The Highway Hit List - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/commute/2017/01/the-highway-hit-list/514965/ <comment><USER2> What surprises me is the vitriol with which people fight back at these efforts. I live in Oakland, and seeing people lose their minds about 980 has been quite interesting. Whenever I take 980 it is mostly empty, and removing it would make downtown and west Oakland way more accessible from either side. Should residents of Walnut Creek driving to Alameda (who from what I can tell are the only people that regularly use 980) dictate Oakland's urban future? I would say not.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to be all for the removal of highways, but now I worry that this trend will accentuate economic inequality and hurt poorer people who might want to move to the big wealthy cities where these highways are being removed.

50 years ago, when these roads were being built, they enabled wealthy workers to flee to the suburbs and commute into city centers for work, cutting through the poorer neighborhoods left behind.

Now the geographic patterns are reversing in some areas, and city centers are now far more vibrant (read: wealthy), while in places like Los Angeles, where I live, much of the new population growth is occurring on the periphery of the urban area, where lower income workers can afford to live while enduring long commutes into the city.

I live in an affluent neighborhood, and many of my neighbors want to make the city more walkable and "friendlier", by making roads smaller and de- emphasizing cars in favor of transit and human-scale development. In the long run, I think this is a good idea, and would dramatically improve my life in the city.

But at the same time, if policies make a city and its high quality jobs difficult to access for people who can't afford to live in the city itself, it's not necessarily a net positive, especially when the wealthiest cities are enthusiastically restricting supply.

Ultimately, I worry that we will look back at this period in urban policy as the time when city centers got far wealthier, low-income people were displaced, and the focus of wonks turned to creating cities that rich people like them would like to live in, without realizing that the same policies that makes a city enjoyable to live in also makes the engine of good jobs hard to access for people who aren't fortunate enough to already be living there.

<comment><USER4> Many people commute to Los Angeles by highway for >1 hour each way every day (for some, it's 2 hours each way), with much of the trip stuck in bumper-to- bumper traffic. This is an absolutely miserable waste of human time, gasoline, CO2 emissions and other air pollution, automobile construction, road construction/maintenance, and so on.

If our municipal planning put denser housing (doesn't need to be Hong Kong here, just 5-story apartment buildings would be fine) and denser employment space next to train/subway stations, so that more people could live within walking / transit distance of their workplaces, we could save huge amounts of resources and human happiness.

Empty highways are amazing for automobile speed and flexibility. But highways scale very poorly to higher amounts of traffic. They're great for cross- country road trips. But for routine commuting, especially once they start filling up, they're pretty well the worst available option.

And that isn't even getting into the harmful effect the highway has on the neighborhoods it goes through. For nearby residents, a highway is like a combination of the inaccessibility of a river + the noise and air pollution of a factory, running 24–7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Real solutions (in my opinion):

      * Public (city/state/etc) owned parking structures at the edges of the city.
      * Good, all weather sheltered, pedestrian access between in city parking / housing / jobs.
      * More residential development within cities, until the competition drives the rent down to the same as (or close
        to) the surrounding areas; when it increases due to network effect push again to keep it within that bound.
      * Improve building codes to keep the quality of life in the city the same as out of the city.
      * Incentivize (tax benefits for compliance, tax more for non-complianc) units having more 'family'
        sized dwellings (and those even better acoustic isolation).  Make it possible to afford and find
        a place to raise a family within the city.

</comment><comment><USER6> I will be a little bit sad to see 280 spur go. For some parts of SF (e.g. Pac Heights) it is better to take I-280 and cut through the tenderloin (6th street exit -> harrison -> 7th street -> leavenworth -> pine) than to take the central expressway spur. When I was driving for lyft, the 280 was a fast and reliable way to return to the high-volume SoMa area for pickups during the evening rush.

</comment><comment><USER7> Richmond VA's got one of these situations. In the 1950s I-95 was routed straight through Richmond's historic black district, Jackson Ward, destroying it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Ward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Ward)

</comment><comment><USER8> Plans to remove 280 spur in San Francisco, that's a major change.</comment>


We carpooled every day to get to know our customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/talk/carpooled-day-customers <comment><USER2> Curious, has anyone ever seen a startup that does customer development as a service?

<comment><USER3> Is customer development still worth anything if a third party does it?

<comment><USER2> Valid question, aware of it as a response to this question, but it doesn't address the orginal question. If there's a existing notable service doing customer developement as a service, the fact they exist might provide an answer to your question.

Maybe one way to rephrase the question that might be more common might be:

Is it okay as a co-founder to let another cofounder handle customer development if they're more experienced at doing it? Or as a non-technical founder, is it okay to outsource development?

My experience is this is super common, and as such, if a solo founder is not experienced doing customer development, it would make sense at the very least get help doing customer development.

<comment><USER3> Personally, I'd be delighted if somebody could convince me the answer to my question was "yes". But I'm staying skeptical.

Specialized cofounders is a much less dangerous situation than outsourced core tasks. There are some events of companies failing or people getting really bad deals because the cofounders didn't all have the complete picture on their heads, but since they normally work in close contact and have the same interests, this is rare. Completely outsorcing those tasks completely remove both the proximity and interests alignment.

Yet, I think you are right in that some service that would watch what I'm doing and tell me "now, you need to do X", "you should have done Y", or "don't ever do Z again!" would be valuable. I'd call that "tutoring", not "outsorcing", and I have no idea if somebody does it.

<comment><USER2> My experience is the number one strength a founder has their passion. It's really not something that can easily be copied and given the vast amounts of opportunities in the world, hiring someone that really knows how to map that passion to a business model and attack the assumption has zero to do with being an entrepreneur, it's just another skill. Core issue is if the founder is not learning from the process and owning it.

Anyway, it's a topic that's interesting to me given how bad most startups are at it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do you have a yawning Perception Gap, or are you in sync with American public? - <AUTHOR> https://perceptiongap.us/ <comment><USER2> Maybe this is just my partisanship, but the misperceptions on the conservative side seem much more egregious than the misperceptions on the liberal side. Liberal misperceptions are of the form of wishy-washy statements such as "racism still exists in America". Of course two different people can say that they agree with this statement while meaning fantastically different things. On the other hand, one of the conservative misperceptions is that the sizable majority of Democrats take the concrete, extreme position of being in favor of completely open borders. I'm a Democrat, and I actually do hold this extreme position. I can tell you the vast majority of Democrats who I've ever talked to disagree with me strongly about this; it doesn't even pass the sniff test. I fail to see any misperception on the Democratic side which is even close to being this severe.

<comment><USER3> I agree they could pick a better question. It's not interesting to know how many people agree with that statement.

However, it is very interesting that Democrats actually thought that Republicans would not agree with that statement

<comment><USER2> Perhaps, but there's two ways that this can be interpreted. One is that Democrats have a misperception about Republicans' beliefs on this issue. I'm sure to some extent this is true. The other, though, is that Democrats and Republicans interpret this statement in different ways. So Democrats believe the statement means X, and Republicans believe it means Y. Republicans tend to agree with X and disagree with Y. Democrats may have an accurate view of how Republicans feel about beliefs X and Y, but still underestimate how many Republicans agree with the statement.

