Ask HN Mods: Why Do You Completely Change What Users Submit? - <AUTHOR> I recently submitted an item:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8052399
It made it to and remained on the front page for a while. Then, after some hours, ~180 votes and many comments, a HN mod changed the title completely and also modified the URL to a completely different article on a different site.
I understand that the new article might have provided additional detail (which another user had also indicated on the comments thread), but why is HN completely changing what its users are posting, while still attributing it to those users? It's odd to have something attributed to me that I did not submit. And, if the answer is that "the topic was the same", "the first article referenced the second", or similar, then it seems that editorializing to this extent wholly changes what HN is about. That is, why not just have users submit proposed topics for discussion rather than URLs?
And, what of any quotes or references to the initially submitted URL in the comments section?
BTW, on the one hand, it seems fairer to allow the user to keep karma earned for the article (as HN did), but this begs the question that if so many people had already upvoted the article, then might it have already been "sufficient"? <comment><USER2> I asked a very similar question of dang [1] about two months ago when he decided to change an article's URL to one I added to the comments [2].

His response to me (w/ irrelevant stuff redacted):

        The short answer is that HN's goal is quality, so that's
        what we optimize for. Optimizing means trading other things
        away. One thing we're willing to trade away–if it's a clear
        win for quality–is fidelity to the original submission. HN's
        focus should always be on the content, and the details of the
        original submission are of little interest compared to the
        subject at hand.

        HN isn't a purist's kind of place. Our goal to make the
        front page and the threads as interesting and substantive
        as possible. We change a lot of things to serve that
        principle. If we knew how to serve it better, we'd happily
        break more crockery to do so.

        Someone (perhaps a purist!) will object that terms like
        "quality", "interesting", and "substantive" have no precise
        definitions and are in the eye of the beholder. True, but (a)
        they're not arbitrary either, (b) the alternatives suck, and
        (c) someone has to make the calls. We don't get them all right,
        but we do try hard to correct mistakes, and I'll defend the
        principle any day.

1: dang = Daniel Gackle, HN's moderator. [http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet- the-people-taking-over-hack...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people- taking-over-hacker-news)

2: Original thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7747401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7747401)

<comment><USER3> I simply don't like the fact that someone can change a link that I submitted to something else. Moderators have the right to kill a story or ban a user for valid reasons, but changing a link to point to another completely different article is just being pedantic and definitely crosses the line. We might as well then just post topics, and let the mods choose the best story for that topic.

<comment><USER4> Do people pay attention to who submits items? I never do. Maybe the display of the submitter could be removed without any loss.

<comment><USER5> > Do people pay attention to who submits items?

Would we be having this conversation if they didn't?

<comment><USER6> I think he primarily referred to other readers, this topic was posted by a submitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The guidance on this is pretty confusing, I agree. On one hand, we have this:

      If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

On the other, we get this:

      If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

So, which is it? Report just the original source without the additional discussion, or the additional discussion if you feel it worth the talk?

It worries me how much power a few people hold over submissions. A few flags on a popular topic, and it's burned to the ground. A few people complaining in the comments about the "original source", and the entire post is changed. It just feels wrong.

<comment><USER8> Sounds pretty clear to me: If you write an opinionated blog post on an article you are free to submit it just as much as the person who submits the article itself. But if your blog post is just a summary of the article it's probably going to get removed.

<comment><USER7> I would agree, if reality had matched up with this theory. I've watched many insightful blog posts be replaced with the original article over the last year. Usually as a result of a few people just linking to the original article (despite some dozen plus other threads continuing the conversation started by the blog).

Sadly, no, I don't have links (and it's not something you can search for), so you'll have to take me at my word, and choose an appropriate amount of salt to go with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe it's as simple as having a changelog on titles. If a mod changes the link or title, you could show something to indicate that on the frontpage, and on the comments page show more details like what the original link/title was, and what it was changed to, and by whom.

IOW it seems like transparency in moderation is what you really need. This would also solve the problem of original discussion referencing the old article no longer making sense when the article changes.

<comment><USER10> Dang is really transparent about his modifications. I always see him posting a comment on many threads about title changes, and voting ring detections etc. He's a great moderator who does a tremendous job.

<comment><USER11> A comment at the bottom of a 180+ comment thread is not sufficient. I'm always annoyed when I get to a comment thread that is talking about a different article than the one I clicked on. There needs to at least be an indication in the UI that this happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady I'm perfectly fine with them changing to a better sourced URL and a more accurate title - however I never thought about your attribution point. If they change both of these things you now have something attributed to you that has absolutely nothing to do with you. That definitely seems like it could cause problem, especially for people who are not 'anonymous' and are using real names.

<comment><USER12> "I'm perfectly fine with them changing to a better sourced URL and a more accurate title"

I can see how this behavior can bring some benefits. However, what if the mods just change the urls in order to point to their own blogs? Or to blogs where the opinion expressed shares their view or supports the interests of whoever? That behavior can dangerously lead to manipulation.

I do not like the fact that I can see some news in the front page with 200 votes and the article that I read is not the one that received those 200 hundreds votes.

I also do not like at all the attribution issue that you mentioned.

<comment> k-mcgrady It's publicly known who the HN mods are AFAIK so if they were personally benefitting from changing the links the community would know about it.

>> "Or to blogs where the opinion expressed shares their view or supports the interests of whoever?"

This is what got me thinking about the dangers of attribution, particularly when linking to a political article.

I think the reasons for changing titles and links (click-bait, blogspam instead of source) is sound but we as a community need to police it and generally that's done pretty well. When links or titles are changed there is usually a comment from someone who noticed and the comment usually lets people know of the original link/title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You submitted [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/15/documents...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/15/documents_show_gchq_manipulating_online_information_like_web_polls_and_traffic.html). That's just a digest [1] of the firstlook.org article [2], so a moderator correctly changed it.

Every major article spawns countless knockoffs as media outlets compete for views. The HN guidelines ask you to post the original source. When you don't, moderators change it. When we don't, users ask us to.

This is routine moderation that we do every day. Tracking down better sources is one way that the community and moderators keep up quality here. We'd prefer it, of course, if submitters would do this before posting.

When I change a url, I often post a comment saying so. The other moderators can't, because they're not public. It isn't clear to me yet what to do about that.

Story submissions on HN are not the property of the submitter. They are pointers, not values—the content belongs to the source, and the HN slot belongs to the site and to the community. If changing the address in that slot makes the site better, we do.

(Comments are different. Story titles are not supposed to be your own words; comments are. We never change those, except on rare occasions when users ask us to.)

I know it sounds subjective and arbitrary to say "make the site better", as if by fiat, but it's less arbitrary than it sounds. The community nearly always agrees about one source being better than another. (I'd be surprised if there were much disagreement in the present case.) And on the relatively few occasions when users think we've made the wrong call, we usually change it.

1\. High-end blogspam might be a more accurate way of putting it.

2\. [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating- online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/)

<comment><USER14> Could you comment about how the item was buried shortly after the changes?

If it wasn't buried by a mod, then either the penalty that's applied to surveillance stories is incredibly enormous, or the story was flagged into oblivion by users. Did flagging only start after the title and link were changed? Isn't that quite suspicious? It really looks like someone's doing title/domain/url monitoring for stories to flag, and this story is a good candidate for examination.

I guess I'd just like confirmation that 1) mods didn't bury the story, and 2) it doesn't look like flagging suddenly increased after the change. If flagging did suddenly increase, it would be strong evidence of flagging abuse. There's no explanation for flagging the second story and not the first, other than failure to detect it automatically. In fact, you would expect the exact opposite pattern if the story were being flagged legitimately.

Thanks.

<comment><USER13> You've asked this several times, so I'm not sure where to put the answer. Let's try here.

(By the way, one reason we ask people to send moderation questions to firstname.lastname@example.com is that then we're sure to see them. We can't possibly read every post to the site. We miss most of them, in fact.)

The story fell off the front page because of a moderator penalty, though user flags caused the fall to be more dramatic.

We're not trying to suppress surveillance stories [1]. We're trying to balance it so the major ones get attention but the me-toos don't crowd out other things. A moderator thought this was a me-too rather than a major. I might have made the opposite call, but it was probably a borderline case. For one thing, the article was shorter, and that's usually but not always correlated with lesser substance. Since we can't come close to reading everything, we're forced to rely on such heuristics. They're miserable, but they mostly work.

We moderate this way not because of personal opinion (I'm personally more inclined the other way, for what that's worth), but because if we didn't, the site would skew heavily toward these stories and there would be many more complaints (remember "Why has Hacker News turned into NSA News"?) than there currently are. The HN community is in disagreement here. Our job is to mediate that. Which of course is impossible. So we try to fail less badly.

We're open to suggestions about how to get the balance better. We do need to balance it somehow. The idea that votes can just determine everything—without irrevocably changing the character of the site—is sadly, utterly wrong.

Some of the most vocal feedback we're getting on the surveillance stories is from people who seem only to care about this one issue and would happily have it dominate HN. That feedback isn't so helpful, because it's at odds with what this site is. But if those of you who follow this issue closely would help us make better editorial distinctions between the major stories and the pilers- on, we'd be grateful. We're not domain experts on any of this.

