium charge for the service, we can't assume everything is free. One thing he mentioned was the storage would be capped at 5GB. There's no telling if there would be a premium cost for people who want more storage (think Dropbox model).

3\. This is only a sample of what iCloud is currently offering. More Apps in the future, probably both by Apple and 3rd party developers will probably integrate with the Cloud and its hard to say whether or not Apple will charge a premium for certain services whether directly to consumers or to the developers.

Only time will tell but I don't think they'd do this at a loss without thinking through a strategy. Things don't always work out as planned, not even for Apple, but one thing Apples does do well is plan ahead.

<comment><USER3> 2\. In the iCloud settings there is an indicator for storage plan and under "storage and backup" there is a "buy more storage" button. I think also Steve mentioned this in the keynote. No prices released though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Microsoft's online services don't have many ads, and they lose half a billion a year (9 billion this year including Skype). Apple have bigger cash reserves, bigger profits, and so on. If you're drawn to Microsoft because of their online services what do you buy? Other than the Xbox, 7 and Office (direct sales of 7 and Office are probably small) it's all third party hardware/software. With Apple, there's an ecosystem over several high quality, high profit items.

</comment><comment><USER5> "people who were going to buy books, music, etc. would have bought them regardless"

Yes, but they'll buy them _with you_.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I was trying to say was that, you can't justify iCloud if people were going to buy books, music, etc. _from you_ regardless of whether you released iCloud. If those folks were going to buy from you, having iCloud would just be an expense, because for those customers, it didn't matter whether you had iCloud.

<comment><USER5> If folks are going to buy from you _regardless_ , then yes, anything you do that costs money is a waste. But clearly customers aren't going to use Apple regardless of the competition.</comment></comment></comment>


Complex Math Made Simple with Engaging Animations - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2019/01/complex-math-made-simple-with-engaging-animations.html <comment><USER2> This seems a little parasitic. It's just links to videos from 3blue1brown's channel [1] with very little commentary and some advertising.

[1] The channel is great, everyone should check it out. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw)

<comment><USER3> Hilariously, it has a super intrusive popup asking you to disable your adblocker so they can show you someone elses work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you aren't already aware, 3b1b made a super cool library [0] to help make the animations in their videos.

[0] github.com/3b1b/manim

</comment><comment><USER5> If you like 3Blue1Brown, definitely look at this collaboration on quaternions: [https://eater.net/quaternions](https://eater.net/quaternions)

(But the actual submission here is blog spam.)</comment>


How smartphones can cut heating bills by a quarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25779937

<comment><USER2> I want to save more than a quarter.</comment>


Science Isn't Broken (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/ <comment><USER2> My pet idea for making science less wrong is to maintain a citation graph of all papers. Then when a problem is found with any paper, every other one downstream from it is automatically flagged as at risk of being wrong. Now all those authors (or others) have to go back and re-evaluate how that citation was used and how it affects their result. Once they decide it's OK, they update their paper and remove the flag. If it's not OK then their paper is retracted or flagged as wrong or simply keeps its at-risk flag if it's not important enough for anybody to bother re-checking it.

This way, people will be reluctant to cite too many useless papers for their friends, and will be reluctant to depend on unreliable ones. Work with good methodology would be more popular to cite or rely on.

Maybe peer review could even become optional this way. If other researchers trust your work enough to risk their own papers by citing it, that would act as a peer approval in the long term. Actual peer review would only be needed to give an immediate indication of the quality.

We would first need to solve the versioning problem where there's no way to update a paper when mistakes are discovered or simply to improve it.

<comment><USER3> > My pet idea for making science less wrong is to maintain a citation graph of > all papers. Then when a problem is found with any paper, every other one > downstream from it is automatically flagged as at risk of being wrong. Now > all those authors (or others) have to go back and re-evaluate how that > citation was used and how it affects their result. Once they decide it's OK, > they update their paper and remove the flag. If it's not OK then their paper > is retracted or flagged as wrong or simply keeps its at-risk flag if it's > not important enough for anybody to bother re-checking it.