<comment><USER4> Interviewer: "Will Republicans say the sky is blue?"

Democrat: "No."

Republican: "Of course it's blue. It's hot pink, which is a shade of blue."

Democrat: "... wait, what? You think... huh?"

Interviewer: "Looks like the Democrat was wrong!"

Which is true... ish. Truthy.

<comment><USER5> Not sure where the negative reaction is coming from for this comment. It's a perfect analogy. You can swap Republican and Democrat in every place if you'd like; the problem is the same. It's presented as if we have a predicate like "PARTISAN believes X" and another predicate like "OTHER_PARTISAN estimates that for all PARTISAN P, (P believes X)".

But it's not as clean as this. Because of the messiness of natural language -- which goes double for political language -- _there 's no guaranteed equality between the two Xs_.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the main question under discussion here when I made the post seemed to be the racism one, which appears to have played out the way I depicted. The general problem is that it's really, really hard to design complex social science surveys that even maybe measure what you're tying to measure. This one's complex, and I'm pretty sure doesn't measure what they were trying to measure. A big chunk of the two major parties don't even agree on the terms these questions are about, meaning they may well be _aware_ of why their counterparts would answer "yes" where they said they'd say "no", but consider their "yes" to be fundamentally about something else entirely.

I wish they'd included "do democrats support murder" and "do republicans support murder". That'd have been fun. Some would certainly have said yes on either side (abortion, the death penalty) and they'd be _right_ from their point of view, even though "do _you_ support murder?" would have been near- zero on both sides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love this angle. There's a lot of room to improve the methodology, but this is getting at the heart of the question of why we are seeing increasingly polarized politics.

With a wide perception gap, we are guaranteed to be framing our opponents' views inaccurately and therefore fighting the wrong battles if movement at a societal level is actually what is desired.

The more politically diverse your direct in-person interactions are, the better your perception gap, and the more likely you are to be able to accurately frame your opponents' arguments when debating with them.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is quite interesting. One question that springs to mind, though: who exactly are the respondents thinking of when they're asked to estimate? Do they hear "Are (Democrats|Republicans) $SOME_TRAIT?" and think "Is (Nancy Pelosi|Mitch McConnell) $SOME_TRAIT?", or "Is my kid's study buddy's (Democrat|Republican) parent $SOME_TRAIT?" There's always a big difference in how you judge someone you know personally as opposed to a face on the news. This doesn't seem to have been asked, or at least it's not mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER6> I was thinking that probably played a role as well. The extreme partisans on one side will be exposed to the opinions of the extreme partisans on the other, and ignoring the namecalling for a moment, it would be interesting to see if the extremists are accurate about what the other side's extremists believe.

I don't think that would change very much about this report overall; I'm sure both extremists would still overestimate the size of the extremists groups on both sides quite significantly. But it would be an interesting data point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I never realized I was in a majority group, but "Exhausted" is exactly how I feel about politics lately. I'm capping my CNN viewing at about ~20 minutes a day.

<comment><USER8> As someone who is more recently interested in politics, I skip CNN, and actually all cable/televised news, because the coverage is so shallow. If it exhausts you, but you still want to follow it to any degree, I'd recommend getting your politics through cultivated written sources.

<comment><USER7> That's usually what I do now, but my husband likes to watch CNN or MSNBC at night so there's always some leakage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, I wonder if the width of the perception gap varies significantly by geography.

I'd hypothesize that the perception gap would be smaller in the regions identified here as "more politically tolerant" \- [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/us- coun...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/us-counties- vary-their-degree-partisan-prejudice/583072/) , just due to the fact that living and interacting with people with more varied opinions may make people more in-tune with what members of the opposing political party actually believe.

Would be cool to an analysis of the data to see if that correlation actually holds.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting piece. I would quibble with one part. At the end they imply that the contention in the country is reconcilable because the extremes do not represent the majority. Now the last time Americans had an irreconcilable difference was the Civil War. We do not have good statistics from that time but there is some evidence that the extreme positions (i.e. abolition vs. pan- American slavery) were not held by a majority of the people in the country. One example I'll give is that even after the South withdrew from the U.S. House and Senate, those bodies still struggled to pass legislation freeing and or assisting black Americans. This indicates to me that not even the majority of the new Republican party was radical abolitionist.

I guess my point is that just because the extremes are confused about how America feels, that doesn't mean they aren't driving us towards irreconcilable conflict.

Now, I'm not one of those that thinks an intra-American conflict is forthcoming. But I would guess that if you modeled various internal conflicts throughout the history of nations, you wouldn't find many where roughly half the population stood solidly behind one idea and the half stood firmly behind another. I think in most you'd actually find something a lot like this. Two outlying groups driving the discourse against each other and a constituency of allies on each side that can't break away for various reasons.

<comment><USER11> > One example I'll give is that even after the South withdrew from the U.S. > House and Senate, those bodies still struggled to pass legislation freeing > and or assisting black Americans. This indicates to me that not even the > majority of the new Republican party was radical abolitionist.

Many assuredly weren't abolitionists, at least not as a matter of policy. The Corwin Amendment [1] was even passed by the 2/3 majority in the remaining senate and ratified by some northern states. Don't forget, Maryland was a slave state and fought on the side of the north.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Properly controlled immigration can be good for America" is a meaningless question. Of course Democrats would think Republicans would be opposed to this idea. The idea of "proper control" is the whole debate! We have republicans who feel that building a wall is part of properly controlling things and democrats who think it's a moral outrage. Several of these questions are phrased so as to make them non-partisan and in doing so create a "bad people on both sides" effect. Vague statements like this create bad sociology my friends!

This isn't about a perception gap. It's about not putting together very good polling questions and then drawing some conclusions based on them.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not directly what the article is talking about, but I feel like this is related:

I recently spoke to a man who used to work for the Republican party. He felt that politics is so polarized because the two parties aren't even talking about the same things. The example he gave is that it's not possible for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground on racial inequality, because the Republican party simply doesn't have that as part of their platform.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that's a particularly tough one because the most obvious laws about racial inequality (equal access to housing, jobs, education) were passed a while ago.

Today if you want to address racial inequality via legislation, that means police reform and drug policy. When you talk about those subjects to someone who isn't either directly affected by them or well-educated about them, they don't seem on their face to be related to racial inequality.

Only recently do you see republicans starting to talk (a little) about drug policy changes now that opioid abuse has started becoming a huge problem in some white communities. Video camera footage of police abuse may also help eventually bring republicans in on that problem - but that is dependent on cops having working cameras, not turning them off, and the people watching the video actually having empathy for the people being abused. Maybe if cops started harassing vocal 2nd amendment advocates their tune would change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if there's definitional confusion underlying this?

I rarely see discussion of the gaps that hide under an umbrella like <party/ideology>-ans. Are we talking about candidates and office-holders? Party officials and operatives? Openly-affiliated pundits? Activists? People otherwise not on the playing field who happen to vote for or be registered as party-affiliated? Abstract stereotypes projected by partisan media?

In practice, these groups may be largely distinct, and questions referencing them can easily smuggle a lot of assumptions in. I would be surprised if highly disengaged voters and highly engaged ones aren't talking about different things when they tell you what they think <X>-ans think, so you'd _expect_ a delta.