1\. To pick an obvious example, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8058362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8058362) has been on the front page all day.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for the detailed explanation of what happened to the post and your thoughts on the topic in general. I'm happy to hear that what's been going on with some of the bigger surveillance stories is the result of the difficulties of moderation and not external manipulation. I now have a greater understanding of why efforts to stop the topic from dominating the site end up supressing it.

As it seems you noticed, my main frustration is that surveillance stories with new information, and other particularly insightful pieces about the topic, often aren't staying on the front page, which essentially means that no one sees or discusses them at any level of depth. HN is generally so good at what it does that for most topics of interest to the community, it can be one's daily news source for an overview of what's going on. Readers come to expect that topics that interest HN will be covered well and that important developments will be posted. So it's particularly jarring after reading tech- related news only from HN for a few days to see you missed a major surveillance story, especially one that deals with the tech or tools. When you search HN and see you missed it because it was submitted but probably buried before anyone discussed it, you start feeling that moderators are parting ways with the community or that something sinister is going on.

I think a number of other difficulties arise as a result of the major stories not showing up. I imagine users start getting the sense that an important topic isn't being discussed, so they submit and upvote even more "me-too" stories. On the stories that do make it, people don't bother writing long and substantive comments because of the risk of the post dropping to oblivion at any moment and no one ever seeing the comment. Those who know a lot about the topic become less likely to write about it insightfully here, increasing the noise further and giving the topic a worse reputation for quality.

How to improve things is a difficult questions, as this topic's scenario really doesn't play to the site's strengths. It seems there's really no feature for "best-of-a-type" other than penalties.

Never-the-less, here are a few ideas (some of which are assuredly overly vague or simplistic, but since I don't know which might be helpful...): \- Consideration could be given to how many surveillance stories are currently on the front page. Very few people want an entire front page filled with these stories every day, but given the level of interest and the continuing developments one would still expect to see a number of stories every day or two. Maybe only resort to giving a penalty to an article that isn't obviously low quality / blogspam if there are already surveillance stories on the front page?

\- Using heuristics concerning novelty, and whether the particular novel issue has been discussed on HN, could supplement length

\----- A quick check of whether the article claims it's new information, the date of the article, and a general search for the main claim of the article

\----- Less scrutiny of publications with a history of breaking stories or that have access to documents, like theguardian.com, firstlook.org, washingtonpost.com, and spiegel.de

\- A way to know a topic isn't going to quickly disappear after investing time in writing a comment would be nice. Some indicator that a topic has been "blessed" by a mod and won't receive a penalty would be helpful for this.

\- Having a moderator who follows the topic might be helpful. I definitely understand that not every moderator does, and that it's probably really hard to make judgments if you're not following it. Someone a bit more familiar with the topic would be a good resource and could keep an eye out for sub-optimal penalties being given out.

\- In general, visible transparency about what's going on would be helpful. I'm not sure how to achieve that because the site's not really designed for it. Talking to you here is great. Having other people with the same concerns get the information is important too.

\- The root issue isn't really that interest in the topic is too high--it's that there's a low signal-to-noise ratio in the stories that are submitted and the passion for the topic is so high that even the noise is upvoted. Some users probably want to make sure everyone knows what's going on. Once a normal level of the best stories are making the front page and there's an outlet for that passion, perhaps the submission problem will decrease and a virtuous cycle will begin.

I'll email first in the future for anything I'd like a response about or if I have more suggestions--I took the comment approach because in the case of a forum or many other online communities, it would be better to have the conversation publicly, but I agree that HN's not really set up well for that (as evidenced by my multiple requests for a response).

Again, I'm grateful for your response, and I greatly appreciate the work you're doing here and your commitment to addressing users' concerns.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. I agree with almost all of it.

I'm not sure how practical these particular suggestions are--for example, we do already try to identify which issues have already been discussed on HN; it's just hard to get right every time. But I do think the pendulum has perhaps swung too far the other way, so we've provisionally turned off the automatic weight on NSA stories. Going forward, I hope the community will help us distinguish major articles from minor ones. People can do that by flagging minor ones and commenting here or (better) emailing email@example.com if they see a major one that they think might be weighted unfairly. We can override the flags when that happens.

HN's goals here are balance and substance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> HN is not as open as other group sites like, say, reddit where it's up to the users to decide what's important. It's run with a specific purpose of quality of stories within a specific set of topics and a vehicle for promotion of YC- related content. Voting exists to provide group input within those guidelines.

The bit about writing a blog post and submitting it is out-of-date based on current mod behavior. If you want to provide commentary, post the original source and add a comment. Links to blogs are nearly always pulled for the original source unless the blog is the original source on an overall trend, research, etc.

<comment><USER4> take a look at /r/undelete some day. Reddit is frighteningly unopen.

<comment><USER15> It varies quite a bit by subreddit, of course. Some mods like to rule their little fiefdoms.

<comment><USER16> This is very true.

Many of the subreddits that are very specific to a given technology or programming language or something like that are often the worst. The audience is comparatively small to begin with, and mostly made up of people who hold the technology in high esteem. Any user who submits comments that may be deemed as slightly negative or questioning of the technology are targeted and "eliminated", so to speak.

This leads to a very toxic environment where quality content and discussion become totally non-existent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Especially after the discussion has referenced the original article, now the entire context is broken.

But in the end, they can have whatever rules they want and it would still be bad because of one problem that prevails all of mod activity: that there is just so infrequently any notification that anything happened. Don't enforce them in secret, leading us to wonder what, when, and why something happened.

</comment><comment><USER18> @unclebucknasty, could you show your original submission for comparison?

At [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8052399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8052399) it says right now: "Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet", which is linked to [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating- online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/)

What did you originally post?

<comment><USER14> Here's a comment of mine from that thread explaining what he posted, how it changed, and what happened [~]:

This story was in the first position on the front page less than an hour ago. It was there for hours. The link was then changed from [0] to [1], and within thirty minutes, it was on the second page at number 47. (It first took a drop to around 17, hovered there for a while, then hit 47.)

Could we have an explanation of what's going on here? How can penalties from flagging be this steep for a story with 200 upvotes and 90 comments? Why did the position suddenly change shortly after the link was changed, but not right away?

[0] [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/15/documents...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/15/documents_show_gchq_manipulating_online_information_like_web_polls_and_traffic.html)

[1] [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating- online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/)

[~] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054173)

<comment><USER19> interestingly enough , I submitted [1] after it was initially published and no one cared

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8031791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8031791)

<comment><USER14> No one cared because it was quickly buried, which could quite possibly be due to a flag ring or automated monitoring for flagging of the firstlook.org domain. Here's my other comment on the topic [~]:

It would be incredibly easy to use this sort of program to game visibility on HN.

This story itself serves as the perfect example. When it was submitted four days ago [0], it quickly took a huge ranking hit and dropped off the front page. When a story drops off the front page this quickly, it's nearly impossible for it to get the upvote momentum required to gain any additional visibility. And the same URL can't be submitted again, so the opportunity for discussion of the article has essentially been removed.

Then, we're left discussing a breaking story as the top item four days later, when a summary report about the original story that contains no new information is published on Slate.

One might be quick to blame moderators, but in the discussion of another recent First Look story, dang said most of the penalty came from users flagging the story. [1] How many users flagging the story does it take to produce this outcome? Does GCHQ just need three accounts with a little karma to seriously diminish visibility here for days? Safeguards should be developed to prevent this sort of malicious activity. Maybe some sort of collusion penalty, where if the same users are flagging the same stories, the effect is diminished? Or a greater restriction on the maximum penalty?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8031791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8031791)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008472)

EDIT: And it's happened again! This story was #1 when the link was to [3]. About a half hour ago, the link was changed to firstlook.org, and within minutes, the story fell to the center of the main page. Now, thirty minutes later, it's at number 47 (with 200 points after six hours). It was at the top for hours, then dropped to 47 within thirty minutes of the link being changed. The fact that flagging happened right after the link was changed seriously suggests that some someone has automated monitoring for First Look links to flag.

[3] [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/15/documents...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/15/documents_show_gchq_manipulating_online_information_like_web_polls_and_traffic.html)

[~] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053852)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The mods here are out of control to the point where I'm considering going back to Reddit completely. The fact the stories are being censored due to "topic association" despite having enough up-votes is ridiculous.

<comment><USER8> Which stories?

<comment><USER21> NSA for example. Any topic with "NSA" gets a very large hit.

<comment><USER22> I'm willing to bet that has way more to do with the substantial body of people flagging down all the NSA posts than some mod conspiracy

<comment><USER23> Where do you go to get this definitive data on HN activities?

<comment><USER24> From Daniel Gackle, who comments on the stories that get buried.

<comment><USER25> That's exactly the problem. You received that info directly from a third person. There is no transparency. Would you believe everything I say? I wouldn't. But if the facts where out there you wouldn't need to. On an issue such as this where people take such sustained and intense interest, your second hand account of someone giving you their word is not sufficient. Maybe it is for you, but please don't condescend by passing it along as though it must be for others.

