Driving a Responsible Digital Ecosystem in These Polarized Times - <AUTHOR> https://www.unileverusa.com/news/news-and-features/2020/driving-a-responsible-digital-ecosystem-during-these-polarized-times.html <comment><USER2> CNBC has more details: [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/26/unilever-pauses- facebook-and...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/26/unilever-pauses-facebook-and- twitter-advertising-for-rest-of-2020-due-to-polarized-atmosphere-in-us.html)

> In a recent memo to advertisers obtained by CNBC, Facebook's VP of global > marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, said "boycotting in general is not the > way for us to make progress together."

Well, yeah, that's the point.

> "I also really hope by now you know that we do not make policy changes tied > to revenue pressure," she said in the memo. "We set our policies based on > principles rather than business interests."

What an absurd statement. This is like Google saying "Privacy is at the heart of everything we do." It comes off as disingenuous, desperate and embarrassing.

<comment><USER3> Facebook is saying that loss of revenue will not cause them to change their business. How many other businesses run that way? Where else is Facebook getting the money to operate without revenue? How long can Facebook operate without revenue?

That's such a weird statement. What are they actually saying with that comment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr:

> through at least the end of the year, we will not run brand advertising in > social media newsfeed platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER5> e:nvm

<comment><AUTHOR> _It 's all just cover for a financially necessary contraction in ad spend, which will inevitably lead to a contraction in revenues and profits._

FTA: _We will maintain our total planned media investment in the U.S. by shifting to other media._

I understand the many legitimate reasons for using a throwaway HN account, but your opinion is built on a misrepresentation of fact. It's hard to understand how you could have missed this, which was included as a separate paragraph within a short and clearly written statement.</comment></comment>


Inside Target Corp., Days After 2013 Breach - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/inside-target-corp-days-after-2013-breach/#more-32276 <comment><USER2> I'd sure like to hear an explanation for the ethics of publishing this material.

When a company screws up, they need to be able to frankly assess the event. Journalists who publish this kind of content are disrupting the kind of honesty that is necessary for fixing these issues.

What are the motivations of someone who leaks this material? Why is it ok to publish this? Are we learning something new?</comment>


Surveying the Attitude of Physicists Concerning Foundations of Quantum Mechanics - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00676 <comment><USER2> "A survey was sent out to 1234 physicists affiliated to 8 different universities. 149 responded to the questions..."

The sample looks too biased (just 8 different universities) and the response rate is low (149 out of 1234 physicists). Makes me wonder how representative this sample is.</comment>


After Paris Attacks, C.I.A. Director Rekindles Debate Over Surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/us/after-paris-attacks-cia-director-rekindles-debate-over-surveillance.html <comment><USER3> So I guess the time to politicize these attacks has come already. Pity.

But if anything the attacks prove that the whole surveillance thing isn't effective, not that we need even more of it. After all if a bunch of lowlifes and assholes are capable of setting this up without any triggers in spite of some of them already being in police databases for activities related to terrorism then clearly that approach is bankrupt. So, thanks for the 'rekindling', now please _shut it down_. And divert those funds to old fashioned policework, which seems to have worked pretty good in the past (RAF, IRA etc).

<comment><USER4>
        So I guess the time to politicize these attacks has come already.

This complaint has never quite sat right with me. This was, fundamentally, a political action -- a foreign "nation" (entity?) attacking another nation's civilians. It seems a pertinent time to have the debate on what should be done in response, as well as what preventative measures should be taken in the future -- even if you are vehemently against certain preventative measures.

<comment><USER3> This statement is about a career government official cynically using the murder of a large number of people for his own ends, just as the murderers cynically used those people for their ends. Yes, it's both political. But it doesn't do any good, what _would_ do good rather than using this to hasten the big brother state to the next level would be to attack these problems at the root. But that would require an entirely different viewpoint, one which I'm not sure America is ready for because it would ask too many questions about deeds in the recent past. If anything a good case could be made for a link between the Iraq invasion and the murders in Paris, my guess is that if the one had not happened the other wouldn't have happened either, but that's just my opinion and not something that I can prove.

<comment><USER5> > This statement is about a career government official cynically using the > murder of a large number of people for his own ends

Which sort of takes for granted the idea that the government official's position -- which no one doubts precedes the attacks -- is not honestly held for the reasons presented, and that the official does not honestly believe that the attacks represent the kind of problem that adopting the policies he advocates would help prevent.

It doesn't seem to me that this style of argument serves much except to win kudos from people who already agree with the ideas behind it and oppose the policies being advocated.

<comment><USER6> > It doesn't seem to me that this style of argument serves much except to win > kudos from people who already agree with the ideas behind it and oppose the > policies being advocated.

Given France already possessed the desired legal capability and was warned by a friendly government about one of the suspects in 2014 and again in 2015...

I'm not sure how asking for the same measures that failed is a strategy of someone with genuine concerns. Why do you think that?

<comment><USER7> Very well put.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just submitted a link to an article about this, but since it didn't get any traction I'll place it here. I think it best represents the opposing side's argument (against surveillance): [https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions- abou...](https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-about-paris- to-blame-snowden-distract-from-actual-culprits-who-empowered-isis/)

Here's an excerpt,

> One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The > Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to > plot, so Western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt > at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the > victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 > in Mumbai, and April 2013 at the Boston Marathon. How did the multiple > perpetrators of those well-coordinated attacks — all of which were carried > out prior to Snowden's June 2013 revelations — hide their communications > from detection?

</comment><comment><USER9> "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." \-- Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff January 20, 2009 – October 1, 2010

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." \-- Benjamin Franklin - <USER2> November 1755

<comment><USER10> ...said in reference to the financial crisis, on the topic of regulation and reform. A lot less nefarious when you're talking about energy, health, education, tax policy, and regulatory reforms.

He also went on to say "Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

As for your (IMHO) cliché Franklin quote - that was in reference to a tax dispute.

"He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it."

 _sigh_

<comment> vezzy-fnord Genetic fallacy. That the quotes originated under particular circumstances does not invalidate them as generalities.

<comment><USER11> But it does take the weight away from them being a window into how politician's mind works.

Without knowing the context it sounds like a politician stating outright what they seem to be doing all the time, which is exploiting a crisis to impose something that benefits few at the expense of many, while the context is the opposite.

I'm sure politicians have this exact thought in either case, but the quote isn't the bullseye it might seem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Few states will countenance speed limit reductions that would reduce auto deaths that kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, but we'll allow our basic rights out the window to prevent what looks like a rounding error on that?

This absurdity is actually what's responsible for any of terrorism's effectiveness. It's basically a hack designed to provoke an absurd overreaction. On that count, it succeeded with flying colors in 2001 - I'm hopeful that we've learned enough in the intervening years (both in terms of the war and police state) to prevent repeating our mistakes.

<comment><USER13> Not to mention the fact that Isis killed 224 people when they bombed the Russian plane on Oct. 31st and no one seemed to care. When they kill 100 indie rock fans in Paris though, it's time to repeal personal liberties as fast as possible? Why is this incident different than the Russian bombing?

 _Neither_ incident should influence policy since as you say, while horrible, there are a lot of other things killing orders of magnitude more people that don't get "addressed" the same way this is.

People need to stand strong and resist the urge to be reactive.

<comment><USER14> > Why is this incident different than the Russian bombing?

Well its quite well known that certain events create more "buzz" than others.