<comment><USER14> There's also a lot of dogma/orthodoxy that elected <X>-ans have to at least pay lip-service to, which might exacerbate perceived gaps on issues that are often in the talking points/propaganda efforts/purity tests.

Aside from nailing down who the questions mean, it might be interesting to see how well respondents can imagine what partisans think about obscure concrete issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this "study" is crap. On one side, you have armed terrorists threatening a state legislature, and on the other side you have... what?

The gap isn't in perception, it's in civilized behavior.

</comment><comment><USER16> Overall, I think this is a very interesting article and raises some good points. I did have some questions though.

Why are "Traditional Liberals" part of the "Exhausted Majority", but "Traditional Conservatives" part of the "Wings"? This is particularly confusing to me because the latter is the second largest of all groups.

In fact, if I'm reading their chart correct, they seem to be claiming that anyone who identifies as "conservative" is part of the "wing"...

<comment><USER17> It sounds as though they derived the definition of "wing" from the perception gap measurement. I think calling everyone who is not in [that definition of] a wing "exhausted" is confusing.

<comment><USER18> That doesn't match the graph shown, in which traditional conservatives have a slightly smaller perception gap than traditional liberals.

The tribes come from another report from the same people, which says "[Traditional conservatives] are included as a wing segment because they are much closer in characteristics to the Devoted Conservatives than to the Exhausted Majority." I'll admit I've only skimmed the graphs (it's 110 pages long), but I'm not sure their data shows that clearly.

[https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf](https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf)

<comment><USER19> I will add that in their methodology they asked the questions without asking for political self-identification, then grouped responders by answers and labeled the groups themselves. There is a consistent and significant response shift when going from traditional conservative to moderate, which I think correctly identifies the groups.

<comment><USER18> It's not the tribes people are questioning here, but the categorization of traditional conservatives as a "wing" and traditional liberals as "exhausted majority".

Looking at a few more of their charts, I think I can see the case for it. On social issues, the gap between traditional conservatives and moderates is large, and the gap between traditional conservatives and devoted conservatives is quite small. On the other hand, the gap between traditional conservatives and moderates is large, while the gap between traditional liberals and passive liberals is much smaller.

<comment><USER19> Fair enough. I took this as questioning the tribe labels: "they seem to be claiming that anyone who identifies as 'conservative' is part of the 'wing'..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am extremely out sync. I ride my bike every day right through the heart of alleged MS-13 territory. The American public thinks I've been shot into Swiss cheese by now.

<comment><USER21> Thoughts and prayers!

<comment><USER20> Very helpful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I thought I was having a stroke looking at that title until I realized that "yawning" also means "wide."

</comment><comment><USER23> The fact that they count Breitbart, and Redstate as 'news sources' skews the study a bit. Of course people who read that crap are going to have a larger perception gap. Even Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed skew more to the left. That's their reader-base, they are going to tailor pieces to keep the readers they have who lean progressive.

I think they should've kept news sources to only nbc/cbs/cnn/cnbc/abc/hn as those are really the most conservative (not meaning GOP but 'reserved') news agencies that tend to (at least try to appear) non biased. Fox is definitely biased right, and MSNBC (which is what I watch) I agree skews left of center.

I think if we brought back the Fairness doctrine that would help a lot but I don't know if we could enforce that on the internet or if we should. I'm a social democrat (not for full socialism, for social democracy like Denmark/France/Germany), but I can definitely see the perception gap for what it is, and it's causes. Our media system is broken. It's a propaganda machine that is controlled by multiple parties with no middle ground. A fairness doctrine would at least allow all sides of an issue to be represented and temper the propaganda machines.

There are billionaires and Super PACS on both sides that are working to divide us. In fact there's some albeit conspiracy-sounding theories that the elite want us divided by fringe issues like abortion/gun control/immigration so we don't band together on worker rights, labor unions, healthcare, etc that would force them to funnel money at the bottom and switch from trickle down to trickle up economy. As long as we're hating each other and have these misperceptions and polarizations we're easy sheep to control.

</comment><comment><USER24> Some of these "perception gaps" may be definitional.

For example, the "racism still exists in America" question. A right-wing person may say "racism exists, but it targets white people now". A left-wing person might see that as a _denial_ of racism's existence. You'd get a fundamental disagreement on what the answer _meant_.

<comment><USER25> Absolutely. I don't see any of this in their analysis of the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> All this thing is telling me is anyone who is a self-defined member of a party, no matter if it is Democrat, Republican, Liberal, or whatever, hold "extreme views", where that is defined as being a grittier bolder version of reality; to put it bluntly, this thing tells me that people who are "into" politics are trolls, and should be avoided, no matter which party they subscribe to.

I mean, it calls itself "The Perception Gap", except there really isn't any such thing by the way they describe it: half the things they ask about are factual things (such as the second amendment (it doesn't matter if you personally think we shouldn't bare arms, it is in the Constitution on how and when to do so), or America being a socialist country (FDR made America adopt many Socialist ideals, forming a hybrid of modern Socialism and our existing Democratic Republic, to fill the gaps in one with the other)); the other half are just polarizing issues that are complex, nuanced, and not something you merely can ask on a simple questionnaire.

The whole article says things that are true, but tries to build a narrative around those things that doesn't quite function. For it to be effective, imo, it should just straight out claim people don't like the truth, don't like the reality they live in, and have chosen to ignore it or recontextualize it into something more palatable instead of accepting it: reality is still real, even when you don't believe in it.

The truth is: our politics are shaped by people who live in pure fantasy, they are allowed to vote, even though they aren't even capable of understanding what they are voting on, or what the outcome will actually mean (ex: Trump protest votes helped get Trump elected, even though the people making the protest votes readily admitted Trump was a bad candidate and would not make a good President), and the article just dances around the issue instead of nailing it.

</comment><comment><USER27> This falls right in line with the concept of cognitive dissonance [1].

In short, people want the world to fit their narrative, not the other way around.

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

<comment><USER28> How is this cognitive dissonance? The people being surveyed aren't holding conflicting opinions within themselves.

<comment><USER27> The cognitive dissonance I have observed is in real-world observations vs other data (social media, news, etc). Basically, if you follow the news frequently, you'd be inclined to think the world was on fire because that's what gets the clicks. But if you observe the world around you, talk to real- world people of differing political opinions, you will find that everything is relatively tame compared to the picture people are inclined to paint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If 30% of a population holds a view, it shouldn't be described as "extreme".

<comment><USER30> 30% of the population holding extreme views isn't the same as any particular view being held by 30% and considered "extreme". They don't go into exactly what this figure means, but at the least we can imagine 15% of Americans holding one extreme and 15% holding the opposite extreme. Or even more credibly, it could mean that 30% of people hold at least one "extreme" view, but each individual "extreme" view is only held by 1-2%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's really important to understand that ideology does not arise in a vacuum; it is an expression of one's material conditions. For example if you tell me you believe that taxation is theft and the free market will solve your problems, I can reasonably guess that you are the owner of some business for whom labor is just a cost and taxation to support public goods is going to cost you more than it benefits you. That includes everyone from corporate interests down to small business owners. The rest of the republican base is those who can be induced to be allies of the above on the basis of race. Keep that in mind and all their ideological positions suddenly make sense. They're just looking out for number one. Even the immigration stuff; labor is at a disadvantage when capital can move freely but labor is stuck.