<comment><USER24> The third person is the site moderator. And yes, I believe pretty much whatever Daniel tells me. He's that kind of guy.

"That Daniel Gackle is the HN moderator" is the kind of factual detail you might want to know before developing very strong opinions about how the site is run.

<comment><USER25> Please see my other comment on this page where explicitly say I completely agree HN is in the right in running a site in this manner. I was just trying to point out that while you may know Daniel others might not. And, again, I believe that a moderator system is 100% fine. HN news has made it work and produces quality content. But, for someone to tell me that since they know someone I should keep my trap shut, it's a little presumptuous.

<comment><USER24> First, nobody told you to keep your trap shut.

Second, if you don't trust the site moderators, HN isn't going to be a pleasant place to spend time.

<comment><USER25> sheesh. your comment isn't a pleasant place to spent time. someone needs some internet kitten love.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This might seem simplistic, but couldn't this problem be solved with a "related" list?

It's been many moons since I've been to Digg, but it had a notification if you're submitting a post with a similar title/URL. While we're discussing it, it may not hurt to have a "previous discussion" list either.

Opinions, information other relevant factors can change over time, so it may not be so bad to revisit a topic.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think this question would have been better via email to the mods. There's a good chance they would have reverted for you based on what you've mentioned in this particular instance. For what it's worth, while they are only human, I think the mods do a _great_ job with both titles and (more rarely) changing URL.

When a URL is changed, it is a way of saying, 'Look, we think this other URL is better for the discussion', while keeping the discussion. Daniel does a great job of mentioning these changes in a comment - hardly ever to a complaint. [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang) for some of Daniel's comments.

Title changes are also generally good ones. Often they happen in response to a complaint.

If you don't like it, email the mods with why!

They do a fantastic job. I approve of changing the titles (even silently) or URL's, especially with a comment. If you have a complaint do feel free to email the mods about it.

And here's a thanks to the great work the mods do and to hoping they will keep it up.

You're only reading Hacker News thanks to their tireless work.

<comment><USER28> Nonesense.! I am sure there are lots of people who submit links for reasons other than karma and HN base discussions. Not everyone will appreciate the redirection of traffic from their researched and well written post. Not to mention the prestige of making it to the front page!

<comment><USER28> I knew I'd be downvoted but its the unpalatable truth

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 1) slate is a shitty source. There are a bunch of websites that keep getting posted to HN and those sites are really fucking awful. I hope mods have a panel that flags up any time those sites are posted so they can chose whether to change the source to something better or not.

2) mods usually mention that they've changed the source or the title.

3) I gently agree that having the title / source changed but leaving it attribed to the original submitter is odd. But at least that person is still getting the karma. I imagine people would be much less happy if the mods put their name on the articles.

4) So far I haven't seen any example of mod changing urls or titles that I disagree with; I have seen plenty that I am very pleased with.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not a mod, but I can answer your three main questions.

1.) Why do titles get changed?

2.) Why do URLs get changed?

3.) Why do things drop off the front page?

The first two questions are answered in the HN guidelines:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

In short, is says to always avoid "linkbait" and misleading titles, and always submit the original source URL. If someone suggests a URL to the original source, then changing the URL helps everybody. The same is true for changing bad titles. Regurgitated blogspam with a linkbaiit title is always annoying, and most aggregators fight against it every single day.

The third question is tougher to answer, since you'd need to do a whole lot of reading. The two most common things which will cause the rank of a submission to drop are users flagging the story, and setting off the voting ring detector (i.e. trying to fake up-votes).

Sam Altman (hn user: sama, YC S05, and a YC Partner) mentioned the ring voting detector issues here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941)

And somewhere in the comments of our fearless public moderator Daniel Gackle (hn user: dang) was mentioned the issue about user flags affecting the rank of stories.

Your fourth question:

4.) Is it fair to attribute something to a user that they did not actually submit?

If you failed to follow the guidelines, then yes, it is fair because it helps everyone else on HN.

For notes, I've had titles of my submissions edited for clarity, and the only part that bothers me is that I made a moderator do unnecessary work that I should have done myself.

EDIT: Found the link where dang mentions user flags sinking a story:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008472)

<comment><USER31> I think we all understand these points, however people such as the OP seem to have their URL/title changed, even though it doesn't "violate" the guidelines, but just because some seem to think differently in the comments.

I can't really judge since I haven't noticed such changes, it's just what I take away from the discussions above.

<comment><USER13> > seem to have their URL/title changed, even though it doesn't "violate" the > guidelines

Posting original sources is an HN guideline, and an important one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> On this issue, Slashdot strikes a pretty good compromise, I think, by providing a link below their posted item to the original submission, i.e., in the "You may like to read:" section.

</comment><comment><USER33> Because the OP continues to receive points for the modified title/URL, it seems as though the current system incentivizes "first to post", not "highest quality". Would it be better if the mods could more aggressively sink poor content with weighted downvotes? This way, the original submission remains attributed to the OP--title and all. If it's a bad/misleading title, secondary source, etc. it might be briefly interesting, but then modded down in favor of better content. But if it remains interesting to the community, it could remain afloat with enough upvotes. It seems like this system would be fair in terms of attribution while incentivizing people to submit primary sources with good titles.

Sorry to bikeshed here, but curious why it doesn't work this way? Too much work? Is there too much luck involved in making it to the front page & mods are interested in changing poor content into good content rather than hoping the good content will eventually make it there itself?

</comment><comment><USER34> If the shared URL changes, the moderator that changed the post should also re- attribute the submission to the person that suggested the new link. When this happens, the system should auto-post 'the original submission: ShortURL by USER has been modified to ShortURL as suggested by NEW USER.'

</comment><comment><USER13> The HN guidelines ask you not to post questions like this to the site, but instead to email us: email@example.com.

I'm going to demote this submission now. I will come back and read it properly when I have the several minutes it will take to do so.

I don't remember what happened to item 8052399 at the moment.

<comment><USER35> Ugh what why??? What a terrible way to conduct things. This was the top voted post on HN today, and there was great discussion happening. In the future, please consider letting good discussions about HN continue, instead of immediately censoring criticisms of the site.

<comment><USER13> > please consider letting good discussions about HN continue

The discussion is continuing. You just posted to it.

The HN front page has never consisted of just the most upvoted posts. If it did, HN would be unrecognizable. Whatever you call this policy—people say 'moderation', 'curation', 'censorship', and other things, depending on how they feel about the most recent thing we did—it isn't secret and it isn't new.

I'm happy to debate this with you till the cows come home, but my first duty is to see that the stories on the front page are the most intellectually substantive of the ones currently in play. I'm not seeing that here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I really don't want to hear another fucking word about "karma" on this site, ever again. "Karma" is what ruined reddit, with spam and reposting rampant only for the sake of stupid fucking Internet points. That is not what the system is meant for.

<comment><USER37> That's an argument I hear a lot, but karma was integral in building the community when reddit is young. It motivated people to contribute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why not have a public edit history? (Or why not show multiple versions, one grayer or smaller print?)

</comment><comment><USER39> I was once the receiving end of such editing and I thought the mods did the right thing (Added a better link).

It's probably a good idea to give some visual indication to submissions that are tampered with though.

</comment><comment><USER40> Considering that there is a lot of users using their own identity, changing the title - or worse - the actual source of a submission, could result in misunderstandings.

</comment><comment><USER41> Suggestion: to have a checkbox on the submission interface, unticked by default, that says "remove my name if the content is changed".

If it is ticked on and then someone else changes the title or link, the the submitter's name is automatically removed.

</comment><comment><USER42> > It's odd to have something attributed to me that I did not submit.

They could just change the submitter and add something like "Originally submitted by xxx" below it to let people know it's been changed.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think that at least the edited entries should be marked as such! (Maybe in the footer with a small link to reveal the original.)

</comment><comment><USER44> Solution: If (mod wants to change link AND link is front page) then mod leaves a comment with link to original.

<comment><USER24> That's what the moderator currently does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > then it seems that editorializing to this extent wholly changes what HN is > about

This has been being since very many years, so it doesn't really change anything per se. It's that you're just realizing it, and lately primary sources are being preferred more.

<comment><USER46> No, the mods have definitely become heavier recently. I saw one the other day which was a letter from Richard Feynman to an ex-student, explaining to him, amongst other things, how to choose problems to work on. The original title mentioned that it was from Richard Feynman, the modded title was just something like "How to choose problems to work on", with no mention of Feynman, which is so generic and boring that I would never have clicked on the link.

Dear mods, modding is something to use when there is a _clear_ threat to community values. The default position, if you are in doubt, should be to do nothing.

<comment> k-mcgrady The rules around titles are to always use the title from the article. If people could make up their own titles we could end up with a tonne of click- bait. There are clearly situations like the one you mention where the title doesn't do the article justice but I'd rather miss the occasional article that see a tonne of click-bait and waste my time viewing dozens of shitty articles.

<comment><USER47> _The rules around titles are to always use the title from the article._

In general, that is the rule.

The cynic in me couldn't help but notice that an article with the original title "One of a Kind: What do you do if your child has a condition that is new to science?" has been on HN's front page for a day now with an alternate title.

