Marijuana Users Are Safer Drivers Than Non-Marijuana Users, New Study Shows - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/04/06/prweb9375729.DTL <comment><USER2> This source is extremely questionable. This is basically a blog post ([http://www.4autoinsurancequote.org/uncategorized/reasons- why...](http://www.4autoinsurancequote.org/uncategorized/reasons-why- marijuana-users-are-safe-drivers/)) and a press release (<http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/4/prweb9375729.htm>) summarizing some reasons that marijuana users are less dangerous on the road than drunks. There is one study linked by the NHTSA which showed they drive slower than drunks, and the rest appears to be pure conjecture. All of this is this re- interpreted in the SFGate article to suggest marijuana users are safer than non-marijuana users. While I agree with the sentiment, this article is of questionable validity and does not really fall into the tech or programming news that belongs here.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you in general. One point on this belonging here though: HN isn't _only_ about tech and programming. The submission guidelines say that anything hackers would find interesting is okay. So this one is just a judgement call, it's not totally cut and dry. I can see how it can be debatable. That said, I think a lot of us are marijuana smokers (at least that's the vibe I get from others I've met here) and many of us are all about progressive ideas like legalizing marijuana and such. I'm don't exactly fall into that category this time but I can still see why it's of interest to many here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the press release equivalent of infographic spam - obscure site manufactures some substance-less eye candy, or in this case pander candy, to generate backlinks.

<comment><USER3> Yes! It's so easy to get suckered into a discussion about the validity of the study or on marijuana use in general but what you said was my first reaction to the post. For such a bunch of smart people I wonder why we get suckered in like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The underlying study

[http://www.4autoinsurancequote.org/uncategorized/reasons- why...](http://www.4autoinsurancequote.org/uncategorized/reasons-why- marijuana-users-are-safe-drivers/)

does not say what the headline here (which is, correctly, the original article headine) says. The claim in the lead paragraphs of the study is actually much more nuanced: "There have been several studies done over the past 20 years and every one of them has revealed that using marijuana actually has a very minor, if any, effect on the ability of a person to drive a car or other vehicle."

Anyway, that conclusion still suggests taking a close look at the study methodologies

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

to see if the studies were really well designed to describe general reality or not. Much more study needs to be done before concluding that, for example, increased marijuana use would invariably lead to increased road safety, which someone might mistakenly conclude from the headline statement of the article kindly submitted here.

<comment><USER6> The link you are pointing to is a blog post, not a study.

Also, if you read the underlying studies you'll see that the ones where they give drivers marijuana under controlled conditions usually don't result in any increased risk at all, whereas with alcohol it's very easy to see a huge increase in risk using the exact same methodology). The second kind of studies they generally use are observational studies, which tend to peg the underlying risk increase from marijuana at around 2x (as compared with alcohol, which gives on average a 3x increase at the legal limit). However, the authors of these observational studies themselves say that this is most likely actually an overestimate of the risk, not an underestimate. Here are the caveats from one recent metastudy:

"Although this meta-analysis provides compelling evidence for an association between marijuana use and crash risk, it is impossible to infer causality from these epidemiologic data alone. A more rigorous assessment of the nature of the relation between marijuana use and crash risk is complicated by several factors. Among them are bias from measured and unmeasured confounding and the difficulty posed by polydrug use. Although most of the studies included in this meta-analysis considered some confounding variables in evaluating the association between marijuana use and crash risk, adjustment was usually limited to a few measured covariates, such as age, sex, and alcohol use. Additional variables that may confound the relation between marijuana use and crash risk, such as exposure to driving and risk-taking propensity, are often difficult to mea- sure and thus are not readily available. Other factors confounding the relation between marijuana use and crash risk are divergent definitions and assessments of marijuana use across studies.