This is also the reason that the extreme right has often had corporate sponsorship at key moments in history.

<comment><USER32> I agree with you except on a small point - I don't think restricting labor movement is particularly beneficial to capital - but I don't see much relevance to the article.

<comment><USER31> I felt that the article was trying to paper over genuine conflicts by making them just look like thinly held opinions. The message is: don't fight, it's not a real difference, it's just slightly different ideas. That's just false- a hen can't be allies with a fox. If people are going to fight for themselves they have to know who their enemies are and _why_ those people are their enemies.

To make the point even more explicit- who do you suppose funds More In Common, and why do you suppose they do that?

<comment><USER33> The message of the article is _we are _not_ enemies_ not "don't fight."

Fellow Americans should be able to disagree and settle the conflict with elections. Enemies wish for each other's destruction, and while it may be how you feel, it is not the right frame of mind to take when attempting exchange of ideas on policy.

<comment><USER31> See now, that right there is why liberals consistently lose and never learn from it. The right _knows_ they're at war, and they act accordingly, and the socialist left does too, but nobody listens to them, and then you have all these centrist liberals who think it's a high school debate club or something. This is win or die stuff man. If the enemy acts like it's a war and you don't, you're going to lose, every time.

<comment><USER33> Sigh. I'm a conservative.

It shouldn't be a war. It should be a philosophical disagreement between brothers and sisters.

<comment><USER31> Look: I was a conservative when I was a teenager and hadn't gone out to see the real world yet. But at some point you go out and the ideal collides with the reality and you have to face what those ideas really mean.

I say what I say out of a desire to influence people; I want to influence people out of a desire to make the world better. I have two kids- I don't want them to be drafted in a war, or go hungry because of climate change. But if the conservatives get their way, that's what will happen to them. I've been in city Council meetings advocating for paid sick leave for local working people. On my side was the vast majority of citizens, together with organized labor, on the other side was the chamber of commerce. The testimony was 20 to 1 in favor. But we lost, because the young lawyer in the expensive suit from the Chamber stood up and reminded the city Council members of who funded their election campaigns. And by defeating paid sick leave, they force people to work preparing food when they have the flu, they force people to choose between watching their sick kids or losing their jobs. I was once a fast food worker and my boss wouldn't let me go home even though I was barfing in a trash can behind the fryolator. An experience like that changes you. But you know, the Chamber won, and they saved the business owners of the city a lot of money.

Look, your side wants a war with Iran that will necessitate the return of the draft; to do nothing about climate change which is rolling the dice on civilization itself; and to literally put children in cages (while making substantial profit for doing it). I'm sorry but you're not my brother or sister if you support that kind of violence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> These questions are meaningless. Seriously? They asked a question like "Does racism still exist in America?" and thought many people were going to say no?

Democrats and Republicans both agree there are problems. The difference is in their solutions. If you ask a facile question like "Is homelessness bad" of course both sides will agree. The difference is that the Republican solution is criminalizing homelessness and other things that treat the symptoms, or handwaving it away and "letting the free market fix it." That doesn't even get into all the ways Republicans repeatedly will defund and undermine any government program, no matter how well they're working. (They're trying to cut SNAP for fucks sake. Over 40% of SNAP recipients are children!) Meanwhile Democrats will make mistakes and get caught in bureaucracy but at least actually make an effort at attacking the cause.

Even if you virulently disagree with me on my characterization of the two parties, you have to agree that the linked article is meaningless. The fact that "both sides agree" on the problems means _nothing_ if one side's solutions aren't fact-based.

<comment><USER3> > and thought many people were going to say no?

Apparently, many Democrats thought Republicans would say no. That's what's being measured.

<comment><USER25> But that is because, for example, many republicans (7/10?)[0] think that the democrats are racist but they are more likely to consider democrats discriminating against whites. A republican is more likely to say that sexism exists, but against men, rather than women. A republican is more likely to say that climate change exists, but isn't anthropogenic -- which is tantamount to climate change denial. The definition of what "properly controlled immigration" means is also unclear; for a republican it may be more likely to mean only let white people in or to reject all muslims. To be clear I'm not saying that all republicans believe these things, it's only that there is at the very least an extremely vocal group of people on the right who would answer these questions in the same way as someone on the left, but for vastly different reasons.

The definitions of what these words actually mean are in dispute between the two groups. Someone on the left may be answering the question as "what do they actually believe, regardless of how they would answer the question." I know that's how I'd reply to a survey like this. I certainly wouldn't have in the moment considered if they would have a warped view of the words.

>[0] [https://perceptiongap.us/media/w5xgckq3/fig7d.png](https://perceptiongap.us/media/w5xgckq3/fig7d.png) (Am I mischaracterizing this graph with respect to racism?)

side note, I fall into the post-doc group who would say that my colleagues and friends generally agree with me politically. But from my perspective, it's because we are more united on what the right ways to handle the problems actually are rather than because we are politically isolated. I consider myself a libertarian, but I generally vote blue; I've got friends who disagree with my general ideological stances but who understand that particular policies are better than nothing. I think that the story that this [1] graph is telling is that the more educated you become, the more you realize that only one of two parties in the united states is proposing sane solutions to the problems we face; whereas republicans in general are the ones who have a perception gap. Probably because they're more likely to be misinformed by the media they consume. [2]

[1] [https://perceptiongap.us/media/pboj2mgp/fig5c.png](https://perceptiongap.us/media/pboj2mgp/fig5c.png)

[2] [https://perceptiongap.us/media/3aaiax5h/fig4c.png](https://perceptiongap.us/media/3aaiax5h/fig4c.png)

<comment><USER6> But remember, the whole point of the question is "What do you think _they_ are going say in response to this question?"

Part of that is correctly interpreting how they are going to understand the question.

If you can't understand how the other side is going to read the question correctly, it's still a fail.

<comment><USER12> If you're using a blunt instrument to measure a nuanced result, you're going to lose some of your nuance.

If I say "Dogs are members of Canis familiaris" and someone else says "no, those are wolves" and a 3rd person asks me "How likely is that guy to know what Canis familiaris is" based on me asking him the question "Do you know what Canis familiaris is?" I'm going to get the answer wrong 100% of the time, because of my "perception" of things.

This is meaningless however, because some facts are facts, and not everything is "shades of gray". Also vice versa.

Saying "there's a perception gap" when two people aren't even having the same conversation doesn't feel like the blame should be on either person. In this case, the observer who's trying to draw a conclusion is drawing a pointless conclusion/asking trap questions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gentoo GitHub Organization hacked - <AUTHOR> https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-announce/message/dc23d48d2258e1ed91599a8091167002 <comment><USER2> What kind of a dick would do this to Gentoo, who makes everything available to everyone? I don't understand the world sometimes.

<comment><USER3> Someone who wants to steal crypto for example. Being able to inject a crypto stealer in a major distribution surely motivates a lot of people to try.