For some reason, the same mods who removed "Feynman" as "click-bait" that is "not the title from the article" don't seem to have a problem sticking with the alternate title "Thanks, HN: You helped discover a disease and save lives" [[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050106)].

<comment><USER48> The submitter here is Matt Might, whose family was the subject of the article. His first comment in the thread makes it obvious why this is an exceptional case.

<comment><USER49> With all due respect, you've only been on HN for a couple of months.

Why would there be an "exception" to the policy of discouraging submitters from editorializing headlines? Even if the submitter had a personal connection to the material (which isn't unusual), the guidelines should be respected.

<comment><USER50> Because the purpose of the guidelines is to make the site better, and changing that headline would not make the site better.

Also, the headline modifications in that case were not made with the same intentions that other (harmful) headline modifications are made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> We'd rather have a primary source than a click-bait blog post.

</comment><comment><USER25> am i still hellbanned here?

<comment><USER52> Nope.

<comment><USER25> sweeeet. ty!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I think the HN community will much prefer having an unmoderated HN over a moderated HN with a bit higher quality as the main reason why people come here, is that the content here is solely selected by the community.

If however, people find out that HN is much more a controlled environment, they will surely turn away from HN. So instead of trying to control the whole thing just in return for a bit of increased quality, rather sacrifice a bit of quality for an open HN. Of course there can be some moderation, however, it becomes a bit tricky when titles and content is changed, and upvotes are controled.

</comment><comment><USER54> Flagged for meta noise.

I'm pretty sure one of the guidelines is to email in for these kind of questions rather than polluting the frontpage with these kind of posts.

<comment><USER55> There's something strange about adding meta noise to a post you believe is meta noise.

<comment><USER54> The entire _thread_ is meta noise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Because they are nazis.

</comment><comment><USER57> Hacker News mods are just dicks! That's all.</comment>


Show HN: An iOS game for kids (and only for kids) - <AUTHOR> http://nextmarvel.net/blog/2012/05/a-match-game-for-my-kids/

<comment><USER2> Finally, someone realizing that kids' apps _MUST_ have no ads and no way to exit (home button aside). My kids like several apps (Talking Cat & Angry Birds in particular) but keep handing it back to me to fix because a stray tap sent 'em to the App Store or some web page.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that creating some sort of "collective marketing" term or group maybe for kids programs that are like this would help reach an underserved market -- someone vetting iOS software and certifying that it is "Kid Friendly" (no ads, no IAPs, no way to exit other than home button, state clearly saved, etc.) would help parents quite a bit. You could charge developers to be listed in a directory (or do it as a public service) and sort of further curate the App Store, as a lot of the kids stuff in it is frankly exploitative and also frankly, not fun.

<comment><USER4> I think <http://momswithapps.com/> comes quite close. A curated list of apps specifically for kids. It also doubles as a marketing vehicle for app developers.</comment></comment>


Bing So That's What A Swizzle Stick Is. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/07/bing-so-thats-what-a-swizzle-stick-is/

<comment><USER2> _There's no denying it is hands down the best porn search engine on the planet_

Wrong.

<http://www.monzy.org/unsafesearch/images/></comment>


255 National Academy of Science Members letter on Climate Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/689.full.pdf <comment><USER2> The signatories are all members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences but are not speaking on its behalf.</comment>


Texas Instruments to shift away from the smartphone chip business - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidcentral.com/texas-instruments-getting-ready-shift-away-smartphone-chip-business <comment><USER2> Here's an opportunity for AMD to buy the OMAP division from them.

<comment><USER3> No thank you, I want the OMAP to be more successful than anything AMD have done to date.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you backup your local databases? - <AUTHOR> HN,
I have some at home projects that do not need to live on Google cloud or aws, and would only introduce costs in excess of running things locally.
I now have around 10gb of data (not a lot in this world) that I want to backup just in case something happens to my local box.
For code this problem is easy (git, bitbcuket etc). But for databases I am unclear.
What do people use? I could go the Google drive route, but I feel like there must be tons of options for a problem like this.
Thank you for any guidance. <comment><USER2> For things like this, I feel you've got three options.

You likely want your data offsite since your primary is onsite, so that means either a cloud provider (Google Drive, Amazon Drive, S3, etc.) which you can choose based on best-price, but as you mentioned, the downside is cost.

The second option is to find a friend or family with similar needs, and "trade" storage. You setup a NAS for them to write to. They setup a NAS for you to write to. You both encrypt everything and send it offsite. The upside of this approach is that it's essentially free apart from the allocation of storage space. The downside is that friends and family may not be as reliable as a paid service.

A third option is to buy a cheap portable hard drive, and periodically perform backups. The downside of this approach is that it's on you to perform this task regularly, and you'll always have some gap between when your last snapshot was performed and this gap may be meaningful if this isn't conducted with enough frequency.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Google drive is a fine price for what I need +buffer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two of which live in the same place (one is the working copy, the other might be a snapshot on another machine or on a detachable hard drive) and the one off-site.

for he off-site, you might just want to go with S3, Backblaze's B2 or mega.co.nz (free up to 50GB). Actually, many web-hosting company nowadays will happily provide you with 20+gb for as little as 20-50$/year.

I just went and verify the last statement and turns out that hostgator will sell you unlimited hosting space: [https://www.hostgator.com/web- hosting](https://www.hostgator.com/web-hosting)</comment>


Billionaire Valley VC Drools Over Chinese Workaholism – DHH - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dhh/status/954319522151976960 <comment><USER2> Fucking toad indeed. Recall the movies set in the 70s, where the dad comes back home in time to catch his son's baseball game. I've seldom been able to leave for home before 7PM and reading some turd deify the working class' death for his billion dollar multiple, I wonder who's more heartless - the bosses in China who don't have an alternative cultural context, or a fuck twad valley VC who'll kill for his multiple despite benefiting from a culture that values a well rounded human life and experience.

As for life after coming back home, most nights, I'm required to attend calls with overseas teams. Thursday, after a long time, I actually had the night to myself, and an overwhelming sense of guilt of not working swept over me. I realize it's Stockholm syndrome from slaving every waking hour for my employer, and this realization is truly depressing</comment>


Web Framework Benchmarks Round 13 is now available - <AUTHOR> https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r13 <comment><AUTHOR> Blog post: [https://www.techempower.com/blog/2016/11/16/framework- benchm...](https://www.techempower.com/blog/2016/11/16/framework-benchmarks- round-13/)

P.S. Phoenix is finally present, hooray!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another interesting highlight: .Net Core is so much better than old .Net

> That is not a typo, it's 859 times faster!

(see blogpost for details)</comment>


What the Heck is a Monad? - <AUTHOR> http://khanlou.com/2015/09/what-the-heck-is-a-monad/ <comment><USER2> Another useless burrito tutorial. If you want to understand monads read Wadler or Moggi. If you want to understand Haskell's use just read the instances for List, Reader, State, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you link to them? Would love to check them out</comment></comment>


The Lack of Netiquette - <AUTHOR> http://www.romancortes.com/blog/the-lack-of-netiquette/

<comment><USER2> This is kind of outrageous. I sort of look at ajaxian as a reliable and interesting source of info on webdev, but now I'm totally turned off. I'll make it a point to not visit. Shame on them.

<comment><USER3> I've unsubbed from their feed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First off, this is bad behavior on Ajaxian's part, and they should learn that people will appreciate them just as much (more, actually) if they send the user off-site to the content they're pointing at.

Second, shouldn't it be possible for Roman to prevent another site from embedding his IFRAME? Either catching the window.parent.location in JavaScript or only serving the IFRAME page if his own domain is in the referrer?

<comment><USER5> yep.. there are iframe busters available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ajaxian's also been bad, now and again, about just copying and pasting the entirety of a blog post as "their" content.

<comment><USER6> Examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's how their post starts:

 _Román Cortés is having a lot of fun with CSS tricks these days. He just built an example rolling CSS coke can that uses background-attachment, background-position, and a few other tricks to get the effect. No fancy CSS3 needed here!_

It looks like they gave him full credit for this. Unless he was selling access to this blog post, I'm not sure why this is an issue. It seems even more benign than piracy. (And as sophacles points out, this uses less bandwidth than a direct link, too.)

Clearly, Román is willing to have his bandwidth used in order for people to look at his cool CSS trick. So why is this a problem when it's a little less bandwidth, plus a third-party endorsement?

<comment><USER8> >It looks like they gave him full credit for this. Unless he was selling access to this blog post, I'm not sure why this is an issue.

Perhaps you missed the quite important point that Ajaxian was using this post to drive traffic to their site effectively and selling advertisements based on its, and not their own, merits? They're not just linking to something and showing it to their users, they're getting his paid-for account to serve the content so that they can make advertising revenue off of his work. I think the ethical issue with such an action should be clear.

<comment><USER7> They promoted him. They showed the same content he did, plus a strong endorsement, minus some of the bandwidth costs.

And he's mad that they might have earned a few dollars from their ads?