This is an interesting idea, but I don't know what real-world problem it would actually solve. As someone who reads a lot of scientific papers, I can't think of a single one whose correctness is actually _dependent_ on the correctness of the results of a paper it cites, as though the paper in question is "buggy" because it "calls another paper as a subroutine" and that subroutine is buggy. Could you give an example or two of this?

I could see this making sense in mathematics since mathematical proofs really do "call other papers as subroutines" (theorems), but not so much in science.

<comment><USER4> >"As someone who reads a lot of scientific papers, I can't think of a single one whose correctness is actually dependent on the correctness of the results of a paper it cites"

What field are you reading where each paper is independent of all the others? As the most obvious example, in biomed pretty much every paper says something like "as done previously[ref x, y]" in the methods section. It is an extremely annoying, but very common, practice (usually refs x and y contain somewhat different methods descriptions and/or also contain the "as done previously" phrase). There are many other ways the papers depend on each other too ("we used these cells because they don't express this protein[ref z]", etc)

<comment><USER5>
        > > whose correctness is actually
        > > dependent on the correctness of the
        > > results of *a* paper it cites

        > where each paper is independent of
        > *all* the others

These are not describing the same thing

<comment><USER6> If I understand, the author is suggesting something like pagerank for axiomatic correctness where a paper's score can be interpreted per paper (in terms of some binary promise of "correctness") even if the score is computed by the weighted correctness of the papers it represents.

Really, the information should be abstracted away from the paper, a la freebase or wikidata, and there should be strict rules (e.g. the protocols stackoverflow enforces) such that no cycles can occur, such that propositions can be resolved to axioms, and such that it is practical to compute scores in a finite period of time with reasonable resource constraints...

See also gitxiv.org (at attempt at literate research for computer science and physics papers that can be paired with code). It doesn't address the problem described, but if statements of a paper are codified (e.g. curry howard isomorphism) in a strict way, it makes it easier for "linked statements" to have a quantifiable value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a nice summary of fivethirtyeight's science crisis work, but (as with most treatments of the subject) it leaves me fundamentally unsatisfied.

Apparently we've identified the problem enough to say "there's a problem". We can say "look at all the ways you can manipulate this analysis to achieve the desired outcome". We can say "gosh, science is harder than we thought". But it seems we're still far from a convincing solution.

The fact that statistical analysis is so liable to manipulation seems to call the entire thing into question. In the article they take comfort from the fact that many of the labs analyzing the red card/race data arrived at similar conclusions. One would assume this is because they made similar choices in the analysis. But what says those were the right sorts of choices? Could it not simply be that the labs shared the same biases and errors, making that outcome more common? Is a proper analysis really determined by (essentially) democratic vote? If that's what we've arrived at, it gives me less rather than more confidence in the robustness of the scientific process.

It feels like something fundamental has to be reimagined. It's difficult to prove things about the world---but maybe it's actually near-impossible? Or maybe we need to get real about the cost of actually demonstrating anything reliably. Instead of individual labs running one-off experiments it becomes researchers collaborating openly to build the perfect experiments, which are then run by many different labs, then analyzed collectively in the open for strengths and weaknesses, then reformulated, sent out again, and so on iteratively until at the end of years of research one little bit of probably- truth drips out the bottom of the system.

But that bit would be something we could build on.

<comment><USER8> Maybe the thing that needs to be reimagined is the naive image of science as an infallible way of always getting true answers. Science works, just not in as simple way as one might naively think. Feyerabend's "Against Method" is my favourite place to start :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Science isn't broken... here's a bunch of ways that people cheat?

Science itself can never be broken, but when people are cheating the system that makes it effective to actually figure out what is true and what isn't, for personal gain, then that system is broken.