<comment><USER4> Someone with such long term goals would most likely not do it as noisy and destructive as this attack seems to be (delete all files, rename the Github org, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am a long term Gentoo user, but honestly I feel Gentoo's security stance is pretty bad, for example [https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=597804](https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=597804)

Their high friction contribution process with essentially requisite 'accredited developer' status is a major contributing factor.

Edit: Hah! Posting here got the bug updated within 10 minutes :)

<comment><USER6> Have you considered Funtoo yet? It's a fork of Gentoo, led by the creator of Gentoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems than the person replaced ebuilds in portage with versions that are supposed to delete all files but that don't actually work. [https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo- dev/message/03df77a347ec7...](https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo- dev/message/03df77a347ec75a9b1ceaab3a2f76ee8)

</comment><comment><USER8> What was the modified version of the GitHub page?? Looks like it was taken down before I could get there.

Crossing my fingers they added jokes about Stallman and _muh freedums_.

<comment><USER9> The title read: Linux For N____es

The N word being _that_ N word.

The logo was also changed to something that implied watermelon eating.

<comment><USER10> Is "negroes" supposed to be a super offensive word now?

<comment><USER4> You don't get to decide what words are offensive for some people unless you are part of the subject group of said people. Anything would be a misunderstanding of the word "offensive".

<comment><USER4> *Anything else

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> side note -- there is another FOSS org that was repeatedly, specifically attacked around the end of 2015, but they chose not to publicize it.. made worse because the volunteer community around the server admin was immediately far outside their comfort zone to implement fixes and recovery. The MediaWiki instance as well as raw servers were affected. No discussion in public about likely perpetrators. but what can you say ? How can you prove it? Commercial vendor rivals, nation-state actors, mean junkies, all of the above? Harsh and UN-necsessary .. everything was volunteer and above-board at the FOSS group, just too valuable ?

<comment><USER12> You can't just tell that story w/o namedropping....

<comment><USER13> Probably talking about FSF.

Employees of backconnect.com including Tucker Preston and Marshall Webb DDoSed them for a while to land them as clients for their DDoS protection service.

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/ddos-mitigation-firm- has...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/ddos-mitigation-firm-has-history- of-hijacks/) (ctrl-f FSF)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Was probably opal

<comment><USER15> Who is opal?

<comment><AUTHOR> Famous IRC artist.

<comment><USER16> yeah you don't want opal on your IRC network

<comment><USER17> > yeah you don't want opal on your IRC network

One of these "DCC 0 0 0" spammers getting people with crappy firewall middleboxes disconnected?

<comment><USER18> No,a PM/channel troll&spammer. but his persistence and discipline really merits the title of an artist.

<comment><USER19> Don't glorify misbehaviour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What changes were made?

<comment><USER4> Apparently the Github organization title and logo was changed, along with a couple of packages edited to contain scripts that were supposed to erase all files on user computers.

The Github repos are just backups of the main package archives, so it would only affect users manually downloading packages from there (which is not the case if you haven't explicitly changed your system config to use those repos for some reason).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wait... did they not use 2FA?!

</comment><comment><USER22> Dammit... l0de can't keep getting away with it. I recommend you call him during his radio hour.

<comment><USER23> Who is l0de? Are you implying they are the ones who did this?

<comment><USER24> l0de doesnt actually do anything except smoke meth and live off donations from his sycophant army on Efnet. It was probably one of his followers/listeners though because this had been announced weeks before on his radio show</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is the Cloudflare dashboard down for anyone else? - <AUTHOR> I'm getting a 503 API error whenever I try to access my dashboard, but their status page says everything is fine.<p>Is this happening to anyone else? <comment><USER2> Exactly the same for me.

Edit: they just updated their status page for this.</comment>


Ask HN: Does becoming a successful startup depend on having maintainable code? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Yes, it does. Bad architectural and engineering practices will start to burn you at a couple thousand lines of code. "Maintainability" isn't some far-off property that begins to matter when you're at hundreds of thousands of lines.

For the record, the best way to learn software architecture (what works, what doesn't) is to maintain your own code. Only when you support a project from inception to maturity do you get a sense of _how much_ architecture matters and _why_ it is so important.

<comment><AUTHOR> The question is more of is it required. I want to see weather there are many companies that have created hard to maintain code, but were able to become successful because of just producing a product that people wanted.</comment></comment>


Add-ons in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/11/23/add-ons-in-2017/ <comment><USER2> Extensions is currently the only thing FF is better than the competition at, and they scrap it to copy Chrome APIs... I just can't understand why they would scrap XUL-based extensions before their new APIs reach feature parity. The day pentadactyl stops working is the day I stop using firefox.

<comment><USER3> Well, XUL-based extensions are not scraped yet. They will, at some point in 2017, but we're not there yet.

The reason to scrape them is simple: the total API surface of XUL-based extensions is pretty much all of the internal APIs of Firefox, which means that any change anywhere in the code of Firefox breaks some extension accidentally. That's a compatibility burden that Mozilla could afford when the only competitor was IE, but it makes the development of Firefox much less nimble than that of Chrome & co. So a new, less invasive and more future-proof API is sorely needed.

<comment><USER4> > is pretty much all of the internal APIs of Firefox,

But that's also what makes them more powerful than any other extension API.

If your box is airtight then there is no out-of-the-box thinking.

An almost trivial example: Internal APIs can inspect the _current_ (as- enforced) sandboxing flags of an iframe. Which is not the same as the sandboxing HTML attributes on the frame, because those can be changed without effect after loading and also due to inheritance of sandboxing effects.

This tiny tiny tidbit is useful when making content-filtering decisions.

And it is just one among countless others.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, it's difficult to achieve a perfect balance here. That's one of the reasons the WebExtensions team has been very actively discussing with add-on developers to try and prioritize which APIs should be created/ported to WebExtensions.

I don't remember specific numbers, but I seem to remember that pretty much all the extension points that had been requested by add-on developers were at least somewhere on the TODO list of WebExtensions. I hope that by the end of 2017, they will all be available, with a much cleaner API than their XUL/XPCOM counterpart, better tests and much better survival chances.

Of course, some of the changes will require pretty drastic reimplementations by the developers. For instance, going from js-ctypes to the native bridge will require full reimplementation in a different programming language. On the upside, js-ctypes was really painful to use and the native bridge will let you use a much better language for the task. Say Rust :)

<comment><USER4> The native messaging API is not useful for _addon developers_. They only cater to application developers that ship a companion addon to their application.

js-ctypes allowed an addon to access already-present native libs on the the host machine or bundled with the addon itself. Messaging only works if you can get users to install some external application in addition to your addon, which is a too-tall hurdle for small extensions.

From my perspective those barely comparable.

> That's one of the reasons the WebExtensions team has been very actively > discussing with add-on developers to try and prioritize which APIs should be > created/ported to WebExtensions.

You are taking requests to keep existing uses supported, mostly for big, already established addons. My concern extends beyond that. Simply by having access to internals anyone can currently develop _novel_ uses, even if they initially do not have a userbase. Those can only be prototyped by access to internals. Someone might not even have an idea if they don't know an API exists that could be leveraged to do it.

In other words, "I can't let you do that, Dave" API design can stifle creativity.