Different methods of assessing marijuana use (e.g., self- report, urine tests, and blood tests) may have different levels of validity and reliability (39). Most of these screenings determine whether marijuana was used within the past few weeks, whereas acute impairment in driving skills from marijuana use lasts only 3–4 hours (39). _Furthermore, because marijuana is an illicit drug in most countries, it is possible that drivers in the comparison groups might be less likely than those involved in crashes to submit to testing, which could lead to overestimation of the effect of marijuana use on crash risk (43)._

Polydrug use represents another challenge to determining the role of marijuana in motor vehicle crashes. Polydrug use by drivers is common, with up to a quarter of drivers injured in crashes testing positive for 2 or more drugs (including alcohol) (42, 73, 74). Although it is necessary to understand the effect of individual drugs on driving performance, the high prevalence of polydrug use by drivers makes it difficult to do so. On the other hand, assessing interaction effects on driving safety of different drug combinations based on epidemiologic data would require very large study samples, comprehensive drug testing data, and tremendous financial and other resources (42–44, 75, 76). One of the studies included in the meta-analysis evaluated the effect of marijuana in combination with alcohol on crash risk and found that the combination of marijuana and alcohol confers an exceptionally heightened risk to driving safety (68). Experimental studies show that cannabis and alcohol affect different cognitive functions that may interact with driving performance (41). Specifically, cannabis seems to impair automatic behaviors, such as tracking, at low doses and impair ability to perform more complex tasks at higher doses, whereas alcohol seems to more readily affect functions requiring cognitive control (41). While both marijuana and alcohol can impair driving performance, there appears to be greater variations in effects of marijuana compared with alcohol (41)."

source: Marijuana Use and Motor Vehicle Crashes

Mu-Chen Li, Joanne E. Brady, Charles J. DiMaggio, Arielle R. Lusardi, Keane Y. Tzong, and Guohua Li _

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't see any evidence that they actually did a study. The link to the study just takes you to a top ten list.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've read conflicting reports before. Seattle's alternative weekly, The Stranger, has been talking a lot about pot and driving in light of the ballot referendum we'll have this year on pot legalization in Washington state. Here are a couple choice bits:

        The report finds that only one of the participants had active THC levels above 5 ng/mL on "admission (day 1)," which suggests that the woman was high when she arrived...The woman had reported smoking four blunts per day.

and,

        Likewise, Grotenhermen et al found in 2005: "The crash risk apparently begins to exceed that of sober drivers as THC concentrations in whole blood reach 5–10 ng/mL."

[http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/02/24/sorry-m...](http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/02/24/sorry- medical-marijuana-activists-your-study-doesnt-prove-that-i-502-will-nab-sober- drivers-for-duis)

So, in other words, yes smoking pot can impair your ability to operate heavy machinery, but you have to be smoking quite a bit (or not used to it, ostensibly).

</comment><comment><USER8> The study has a statement that smokers have a lower responsibility rate in accidents, but I'd be very curious about response time to unexpected events that can occur while driving. Granted, if you're going slower, you would have more time to respond.

<comment><USER6> "I'd be very curious about response time to unexpected events that can occur while driving."

That depends on the dosage, the person's tolerance, the route of administration, how long it's been since the person used the substance, etc. There isn't going to be a single number.

That said, someone driving at the legal limit for alcohol has on average a 3x risk of causing a fatal accident. Whereas someone under the influence of marijuana generally has a risk of less than 2x, meaning that it really shouldn't be illegal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone that occasionally smokes a joint, I really don't feel safe driving - but joints can have different effects on different people, the strength etc... Someone that smokes up daily is more resistant than people that smoke on small occasions

</comment><comment><USER10> Of course they're safer. They're sitting in their driveways, giggling their heads off because of the funny shapes of their keys until they remember that they're hungry and head back inside for those Doritos that fell behind the couch the other day.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like another case of using statistics to prove anything. It's not the study I don't believe but the interpretation. Before I go on, I'll give full disclosure: I'm on the board of a drug use prevention/treatment charity that works closely with government agencies and private companies that research all types of drug use and related subjects like that of this article. I'm also a former poly drug abuser (that means I was a gigantic stoner some years back too).

I think the implications made here are dangerous. They encourage current pot smokers to keep driving stoned and sends the message that driving stoned is safer than driving sober. That's just not so.

The reason for the statistic showing marijuana users being responsible for accidents less than sober drivers may simply be a product of the fact that there are just less stoned people driving than sober people.