<comment><USER10> Science is a people-driven system of acquiring knowledge. If people can cheat the system, then the system (science) is broken.

<comment><USER11> The answer then is "propose a better one".

Unconstructive criticism is worse than non-constructive mathematical proofs, as those tend to further actual results later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know tons of scientists, post-docs, lab heads.

It's _WAY_ too hard to be a scientist. The kind of salary and other sacrifices scientists are asked to make are unfair and surely deter many to leave science.

Science is the only thing moving everything forward and if the funding strategy is look for irrational people who will work insanely hard for next- to-nothing salaries...it doesn't sound like a great strategy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Science a huge pr problem, one so bad you might as well say science is broken.

The average person is losing faith in science because of high profile failures, and the distrust is only increasing.

I fear Nasim Talib is right.

[https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet- idiot-13211e...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet- idiot-13211e2d0577#.pbipdn1dg)

<comment><USER14> > Science a huge pr problem, one so bad you might as well say science is > broken.

Science has a huge PR problem in that it is _FAR_ less funded than the people with money and power whom it sometimes comes into conflict with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the most damning thing to come out of the replication crisis was when they asked a bunch of scientists to place bets on whether a given paper (with p < 0.05) would replicate, and it turned out these bets were right quite often ([https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-good- studie...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-good-studies-from- bad-bet-on-them/)).

That shouldn't be possible! Science is supposed to be the best possible epistemological methodology, and here it is being beaten in "success rate of determining true from false" by guessing. What's immensely frustrating is that it's not a question of whether we're just not smart enough to tell true from false, we clearly have the power (since the guesses were often right) but we're not using it. Whatever "truth compass" the guessers were using should be part of the scientific process somehow. That's what is "broken".

<comment><USER16> That "truth compass" they used was reading the method section, which is far from guessing and very close to the scientific process.

<comment><USER17> It shouldn't be, though. It may be easy for a scientist to look at the method sections of two papers that had p<0.05 results and say of the first "that looks like a solid study with a reasonable conclusion and robust controls" and of the other "that's bogus".

The problem is that without this expert panel making these calls, both studies got published, were given the same credibility, and got consumed by non- experts. Peer review and the publishing process are supposed to weed out the obviously bad studies, but they're not doing so.

<comment><USER18> Scientists are familiar with the literature and are taking into account information from other papers when judging a particular one.

Individual papers are not a source of truth, they're bits of cumulative evidence hopefully leading to the truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If a person's mental state can impact their decisions and the quality of their work, why aren't we tracking the subjective states of those conducting research? And does [http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu](http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu) provide a tool for doing so?

<comment><USER20> This sounds very scary and totalitarian. We have the law and the police that's the maximum level of intrusion I am willing to tolerate in terms of monitoring my personal state and behavior. Anything more than that and I am gone.

<comment><USER19> I agree. Thankfully, as human beings, we're capable of coming up with systems using this technology to solve the subjectivity problem in a responsible, ethical manner. It doesn't have to be one involving the law.

<comment><USER20> Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not. I hope you are being sarcastic because we know that more or less any such technology not only has the possibility of being abused but has been shown to be abused in practice over and over again.

<comment><USER19> And yet the technology exists.

Who would you rather use it: those who sell to develop a responsible framework for using it or those who seek to abuse it?

This tech is only going to become more accurate and more widespread over time. Ignoring it isn't an option. We've got little to no idea how to responsibly use human emotion as an input and decades worth of collective experience on how to exploit it.

The potential for abuse is high, which means extreme transparency is needed, at the very least.

Operating at an emotional level requires a whole new set of metrics and a fundamental shift in how we do anything. Better to figure it out now than to wait until the tech becomes ubiquitous. Those looking to exploit the tech most definitely won't wait for that day. A few people I've spoken to about it were eager to explore the tech purely for the sake of improving sales of various things. I changed the subject with them after realizing they had little regard for human life in this context.