And it also introduces a bias in favor of already entrenched extensions, which is less open than the current approach.

<comment><USER3> > js-ctypes allowed an addon to access already-present native libs on the the > host machine or bundled with the addon itself. Messaging only works if you > can get users to install some external application in addition to your > addon, which is a too-tall hurdle for small extensions. > > From my > perspective those barely comparable.

I haven't checked, but I seem to remember that you can provide a platform- specific binary as part of an add-on, spawn it from WebExtensions and then communicate with it through the native bridge. Building/shipping one binary per platform is annoying, but the rest is infinitely better than using js- ctypes. I should know, I've been one of the first users of js-ctypes and I still shudder at the thought :)

> In other words, "I can't let you do that, Dave" API design can stifle > creativity.

True. On the other hand, this is the kind of paradigm shift that was implemented by operating systems ~20 years ago (more in the case of Unix) and so far, improving the safety and security of operating systems has generally played in favor of users and creativity, not against them.

This doesn't mean that there is no space for lower level, MS-DOS/Apple II- style hacking – I'm doing exactly that these days. But still, separating both sounds like a good idea to me. YMMV.

> And it also introduces a bias in favor of already entrenched extensions, > which is less open than the current approach.

Good point. I seem to remember discussions about how to have an "unsafe" extension mechanism that would make it easier to experiment with non-standard APIs. I haven't checked myself, but I believe that this mechanism has been published, as an extension called "the WebExtension Extension" or something like that.

<comment><USER4> > On the other hand, this is the kind of paradigm shift that was implemented > by operating systems ~20 years ago

No. Kernel modules can be installed at runtime. The user just has to grant the application the necessary privileges.

This means OS developers do not try to attempt to "strike a balance" between power and safety. They allow both, the unsafe stuff merely requires a fairly simple opt-in.

This is the whole crux of the issue. I do not mind security measures, as long as there is a bypass. Mozilla has taken the - in my opinion extremist - position that even bypasses cannot be allowed because they know what's best for users.

> I haven't checked, but I seem to remember that you can provide a platform- > specific binary as part of an add-on, spawn it from WebExtensions and then > communicate with it through the native bridge.

I am not aware of any such feature. This used to be true for bootstrapped extensions, but not for webextensions.

> I haven't checked myself, but I believe that this mechanism has been > published, as an extension called "the WebExtension Extension" or something > like that.

yes, only works on dev edition though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nv-vn And this is how Mozilla goes out. Their last remaining reason for existence is being destroyed. They've already gotten rid of Thunderbird, Tab Groups, full themes, and more, but left us with the things nobody wanted (Pocket, Hello, etc.). They've also slowly let performance go in many places, seemingly.

A few years ago, I switched to Firefox for precisely the set of features they've axed. It was also much faster than the alternatives for me, used much less RAM, and rarely locked up. Since then, I've seen performance decline, RAM usage ramp up, and watched the browser lock up nearly once every hour. At this point, I'm probably just gonna go to Chrome. What's the point if Firefox is just gonna be a shitty clone?

<comment><USER5> >> performance decline, RAM usage ramp up

Thats what they want to fix by getting rid of XUL, among other things.

<comment><USER6> Poorly written addons were precisely the reason that firefox got a bad rap in the past. I hope webextensions being more common and restricted will help this out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The decline of XUL started around 2009. I spent months building a very complex app around XULRunner only to find out that Mozilla had no interest to support the technology in the future.

So I decided to leave the platform and put my efforts on native and web and frankly it was a good decision.

The WebExtensions API is no match to XUL and XPCOM but I only hope that now that we have Mozilla behind the technology we will see further API improvements.

<comment><USER8> > I decided to leave the platform and put my efforts on native and web

For the sake of curiosity, did you create extensions as side-projects/startup ideas? Do people pay for extensions or are we talking about patreon funds here (Or startups like pocket whose extensions are ways to get more crowds).

<comment><USER7> It was a desktop app that was based on top of XULRunner and yes it was for profit and people payed for it. I have no experience with selling extensions but I would imagine it is a very hard market to crack unless it is targeted towards enterprise customers.

Based on my experience, I can only advise not to base your entire business model on browser extensions as you will become dependent on platform moves (again unless enterprise).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love some figures on whether the main popular extensions will continue working, as well as how many in the Firefox Add-ons site are already web extensions.

I'm curious about my mains:

\- Classic theme restorer

\- uBlock

\- DownThemAll

\- Markdown Here

As I'm already using electrolysis, I know Markdown Here basically doesn't work. How I can check whether things will break or not.

<comment><USER10> You can consult [https://www.arewee10syet.com/](https://www.arewee10syet.com/) ; seems authors are mostly showing some efforts to migrate their extensions. CTR: seems OK, uBlock: uBockO: seems OK, DTA: bug, but at least tries to be e10s compatible, Mardown here: unknown (supposedly not compatible?)

You can try yourself: either install [https://nightly.mozilla.org/](https://nightly.mozilla.org/) and load it with your addons (it uses different profile) or use your stable one and look at about:support page for "Multiprocess Windows" cell if it states 1/1 and does not mention "(Disabled by add-ons)" you are covered. You can try some about:config alterations [0] to force it if you are adventurous. In this case, it might be nice to install "Add-on Compatibility Reporter" [1] for tracking and sharing your findings.

[0] [http://superuser.com/questions/1096974/how-to-check-if- multi...](http://superuser.com/questions/1096974/how-to-check-if- multiprocess-e10s-option-is-enabled-in-your-firefox) [1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on- compat...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on- compatibility-reporter/?src=api)

<comment><USER11> Careful. The e10s transition is a much smaller step than the move to WebExtensions. To witness, notice how (higher up in this thread) the DTA developer once again said that there will be no DTA as a WebExtension.

<comment><USER10> Oh, thanks for pointing this out, I really mixed multi-process and WebExtensions and diminished main XUL problem (which I oversimplified for myself as "just problem of settings pages to be rewritten to HTML" what is really wrong [0]).

As I understand it WebExtension is inherently multi-process compatible so (to answer question below) the only extensions we know today will work next year from arewee10syet.com are those marked as "compatible-webextension".

[0] Most of extensions I'm used to alters chrome visually or functionally: calls external applications, changes hotkeys, so almost none of them are XUL- free. But I still hope / believe Mozilla is not that insane and will achieve consensus keeping the most important features for extensions authors available in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There may be a lot of components and interests involved in this change.

As a user of, not developer for, Firefox with its extensions, it's this simple for me: The day my existing extensions stop working -- the day neither they nor an alternative under the new paradigm offer equivalent functionality -- is the day I no longer have any reason to stay with Firefox.

I'm not saying, "Stop, wait, a user is unhappy!"

I'm simply saying that, as a perhaps sophisticated user with some more advanced functionality, security, and privacy concerns, the set of extensions I currently use is my only compelling reason for using Firefox over Chrome.

Well, that and Google/Chrome's current trend towards its own version of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish wrapped within a panopticon.

I embrace the browser as the _user_ client. I'm glad to have security issues addressed, but I also require that the browser do what _I_ want, and not what -- a la Chrome, for example -- media interests want to dictate.