There's no doubt that marijuana impairs your ability to operate a vehicle. It slows reaction times and messes with one's perception of speed and distance. It also has an effect on focus. Some people become distracted while others focus too strongly on one particular thing. That effect seems dependent partly upon dosage used and the individual.

Trying to be cautious and actually doing it successfully are very different. Slow driving does not amount to safe driving. Driving slowly can lead to accidents just the same as speeding. Driving requires you to be mindful of many things at once. Going back to what I said about focus, being high while driving can make the task overwhelming for those who experience a lack of focus while under the influence or it can a driver to be far top focused on one particular aspect of diving. For example, a diver can be so focused on his speed that he doesn't notice the guy tailing him too closely in the rear view. Driver has to stop short because he misjudged the distance and speed of the cars in front of him and wasn't focused enough on them causing the guy tailing him to crash. That's an avoidable situation and one where the stoned driver would not be at fault. Regardless of whether the driver who was tailing too closely shouldn't have done that the point is that this is an example of an avoidable situation that is actually very realistic.

I'll concede that marijuana is far less dangerous than alcohol. In fact, despite my position on the board of the charity I mentioned and despite my less-than-good experience with drug use and subsequent rehab, I still take the position that pot is generally harmless. So what I'm saying isn't coming from some hard line "just say no/all drugs are evil" perspective but we can't just deny that marijuana use doesn't impair you in the ways I describe. I don't even believe its bad for you (except for inhaling the smoke - even if it a billion times less dangerous than cigarettes it's still never a good idea to inhale any kind of smoke). Unfortunately, articles like this will give some people the impression that marijuana is good for you, absolutely, and only good things can come of its use. That's irresponsible and one single study showing this will not convince me that driving while stoned is safer than driving sober.

As far as I'm concerned this is just a really catchy article that should not be taken at face value. The study could have major flaws and for all we know it may just be a way to get publicity for the insurance company that sponsored it. The spin on this is really irresponsible. Even total stoners like the kind my friends and I once were should take it with a grain of salt but I doubt they will because it's just more reinforcement for their beliefs surrounding marijuana use. You know what I mean... There are always those groups of suburban, upper middle class white kids that are nerdy then discover weed, smoke some, turn into stoners, and then they all talk about how marijuana is the cure for everything from cancer to aids to the common cold and a way to avoid death itself. It's those kids I fear for when they read this.

<comment><USER11> _Driving slowly can lead to accidents just the same as speeding._

Amen. The first thing I thought of when the article mentioned driving slower was that in my experience the most common hairy situation I see on the freeway is the chaos and disruption that results from someone driving significantly slower than the general speed of traffic. Or merging onto a busy 65mph highway at 50, or similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There was a UK study from the Transport Research Laboratory in 2000 that said that people who were slightly stoned tended to keep their distance more and their speed down.

People who were boxed were rubbish however. Sobriety is generally the best state for driving.</comment>


Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20% - <AUTHOR> https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazoncom-announces-second-quarter-sales-20-634-billion <comment><USER2> Two interesting points:

1) Close to 70% of Amazon operating income once again can be attributed to AWS.

Consolidated operating income: $3,084 m AWS operating income: $2,121 m

2) AWS revenue was $8.3B for the quarter, 37% more than the same quarter last year.

<comment><USER3> What's interesting isn't the fact that they "make" more from AWS, it's that AWS gets premium margins where their store is running right at cost (and has been, basically forever -- it's their thing, sorta).

The interesting number you left out was the non-AWS revenue, which in 2018 (too lazy to correlate with today's announcement) was _$230B_ , literally 30x higher. AWS is a tiny drop in the bucket, no matter what the profit details say.

Which then prompts the question of why AWS gets that kind of margin, when it would _seem_ like a pretty commoditized field at this point. Linux VMs are an open and very portable deployment platform. You can get them from any number of top tier providers and a huge horde of little ones. You'd expect to see a ton of competition driving prices down, but we don't. I genuinely don't know why.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's commoditized. AWS has moved past being just EC2. Virtualization is a small piece or the picture, and building and operating DynamoDB or S3 or SQS are all very tough tasks.

<comment><USER5> It's not commoditized at the scale Amazon operates it at.

And from an AWS / profit perspective, running the rest of Amazon is essentially what gives them a base consumer to get them to that scale.