People concerned about this need to band together to find ways to productively use it and defend against its misuse.

I've been working on such a framework, if anyone's interested in exploring it with me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Science isn't broken... the academic system is

</comment><comment><USER22> > It's no accident that every good paper includes the phrase "more study[1] is > needed" ...

[1] read: FUNDING

Let's distinguish "science" \-- the scientific method, the general advancement of human understanding over the centuries, etc. -- from "pork": institutionalized government funding, the establishment pursuing that, and all of the mundane, bureaucratic processes that ensue, and then the resulting hype, pettiness, recriminations, and sacrificing of ideals that it inculcates.

There is nothing wrong with science, although it may be harder these days to recognize it.

Pork, on the other hand, is approaching a singularity.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nobody is claiming that the basic principle is not working. What is warped and bend is the pipeline, that would allow for science to proceed faster, for the results to be transferred to companies faster, for the companies to actually apply the results in buy-able products and for that revenue to feedback into science endeavors.

That machine- is broken, leaking and actually in parts moving contrary to the scientific interests of humanity.

The quality issue of science itself, could easily be remedied by replacing citations with partial repeatable experimental coverage in citations this way also ending inflation.

</comment><comment><USER24> This article is from August 2015. Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10085698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10085698)

<comment><USER25> This should have "(2015)" in the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The answer is clear.

Hypothesis driven experiment.

Drive it into the brains of everyone who might enter the scientific profession, and then, when someone is caught with an _experiment driven hypothesis_ , we don't have to speculate whether or not it was fraud, because they will have known better, by simple virtue of having their credentials, and we can then safely revoke those credentials.

</comment><comment><USER27> > Scientists who fiddle around like this — just about all of them do, > Simonsohn told me — aren't usually committing fraud

Yes they are

</comment><comment><USER28> Glad to see journals finally omitting p-value cases for more substantiated findings.

</comment><comment><USER29> Social science isn't broken. Math and physics are like what's p-hacking.

</comment><comment><USER30> There are actually ways in which science can come up with the wrong answer - for example if we lived much later, the universe would be expanding so rapidly that we could not see the stars around us - the night sky would be dark. We would wrongly conclude that nothing is out there.

Sadly, what people call science these days has nothing to do with the scientific method, it's just a bunch of idiots doing correlation and thinking it's causation.

<comment><USER31> If the sky is dark, it is because there _is_ nothing out there. That's what "nothing" means: that which provides no evidence or experience from which to demonstrate its existence.</comment></comment>


Covid-19 Vaccine Candidates - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine#Vaccine_candidates <comment><USER2> Nature had a nice graphic showing the different approaches being taken: [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01221-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01221-y)

<comment><USER3> Also

[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/23/a-...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/23/a-close- look-at-the-frontrunning-coronavirus-vaccines-as-of-april-23) (updated May 1)

[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/05/18/an...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/05/18/another- set-of-coronavirus-vaccine-candidates)

unfortunately on the treatment side, theres also this [https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/14/gilead-should-ditch- remd...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/14/gilead-should-ditch-remdesivir- and-focus-on-its-simpler-safer-ancestor/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Twelve candidates in clinical trials according to the table. That sounds like a lot, but I have no idea how that number compares to other vaccines. Is this a typical number, or is it high/low?

<comment><USER5> From my perspective it is quite a number all at once. Usually it is a lot less (one or two candidates, AFAICS).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has there ever been an attempt to develop a vaccine against SARS or MERS? If so, what happened? Did it fail or was is just not needed anymore?

<comment><USER7> Late stage vaccine trials are conducted by vaccinating a bunch of people and then seeing how many get infected versus a control group. So it's not just a matter of "not needed"; the trials simply couldn't be performed without an active outbreak of the disease. There was a lot of promising early-stage development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Given the ages and health conditions of the dead, what is the chance that a vaccine will do any good to them? Remember that the flu vaccine is of very dubious effectiveness on those aged 65+.