I'm watching 2017 with trepidation, and wonder whether and when something may fork. Not unrealistically, though; I'm skeptical any fork is going to have the resources and commitment to maintain a modern, full-featured browser in the face of current and future... err, developments.

Maybe such a fork will, both of desire and of necessity, look instead towards a bit of minimalism. Not doing "everything", but doing core functionality well and securely.

I guess then we'd have to see whether the content farms with their Javascript++, DRM delivered content, end up leaving such a fork too much out in the cold for it to maintain sufficient interest and/or usefulness to keep itself going.

</comment><comment><USER13> As always, the only question for me is whether tree style tabs is going to work with WebExtenstions.

If not, then say hello to people staying with firefox 56 for years.

<comment><USER14> There is a native vertical tab feature in Test Pilot, the downside is that it doesn't support nesting (yet?).

<comment><USER13> What is Test Pilot? Another release channel?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Old or complex add-ons are what keep me with firefox. Will switch to qutebrowser¹ and probably chrome as my backup for what the cutie can't handle.

¹keyboard goodness: [https://github.com/The- Compiler/qutebrowser](https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for that pointer! I've been off Firefox for the past six months since they broke my private feedreader extension[1]. I'd been using Opera but I'm typing this out on qutebrowser.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287049)

<comment><USER15> It's still quite young and you feel it at times, beware :)

<comment><USER16> Yes, I'm going in with eyes wide open :)

Some experiences:

a) Copying HN links doesn't work. All you get in the clipboard is "/item".

b) Google Drive is utterly unusable.

c) Facebook is mildly unusable. Rendering gets easily messed up.

d) No password management.

But these are fairly minor, I'm happy to use a secondary browser for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As an addon developer, this annoys me. I've had to port my addons to different APIs twice in the last couple of years. Hopefully this is the end for a while.

</comment><comment><USER18> Slightly OT: There is another problem that most people seems to miss. Add-ons in their current form in ff are tightly coupled to the browser to the point that it's the browser itself. In the modern web, the browser knows too much about you, and so does the add-on, and it's not unheard of them to explore it[1]

How does that free webpage to PDF converter add-on make money? By selling your web history of course.

[1] [https://www.google.de/amp/thehackernews.com/2016/11/web- of-t...](https://www.google.de/amp/thehackernews.com/2016/11/web-of-trust- addon.html%3famp=1)

EDIT: added OT tag

<comment><USER19> Web history is also available to WebExtensions, so I don't see how this is relevant to people missing XUL/SDK addons?

<comment><USER18> Added OT tag, I was not comparing webextensions, pointing out, this is still an unsolved problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hope the "end of 2017" deadline is flexible to change based on what's supported and what's not supported for current extensions. As people have said on the comments on the Mozilla blog post, Firefox will die without the popular extensions, of which there are many. Even today, Firefox extensions are far ahead of extensions on other browsers in what's available and how well they function.

</comment><comment><USER21> If I can't use Ghostery, Blend In, No Resource Leak (or they are watered down), I see no use for Firefox. Please Mozilla, don't kill some of your biggest attractions! You copied UI from Chrome, now you are copying Add-Ons, why would anyone need to use your product then? Aren't you shooting into your own feet? When are you going to pull off Opera and just skin Chrome differently?

</comment><comment><USER22> Man I will be so sad if they finally manage to kill TreeStyleTabs

<comment><USER23> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13031013](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13031013) regarding Tree Style Tabs. I suspect it will work in the new system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Firefox was supposed to be "slow" and they are trying to fix it radically with projects like e10s and Quantum.

If the browser is able to eat my RAM a bit less, I would be quite happy to have my add-ons off for some time.

</comment><comment><USER25> _" By the end of 2017, and with the release of Firefox 57, we'll move to WebExtensions exclusively, and will stop loading any other extension types on desktop. To help ensure any new extensions work beyond the end of 2017, AMO will stop accepting any new extensions for signing that are not WebExtensions in Firefox 53."_

Based on Mozilla's track record, that's too soon. It took about three years after the announcement of the Jetpack API before it worked right.

</comment><comment><USER26> RSS reader, Another RSS reader, Dictionary, something for user scripts, domain white list, Another dictionary, Gmail checker, uBlock origin. 4 of those extensions are my own. NIH much :(

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm a bit worried that some lesser known extensions will be unimplementable... Would the following still be implementable?

"Open in Browser", which allows ignoring "content-disposition:attachment" to display pdf/image/txt in browser rather than save to disk

"Android Text Reflow", which allows wrapping text to fit the screen on Android after zooming in on a web-page

"Status-4-Evar", which adds back the status bar at the bottom of firefox

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER28> Only accepting WebExtension based add-ons while not yet fully implementing the Chrome API seems like it would lead to a large number of unsupported add-ons.

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone knows about the fate of SeaMonkey? It's still based on XUL as far as I know and supports a lot of existing Firefox extensions.

<comment><USER30> There are constant references on forums to how they want to move away from XUL, for both Firefox and Thunderbird. XUL works, but I feel like very people are able to improve the guts of XUL, and that can be a huge risk for the future of the project. Pale Moon seems to be the main contender willing to maintain XUL, but presumably not improve it (changes to XUL can break extensions).

As someone working on another free software project with an aging code base, we see this debate all the time: limited funds, limited interest to maintain the old core, but users rely on it. However, users also want performance improvements, more reliability, new features... not to mention what do you do when security issues pop up. At some point you need to cut your losses and find a model easier to maintain.

<comment><USER31> Has anyone taken the Firefox security advisories since Pale Moon forked and checked how well Pale Moon has addressed the vulnerabilities?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> People inside institutions tend to have trouble admitting when they're wrong. They basically don't do it. So I fear for the worst with this.

Could be some kind of effort to fork the code and have users who care about Firefox rally around a non-hobbled version?

</comment><comment><USER33> So they are going to scrape their best selling feature. I'm just curious to know why you will use Firefox over Chrome? Privacy from Google?

</comment><comment><USER34> What, if anything, does this mean for GreaseMonkey?

<comment><USER35> Tampermonkey works fine on Chrome, so probably very little.

<comment><USER34> TamperMonkey is not equivalent to GreaseMonkey in terms of development workflow because TamperMonkey stores scripts in a database and pretty much requires use of its built in editor which is of 'built-in-editor' quality. On the other hand, GreaseMonkey stores scripts in files and therefore allows any editor/IDE to be used in the development workflow.

Because scripts are stored in a database, TamperMonkey does not play swimmingly with GIT either. Finally, TamperMonkey is a third party tool that from time to time asks for money. GreaseMonkey is open-source.

The TamperMonkey EULA:

 _Your right to use Tampermonkey continues until terminated by the Company, which may terminate this Agreement and your license to use Tampermonkey at any time, without cause and without notice. You may terminate this agreement at any time by uninstalling Tampermonkey. This Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any of the terms of this EULA. Upon termination, you agree to stop using and to uninstall Tampermonkey._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wondering if/how Zotero and similar applications will exist beyond 2017. Will they need to fork Firefox?

<comment><USER37> Zotero will work the way it does with Chrome now: there will be a plugin that integrates with Zotero Standalone, which will continue to be developed using XULRunner.