<comment><USER6> Which is the strange part. Because it is rather commoditized on the level that 95% of their customers are by themselves.

It's that aggregate of so many individual clients that makes it difficult. So why aren't all the small clients getting picked off by the hundreds of small competitors?

My take is that the sheer scale of AWS has hit a point where engineers (the ones making infrastructure decisions) and moving from one company to another are just more likely to be familiar with AWS at this point. The same concept makes hiring easier.

My other guess is that lots of engineers are like me and just got sick of their hosting company getting bought out and constantly having to deal with console changes and migrations.

I am with GCP now, one of the reasons I picked GCP is because they are very large and have reasons to continue offering cloud services even if it becomes commoditized and unprofitable. The same is true for AWS.

Also, of course "no one ever got fired for choosing AWS".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Proof I have no idea how the stock market works:

"Wow, that's insane, their stock must have popped back over 2k because of this news!"

 _checks ticker_

"Down 2.5% after hours...?"

<comment><USER8> As always, it's due to the results being below Wall St estimates that are already priced into the stock which is still trading at an insanely expensive 100 P/E ratio.

<comment><USER9> Price/Sales is 4.01, lower than GOOG, FB or MSFT. They are going for growth, not profit. No valuation metric is perfect, but P/E is particularly useless for this company.

<comment><USER8> They're not a Startup, they've been "going for growth" for a 1/4 of a century, eventually you need to make a profit to justify your Market Cap. Just because profit isn't a goal for AMZN doesn't mean it's not a vital financial metric.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand why companies don't just let there stock price fall. This makes no material difference to the operating of the company, right?

<comment><USER11> Rising stock price is helpful for retaining high value employees that are compensated with stock

<comment><USER10> I guess. You could just pay them more though.

<comment><USER12> > I guess. You could just pay them more though.

This is a good idea. Stop the stock game and just pay a set base salary = to comp + stock.

But we can't do that because that would take all the fun out of seeing part of your potential income fluctuate with the whims and buffoonery of Wall Street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What a life, sales are up 20% and there are frowns all around...

<comment><USER14> Obviously not literally what happened, but selling a dollar for 90 cents would help boost the sales figures but hurt the bottom line. Sales alone doesn't tell the whole story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> They actually missed wall street expectations on profit, this isn't a victorious quarter for then.

</comment><comment><USER16> Stock is down 3% after hours.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone feel lile commenting on why stock price fell after this?

<comment><USER18> Effectively zero net income or operating income growth ($2.6b vs $2.5b; and $3.1b vs $3.0b), despite 20% sales growth. The market generally dislikes it when margins contract.

Plus, AWS growth dropped to 37% from 49%, year over year. I consider that a great number given their size is approaching that of Oracle. However, every headline likes to hang on the persistent decline in AWS growth. It's a very large part of what's propping up the enormous AMZN valuation. As goes AWS, so goes the AMZN stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> $14B in goodwill! Crazy.

<comment><USER20> That doesn't sound super unreasonable to me. Imagine if Amazon suddenly was a different company with a different name, holding everything else the same. How would this affect cashflows and sales? The difference in sales between this hypothetical company and Amazon is essentially what goodwill is. $14B sounds okay when you think about it like this.

<comment><USER21> Goodwill is the accounting balance recorded when a company buys another company for more than the value of its assets.

If you have $1bn in assets, and you sell to my company for $2bn, $1bn is recorded as the assets bought and the other $1bn has to be recorded somewhere - and that somewhere is 'goodwill.'

Later, if the acquisition turns out to have been a bad idea, and what I bought from you was worth only $1.2bn, I will record an $800mm 'goodwill impairment' that would be a loss on my income statement and 80% of that goodwill would no longer be recorded as an asset.

<comment><USER22> And "assets" as accountants define them are an almost useless metric for knowledge-based companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> But they still need tax breaks if you want them to build in your city!

<comment><USER24> Of course they don't _need_ it, but if states are willing to bribe them billions of dollars, they're happy to run up a bidding war.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How would it be, to be able to self declare something like "prime day" and make more than black Friday sales?