The plane crash is mostly limited in impact to the bereaved who are probably mourning rather than tweeting. At least in the UK the travel chaos afterwards caused more "buzz" than the actual event itself, perhaps because angry tourists are more likely to tweet/Facebook.

The attacks in Paris directly affected thousands who will have all communicated that experience directly to friends and on social media. It went on for hours and was watched by million. For most people it did have more impact, however shallow that may have been.

<comment><USER3> I think this is a direct effect of how large the media portray an event to be. MH17 was a much larger 'event' in the media than the Russian plane crash recently (probably due to a bomb placed by IS). The number of casualties were roughly equal.

So I don't think it has as much to do with the event itself rather than with the degree to which the media put it on the front burner and what the nationalities of those involved are. A rule of thumb seems to be that the further east something happens relative to Greenwich the smaller the font will be. Ditto South of Spain. To the media some lives are fairly clearly more valuable than others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "As far as I know, there's no evidence the French lacked some kind of surveillance authority that would have made a difference"

This is really all that should need to be said. Opportunists will jump on any event to push their own personal agenda, even if what they are pushing wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference in the outcome of said event.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps we should donate copies of NSA software to our allies so they can protect themselves. </snark>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> During the Cold War Pravda said the US's military-industrial complex existed due to America's nascent imperialism. All mainstream talking heads, commentators etc. in the US said US military bases only ringed the world because of the threat of teh Soviet Union. Of course, when the USSR dissolved itself, NATO expanded east, and US bases didn't close, but open in countries it could not have been in before. As some Russians say "Everything the communists said about here was false, everything they said about the West is true".

The militaruy-industrial complex has found its own form of product-market fit. Arm Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban to eliminate Afghanistan's seculat government. Work with the mullahs to overthrow Mossadegh's secular parliament in Iran. Arm Islamic fundamentalists to undermine Assad's Syrian government. Then put military bases in, and bomb in some of the countries in which these Arab nationalists live. Well after a decade of US military occupation of "Saudi" Arabia, and some decades of arming him against secular threats, Osama and company attacked the Pentagon etc. ISIS just responded to France's month long bombing campaign with bombs of their own.

Then we're told we the people have to be spied on...when I was young Nixon was having burglars break into the Democratic campaign headquarters, then using the FBI to cover it up. The FBI which was bugging and intefering in Martin Luther King's campaign for all people in the US to get the freedoms which the law said we all were supposed to have.

It's a self-reinforcing circle. What the hell does the US have military bases all over the world for? Not for any good purpose, I have as much suspicion of the US and French's governments intentions in Arab countries as the Arabs do.

<comment><USER18> > Well after a decade of US military occupation of "Saudi" Arabia...

Having a base in a foreign country is not the same as an occupation - especially when the base is there with the permission of the foreign country, because they want your support against other foreign countries.

<comment><USER17> The "permission of the foreign country" is the puppet dictatorship that the US put in to rule that country. A country which is named after the puppet dictators family.

It was as clear an occupation as you can have.

Obviously the 15 Saudis who flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center had different ideas from you about the US's former military occupation of their country. Which resulted, within two years after 9/11, with the US ending military occupation of "Saudi" Arabia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If "secure" communication schemes are made insecure, other methods will be used. For example, while it may be inconvenient for two people to drive halfway across town and meet face-to-face in a dark warehouse, they'd have no problem doing that if it was the only way to ensure secret communications. Especially when they're planning events that might take weeks or months to unfold, what's an extra 30 minutes of driving?

If you invest billions in surveillance, you will only achieve two things: having spent billions, and making sure that criminals communicate in some other way. You will have stopped no crimes, except the people who are stupid enough that they would have been caught anyway.

<comment><USER3> Apparently they used playstations...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Like many modern movements, the surveillance state thrives on its failures, which makes it nearly impossible to defeat.

<comment><USER21> I think it is a bit dangerous to consider this a failure of the surveillance state. One fundamental problem is that intelligence agencies are seen as having been given or having taken on the impossible task of preventing any political violence.

While it's understandable to think that they have failed at this, given that the task is impossible, it's probably not a good idea to last the failure at their feet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The French should consider consulting the Israeli's who have probably the most experience combatting Islamic terror. The Israelis are good at both hi-tech and HUMINT and doubtless other countries could benefit from their expertise, if they don't already.

However, it is noteworthy that in the end, the Israelis had to build a security fence around their country in order to combat terror. But this was for combating terrorists from outside the country.

Several of these French terrorist were French citizens and as such the Israeli the French could benefit from Israeli assistance.

</comment><comment><USER23> This isn't really too surprising, nearly all Law Enforcement agencies have been using these as a pretense to undermine civil rights. And the argument is just as broken for crypto as it is for guns, people who are going to use a tool for ill, will do so regardless of laws disallowing such use. And while it would be possible to force vendors to put back doors in phones, it doesn't prevent anyone from sideloading a crypto app.

One of the best counter factuals for this debate is that our terrorists are using high explosives in suicide belts and fully automatic AK47's in their acts. Both of those things are supposed to be "impossible" to get by non- authorized personnel and yet they are. Those physical things have to move through channels that the authorities already have the right to search and seize (trans-border crossings) so why not fix _that_ problem?

It is a sad situation, and I mourn for the people of Paris and all the people and in the future who have been and will be killed by extremists. But that pales in comparison to how much I mourn for the death of a free and equal society with guaranteed human rights.

</comment><comment><USER24> Unless the French intelligent services were picking on people at random they already had information on the people they should be watching as evidenced by the immediate sweeps in the aftermath.

In many of these attacks the individuals are well known to the police and security services as they often have criminal backgrounds and have been in prison or custody of some kind. So either they are some sort of criminal masterminds, which I doubt, or the security services are completely inept even when they have a wealth of information or something more sinister.

So in my mind more intrusive intelligence is not really the answer.

</comment><comment><USER25> All the encryption tools needed are public and open source. Putting backdoors into Skype, iOS Messages, etc. isn't going to get terrorists.

</comment><comment><USER26> Short term good, catastrophic long term.

Much rather we tackle social issues foreign and domestic.

For one, let's stop using violence to solve other people's problems. Violence is only justified in defense, as they're invading us.

Everything else should be through discussion in order to foster understanding and more importantly: empathy.

<comment><USER18> > Violence is only justified in defense, as they're invading us.

How about when they're shooting up our cities _without_ invading us?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's like a big linear regression. He is arguing for a higher surveillance coefficient to the societal equation. There are hidden variables though. Machine learning taught me a lot about politics.

</comment><comment><USER28> Saying that surveillance doesn't stop all terrorists so we should stop surveillance is like saying police don't stop all crimes so we should get rid of police.

<comment><USER3> Not all surveillance is bad but dragnet style surveillance of each and every person (abroad, because of course nobody would ever spy on American citizens) is apparently in-effective. Targeted surveillance could be an extremely effective tool against terrorism. As would be the more old-fashioned style operations (but with much more personal risk for those involved).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What worries me most is Hillary is going to give all these agencies a blank check.

We might not find out what horrors they've done to "protect us" until late next decade.

</comment><comment> norea-armozel Didn't the Iraqi government warn the French government that there was a plot to attack them a day before? I swore I read that on Google News.

<comment><USER30> Afaik, there were warning signs that authorities were aware of, but they didn't really have any idea what to actually expect.