<comment><USER9> He is angry that they effectively hijacked his bandwidth to earn them revenue off of his work. And all without the courtesy of asking his permission. Twice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't a direct link cost more bandwidth? In which case does the one google ad on your site make the difference in cost/income? Further, does the ajaxian style hotlinking -- full credit and source link provided, constitute the same think most people think of for hotlinking (no credit, just images from someone else's site...).

<comment><USER5> The satisfaction of getting visitors is very important. Don't read his post as about costs alone. It is more like he paid the costs but got nothing in return. No visitors, exposure or fame :)

<comment><USER10> I tried to read it like that, but the part where his screenshot of the rickrolling, which includes the whole ajaxian post, has attribution to him, as well as a direct link to his site. Im not sure how that is not exposure/fame.</comment></comment></comment>


Mutations in Y Chromosome made us separate species from Neanderthals - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2083381-missing-y-chromosome-kept-us-apart-from-neanderthals/?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=ILC&utm_campaign=webpush&cmpid=ILC%257CNSNS%257C2016-GLOBAL-webpush-Y-CHROMOSOME <comment><USER2> A little dark hypothesis:

I've seen some (intertwined) hypotheses in the news lately of why there's no neanderthal Y chromosomes: the mixed-race-neanderthal-Y boys didn't do so well for some reason, the human Y chromosome had advantages, or the neanderthal-Y wasn't compatible genetically.

How about the more obvious guess: homo sapiens invaded and conquered neanderthals, killing all the males (and their Y chromosomes with them). It's speculative, but it would definitely not be the first time in history that such a thing has happened. And the neaderthals live for hundreds of thousands of years, then disappear just tens of thousands of years after homo sapiens show up in their neighborhood. So it's likely one group wiped out the other. And it's not hard to imagine keeping the women when you decide to kill a whole neighboring tribe.

I actually came up with the hypothesis about how the two groups most likely interbred just a few days before I found out in the news that the neanderthal Y-chromosome disappeared. I don't know if I should be excited or disgusted that the evidence might support my hypothesis.

<comment><USER3> Human history is unfortunately littered with stories like this, but we know the Neanderthal genetic flow came in from the males. The reason why we know this is we are missing all Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA sequences which are only inherited down the female line. If your theory was correct then we would see modern humans with Neanderthal mitochondrial genomes.

It appears what happened is much more interesting - Neanderthal males mated with female humans of African origin, but the male offspring were infertile.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the insight. I wonder, how do we know the males were infertile?

<comment><USER3> We don't - all we know is that the Neanderthal Y chromosome is missing from the modern human population. This could have occurred by chance (genetic drift), lethal genetic incompatibility (all males died), or infertility. Given the data we have it is hard to know which of these is the real cause.

<comment><USER2> Is it not equally likely the other way around - that the Neanderthal mitochondria disappeared because of unsuccessful mixed females or other genetic drift?

<comment><USER3> No because of the way genetics works it is much more likely to be the Y chromosome that is lost. First the Y chromosome is under stronger indirect selection than the mitochondria due to asymmetric mating. Second in mammals when two different species have a genetic incompatibility this incompatibility manifests in the male offspring. Both of theses point towards male Neanderthal female African as the way this hybridization happened.

Edit. I should add the scientific paper behind this New Scientist article proposes a precise genetic mechanism for how the Neanderthal Y chromosome is lost which is further evidence the loss is due Y Chromosome incompatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title on NS is: "Missing Y chromosome kept us apart from Neanderthals" and that is importantly different from the title here on HN.

Only males have Y chromosomes so if only "Mutations in Y Chromosome made us separate species from Neanderthals" then female Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals would be genetically the same. I know I'm being a bit pedantic about the use of the word 'made' in the title but it seems important to me.

<comment><USER3> It is not that Africans females and Neanderthals are genetically the same, just that the genetic incompatibility between the two species appears to be sex specific. This is pretty common when different species hybridise.

Haldane's rule covers why this occurs [1].

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane%27s_rule](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane%27s_rule)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actual study (open access!): [http://www.cell.com/ajhg/abstract/S0002-9297(16)30033-7](http://www.cell.com/ajhg/abstract/S0002-9297\(16\)30033-7)

Many of the shortcuts taken in TFA seem to lead to confusion rather than understanding, so this might be worth a read.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think someone needs to tell New Scientist that many of us are part Neanderthal.

<comment><USER6> Given that much of the definition of speciation these days is the inability to produce fertile offspring with high likelihood, it sounds like they're right on the nose.

Something like one mule (horse-donkey hybrid) in tens of thousands is fertile, having by chance received just the right combination of chromosomes to be able to reproduce. But the rest are sterile. The rare successful interbreeding doesn't make horses and donkeys the same species either, despite being closely related. (In their case, IIRC, the infertility of hybrids has to do with differing chromosome counts between horses and donkeys.)

So we can have some Neanderthal genes (whether from prior to y-chromosome differentiation or from the rare successful interbreeding or from successful and fertile but rare female offspring) but still be separate species.

Besides, it's oft cited that we share 98% of our DNA with chimps, and nobody's claiming that we're the same species.

<comment><USER3> The definition of a species is not the inability to produce fertile offspring. Certainly if you can't produce fertile offspring then you are a different species, but having fertile offspring does not mean you are the same species.

Many humans (all non Africans) are a hybrid between two different species - all this result is telling us is that Africans and Neanderthals really are two different species.

<comment><USER7> You've made this claim before. It's so extraordinary that either we all would have learned it in school or Nature would have published it and in addition it would have been in all the major media.

Claiming that blacks are a different species, not even a different race, is some next level Hitler / KKK / etc. shit.

But basically, I just think you don't know what you're talking about. For example, I just typed "species" into my search box and Google handily provided the following from Wikipedia:

> A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which two > individuals are capable of reproducing fertile offspring, typically using > sexual reproduction.

Go try and fix Wikipedia if you wish to spread nonsense.

<comment><USER8> > Claiming that blacks are a different species, not even a different race, is > some next level Hitler / KKK / etc. shit.

I may be missing something, but the claim I've read around the Internet is that "Africans" are the only pure Human group, and are a different species from _Neanderthals_ , while other Human groups have a small percentage of Neanderthal genes.

Whether that's true or not, it seems like a far less problematic claim than the one you mention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am reading about this story for a while now and still do not get what is so surprising about it. While people of caucasian descent all share about 2% of their DNA with the Neanderthals, thats all random bits and not a single larger fragment or even chromosome. The latter would need to happen for the Y Chromosome. All Chromosomes but Y (and Mitochondria) can exchange fragments with their homologs but as there is always just one Y chromosome in any given cell, thats is not going to happen there. Therefore, if we should find it, we would find a whole Y Chromosome. But that is not going to happen. And that is honestly not very surprising...

<comment><USER10> > While people of caucasian descent all share about 2% of their DNA with the > Neanderthals

That number is shockingly low to me, which probably means I misunderstand some subtlety of what you're saying. Could you expand/explain? (I'd have expected a figure starting with at least two 9s [99+%])

<comment><USER11> Modern Europeans share about 2% of their alleles with Neanderthals might be a more correct way to put it. But to understand that sentence, you have to understand what's an allele (and I'm not completely sure I'm using the term correctly).

<comment><USER3> This is pretty close. A simpler way of describing this is 2% of the average genetic heritage of a European is able to be traced back to Neanderthals. This is a lower bound and it may be higher.

The more interesting observation is that the 2% is not the same 2% in everyone of a European genetic background. Overall at least 25% of the Neanderthal genome is present across the whole population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reading about things like this, I wonder about the fertility between groups of modern humans that split the farthest back. Admittedly it isn't 600,000 years ago, but I suppose there would have to be some problems.

<comment><USER3> Apparently is it common for there to be issues with teeth when individuals from different genetic lineages have children. The genes that control teeth size and location have some level of incompatibility that manifests itself in orthodontist's vacation homes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Took me a few seconds and some stares to my dutch friend until I realized I read "Netherlanders" and not "Neanderthals"

</comment><comment><USER14> This is fucking dumb. Drift is far more likely by orders of magnitude. New Scientist is like the Gawker of science journalism.

</comment><comment><USER15> Overstated. The article just says the genetic change is "linked to increased risk of miscarriages ".</comment>


Israel Retaliates to Cyber-Attack with Immediate Physical Action in World First - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/05/06/israel-retaliates-to-a-cyber-attack-with-immediate-physical-action-in-a-world-first/ <comment><USER2> More than 600 rockets were fired into Israel last weekend. It doesn't seem the retaliation is merely due to a cyber attack.

</comment><comment><USER3> > sends a clear message to any state or non-state actor that threats > promulgated through cyberspace can and will be met with a physical response

As long as that state is Palestine? Would North Korea, Iran, Russia, US (you name it) get the same treatment under similar circumstances?

<comment><USER4> No because this is part of the current tit for tat conflict that has been going over the past few days.

If this wasn't in the midst of 600 rockets being fired this wouldn't have been greenlit either.

Blowing up a building in Moscow has a different repercussion to blowing up a building in Gaza.

Same goes for rockets fired at Israel than say the US or Germany.

I can guarantee to you that if 600 rockets would've been fired into the US from Mexico the response would not have been so limited in scope.

<comment><USER3> My point was that the statement should be amended since it sends no such signal related to hacking.