</comment><comment><USER26> To put this in some global perspective... Alibaba's one day sales event "Singles Day" last November grossed almost half that amount (i.e. $30B).

Note: Alibaba's operating margins are approx. 30%.

<comment><USER27> Yet Alibaba's revenue for all of 2018 was $55B USD, compared to $232B USD for Amazon.

I see that one day sale thing appear in many mentions of Amazon and it might be a little...misleading.

<comment><USER28> Am I missing something or are Alibaba seriously making more than half their annual sales in one single day?

<comment><USER29> Alibaba's revenue is (primarily) only the fees and commission they charge their sellers. They did $30B of gross sales on that day but probably only collected $1-3B in reportable revenue. Amazon does the same thing for it's third-party sellers; only the fees and commission make it to Amazon's top line revenue number for seller sales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> LOL so just forget any changes to inventory commingling and counterfeit merchandise.

<comment><USER20> Why would you think that your comment is relevant to their sales going up 20%? Maybe they would have gone up more if they didn't have a counterfeiting problem, or maybe they would have gone up less, I dunno.

But fundamentally sales going up has nothing to do with counterfeit goods.</comment></comment>


JOYSTICK: THE UNTOLD STORY OF OTTAWA'S COKE-FUELED 1980'S VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - <AUTHOR> https://ottawarewind.com/2018/12/02/joystick-the-untold-story-of-ottawas-coke-fueled-1980s-video-game-industry/ <comment><USER2> THIS WAS INTERESTING, THANK YOU FOR POSTING IT.</comment>


Ask HN: Tool for self-hosting your own Facebook profile after downloading it? - <AUTHOR> I was playing with the idea of a Facebook profile cemetery. It would be a tool to structure your profile data after you download it from Facebook, in order to self-host it on a space you own. The idea would be to keep alive your profile history, but on your own website, for friends and family to still browse it, or just as a way to claim and still show data that's fundamentally yours to show around.<p>Before I try to figure out a way to do that and start building something, do you know any tool useful for this purpose? <comment><USER2> The zipfile you download from Facebook is already in the correct format. All you need to do it spin up a web server (apache nginx etc.) and unzip the files into the webroot.

For security, just add the usual webserver/*nix security.

EDIT: Just unzipped an old download from my (pre-purged) profile into an empty web folder, and it all works, mostly. FB specific icons are missing, and your private messages are all in a subfolder called 'messages' which has no security, and all the threads are folded into a long chronological list. So I guess the format would need tweaking a bit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wouldn't it be better to import the data into an open social network like Mastodon?

What would be great is a tool that continuously does this (i.e. a one-way sync). This could help people convert away from FB.

<comment><USER4> Mastodon is just twitter. I'm on it... unless I'm missing something.

It doesn't completely replace it at all and missing a lot of functionalities that FB have. The ones being, chat room, event invitation/planing, birthday reminder, photo albums, group, etc...

<comment><USER5> My company is working on something to power that and more, for everyone as open source

[https://qbix.com](https://qbix.com)

If you wind up trying it, please provide some feedback.

<comment><USER6> Honest feedback: get rid of the spinning globe GIF, it reminds me of Geocities in the 90s.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried clicking on this GIF?

<comment><USER7> the full-size globe itself looks cool indeed, it doesn't necessarily help the gif feel of the small one though :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When you ask Facebook for your archive it's already pure HTML. All you need to do is to censor it somewhat (if appropriate, e.g. remove private messages) and host it somewhere with access control.

<comment><USER9> You also need to remove the Facebook tracking pixels they have embedded in it.

<comment><USER10> I've checked my own archive and they haven't embedded any tracking pixels. Don't spread nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I once created [https://github.com/FabianBeiner/Bela-Facebook-Archive- Theme](https://github.com/FabianBeiner/Bela-Facebook-Archive-Theme), but I don't know if this one still works with the current version of the exports. But basically, you can just beautify the pretty decent export of Facebook with some CSS and remove the parts you don't want.

</comment><comment><USER12> The [http://indieweb.org](http://indieweb.org) community has prior work in this area.

 _> Your content is yours: When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users' data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control_

</comment><comment><USER13> No, but I am curious too - that would be a nice idea to kick-start a distributed social network imho.