That's just what I've heard. Id appreciate if someone could come by with more info or a source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Obviously the world will be 100% monitored in everything we do. Unless there are big changes in the government there is no stopping it.

<comment><USER3> I'm not ready to concede that just yet, just like I'm not ready to concede that even though it is trivial for a bunch of people to acquire arms and to commit mass murder that there is nothing that can be done to put a spanner in their works _long_ before they are even aware of that particular possibility.

Because if we do not solve this problem Europe will have a major civil war on its hands somewhere in the next two decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> He couldn't have been cheaper. This is how you make voters feel like stupid little kids.

</comment><comment><USER33> Never let a crisis go to waste.

<comment><USER33> My goodness, has no one else ever heard that before?

[http://www.perc.org/blog/rahms-rule-never-let-serious- crisis...](http://www.perc.org/blog/rahms-rule-never-let-serious-crisis-go- waste)

And further -

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

Rahm Emanuel

Before the bodies were cold, multiple mouth pieces were blaming encryption for the attacks. This is exactly what the quote was talking about.

[https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions- abou...](https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-about-paris- to-blame-snowden-distract-from-actual-culprits-who-empowered-isis/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's next to impossible to have privacy in societies where there are large swaths of population who want to do others harm.

This is why privacy is doomed in "multicultural" societies.

<comment><USER18> I assert that it is possible to have a multicultural society _without_ having large swaths of population who want to do others harm.

<comment><USER34> There isn't a single one in the history of the world that lasted for long time.

There's so much research out there that shows that multiculturalism is the root of conflicts. For example [0] and see references too.

Just look at the current French republic and how that worked out for them. [1]

[0] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1409](http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1409)

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/1199...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11995821/Paris- attacks-have-put-a-dagger-through-the-heart-of-liberal-Europe.html)

<comment><USER35> What about the US, then? We have a form of multiculturalism where minorities are on average oppressed, but integrate rather than lash out (usually).

I'm not saying we're a shining model or anything, but we have a ton of different cultures living together more or less harmoniously, even taking into account the habitual blacks vs whites squabble.

<comment><USER36> Humanity also has a pretty extensive history of conflict, even in more mono- cultural societies. Hell, you could take any mass of people, all from the same background, race, ethnicity, religion, etc (take your pick), put them on an island for a hundred years or two, and you'll get factions.

You'll get people fighting over how they think the place ought to be run. You'll get people fighting over who gets what and why these guys have all this stuff and we have less stuff. If nothing else, it comes down to availability of resources and numbers of people (along the lines of Dunbar's number and all that).

Sure, ethnicity, race, and religion are convenient signifiers of groups of people and usually when you have two or more groups with significantly different cultures, you've probably got two or more groups with some level of inequality and power imbalance so you're already halfway there. But even if you don't start out with cultural differences, they'll pop up eventually. Groups of people over a certain size will always have a harder time avoiding conflict when things get tough. It's almost in our nature to split into "us" and "them" just to manage it all.

<comment><USER37> Europe is currently pretty much ordered itself into nation states. It required some bleeding over the centuries. If you look at Swiss and Germans, they can hate each other and be internally fine. Both are using 2% of their GDP in defense to fend of each other proactively. There is balance of power, which result very little violence.

Now _if_ both countries would import so much people from middle east that they would constitute something like 30% of the population of each country. Now ethnic Germans and Swiss seem to be "the same group" compared to Muslims. If shit hit's the fan, there is new pressure to readjust the borders. And move the people. Usually that stuff causes bleeding.

You could say that "if" is completely unrealistic right now. I agree. Nothing that has happened in Europe during past 15 years really warrants any policy change regarding immigration. The point was largely theoretical, just like your island.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Motivation = Decision before Action — 'How do I Get in Shape?'–Excercise Hacks for Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://davidadewumi.com/2008/10/10/1-motivation-how-do-i-get-in-shape-excercise-for-entrepreneurs/

<comment><USER2> The number one motivator is if you pay for it. All studies point that if you pay for a gym membership you're more likely to go or if you buy a bike, etc. If it tallies monthly, then you'll be working out a lot.

<comment><USER3> Depends on how much you pay I guess. My gym membership was usually so cheap that it never really affected me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First thing is: guys who post their own blogs are lame lame lame.

Second thing is: when you call it an exercise "hack" you already screwed up. The whole thing about getting in shape is that there is no quick hack. There is no short term solution. Getting in shape is not a hack. Getting in shape is a permanent lifestyle change. Otherwise you might as well just get some lipo and some buttcheek implants.

For those who care: you should get in shape, if you are an entrepreneur, for no other reason than because having a healthier body will also give you a sharper mind, quicker mental response time, increased alertness, and just all around better mood. Don't believe me? Just try this simple experiment: Go eat a salad and then try to solve a sudoku puzzle. Now go eat a pizza and a cheeseburger and then try to solve a sudoku puzzle.

No time? Check out this book called "High Intensity Training" by Mike Mentzer. He recommends short (20 min) workouts once a week, and as your body and nervous system becomes more trained and able to exert more of their maximal output in a workout, you have to take longer and longer breaks (like 2 weeks in between workouts) for your body to recover.

<comment><USER5> > guys who post their own blogs are lame lame lame.

totally disagree. If you wrote something that may be interesting to an audience, why not post it? Gaming the voting system is lame, but posting your own stuff is no big deal.

Anyway, my book recommendation is always "Infinite Intensity" by the excellent Ross Enamait: <http://www.rosstraining.com/infiniteintensity.html> . The marketing is cheesy, and the writing's not that of a pulitzer prize winner, but the attitude is right and the workouts are great. He gives the appropriate research findings so that you can go read for yourself if you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> crossfit.com, great resource. They post a workout of the day, and their short intense and it will get you into amazing shape.</comment>


Collaborating on GitHub with Subversion  - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1178-collaborating-on-github-with-subversion

<comment><USER2> I like that GitHub offers SVN interoperability, but this tutorial doesn't seem tailored to its ideal use-case. I would imagine that the biggest benefits of using SVN to access github would be for use with higher-level tools (IDEs, continuous integration systems, etc.) that already have SVN backends. If you're just going to be interacting with your repo from the command line like they do here, though, you could spend the same amount of time it takes to read this tutorial to learn the four or five git commands you would need to complete the steps it covers.

<comment><USER3> Nah, a major benefit is teams that have the one guy who won't learn git. He'll claim he is, but really he's still mentally using subversion, and it shows when it does awful things to your repo. We have this guy on our team, just for an example of what happens:

* every day claims "subversion doesn't have merge conflicts"

* every day decides that "branches should be taken out of git, they are too confusing"

* refuses to accept that master is not special other than by convention

* regularly requires someone else on the team to take 30 minutes cleaning up his stuff

* since he doesn't get git, he will have his code changes scattered around 5 different clones of repos and do hand merging because it is safer. (he did this with svn too :/)

* wishes that TFS would just hurry up and have a git bridge because git isn't enterprise enough, and therefore not production ready.

There are more...

Anyway, he's a good coder and useful in what he does well, so it's not a case of "bad develper", he just has blind spot when it comes to version control. I presume he's not the only one.

<comment><USER4> He's probably not unusual. I know git, but I refuse to use it until forced to. It's overly complicated and wastes my time.

My SVN workflow works fine. My non-branch workflow:

* _Step 1:_ Do my work. Commit very often -- every time I implement a small granular piece. I keep the unit tests running. Other people see my commits immediately. This is simple, communication flows easily, and _I'm not thinking about version control_.