Of course, vaccinating the whole population might render those groups less likely to be infected (because of herd immunity) but still, it will involve vaccinating populations which have little risk from the disease with a vaccine that has been fast-tracked through the approval process.

This situation is a disaster.

<comment><USER9> _Remember that the flu vaccine is of very dubious effectiveness on those aged 65+_

The CDC still recommends vaccines for the elderly:

 _Because of age-related changes in their immune systems, people 65 years and older may not respond as well to vaccination as younger people. Although immune responses may be lower in the elderly, studies have consistently found that flu vaccine has been effective in reducing the chance of medical visits and hospitalizations associated with flu._

Source: [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/highrisk/65over.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/highrisk/65over.htm)

<comment><USER10> They are still only ~50% effective.

[https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines- work/vaccineeffect.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines- work/vaccineeffect.htm)

<comment><USER9> There's a vast gulf between "~50% effective" and "very dubious effectiveness"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Question: if the virus completely dissapears in a few months, like other SARS variant, should we vaccinate the world population ?

<comment><USER12> If it did disappear, sure.

But it won't. Way too many infected all over the globe now, eradication is impossible without a vaccine. Either it will eventually infect the entire world, or we'll vaccinate against it. Those are the only two options at this point.

Even if an entire nation managed to eradicate it via distancing, it would only take a single carrier arriving by any means from another country to initiate a second wave and restart the clock.

Edit: I'm not one to engage in meta, but seriously, what the fuck is with the downvotes? Every word of what I said is casually verifiable with a quick google search and is not at all controversial. There is absolutely no way to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 without global immunity due to its exceptionally high R0 combined with the fact that it's already present all over the globe. The only two ways to achieve global immunity is if everyone gets infected and develops immunity, or everyone is vaccinated. Someone who's hitting downvote, please comment and explain.

<comment><USER5> Third option: we fight it with drugs and we prevent / reduce hospitalizations, and it becomes a disease like every other.

<comment><USER7> The obvious comparison is tuberculosis, where vaccination (albeit not universal vaccination) is a critical component of our control measures. Even if we find a strongly effective treatment, which I agree there's reason for optimism on, we'll still want a vaccine.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, lockdown == prevent. ICU == treat. At the moment thats all we have

<comment><USER5> Many doctors are actually experimenting different treatments, even handling in the ICU has shifted compared to two months ago.

The problem is that most of the pharmacological evidence is sparse and anecdotal at worst (except for remedisivir, and now lopinavir/ritonavir/ribavirin/interferon beta). Trials are ongoing and should at least give better answers, or hints.

Protocols change among countries or even across hospitals, so it's kind of hard to figure out which treatment is best. There's a lot of road to cover to come to proper treatments, but if we are to believe case reports, it is undoubtedly much better than when the pandemic started hitting the West.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


League of Legends quickly gaining on traditional sports in American popularity - <AUTHOR> https://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/28319463/league-legends-quickly-gaining-traditional-sports-american-popularity <comment><USER2> As a guy in the mid twenties League of Legend was a big part of my teenage years. My friends and I played a lot and even watched some matches live. A few classmates were pretty good in the game (around Top 1000ish on the european ladder), but no one of them really tried to play it in a team on a more competetive level. Back then we had a lot of fun playing smaller Fun- Tournaments in which we participated together with hundreds of other teams, much of them way better then we were at the point.. but we had a lot of fun and we have some great memories.

Now one of my mates switched from LoL to CS:GO and plays on a semi- professional level (national league). We try to watch every game via Twitch.tv together while talking via Teamspeak. We are not playing that much anymore, but because we grew up with these games and still know the rules watching E-Sports feels natural and we are more connected to it than to regular sport.