I think this will be good in the long run--Zotero is complex enough to merit being its own application, and separating Zotero and browser plugins will make it easier to migrate Zotero off XULRunner at some point, if the developers choose to do so.</comment></comment>


New Kickstarter Scam From the Same People Who Made Off with 200k - <AUTHOR> http://btcbible.com/crypteks-kickstarter-scam-continues-to-be-ignored/

<comment><AUTHOR> These guys have created a new project for creating a bitcoin mining box. Unfortunately, it's vaporware, just like the last project they used to make off with 196 thousand dollars.

[http://www.dleg.state.mi.us/bcs_corp/dt_corp.asp?id_nbr=0423...](http://www.dleg.state.mi.us/bcs_corp/dt_corp.asp?id_nbr=04234H&name_entity=CRYPTRADE,%20INC)

[http://www.dleg.state.mi.us/bcs_corp/dt_corp.asp?id_nbr=0513...](http://www.dleg.state.mi.us/bcs_corp/dt_corp.asp?id_nbr=05133X&name_entity=CRYONIKS,%20INC)

</comment><comment><USER2> Like the guys selling "get rich with real estate/day trading/etc" why would they sell money generating device instead of just using the device themselves?</comment>


Google's War Against the Homeless in Los Angeles - <AUTHOR> http://yashalevine.com/articles/we-got-geeks-inside-google-s-ugly-war-against-the-homeless-in-la <comment><USER2> Something is off in this story. Early on, it recounts the story of a homeless man who, along with his girlfriend, was maced by private security guards (contracted, apparently, to Google) for not clearing off a public sidewalk.

That's bad, but it's not just that: it's a crime, and also a tort. No security company that allowed its employees to pepper-spray nonviolent people on public walkways --- or, really, _anywhere_ \--- could long remain in business.

If something like this is actually happening, Google's opponents don't need to generate outrage. They just need to get onto the streets of Venice with cameras, capture it happening, and help the victims make criminal and (lucrative) civil complaints against one of the largest corporations in the country.

What am I missing here?

<comment><USER3> > What am I missing here?

You can do pretty much what you like (short of mass murder) to homeless people and no-one, including police, gives a fuck.

Many homeless people have adversarial at best relationships with police and will be reluctant to seek police assistance.

<comment><USER2> That's just not true. In many places, it may (unfortunately) be the case that there's no recourse when the _police_ assault homeless people. But ordinary citizens have no presumptive right to use physical force against other people in anything but self defense. Private security guards are nothing but ordinary citizens.

The really famous cases of nonviolent people being pepper-sprayed are instructive: they're university police, a special class of private security guard actually deputized to use force.

I'm not here to argue that the homeless aren't abused, or aren't getting a very raw deal with the law and law enforcement in general. I'm just saying that the details in _this particular story_ seem off. Again, they should be getting this on camera. Those videos could be worth a lot of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Impressive. I didn't think we'd experience Google explicitly doing evil this quickly. In fact, if the mace anecdote is true, then this isn't even evil, this is bodily assault, this is Google hiring people to commit crimes.

<comment><USER3> (EDIT: Wait, they have Google employee badges?)

Google will claim that these are not google employees but contractors, and that they're shocked at the lapse in standards, and that they've had strong words with the contractors to remind them of Google's standards. They'll make some token donation to a homeless shelter (or maybe they'll remind people of the donations they presumably already make).

The pepper-spraying will continue, but in future guards will count to 3 before spraying.

<comment><USER5> Nice, but you forgot the standard "We take XXXX very seriously" Mad-Lib PR statement. Where, in this case, XXXX is "the rights of the homeless".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These stories are always interesting to me, both from the author and the target (in this case Google's) perspective.

The author goes out of their way to paint Google as a sort of tone deaf entity with baskets of money spending a small amount on security to hassle and threaten the "lesser" people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves penniless and sitting on sidewalks near them.

The question though is a lot different. What, if any, responsibility does Google have to the homeless? And what responsibility does Google have to its employees?

I think the _responsibility_ for collecting funds from everyone in the form of taxes and applying it the collective homeless problem, is that of the Government. That is in part why we elect people to represent our neighborhoods and our cities, so that they will use our taxes to address the issues the city (or county) faces.

Google has the responsibility for making a safe and enjoyable workspace for its employees. And pretty much that is it.

If we want to use Google's capital to help the homeless, the way we do that is we tax them in the city, we take that tax money, and we apply it to the homeless problem that the city faces.

Easy to say, hard to do. Many people will say that the great dumping of mental patients into the streets[1] in the 1970's was a mistake. While the mentally ill are not the majority of the population of homeless, they are the most impactful on city services and on the _perception_ of the homeless issue.

It sounded from the article that Google was going to far in trying to improve their employee's perception of safety, and the author was going to far in implying that Google's wealth made them responsible to fix the problem. It also sounds like the city councilman is in Google's employ :-) which tells you perhaps the voters can have an impact here.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of- men...](http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-mental- patients-began.html?pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER7> So if a journalist (together with a filmmaker and filmcrew) points a camera at you without your permission, it's 'freedom of the press', but if you point a camera at a journalist, it's classed as "aggressive", "creepy" and "disturbing":

[the guard] "then got even more aggressive. He called us "paparazzi types" and followed us around, repeatedly jamming his Android phone into our faces and recording us in order to document our identities. It was creepy and disturbing — especially because this all happened on public property."

</comment><comment><USER8> This happens all over the world, in every major city where there is a gap between the rich and poor. This is not a Google, private security, or an LA thing

In Toronto last year, I witnessed a homeless guy get kicked out of an ice cream parlor by an undercover cop the moment he stepped in the door. The bank up the street from me has a security guard outside 24/7, and during the Winter, I saw him kick a homeless man out of the warm ATM vestibule. Last week I watched the police round up a group of homeless sitting outside a McDonalds. There's an article that floats around about Hawaii putting their homeless on a one way trip to anywhere else.

There's no good place for people who don't have anywhere to be. They move to a park and park-goers complain. Any place indoors they will get kicked out of because they don't have money or a reason to be there. They can't stay in shelters because they're overcrowded.

So this article sucks because it doesn't do anything but blame Google. Google is just doing what any other independent actor would do; keeping a healthy and safe appearance.

We can't solve the homeless problem, so I ask, where should they go?

<comment><USER9> I thought the article was helpful in shedding light on this disgraceful practice. If Google is part of it, it deserves to be called out on it. The problem may be bigger than just one company, but it doesn't mean that just because others do it too, they should not be targeted. I appreciated the article.

<comment><USER8> I don't know that I would call the practice of "displacing the homeless" as disgraceful, but I agree that the way the private security elevated the situation is. They shouldn't be defaulting to spraying mace, as one might spray insecticide, it should just be there as a last resort.

The disgrace belongs to you and me and the rest of capitalistic society who have let homelessness happen. Since we can't/won't house them, the only thing we can do is shuffle them around.

<comment><USER9> Disgraceful is a good word for sweeping this huge social issue to places it's less seen.

Yep, there's plenty of blame to go around. I hope we don't become desensitized to the sufferings of others by moving "problems" out of eyesight though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>