My branch-based workflow.

* _Step 1:_ Create branch. svn cp ^/trunk ^/branches/feature-whatever && svn switch ^/branches/feature-whatever

* _Step 2:_ Do my work. Commit often. Other people see my commits immediately. This is simple.

* _Step 3:_ Run svn merge ^/trunk. Fix the occasional merge error caused by two people working on the exact same code at the same time. This is simple as long as I communicate with the team. It's easy to communicate with the team, because they all see my regular commits, and I see theirs, and so I know if we're stepping on any toes.

* _Step 4:_ Merge my work to trunk (possibly after review). svn switch ^/trunk && svn merge ^/branches/feature-whatever

I hate the constant badgering from git proponents. They all want me to use a more complicated tool that doesn't offer any advantages to what I see as a simple, seamless workflow. I want my SCM to stay out of my way entirely. If I could avoid even thinking about it, I would.

My job is to write code, not to spend a bunch of time juggling local/remote commits in a complex SCM tool.

I've worked through the industry transitions from RCS to CVS, CVS to SVN, and introduction of SVK, Mercurial, darcs, and now git. Despite being a part of all those industry transitions, I've never seen such religious proselytizing and scorn from any SCM "proponents" as I've seen from git advocates.

<comment><USER5> With git, you can basically do the same thing and a lot more. You could probably even alias your favorit SVN commands for easier learning. One of the main problems with SVN is that it works with files and not commits, you work on 3 files, commit your work, and SVN will let me only update 1 or 2 files, I think this is horrible and people do it... a lot.

You are not forced to have local branches and commits that you didn't push to the main repository, but having them as options is a step forward. Also I can't imagine SVN working as good as git in the open source realm.

<comment><USER4> I'm aware that you _can_ do the same things, just with a lot more user complexity. I prefer simpler tools if the complexity does not strike me as advantageous towards completing my primary task -- writing software.

As for OSS, I'm much happier with the results of the PostgreSQL or FreeBSD development communication models than I am with the results of git/Linux style of development coordination. I think it's fair to judge by results.

<comment><USER5> I don't feel any complexity, only more control. I admit though, that I started with git, which probably helped a lot.

If I want to I can alias git commit && git push, so that I don't have to type two commands to achieve something that can be done with one in SVN, I really don't see that as a big deal.

The thing that bugs me about a lot of SVN users is that they are afraid for branching. A lot of them thing that updating specific files instead of the whole tree is a good thing.

Sure there are some projects where SVN is good enough, but sometimes you just feel the need for the features of git.

I think Linux is doing a lot better than FreeBSD. :)

<comment><USER4> > _I don't feel any complexity, only more control. I admit though, that I > started with git, which probably helped a lot._

Control, complexity. Same thing. I don't need control, I need the SCM to make my commits available to everyone immediately and get out of my way. Any time I spend twiddling the SCM system for asthetic reasons, or because I don't want to share my work until I'm ready for other people to see it, is wasted time that serves no code or communication advantage. We're software developers, not SCM operators.

Git appeals to certain aspects of human nature that make the tool appealing, but are fundamentally negatively impacting on communication and the development process.

> _I think Linux is doing a lot better than FreeBSD. :)_

Not in terms of code quality, it's not. MySQL is also more popular than PostgreSQL, but there's no technical comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And here I thought <http://svnhub.com> was an April Fools joke.

<comment><USER7> It was an April Fools joke in 2008. The feature became a reality in 2010, and has seen some major updates since then.'

<https://github.com/blog/31></comment></comment>


The Internet is Rigged - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@davepell/the-internet-is-rigged-d74b342505f0?imm_mid=0ce413&cmp=em-web-na-na-newsltr_20150311 <comment><USER2> Apple's app store is their walled garden and they get to do what they want. If you choose to develop native you get all that comes with it...

However don't confuse app stores for the rest of the internet. The web is still here, freer than ever. It's like the best app store ever: develop on any OS! no ratings and reviews! instant cross-platform compatibility!

I know, I know, there's money in native mobile apps (maybe... if you get lucky...). I think however it's time devs stopped salivating at the thought of winning the app store lottery and come back to the web - maybe our open field would get more respect in mobile.

</comment><comment><USER3> That is the wild west era, you see this on any new major platform, at first all is level and after a while you see the ones with the deep pockets getting a headstart and then after they succeed they try to make sure that others will not succeed.

So either play along or find/make yourself a new major platform to play with.</comment>


Colleges slammed with lawsuits from men accused of sex crimes - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/colleges-slammed-with-lawsuits-from-men-accused-of-sex-crimes/ <comment><USER2> The bigger problem here isn't specific to sexual assault. Private colleges can choose to expel or suspend students for any reason, as long as they feel the student is in violation of the student handbook, which can often have vague phrasing, like "Respect for the college," "respect for other students," "Personal honor," etc

At my alma mater, I know of one student that had a two year suspension because someone told a student RA their friend had told them that the to-be-suspended student (sorry, it's a lot to follow in one sentence) had sold a small amount of marijuana to the friend. Another student received a two year suspension when someone accused her of prostitution. No proof, or real evidence to speak of, in either of the cases.

Sometimes, students would mysteriously disappear amidst rumors of suspension and reappear a year or two later, not being able to talk about it. A couple students went away, and we assume they were expelled, or suspended and didn't bother coming back.

Everything's behind closed doors, students may be told by RAs or advisors that conversations are "just between the two of them," or anything they say is private when it isn't. Campus police may get involved, local police officers may decide to hand suspects over to the school rather than arresting them, schools can explicitly prohibit lawyers, and make a student's silence a condition of return to the school, or hold transcripts hostage. They can cut students off from housing that the students paid for, lock up possessions, or suddenly remove them from housing with power that a landlord would never be able to have "in the real world." These are students that may be living on their own for the first time, away from family, nowhere to go, no resources, and trapped in a "legal" system that's completely without rules. The whole college "court" system messed up.</comment>


Replacing Education With Psychometrics - barry-cotter http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/07/replacing-education-with-psychometrics.html

<comment><AUTHOR> One lengthy blog post deserves a few more blog posts in reply. I suggest

<http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html>

<http://www.scitopics.com/Learnable_Intelligence.html>

<http://www.psychologymatters.org/aronson.html>

But rather than stop at blog posts, I would also like to recommend scholarly articles and research lectures.

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u81/Dickens_and_Flynn__...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u81/Dickens_and_Flynn__2001_.pdf)

[http://www.psychometrics.sps.cam.ac.uk/page/109/beyond- the-f...](http://www.psychometrics.sps.cam.ac.uk/page/109/beyond-the-flynn- effect.htm)

There are a lot of monographs worth checking on this subject before considering one blog entry or the other to be the last word.

<http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html></comment>


Slide.com shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://www.slide.com/

<comment><USER2> Can someone explain why such high traffic sites like Slide.com, Picnik.com, Flektor.com, etc are often shutdown after acquisition? Even as of today these sites must be getting millions of hits. Not to mention that for many people it's still the go-to site for making slideshows, or picture editing.

Why not instead auction them off or maybe add a business model to cut some losses? It can't hurt more than shutting it down completely?

My guess is big companies get some sort of tax benefit from doing this? But is that the sole reason behind it? Or am I missing some part of the picture?