Another cool fact is that we all know the game and sometimes come together to play one or two rounds of League of Legends together. It is the game everyone at my age played.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not into watching sports "e-" or otherwise. That said, it's worth remembering that the gaming industry is (way) bigger than music and films combined. Why wouldn't e-sports eventually be bigger than... "p-sports" (p for physical)

<comment><USER4> The fact that people like playing video games does not have to necessarily imply that they also like watching other people playing video games.

On the other hand it is also not clear what is the audience of people who don't play games but still watch esports (like me).

<comment><USER5> I've always wondered why someone may like to watch people playing videogames when you can play said videogames yourself.

It's not like the case of football, where you need friends and you need to go out to play. Thanks to matchmaking systems in games, you don't even need friends to play. You just click a button.

<comment><USER6> >It's not like the case of football, where you need friends and you need to go out to play

In fact this is part of the problem. the Dota-like/MOBA genre indeed has decent match making for the major games, but having a team you know, are communicative with and have a long/deep experience with one-another's playstyles helps immensely. I only really played League, so I can speak mostly towards that, but it's a different game queuing with friends than it is queuing with randoms. A lot of the excess communication required for a smooth match is removed when you have established a "sense" of how your teammates will react to situations, and it changes your judgement a lot when you no longer have as many random variables to consider during team fights, ganks, etc.

Watching pros play does a few things as well; you see not just good strategies, but mathematically sound and consistent strategies, which make the times you do play much more fun since a lot of your guesswork is removed. Pros also tend to have the skill for higher performance, and you get a chance to see pretty unique situations and plays that just never happen in ranked/normal queues. Plus, the pros have a huge audience typically, and you respond with the audience; being excited about an awesome play is amplified when you and thousands of other fans are collectively "losing your shit" over a play.

So yeah, you can go solo in such games, but the experience is always better with a team of people you know and can trust, and you end up in the same situation as football where you need to find others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't really watch sports in general. However, every so often I'll watch an NFL game or an OWL game with friends. In both cases, it's a fun social event, and its own particular type of entertainment. Nothing feels quite the same.</comment>


Twitter Shows the Whale after announcement of 3G iPhone. - <AUTHOR> http://status.twitter.com/post/37764171/experiencing-a-network-problem <comment><USER2> Proposal: "Showing the whale" will now replace the terms "Epic Fail" and "Belly up" in the web 2.0 lexicon and become shorthand for any sort of transitory service failure of a web application.

I feel that the slightly rude tone of the term "Showing the whale" appropriately reflects the disrespect a user feels when I service they rely on goes down without explanation.

<comment><AUTHOR> The folks at Twitter have embraced the term:

<http://static.twitter.com/images/whale.png>

<comment><USER2> Yes, I know :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please. It's far more efficient to post a news story when Twitter is _up_.

</comment><comment><USER4> What? Twitter went down? I'd demand a refund immediately ...

</comment><comment><USER5> I prefer "Twitter is throwing the Fail Whale"

</comment><comment><USER6> no surprise here</comment>


Google manipulating SunSpider search results after forking WebKit - <AUTHOR> http://www.brianroizen.com/blog/google-artificially-removing-sunspider-javascript-result-from-search-results/

<comment><USER2> Article title: _"Google artificially removing SunSpider Javascript Test from search results"_

Current link text: _"Google manipulating SunSpider search results after forking WebKit"_

Evidence provided: Bing links to SunSpider, but Google doesn't.

But hang on: did Google ever link to SunSpider?

But hang on #2: Google links to a WebKit blog post announcing SunSpider v1.0, and a Wikipedia article about SunSpider, both of which link to SunSpider. If Google was intentionally blocking information about SunSpider, motivated by Google having forked WebKit, wouldn't they block these links as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Google used to link to the actual benchmark test page, as I used to always find the actual benchmark URL through searching Google for "sunspider". While they link to other sites that then link to the actual test page, by removing the actual benchmark link (that used to be the first result for years) they make it far harder to get the actual page. It's indirect, and something fishy is going on.</comment></comment>