As for the rest of the reaction, I doubt there are many wars going on right now in which so many atrocities and war crimes were committed, with the rest of the world attributing them to a "response to a hack".

<comment><USER4> The Israeli Palestinian conflict is irrelevant heck the casualties of it including all the wars Israel had with it's Arab neighbors amount to far less than the ongoing Mexican drug war, not to mention the war in Syria or what has been going on in the Philippines.

I don't think you realize just how disproportionate the amount of media attention this gets.

I can think of many ongoing conflicts both in the region and anywhere else that are far bigger in scope.

<comment><USER3> > if 600 rockets would've been fired into the US from Mexico the response > would not have been so limited in scope.

What I meant is that the reactions are not comparable. If the US used methods classified as inhuman by every single humanitarian organization that was ever involved in that conflict, then the hundreds of crude and inefficient rockets that rarely make victims would be be framed differently. Wars kill but _how_ they kill is the difference.

Even in your examples the official justification usually involved more than a hack. You can tell how much one party cares about giving legitimacy to its actions by the effort it puts in building a justification.

<comment><USER4> These crudes and inefficient rockets cause billions in damages and the only reason they don't cause more casualties is because Israel has bomb shelters, early warning systems and kinetic interceptors.

As far as the "human rights" organizations go they have little legitimacy considering how most of them operate and their selection bias.

This is the easiest conflict to cover it's pretty much risk free and they can still get Sushi in Tel Aviv over the weekend, same goes for the media there are more foreign journalists and media staff stationed in Israel than the entirety of Africa.

I'm not entirely sure what you expect Israel to do besides going back to the days where they had a suicide bombing on average every 3 days and the casualties were essentially 1:1 like it was during the mid 90's and early 2000's.

Hamas is classified as an enemy of the state by Israel as far as targets go this is a legitimate target.

Now if you have a solution that does not exchanges casualties on one side for casualties on the other I'm all ears but until then I don't see here an argument other than a misguided appeal to emotions.

<comment><USER3> > As far as the "human rights" organizations go they have little legitimacy > considering how most of them operate and their selection bias

> Hamas is classified as an enemy of the state by Israel as far as targets go > this is a legitimate target.

Surely your opinion is more legitimate and weighs more than their's right? Your bias is barely showing, especially when proudly declaring that war crimes, atrocities, and human rights violations are irrelevant or justified because "they be the enemy".

It's the kind of explanation you'd imagine was used in the Nuremberg trials by those who also considered anything done to "the enemy" was justified and legitimate. I hope you'll excuse me, I'll have to make my exit here before you plumb new depths of abjection.

I have made my point pretty clearly: considering what happens in that war, claiming that a hit was the natural response to _hacking_ is both a needless excuse and a load of BS (given that no other non-Palestinian hacking attempt triggers this reaction).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

These 16 words were the pretext for the disastrous US war against Iraq. These words were false and US officials knew they were false when they were uttered.

But at least after the fact we can examine the evidence and know that our leaders used yet another false pretext to lead us to catastrophe.

How will we ever determine if a presumed cyber attack (a) actually occurred, (b) was dangerous enough to justify a response, or (c) could have been dealt with in some way other than blowing up people?

Seems like the perfect pretext for another catastrophe.

<comment><USER6> Hamas has been firing missiles at Israel for some time now. Let's not pretend this is an entirely unprovoked attack, even without the cyber incident they have been firing missiles at Israel. Why do you jump to defend a terrorist state?

<comment><USER5> Please read my comment again. I'm not defending anyone.

Why would you accuse me of something so outrageous?</comment></comment></comment>


Chrome Extensions for Marketers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getambassador.com/13-best-chrome-extensions-for-marketers/

<comment><USER2> Pocket w/Feedly and Buffer make a great content consumption/sharing trifecta. Meldium is useful. I would pick Fetchnotes over Evernote for clipping. Momentum is slick.

<comment><USER3> The Pocket/Feedly combination is crucial. There's an awesome post about it [here]([https://medium.com/technology-and- you/3804306ce501](https://medium.com/technology-and-you/3804306ce501))</comment></comment>


Show HN: SignRequest – Electronic Signatures for everyone - <AUTHOR> Https://SignRequest.com <comment><USER2> We've banned this account and this site for using a well-known upvote-selling and comment-selling service. I wish everyone would realize that this is obvious in the data and not worth the risk. Perhaps someone could also communicate to the upvote-sellers that they're wasting their time?

All: Spam votes and spam comments will get your accounts and sites banned on HN, so please don't.

<comment><USER3> Hey dang, can you comment about the recent spree of comment spam here? (I mean the really trashy spam, not the brigading.) Does that happen every now and then or is it something new?

<comment><USER2> It happens now and then but the latest wave of is new in how much of it there is. If we have to, we'll write software to kill it, but we're sort of lazy about that, so we're hoping the existing anti-spam measures will work first.

Fortunately, from a community point of view it's just a nuisance, because it all gets flagged. But we don't want to let it clog the system up too much.

<comment><USER3> OK, thanks. hope the existing measures work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How do they make money? Don't love the idea of my potentially-sensitive documents or contacts being mined to sell ads.

Note, too, that this is far from the only electronic signature provider [1][2][3], let alone free one [4][5][6]. Seems like a new one pops up every day.

[1] [https://account.docusign.com/#/username](https://account.docusign.com/#/username)

[2] [https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/sign.html](https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/sign.html)

[3] [https://rightsignature.com/pricing](https://rightsignature.com/pricing)

[4] [https://app.hellosign.com/info/pricing](https://app.hellosign.com/info/pricing)

[5] [http://www.esignatures.com](http://www.esignatures.com)

[6] [https://www.digisigner.com](https://www.digisigner.com)

<comment><USER5> I've reviewed all of those services and none of the pricing models are right for me. Based on the features I'd like to use, I'm bumped into a higher price bracket even though I'm only doing 3-4 contracts per month. At that volume it's just been easier to either do it in person or have my signer print and send back a signature page. Whereas $7 or $14 per month is an easy signup.

<comment><USER4> > _Based on the features I 'd like to use, I'm bumped into a higher price > bracket even though I'm only doing 3-4 contracts per month_

I have no horse in this race, but out of curiosity, what are those features?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been wanting this product for 6 months, and didn't have the will to make something internally for our company. Great product, you've nailed my price point (small business), going to do the trial and see whats up.

<comment><USER6> I've been waiting years for something like this! I actually did make an internal version for my company (a small underfunded startup) since paying a hefty subscription for something docusign and hellosign is a bit absurd just to easily sign documents electronically without downloaded software day to day personally or for small business

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks great. I didn't try it with a custom document, but the demo document worked very well and it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to use with other documents.

One minor grievance: when converting, the client polls to see if the pdf was converted and shows a loading bar for every poll request which made it seem like things were broken.

Things that I liked:

\- Only one slightly annoying request to sign up at the end, but the opt-out was clear and redirects back to the landing page.

\- The signing log is included with the completed document in the email. Services like Docusign make you log in order to view the completed document and I don't think they provide any sort of log.

\- The actual signing process is simple. I didn't try saving my signature or anything like that, but there's an import option which looks like it would be very easy to use with Preview's signature output.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm working on something similar right now'although, it's targeting a different audience. Obviously this has been under development for while, given the complexity of the service.

I'd be interested to hear the origin story of this idea and company.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's something similar in Finland from a company called Visma: [https://allekirjoitus.visma.fi/](https://allekirjoitus.visma.fi/)

It's tied to the de facto standard bank/other authentication system called TUPAS[1] which is used to prove your identity to government services, banks, etc. etc.

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

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm sorry, but is it legally binding if all you're doing is scribbling into a text box? Presumably you'd need to do some sort of identity verification.

<comment><USER11> Digital signatures carry the same legal authority as a wet signature in most cases (US advice). Very little verification exists.

<comment><USER12> But... Then you can literally just copy it. I don't really understand how signatures are still a thing, but this...

<comment><USER13> Well, you can also forge a regular signature. In proper legal contexts, you need a witness to a signature (which is a justice-of-peace or similarly trusted party in Australia) who will check your identification and witness you signing the document. Signatures are more of a ceremonial thing at this point, they just are used to signify that at the time you agree with a document. If you dispute the validity of a signature, it becomes a forensic investigation (which would also apply for electronic signatures I imagine -- ignoring that digital forensics is such a bad science).

Scanned copies of passports are also seen as sufficient ID in some contexts (though they should be notarised copies, very few online services require that). And that's even worse becase the person getting the copy could just impersonate you with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a reason why you don't electronically sign the PDF? I know to become an official Adobe Signing Authority is expensive but I feel like if it's your business it should be a priority.

Edit: Link [https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/approved-trust- list2.html](https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/approved-trust-list2.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Offtopic, what's your frontend stack? The pages are super fast!

</comment><comment><USER16> Having spent time researching this space for some potential freelancing projects, non-public API pricing is a deal breaker.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why should I use this over something like Keybase?