<comment><USER3> It would still have to be maintained so those resources are better used elsewhere. Nobody wants to work on products that aren't getting much attention either. For Google, I imagine it's about focusing on a few things that have massive potential (to really win) and they simply do not find it worthwhile spending more resources on selling it off.

<comment><USER4> > it's about focusing on a few things that have massive potential (to really > win)

If you has to focus in order to success, you are already on the edge of fail. Remember Gmail? It was a 20% time casual product.[1]

[1]: <http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html>

<comment><USER5> What, like say Apple? A company renowned for focusing on doing a small number of things well.

And what was the first thing Larry Page did when he took over as Google CEO? Start hacking away at projects that were going nowhere to focus on a smaller number of key areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sad :-( to see all the work from fellow sliders go away. It'll be survived by all the companies people from slide have now started:

Mixpanel, sosh, quixey, pathjoy, formula am, etc

</comment><comment><USER6> what in the world is prizes.org? very odd thing to link to.

<comment><USER7> The last surviving slide-developed property post Google acquisition...</comment></comment>


Just released a new political advocacy tool: MailCongress.org - <AUTHOR> https://mailcongress.org MailCongress.org has been a passion project of mine, finally over the past month I've had the free time to build it. Basically, it gives you the power to send physical mail to your congress people over a web app. I handle the printing, stamping and sending of all the mail.
So there is a cost. $1 per letter and the messages are limited to a single printed page. I am also limited today's trial to the first 100 participants. (I currently don't have the printing hardware in place to scale this yet… but if the response is good I'll invest immediately)
If you guys like, hate, whatever the idea please give me some feedback. Thanks! <comment> mike-cardwell We have a similar (but much better) website in the UK - <http://www.writetothem.com/>

Enter your postcode and it will give you a list of your local councilors, your MP, your MEPs, along with their party information, and a link to a list of lords. You then click who you want to contact and it gives you a form to fill in.

The contact is free, and via email rather than post, but in the UK that's just as good a way to contact them. They usually respond by post.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not certain how it is in the UK but the US is very different. In fact, most of the email is ignored and used for data collection purposes. (i.e. donation drives)

Hand written letters are very influential. Clearly that is not possible via a web interface. But still an actual physical letter is quite powerful for a US politician.

<comment><USER2> I worked in a Congressional office and email which contains a name and address within the representative's district is treated just like a paper letter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, I am a candidate to use this if I care enough but an issue to mail my representatives but either

1\. I do not know who they are.

2\. I do not have a way to commit my words to paper and mail them to the representatives.

I don't say that there aren't people who will find this convenient, but it seems a narrow market.

<comment><AUTHOR> @sblom got it right, the site solves both problems. The congress person will know you are a constituent based upon the home address you provide. (it will be on the outside of the letter as the return address but also on the inside under your name identifying you as a constituent)

However, the same problem exists with regular mail. If somebody wanted to provide a bogus home address they could. There is no real way for us to validate you are who you say you are. And there will be some people that have a different billing address and name information on their credit cards than their home address so I didn't want to validate based upon that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I _love_ this idea--I often want to send a letter to my Congressmen, but am too lazy to actually address an envelope.

Only problem: how do we know that mailcongress.org will actually mail the letters that we pay to have them mail? It's not like we can call our Congresscritters later to confirm that they received them...

<comment><AUTHOR> The site will send you an email when the letter has arrived. We encourage that you make a follow up phone call.

But I understand the concern. This is the hump I'm trying to get over, trust. All I can say is that this is very important to me and the only way it will work is if the users trust:

1.) Their letters are being sent. 2.) Their correspondence is private.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a nice and idealistic idea. But If you actually try mailing your member of Congress, you will find that for the majority of time by far, there will be no response whatsoever. If you do get a response, it will be a canned boilerplate letter that most likely will not address the issue you raised.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which is why when the letter arrives in their office you'll get an email saying so. You'll also get their phone number so you can make a follow up phone call. Keeping this type of loop is important if you want to get heard.

<comment><USER5> I suggest you iterate this process a few times, because you'll discover that's not how DC works. Politicians understand money; and view constituents with contempt. Interns answer the phone and assure you they'll "tell the Member your views." If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHjPcgb0pZI&t=1m37s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHjPcgb0pZI&t=1m37s)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do this and employers will come after you - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@heyfebin/just-doing-this-will-make-employers-come-after-you-600c9be488ab#.8w30xktjj <comment><USER2> Be careful. Recruiters are using the "I saw your profile on GitHub..." line when in some cases they have never even seen your profile and/or have no clue what you've contributed. Also, it helps to have meaningful contributions (even better: your own project) and build somewhat of a following.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, A few people are successful in building organisations from the following.</comment></comment>


Steve Jobs just ruined the iPhone for Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://fulldisclojure.blogspot.com/2010/04/steve-jobs-just-ruined-iphone-for.html <comment><USER2> The first comment is apt: _"This is NOT thinking differently Apple."

It's not? Can you give another example of a similarly idiotic restriction imposed by some other company?_

On the bright side, this confirms that Steve Jobs is in reasonably good health. Nobody would establish this kind of Orwellian control unless they believed that they or a blood relative would be around to pull the strings. Right? He wouldn't be working to bequeath a death grip on the iPad software ecosystem to his successor at Apple.

<comment><USER3> Maybe Jobs's brain has gotten infected by whatever disease he is suffering from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FWIW, despite being the author of a Clojure/Cocoa bridge, I was never under any illusion that this would ever be able to run on the iPhone.

(See "Why is this a terrible idea?" at <http://github.com/allertonm/Couverjure>)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, you've got some good points. My main concern is long term, when Clojure- in-Clojure really takes off. That's the dream that was just shattered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think Apple's got better things to do with their time than to police against the 3 Clojure iPhone/Pad developers out there using some kind of cross- language compiler.

Plus, if Apple did start enforcing against Clojure->Objective-C, it'd be sort of cool. Imagine Clojure in the big time... the HN headlines: "Functional programming keeps Steve Jobs up at night" or "Steve Jobs and Rich Hickey seen outside coffee shop in Cupertino -- Eric Schmidt feels lonely". Right, not gonna happen, keep cross-compiling away.

(There is a warm space in my <3 for all that is Clojure and I haven't touched another language in 2 weeks)

<comment><USER7> It's not really an issue of if you can get away with it. It just betrays the fundamental attitude that Jobs has shown since first introducing the Macintosh. He appears to firmly believe in a closed, tightly controlled platform. I wonder how the world would be different if Woz had taken over and Jobs had wandered off to do something else. And stayed there I mean. Who am I kidding. People would probably be fighting each other for NeXT machines instead of Apple boxes.

<comment><USER8> I for one would be happy with that scenario :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This should be a relief to any Clojure (or other non-iPhone language) developers. This completely removes the major headache of worrying about Apple, the App Store, etc.

<comment><USER10> It's a good thing to think of problems as opportunities. I'm not so sure about thinking of opportunities as problems...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was no JVM to start with, and there was already a no-interpreters clause. They had a long way to go.

<comment><USER12> Interpreters were fine as long as the user could not download or create code. A lot of games use a scripting language (Lua, Python, and other proprietary languages (SCUMM for the Monkey Island remake, for example).

... and there's a CLR port of Clojure, so the scenario was not out of reach (see Mono Touch)

<comment><USER11> Some apps have interpreters, yes, but they _are_ in violation of the agreement.