<comment><USER14> Opera had something called Unite just before it went under; it was a web- server that ran on the browser and allowed you to connect to friends p2p for sharing, etc., it wasn't quite there but it had the concept of the 'net as _the_ social network without intermediates.

I was really excited by the concept and thought we were on track to have "the next Facebook". Primarily it needed caching to handle self-hosted content not being always on.

Still hopeful we can move on that direction so we can self-host and publish to different platforms, etc..

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I deleted my Facebook. Two things I would've liked:

\- a tool to add exif location data back to my images. In the export the image metadata (like location) is in a separate file. I ended up writing a quick script to do this.

\- a tool to message people in messenger my phone number and email. I ended up doing this manually, but it'd be nice to have an automated solution.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does Mastodon use ActivityPub?

<comment><USER17> Yes. First line in the README on Github: [https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think it would become public and anyone would be able to see who you are, what you do. How are you gonna check if someone visiting is your family member?

<comment><USER19> One-off passwords?

<comment><USER13> Or invitation links (with auth tokens).

<comment><USER18> A secret is only a secret when only one person knows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Try mastodon, I think it has a fb import tool

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not looking to create something to update in the future, more like a public repository of my own content under my own direct control

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there any way to get a list of my direct friends with all their contact information (email, phone, etc)?

<comment><USER22> This is a horrible idea

<comment><USER21> Why? I have access to it anyway by clicking on their name and can cut-and- paste by hand. And they are people who have agreed to share this kind of information with me specifically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thanks for this idea! Will implement it next year into my website generator

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked it. Keep me posted.</comment></comment>


Announcing a New Database Widget Partnership with AngelList - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/14/announcing-a-new-database-widget-partnership-with-angellist

<comment><USER2> We're hoping the parternship helps complet/polish our coverage when people see their angellist profile up on pando daily, and pando gets a founder-driven source of startup data.

Disclaimer: I'm just the eng that built the embed widget. Not a bizdev guy. Please don't read anything into longterm product strategy and/or valley gossip. That's not my bag.</comment>


How we've paid for music from 1983 to today, in one gif - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/24/6062665/how-weve-paid-for-music-from-1983-to-today-in-one-gif

<comment><USER2> i like the ups and downs on different mediums. Digital goodtimes.</comment>


GitLab Annoyance: Private to Public Repos - <AUTHOR> https://chrisshort.net/gitlab-annoyance-private-to-public-repos/ <comment><USER2> Hi, Mike here from GitLab. Sorry for the pain! I assume the issue you are referring to is this one? [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/27049](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/27049)

This should be fixed very shortly. Thanks for taking the time to point it out and help others with your blog post.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been bitten by this problem too... but the "fix" sounds like allowing anybody to push code, so in the end, the repository remained private!

<comment><USER2> In more recent versions of GitLab, you can change the project level visibility in a separate drop-down, this will allow visibility to all, but continue to restrict push access.</comment></comment>


Comcast Declares War on Tor? - <AUTHOR> http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/09/13/comcast-declares-war-tor/ <comment><USER2> This article seems seriously confused about how Tor works ("only the ISP used along with it can ascertain what activity takes place on Tor"), such that I don't trust the rest of what it's saying. There is probably no story here.

<comment><USER3> Likely a technical misunderstanding by the author. It is possible for an ISP to detect tor traffic[1], but not determine the contents of the traffic. My guess is that the author is not aware of this.

[http://www.netresec.com/?page=Blog&month=2013-04&post=Detect...](http://www.netresec.com/?page=Blog&month=2013-04&post=Detecting- TOR-Communication-in-Network-Traffic)

<comment><USER4> > but not determine the contents of the traffic.

Not even this much, actually. Tor doesn't do any sort of protection on the traffic; it just routes it cleverly. The packets themselves are still plaintext if you're not using an encrypted protocol (e.g. HTTPS) on top of Tor.

In practice, most people use Tor through the browser bundle, which includes an HTTPS-Only extension. But if you're routing random other protocols through Tor (e.g. XMPP, BitTorrent, etc.) be aware that _Tor_ is not doing any protection of your plaintext; that's the responsibility of your client/protocol.

<comment><USER5> Not exactly.