</comment><comment><USER18> The free plan looks great!</comment>


American Airlines Is Suing Gogo Over Its Crappy Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/sapna/american-airlines-suing-gogo-over-crappy-internet#.olnPn30mDl <comment><USER2> nice... but i'd be willing to be some of the "crappy" features of gogo was a business requirement from AA in the first place.

lets hope competition will give us customers a better option than gogo did.</comment>


If you want to know if your UI is intuitive, localise it to German - <AUTHOR> http://gwynmorfey.com/notes/it-s-all-german-to-me

<comment><USER2> Interesting point, however it requires an application be built with localization, which for me is a hurdle I'd rather not jump until after the product has seen a good amount of usage (and has a nice feature set that's making money).

So it's kind of chicken and egg, unless you have the time to sit down and do localization for your app.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't have to localise it properly, just garble the text. I bet it would be possible to write a Chrome plugin..

(More realistically, perhaps, just having had this experience provides a new perspective. It'd probably do to just use _any_ localised app.)</comment></comment>


Earth-like planet found - <AUTHOR> http://www.yahoo.com/s/1061124

<comment><USER2> As others said, It's too close to the star to be habitable, but the good news is that it is 1.9 times the mass of the earth, meaning that the chances of finding earth size planets in a habitable zone are getting very good. M class stars are not good candidates for habitable planets, because they would probably be tidally locked and the stars are less stable. G and K stars are better, but the planets are harder to find, because the stars are so much larger and brighter.

</comment><comment><USER3> The new one is outside the habitable zone though. The older one from the system, Gliese D, is believed to be in the habitable zone and may be a water world.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Earth-like" is pushing it. It's not ridiculously bigger than the Earth, and it's probably made of rocks. It is an important discovery because it shows that we can discover planets that are approximately Earth sized, but put down your home-made space-suits, people.

</comment><comment><USER5> By the "earth-like" definition I wonder if mars is earth-like?</comment>


Facebook Android App Is Asking for Superuser Privileges - <AUTHOR> https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/help/facebook-superuser-permissions-t3792035 <comment><USER2> Maybe a better source: [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/the- facebook-...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/the-facebook- android-app-is-asking-for-superuser-privileges-and-users-are-freaking-out/)</comment>


Now that Reader is closer to death, has a superior alternative emerged? - <AUTHOR>

I know there were several frontrunners like Feedly and others near the initial announcement.  Now that people have had a chance to try out various solutions, I'd love to hear people's opinions of what's the best to migrate to.  I'll pay if I have to, but of course would love a free option. <comment><USER2> I like Tiny Tiny RSS. It's open-source and self-hosted, so not reliant on other people. While you could host it on your own computer, I prefer to host it on heroku (<https://github.com/projectdelphai/ttrss-on-heroku>. It's also been hosted on openshift ([http://tt- rss.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1360](http://tt- rss.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1360)), but I have no experience with that. Overall, though, ttrss works really well. I would highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think most people are going with feedly or the old reader

</comment><comment><USER4> many people are using <http://www.newsblur.com> also</comment>


Ask HN:  Know any great freelance developers? - <AUTHOR>

My company (MyClean) is looking for an outsourced or freelance developer. We're running a LAMP stack on our new site (not pushed live yet) and looking for someone to take over on a part-time basis as we roll out improvements. Location agnostic. <comment><USER2> If you're looking specifically for US based quality developers, my startup matchist (<http://matchist.com>) can help ya out. We have great LAMP developers from all over the US.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll definitely try posting!

<comment><USER2> No problem. If you have any other questions, feel free to email me - tim at matchist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My startup <http://thectonetwork.com/> is aimed at solving exactly this problem!

Email email@example.com if you want to talk more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will reach out soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a freelancer who's comfortable with LAMP. You can find my personal projects and resume at davidkw.com.

Contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am available, with a solid background in Lamp and iOS development. Feel free to contact me (info in profile), or check me out at JoeCortopassi.com

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm available for part time work, email me at john at johnhamelink . com if you'd like to know more!

</comment><comment><USER7> I am currently available for part time work. You can contact me at ishener at gmail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you post a link to a portfolio or quick bio/skills?</comment></comment>


The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production? - <AUTHOR> https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Why-The-Saudis-Are-Lying-About-Their-Oil-Production.html <comment><AUTHOR> Comment by Dr Mamdouh G Salameh, International Oil Economist Visiting Professor of Energy Economics at ESCP Europe Business School, London is also interesting. No way of verifying accuracy.

'Having done a lot of research and analysis for years about Saudi proven oil reserves, I reached the final conclusion that Saudi reserves couldn't be more than 55 billion barrels (bb) rather than the 266 bb the Saudi have been claiming for years.

Moreover, the Saudis haven't been transparent enough about their production capacity. Their oil production peaked in 2005 at 9.65 million barrels a day (mbd) and has been in decline since. In my estimate, their production capacity doesn't exceed 8.5 mbd. Moreover, they never had a spare capacity of 2 mbd as they have been claiming because to have such a spare capacity would mean that their production capacity is 12 mbd and this figure has never been tested. When they say they are producing 10 mbd, at least 1.5 mbd come from their stored crude.

With estimated stored crude oil of 130 million barrels , the Saudis could continue to meet their customer needs for less than a month after which their stored oil would have been totally exhausted. The proof they aren't telling the truth about the timetable for repairs is that they have been telling their customers that some lighter grades would likely be replaced with heavier crude grades.

The truth about Saudi oil potential and reserves will eventually come out. And when it does, the global oil market will get the shock of its life with a horrendous global oil crisis to match.'

<comment><USER2> >the global oil market will get the shock of its life with a horrendous global oil crisis to match.

It won't.

There is a very large amount of oil production on hold or at low capacity in North America because the prices are currently too low and very much expected to go higher in the future.

Prices will rise up to 50% but that isn't much of a crisis or unprecedented.

Renewables will become more attractive and their growth will accelerate a little.

<comment><USER3> > "Prices will rise up to 50% but that isn't much of a crisis "

If a 50% price increase isn't a crisis, then what is?

<comment><USER4> Oil prices are ___VERY VOLATILE_ __in the last 50 years the number of times the price of oil has either halved or doubled with a year is not uncommon. It has occurred at least a dozen times.

And more importantly, oil prices are less important to the economy than most people believe.

TL: DR - Oil prices are not that important

<comment><USER5> So, it's a coincidence that oil prices peaked during the 2008 crisis?

<comment><USER6> Once the housing crash occurred, demand plummeted and the price of crude dropped. So yes?

<comment><USER5> You're proving my point that they are tied ?

<comment><USER7> Correlation does not equal causation.

<comment><USER5> You don't think that steeply increasing gasoline prices, and the resulting squeezing of discretionary (and not so) income could have popped the US housing bubble ?

[https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-915-march-7-2016-a...](https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-915-march-7-2016-average- historical-annual-gasoline-pump-price-1929-2015)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Clickbait title, bad article (completely unsubstantiated/unsourced, openly hostile, ...), and a pretty horrible website in general.

SA inflating their production and capacity numbers is perfectly possible (and probably likely), but that kind of writing is not exactly trustworthy.

But some things to think about:

* With modern drone/missle capabilities, it seems quite easy to severely compromise global oil and gas production with just a few targeted strikes; mainly on the big refineries. Quite scary.

* Is Iran, after years of fighting proxy wars, now moving towards more direct conflict with Saudi Arabia?

<comment><USER9> Guarding a refinery is at least doable in principle, but most oil is transported there by way of a pipeline. Guarding miles and miles of pipes in the middle of nowhere is going to be prohibitively expensive.

The Trans-Arabian pipeline for example is a whopping 1214 km (754 mi) long[0]!

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans- Arabian_Pipeline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Arabian_Pipeline)

<comment><USER10> 754 security guards on dirt bikes with radios? Maybe a helicopter on standby.

<comment><USER11> Ah yes, "dude on a dirt bike with a radio and rifle" \- the supreme air defence asset of our time.

Seriously, this might work for stopping people walking up to the pipeline with explosives - but it wouldn't stop someone with an RPG, recreational drone or (lol) cruise missile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A truism at the commodities hedge fund I used to work at was the "the Saudis are always lying" along with "never be long a country's currency if they have their own word for afternoon nap"

<comment><USER13> I think that says more about the hedge fund you worked at than it does about the wider world, to be perfectly honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought it was common for everyone to lie about their oil production for all sorts of reasons and everyone knows it.

Half the battle within OPEC was over who lies how much and everyone coming to the table to figure that out and come to guidelines about production that are largely general guidelines in practice. Sort of "Ok everyone we're all way off the agreed numbers way too much let's dial it back for a bit." agreements.

I want to say that I've heard representatives in OPEC have openly say such things plenty of times.

<comment><USER15> Not just lieing about oil production [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gold- swiss-fakes-exclusiv...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gold-swiss-fakes- exclusive/exclusive-fake-branded-bars-slip-dirty-gold-into-world-markets- idUSKCN1VI0DD)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm trying to understand what all this means.

The recent attacks are said to have cut Saudi production by 50%.

The Saudis claim production capacity of ca. 12 mbd. 6 mbd lost to attack. Their estimated stores are at ca. 180 million barrels.