<comment><USER12> A truckload of games have interpreters, coming either from indie developers or major publishers. None of these will be able to update their games to the new SDK.

Regarding the interpreters, I used to be right, but it changed at one point. Quoting Henk Boom on the Lua mailing list:

[[ I thought this was already the case. From an excerpt of the agreement on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_OS#Java>

"No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

I've read that the "or" in "downloaded or used" was originally an "and," but that Apple changed it at some point. ]]

<comment><USER13> > None of these will be able to update their games to the new SDK.

The ban on interpreters significantly predates the new SDK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's like Apple are just coming up with yet another reason for more technically-literate people to either jailbreak (or not buy) the iPad.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not aware of a Clojure runtime that'll work on the iPhone, but I'm disappointed that apps written in Scheme (Gambit, etc.) won't be allowed in future. Or at least, it'll be a lottery whether or not they notice that the C code isn't human written, which means the risk is too high for anything serious.

<comment><USER16> I've heard some rumors that this will do it:

<http://xmlvm.org/overview/>

(Don't tell Steve Jobs about it though)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't really understand the level of concern. I'm expecting a kick-ass slate based on a more open platform like Android or Ubuntu to come out in the next year.

<comment><USER17> ... with a crummy user interface.

I'm posting this a lot, but I'm not just trolling. I'm trying to get people to grasp the fact that UI is _the reason_ for Apple's success.

Everyone else treats the UI as an afterthought or for whatever reason is incapable of designing a good one. The UI should be of primary concern.

This is particularly true of mobile apps. As your device and its screen gets smaller, UI design becomes exponentially more important. A bad UI can be tolerated on a 1920x1080 desktop, but not on a phone or a small pad.

<comment><USER18> really? I own neither an iPhone nor an Android phone, but I've used both in passing, and the iPhone was neither particularly intuitive nor particularly snappy.

To honest, I think the goodness of their UI is often overstated.

<comment><USER19> "I've used both in passing" is the key phrase here.

<comment><USER20> Agreed. I had used lots of cellphones and mobile devices BEFORE I tried iPhone. iPhone & iPod Touch were just light-years ahead of anything I experienced before. And it was all about UI/UX superiority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> HCI experiments? You can still do those in Clojure. You just can't put them in the app store.

</comment><comment><USER19> Change your subdomain to fullclojuredis in protest</comment>


Russia Blocks Porn Site Brazzers for 'Damaging Human Psyche' - <AUTHOR> https://themoscowtimes.com/news/russia-blocks-porn-site-brazzers-for-damaging-human-psyche-57065 <comment><USER2> But beating your wife is fine apparently [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/30/russia...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/30/russia- decriminalise-domestic-violence-laws)

<comment><USER3> Did you just assume who is getting beaten in the relationship?

<comment><USER4> he didn't assumed. He just knows it like any person who knows Russia. [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21474931](http://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-21474931) , [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_Russia)

"... every year. ..., 14,000 die from injuries inflicted by husbands or partners. ..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At the same time Russia is the go to country for hosting "revenge porn" sites and image forums with stolen nude photos. Because that wouldn't damage the psyche of anyone?

Fine if you decide that porn is bad, I don't agree, but that's something the Russians need to work out for themself. It's the blatant lying and use of double standards that annoys me.

<comment><USER6> It's standard practice for Russia to do things for one reason and give a completely unrelated official reason as excuse.

I'm not too familiar with the specifics of this case, but I can easily imagine this just being a case of nationalist protection. In that they want people to go to local Russian porn outlets that can be better controlled, tracked & monetized. Then again, it could also be something as simple as some Russian official being pissed off and on a personal vendetta mission.

<comment><USER7> Russian laws effectively prohibit all kinds of internet pornography. More precisely, they restrict "unlawful distribution of pornography", but never define any "lawful" way to do so.

\---

That said, if it weren't pornography, small rant about our judicial system:

Any judge in any city pop 50000 can issue a country-wide block for any site. Often these resolutions are too far reaching, sometimes they order to block root page (/) instead of specific page (/foo/bar), rendering whole sites unavailable. Sometimes they ban ip addresses of aws services, disrupting half the internet.

Another important thing about these hearings is that there is often no defendant. They might call in the site hoster, but hosters are never interested in defending their customers so they simply ignore the subpoena. Site owner would often discover their site was blocked after the fact.

Finally, in many cases judges don't even bother writing their own verdict. Instead they copy-paste whatever public attorney cooked up, including all the factual and orthographic errors, and sign it.

[https://medium.com/@aalien/law- limits-8d733178e158](https://medium.com/@aalien/law-limits-8d733178e158) this is a very insightful post (alas, only available in Russian) from @aalien, founder of lurkmore.ru, which is arguably the most often banned site in Russia, about how this horrible system functions (or rather, malfunctions). I found this excerpt especially hilarious:

«Full list of Roskomnadzor-banned pages is available on our site. Unfortunately, that page is also banned by Roskomnadzor, because it contains "textual information about committing suicide". It's in the quoted Roskomnadzor letter, of course»

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I might find a lot niches of porn a little distasteful... or a lot distasteful in some cases, I think they're reaching a bit. Surely the kinds of people visiting these sites are already interested in seeing this kind of stuff... and thus are already 'damaged'. I feel like the cause and effect is being reversed somehow. Perhaps that's just me.

Edit for clarification: I used the word 'damaged' in reference to the parent post, it was not a word of my own choosing.

<comment><USER9> There is a large amount of anecdotal evidence that pornography has been at least a contributing factor in ruining relationships. Moreover, arguments can be made that even at the individual level, viewing of pornography is (1)habit- forming, (2)distort one's views/expectations of sex & intimacy.

I think censorship of any form is very stupid. This one included. However the notion that porn can sometimes be bad is not unfounded. Even vanilla porn, let's leave the sick/twisted stuff aside. Excepting illegal things like child porn & bestiality I doubt any consensus can be reached as to what is considered distasteful.

<comment><USER10> I agree. You could make the argument that pornography damages people's lives. Of course that doesn't mean the state has the right to censor it.

By the same token, I wonder if an argument could be made that the availability of free internet pornography has led to a decrease in sexual assaults/violence/rape. I know of no research into this, but it's not a totally implausible argument on the face of it.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash You are correct. The linked source claims that sexual assault rates have halved since the early 90s.

Of course, correlation != causation, but 50% is a huge amount and it overlaps quite neatly with the growth of the internet.

[https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope- problem](https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Repressive regimes are also somewhat damaging to the psyche. Just saying.

<comment> chroem- I'm not trying to defend Russia, but the UK is trying to do this too. Well, actually they've already done it.

<comment><USER12> No, they're in the process of doing it right now.

The Digital Economy Bill is currently in the Lords. It's actually going to the Committee Stage tomorrow.

That's the bill that will force age verification (with security implications subsequently) as well as banning "non-conventional" pornography in the UK.

You can read more over at ORG: [https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/digital-economy- bi...](https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/digital-economy-bill-hub/)

And if you'd like to write to a Lord on the issue: [https://www.writetothem.com/lords](https://www.writetothem.com/lords)

<comment><USER13> Writing to a politician is already very inefficient, given that the lords have life terms, would they even care?

<comment><USER14> Well, for one thing, the Lords as presently constituted being instrumental in something that is later see as important to the nation but on which the Commons alone would have failed is fuel for the argument against abolishing the Lords, further eroding their role, or replacing them with an elected body, which seems to get proposed every few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why that site and not others.

<comment><USER16> From the article... "The move follows Roskomnadzor's decision to blacklist adult video site Pornhub in September 2016."

<comment><USER17> I think the question is still valid though: Why these sites?

There are _sooo_ many porn sites out there, that blocking just a couple seems like a waste of time.

<comment><USER18> Explanation from Anton Nosik ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Nosik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Nosik)):

"To understand the logic behind those obviously absurd and inefficient bans, one should look deep into the very essence of the "checklist system" (палочная система in Russian). Once there's a law in place, requiring the police, the prosecution, the courts, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Communications to find and censor "bad" websites, it means that they have to find and ban some URLs every other month, just for the record. It does not matter much, whether those sites are actually bad, or how many million other sites do carry the same content, but haven't been included in the current version of filtering blacklists. There is only one relevant KPI for every single official in the chain: a checklist, showing how many sites they've blocked in every given month.

There is one district prosecutor in Ufa, who initiates the whole judicial process of blocking Russian copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf online, one mirror at a time. For every copy there's ample paperwork, starting from police investigators, who conduct primary finding of fact, then the district prosecutor's office, that petitions the district court to ban the copy in question. The court passes its ruling, citing the URL as stated in the filing. Then the Ministry of Justice in Moscow enters the URL into Extremist Materials' List, and Ministry of Communications updates its Banned Websites' Registry. Even before the cycle is completed (usually takes 2 to 6 months), the process reopens with another copy of same book, on a different URL. Five years since the initial inclusion of Hitler's manifest in the federal Extremist Materials' List, which is today, there are still some 300 copies of Mein Kampf in Russian, freely accessible online, and five years from now, there will probably be 3000. But every single civil servant, involved in the blocking process, duly receives his salaries, promotions and other benefits of government service, as long as he doesn't forget to submit the updated checklist to his superiors. That's how this system works, and there is absolutely no point in trying to evaluate its efficiency in conventional terms of common sense or public good."

[http://dolboeb.livejournal.com/2843155.html](http://dolboeb.livejournal.com/2843155.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And unblocks YouPorn on the same day.

Source:

[https://twitter.com/roscomnadzor/status/828984752476651523](https://twitter.com/roscomnadzor/status/828984752476651523)

</comment><comment><USER20> Probably both are damaging, but what is more damaging, violent video games or porn?

<comment><USER21> For an adult that has a fully formed identity and personality. Probably very little damage can be incurred from either.

<comment><USER22> So what is the implication from the fact that it is impossible to block porn for people who are not "an adult that has a fully formed identity and personality"?

<comment><USER21> It is called "parenting", people should do more of it.

<comment><USER22> Not too easy if you're working two jobs to provide for your family. By giving all the responsibility to the family you sacrifice those vulnerable children who weren't as fortunate as yourself growing up.

<comment><USER21> So society doesn't need to fix the "two jobs" problem but society needs to help with parenting instead including filtering porn of the interwebs?

<comment><USER22> I think we both realize that solving the two job problem is much harder. Hands off government and giving people the freedom to fuck up their life is great for middle class kids in super supportive families, but can be disastrous for less fortunate children.

<comment><USER14> > I think we both realize that solving the two job problem is much harder.

No, it's not harder than solving the problem of how you let the government substitute for absent parents without creating a regime that exerts authoritarian control of the adult population through its control of content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> OK... but since when has Russia been moralistic about anything? Some of the nastiest most immoral webhosts on the planet ever have operated out of Russia for years.

Could this be Russian purveyors pulling strings to get "the competition" shut- out locally on some comically absurd moral pretext?

<comment><USER24> At least since Tolstoy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> not about pron, its about control and making sure everyone breaks some kind of law and can be broken/coerced

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash If you start to debate the merits or costs of porn to the human psyche, you've already lost.

Delegitimization and criminalization of vice is an old, old, old, old, old trick in the book to stir people up against a "degenerate" "other" as a means to engineer their consent for their leaders to accumulate power and wealth.

It also provides a convenient way for dissidents to be delegitimized or arrested when police "find" (i.e. plant) evidence of drugs/porn/what-have-you. Old trick, works as well today as it has for thousands of years.

<comment><USER26> Inevitably anti-pornography laws are enforced more harshly against more vulnerable groups.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Same with drug laws under Nixon/Reagan/Duerte.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft researchers use light beams to charge smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/564178/microsoft-researchers-use-light-beams-charge-smartphones/

<comment><USER2> WiTricity is a pretty interesting project being worked on by some smart cookies from MIT - needs smartening up a bit, but the basics are there. Definitely worth a look if the growth of wireless charging interests you - [http://witricity.com/](http://witricity.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Like come on, this is the stuff we've all dreamed about. The future is fast approaching!</comment>


Russia Takes Aim at Asteroids - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580904574638230276797924.html#mod=djemEditorialPage <comment><USER2> This search: <http://searchyc.com/russia+asteroid>

yields these hits:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024186> <\- This one has comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024245>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023123>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023191>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023578>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025693>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026179>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023803></comment>


Designing a Mobile App for Maximum Growth - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/review/this-is-how-you-design-your-app-for-maximum-growth/ <comment><USER3> There seems to be something being missed in this thread with the back and forth of effective tutorial screens:

What if we created UX that didn't require explicit hand-holding?

I'm sounding snarky I'm sure, and maybe that's because this is kind of a snarky comment, but as someone who makes mobile apps for a living it's a position that is surprisingly infrequently considered.

Yes, I know it will look really cool, but do you _really_ need to break platform conventions (that users have already spent _a lot_ of time learning) just for your one thing?

Maybe instead of pointing an arrow at a hamburger button and telling the user what's under that button, we should consider something less _insanely vague and useless as the hamburger button_?

Having built a pretty large number of apps so far, my position right now is: if you find yourself building a tutorial screen/mechanism, _you have already failed_ , and the only good you're doing for your UX now is controlling the degree of failure between "mild" and "utter".

My experience with tutorial screens - not just on the implementation and UX side, but also where they seem to come up during the product development process - suggests that they are at least a bit cargo-cult-y. People suggest them because other apps have them and it's at least a superficially sensible thing to do.

A lot of projects start with the fundamental premise that tutorial screens will be necessary, and when these projects inevitably run into conversion/completion barriers because of the tutorial screens, attempts to mitigate rarely involve _completely removing_ the screens. It's as if the presence of tutorial screens is fundamentally non-negotiable.

<comment><USER4> Completely agree here. I think the main theme of that section being "Don't over-educate users" if you can reach for high engagement and conversion rate without overlays, arrows, etc. then that's the way to go.

It's great to design the experience at the outset to not need the tutorial screens. And then test into the possibility of including them anyways.

One "in-between" possibility would be to have something similar to Slack's old onboarding experience where you'd see some elements that gently pulsed prompting the more curious users to click on them and learn more. And everyone else to safely ignore them and move on.

Interestingly Slack has moved on to more explicit explanations during their most recent onboarding iteration. But I am sure that they'll also try something without any tool-tips at all.

The larger point is that many apps have sliding screens that force users to read in order to learn about their app. And that users did not install and open the app to _read about_ it. They're there to use it.

We've seen massive increases in conversion rate and engagement by replacing these screens with "learning by doing" interactions.

If that "learning by doing" step can be accomplished without tutorials then even better!