To keep a happy face, the Saudis could sell from their stores to offset for the loss of Abqaiq and Khurais, but this can only be kept up a limited time, as the store is empty in roughly 30 days.

The time to fix the damage has been estimated at 8 months.

Does this mean the Saudis face losing 50% of their oil income in about 30 days?

<comment><USER17> That means they'll be eating King Salmon for dinner in 60 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How reputable is the oilprice.com?

I see articles linked quite often on EV forums I follow

I only remember Upstream [1] from when I was briefly in the oil industry ten years ago

[1] [https://www.upstreamonline.com/](https://www.upstreamonline.com/)

<comment><USER19> I'd love an answer to this. The article was very aggressively written and I have no basis for understanding any bias _if_ there is one.

<comment><USER20> Oilprice.com is kind of like Forbes is today. Filled full of articles written by freelancers. Some of them are good, some of them are terrible. You have to know the writer, primarily, to sift through the rubble of the site.

I've read the site on an occasional basis for years. Usually I only end up there when looking for recent production updates. They often have good industry updates on production, expansion, etc. There is also plenty of quackery, over the top conspiracy writing, mediocre speculation and very questionable pumping & bashing.

<comment><USER19> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >Once the hedge funds, who had handily positioned themselves long some days before the attacks, had taken their profits...

This implication is so far beyond the pale it borders on satire.

<comment><USER22> Why "beyond the pale"?

Maybe those behind the attacks also went long, and some hedge funds picked up on that. Or maybe they just did a better job of understanding the escalation in recent months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ah reminds me of the famous leak on Oil Production here: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_United_State...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak_\(Saudi_Arabia\))

<comment><USER24> Non-Mobile link: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_United_States_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak_\(Saudi_Arabia\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> question - what do Saudis gain from inflating their production capacity and oil reserves? Do they want to come across as some sort of superpower / critical country based on their reserves -- to continue getting preferential treatment from rich countries?

<comment><USER26> Their Aramco IPO valuation will, at least partially, be a function of their reserves. Aramco IPO is critical to Saudi financial circumstances.

<comment><USER27> Isn't that practically cancelled?

<comment><USER26> No, they're forging ahead with it. WSJ Today says that MBS wants to float not just 5%, but eventually up to 10%.

<comment><USER28> What MBS tells the press he wants to do and what actually ends up happening isn't always very well correlated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "This is despite the all-out oil price war that Saudi started in 2014 against U.S. shale producers to try to destroy the industry through low prices caused by flooding the markets with oil. "If the Saudis had anything near 12 million barrels per day capacity, that would have been the time to pump it but all it managed was just under 10 [million bpd] with 10.5 [million bpd] managed for just one month over that two-year period [2014-2016 before Saudi reversed it strategy],"

Would it have been the time to pump it? If the goal was just to impact US shale producers, why also undercut your own sales? The best strategy factoring in shale-targeting AND profits would be to pump just as much as to impact shale producers, but no more.

Also, another angle as hinted at from conclusions, but not included:

"Saudi Arabia ends up boosting the bank accounts of the very people that it thinks was behind the attacks on its own oil infrastructure, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps "

but, counterpoint, if they pumped too much at that time, dropping prices against US interests, when the political climate was more favorable to Iran, trade talks could have further favored Iran as a counterbalance, if for no other reason than to 'keep the saudis in line'.

i have no direct knowledge, but the analysis is quick to highlight some angles and not others.

</comment><comment><USER30> " the hedge funds, who had handily positioned themselves long some days before the attacks"

Wow, really? Would love to see numbers. Sheer luck or conspiracy?

<comment><USER26> It's nonsense. This website, and this author in particular, are very low quality. A couple weeks ago spun a meeting between China FM and Iran FM as some massive 25 year oil development/marketing deal with China. All unsourced. And almost all of it unsubstantiated by anyone except vague anonymous sources. Wrapped around a kernel of truth (the Iranian and Chinese FM did meet the preceeding week).

Regarding his accusations that hedge funds knew Iran would attack Saudi that weekend.... zzzz 1st there are few commod-specific hedge funds left, 2nd macro funds currently hate oil if anything, and don't have big positioning in either case (see CFTC data), 3rd any oil specialist that is long was/is long because our markets are very tight currently -- crude oil markets are strongly backwardated (implying urgency to acquire spot barrels) and refining margins are large globally. The Iran attacks were a (fleeting) side benefit and are very nearly lower than they were before the attacks now.

Reading this sort of garbage on oil markets always reminds me the Gell-Mann effect must be real and I should quit reading news in other domains, because it's probably as crap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ok. So let's say I believe in this, with the implication that oil prices in the future are likely to go up. Any investment advice? How can one - say a UK taxpayer - profit off of this investment thesis?

<comment><USER32> Not advice, but you can trade oil futures and options if you have belief in your thesis.

<comment><USER33> Except, if other people already have the same belief, won't it will already be priced into any oil futures prices.

So that only works if it's a belief you hold, but you also think that others believe the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Peak Oil as a concept for production in a conventional reservior makes sense. It's on a time frame/size that makes sense. Reserves are not explicity capacity based, reserves are heavilly economically based. As price increases you get more reserves despite having produced oil. This, in addition to technological changes, allows for increased reserves and is why global peak oil as a concept is a bad predictor. Global peak oil was originally predicted to be 1970's.

Edit: grammer/spelling

<comment><USER5> No, it wasn't? Reread the paper... (Also, it already tends to take technology improvements and prices into account...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Worth a read: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy by American investment banker Matthew Simmons.

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

<comment><USER36> Book was in 2005. Simmons made a bet that oil would be $200/barrel in 2010 and lost (it was $80 in 2010).

It's almost 15 years ago now. Eventually the Saudis will run out, but this book failed in its prediction of imminent collapse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Shouldn't the title be "Are the Saudis lying about their oil production?" or remove the ?

<comment><USER38> The literal title seems to be:

 _Why The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production_

A question mark makes no sense at the end of a sentence that states a fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I thought some time ago that the Saudis would likely try to exhaust all their production without telling anyone, then try to sell of Aramco under the pretext there was still a lot of oil in the ground. Did not expect them to sell it so soon.

</comment><comment><USER40> I remember reading something years ago about how the Saudi's have always over reported the amount of oil reserves they have and the quality of the crude oil.

</comment><comment><USER41> That will explain recent bold moves by the crown prince in attempts to modernize and diversify their economy like UAE did. Will it work out? We will see.

</comment><comment><USER42> When you listen to official announcements by government leaders these days, you have to conclude that Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf was ahead of his time.

<comment><USER43> Reference for Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al- Sahhaf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf)

The Iraqi Minister for Information during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> > ...Recently it's occurred to me that [the Saudis] genuinely don't know > anything about the oil industry

Or tech. Softbank's vision fund is dumb money.

</comment><comment><USER45> Iran knows how to play this game because the Middle East is somewhat personal....they appear to be a family run oil business. IF we took oil away from the M.E. equation then it would be void..just saying. This game is slated to change becasue of the large oil discoveries taking place in Guyana and it is going to surpass what the Saudi has been touting as their "real production". Perhaps the USA needs to shift it's focus a little more to the Americas. Just adding to your comment

<comment><USER5> Interesting, just how large ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> People certainly love oil related conspiracy theories.

So here's a fun one: the US staged the attack on Saudi oil production. The US gets to blame Iran, benefit its own growing oil industry (new export pipeline recently hooked up in the Permian), and harm China (increasingly dependent on Saudi oil) - all in one neat little package.

I'm not suggesting that scenario is legitimate at all. I'm just surprised that I've never seen anyone else float it, so far.

<comment><USER46> > the US staged the attack on Saudi oil production.

that is definitely no for so many reasons that there is no point in going over them. This is why nobody floats it. After all a good conspiracy theory must have a good theory element in it - ie. a plausible explanation of some facts without contradicting the rest of the facts :)

What may have happened is US finally decided that it may be the time to stop the blood bath in Yemen, yet how one would go about it without displeasing the Saudis? So may be the US just did let the drones pass through (as in the ships carrying the drones as well as the drones flying to the target). Thus US preserves Saudis as dear friends, while the Saudis become very interested in ending the war because their lower back becomes on fire, and how are they going to do the oil IPO if the oil infrastructure/assets overnight became de- facto located in the war zone?</comment></comment>


Why It's Pointless To Argue About Movies - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/why-its-pointless-to-argue-about-movies/ <comment><USER2> That's just horrible.

It's only useless to argue with people that don't want to hear each others opinion.

First of all, we don't need to be black-and-white. For instance, the opinion of your friends can change you from neutral to excited. I have changed my perception of movies several times that way.

Second, even if you don't change your view of a movie, it's fun to talk about the movie… Noticing things you haven't.

Third, and this one is the important thing for me. Talking about the movie can make me understand better how my friend thinks! For a second let's forget how good that is… assuming we only cared about movie's quality. That will help you next time a friend recommends a movie. You can ask specific questions that will bridge the gap.

It's only pointless if you think it's a zero-sum game.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure why a whole blog post was needed to say "because people have different tastes." Some people prefer visuals, some prefer the plot.

<comment><USER4> Which also begs the question – why was his posted on HN in the first place?</comment></comment>