<comment><USER3> > _" If that "learning by doing" step can be accomplished without tutorials > then even better!"_

Sure, but I'd still argue that 95% of the time you're still negotiating the degree of failure.

Honestly, the times I've been able to exert enough force on a project, we have always come out with a better, more refined, and clearer design that required no tutorials whatsoever.

5% of the time, user confusion comes from the fact that you're doing something truly new and groundbreaking and that the user will simply have to learn it somehow.

95% of the time, your design simply isn't good enough and you haven't iterated enough on it, or you have a tolerance for convention-breaking that is poorly- justified in the context of your app.

Mobile devs (me sometimes, too) have an annoying tendency to think they are in the 5% category _all the time_. My challenge to people is to accept that _almost all of the time when users can 't figure out your app, the solution isn't user education, it's to un-fuck your design_.

[edit] I just read your post more carefully...

> _" It's great to design the experience at the outset to not need the > tutorial screens. And then test into the possibility of including them > anyways."_

 _Wait what_. That seems entirely unreasonable. If you've designed an experience that is intuitive and requires no tutorial screens, _you want to include them anyways_?

Am I reading your post wrong?

Tutorial screens and mechanisms _are never a good thing_. They can (rarely) be justified as a necessary evil, but at no point are they _actually good_ , and at no point do they make your UX _better_. A well-designed tutorial is simply _less awful_ than a poorly-designed tutorial. Both scenarios are _categorically_ worse than simply not needing a tutorial.

Note that I'm drawing a distinction between onboarding and tutorials - <USER2> introduces the user to the _product_ , the other introduces the user to the _UI_. Onboarding (like, say, an online dating app helping you import your first photo so your account is even marginally useful) is entirely legit, tutorials aren't. The screenshots provided in the original article are tutorials, not onboarding.

<comment><USER4> > "Tutorial screens and mechanisms are never a good thing."

What's your definition of a "good thing" or "actually good"? If it's quantifiable as higher engagement and retention then these mechanisms are far from "never a good thing". They're a good thing quite often - when done correctly. This is why you see them in many products that have growth teams dedicated to the task.

Agreed that the screenshots do not do a great implementation justice.

Note that when I'm talking about onboarding, I am talking about combining introducing users to the UI with introducing them to the product.

Sure introducing the user to UI by itself is not great.

> "If you've designed an experience that is intuitive and requires no tutorial > screens, you want to include them anyways? Am I reading your post wrong?"

Slightly yeah. It should be read as: "If you've designed an experience that is intuitive and requires no tutorial screens, you want to _test_ them anyways."

Because we've seen their inclusion improve engagement and conversion even in experiences that are intuitive. Sometimes that's not the case, but the possibility is strong enough to justify _testing_ them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not a fan of screen overlay tooltips as in [1]. My first instinct as a user is to get them out of my way, and I do that every time, feeling guilty. And adding a "next" button and going through tooltips one-by-one doesn't make this any better, just more annoying.

Actual games (such as GTA or Cut the Rope) do a great job with onboarding, and apps tend to take the simpler show-everything-in-the-beginning way.

Two alternatives I've tried as an indie dev:

\- Gamification, where you ask the user to perform one task, such as "drag X to Y." Only after they performed the action move on to the next prompt, and perhaps not even immediately.

\- Utilizing badge counts or "bouncing" animations to indicate some action that needs to be performed. The benefit is that the user can try it on their own time, and you're not rushing them. The downside, though, is that some users may never actually click.

On the flip side, these approaches can add complexity in both code and how you structure your UI.

[1] [http://s3.amazonaws.com/marquee-test- akiaisur2rgicbmpehea/R9...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/marquee-test- akiaisur2rgicbmpehea/R9Z7wKsTTDepaxHpZ8NU_Usability_Post.jpg)

<comment><USER6> I like the tooltips better than either of the approaches you've suggested. If I'm confused, I glance at them and then am less confused. If I'm not confused, I just dismiss them, not feeling guilty.

I hate "help" mechanisms that keep popping up in normal operation, because usually I know exactly what I'm doing in normal operation.

<comment><USER5> You're on point, these help mechanisms should be rare and few, or they would be a nuisance as well.

The problem with forced screen of tooltips in the very beginning is that you haven't had a chance to explore the app yet, and so it's hard to mentally assign importance to them. And later, they're gone.

<comment><USER7> This is my issue with them. Maybe I _do_ need a tooltip to figure some feature out. But I certainly don't know which one I need yet.

If you bombard me with "Hit the + button to make a new document!" on first launch, of course I'm going to dismiss the tips. It's 2015. Figured that one out on my own.

Better to design an app where functions aren't hidden in secret menus and I can explore without accidentally screwing things up. Is that too much to ask?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Assuming that users who installed the app already understood the need to provide their location data. This allowed them to axe out the long-winded welcome flow and make the permissions request the second screen. The text was changed to say that users needed to "Enable Location Permissions"

Just so wrong.

<comment><USER9> Yup - I wonder if the article misrepresented the actual change because it seems a bit odd?

This article has a lot of good points but some are really debatable. Not long ago, Hopper (app for flight price monitoring) published their experience in re-doing their onboarding [0]. Some take aways from that go against what this one says.

Ultimately you have to see what works for you and what doesn't. Copy & paste (just like the Social links paragraph funnily) will never just work without some thought.

[0] [https://medium.com/@hopper_travel/the-notification- problem-5...](https://medium.com/@hopper_travel/the-notification- problem-50267cbabad2#.9anehkja7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It should be no surprise that decreasing the tutorial from 6 pages to 2 will increase number of users "registered" from 40% to 80% (or more). In my experience, tutorial dropoff follows a power law, that is, every new hurdle you place before the user can use your app gives them one more chance to bail. You can try all the fancy design tricks you want, but the end result is still the same...you're creating friction points.

In reality there's a delicate balance. Train users to use your app early and take the hit in registrations. You should end up with more engaged users who retain better. Or let everyone in and teach them as they use your app and risk retaining them because they don't understand what the hell they're doing. There is no silver bullet.

</comment><comment><USER11> _When you look at user tests, no one pauses to read this text. And the very few who do immediately forget what they read..._

Even though some of the technologies discussed are hillariously obsolete, nearly everything published on joelonsoftware.com 10+ years ago remains surprisingly relevant:

 _You could explain things in the manual, but everybody knows that users don 't read manuals, and they probably shouldn't have to._ [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000058....](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000058.html)

<comment><USER12> I wrote a response to your comment: [https://medium.com/@firasd/things-i-read- on-joel-on-software...](https://medium.com/@firasd/things-i-read-on-joel-on- software-that-came-true-cd201c03cf58)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Completely agree with this: if the user doesn't see value within 5 seconds (and is wow'ed by it), game over... wrote a piece on it: "Onboarding is Everything" [https://blog.orangecaffeine.com/onboarding-is- everything-327...](https://blog.orangecaffeine.com/onboarding-is- everything-327dddb8b1d0#.3iq1vwhvr)

</comment><comment><USER14> I love this article and it is a pretty great handbook on a variety of tactics you normally don't get much depth about. But I wish the whole thing was prefaced with, this mostly matters after you've found an audience. (Or product/market fit if you're pmarca)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi all, I'm the person cited the article. (Kamo from Primer)

Happy to answer any questions or elaborate on anything in there.

</comment><comment><USER15> awesome article. really nice to see a guide on how to build effective onboarding from an experts view</comment>