Tor encrypts your traffic within the Tor network. Even if you don't encrypt, Tor does automatically so your ISP cannot see your content.

If you don't encrypt, your content will be visible to the exit node, but not to your ISP.

[https://www.torproject.org/about/overview](https://www.torproject.org/about/overview)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I live on the peninsula and it boggles the mind that, in sfbay, I effectively have one choice for wired internet access because dsl is so slow where I live.

As idlewords says:

       San Francisco is an 8-mile square that aims to disrupt the world but can't
       wire itself for decent Internet. I guess it's a hardware problem

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't believe I'm "defending" Comcast, but this sounds made-up.

Why would Comcast care about Tor and if they wanted to discourage use why would they _confront_ customers using it?

<comment><USER8> Totally with you; this story sounds made-up.

 _> >Users who try to use anonymity, or cover themselves up on the internet, are usually doing things that aren't so-to-speak legal._

So what does Comcast think about people who use VPN? Maybe VPN also illegal now? Privacy is dead? Next up, curtains on the windows of your house are also illegal.

<comment><USER9> It's interesting to read what BBC thinks about that [1].

[1] [http://torrentfreak.com/bbc-isps-should-assume-heavy-vpn- use...](http://torrentfreak.com/bbc-isps-should-assume-heavy-vpn-users-are- pirates-140908/)

<comment><USER8> So it's really going to happen... slowly, in the name of piracy _(but we know that 's not really why)_, any form of encrypted communication will become illegal. Oh, and of course this won't apply to affluent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >A Comcast agent named Jeremy allegedly called Tor an "illegal service."

Did the customer mention it was started by the US Navy and continues to received a lot of funding from them?

<comment><USER11> Talking to a comcast "agent" is like asking a Seaman about Naval tactics.

<comment><USER12> That's giving far too little credit to the average Seaman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article implied, but didn't make clear, that the customers were using Tor to browse the internet (as opposed to being a Tor endpoint). I could see comcast having an issue with customers who are endpoints, but, I'm not really sure why they would care / how they would know that someone was was using Tor.

<comment><USER14> _> why they would care_

Not sure. It's not as though using Tor circumvents the need for an Internet service provider. Maybe it's political.

 _> how they would know that someone was was using Tor._

It's easy to determine whether a user is using Tor based on the (known) connections that are made. It's the same way organizations can block Tor, or that the Tor client knows how to reach the rest of the network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So here's one of their sources:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2g2e44/is_c...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2g2e44/is_comcast_legally_allowed_to_do_this/)

I think it was posted by this user:

[https://www.reddit.com/user/theliberare/](https://www.reddit.com/user/theliberare/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Who uses Tor without VPN? When I'm using Tor, all Comcast sees is an encrypted tunnel to Private Internet Access.

<comment><USER16> Isn't Tor supposed to be an encrypted tunnel?

<comment><USER15> Yes. But, with VPN it looks something like this:

Me -> TOR encrypts data -> VPN encrypts data -> data goes through tunnel -> VPN decrypts data -> TOR encrypted data passes through first node -> TOR encrypted data passes through relay node -> TOR decrypts data as it passes through the exit node -> swish nothing but net

This gives protection from the ISP and from the VPN provider -- I have to trust neither.

<comment><USER16> It seems excessive; tor traffic already goes through 3 different nodes. And if the ISP is banning tor there is no reason they wouldn't/couldn't ban VPNs.

<comment><USER15> Too many people use VPNs for work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What other proof does anyone need that Comcast hates net neutrality? It should be a clear reason to tank any of their plans for acquisition of TWC.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone explain how this article has more upvotes in less time than the story about Beamforming, yet is two spots lower on the HN frontpage?</comment>


Bill Gates 2013 Annual Letter - <AUTHOR> http://billsletter.com

<comment><USER2> I love the focus on measurement. Hans Rosling's quote, "only by measurement can we cross the river of myth" rings extremely true when you look at the last decade for most of the developing world.</comment>


RBG – An Example for Our Times - <AUTHOR> https://blog.simplejustice.us/2020/09/19/ride-an-elephant/ <comment><AUTHOR> My politics are 180 degrees from hers, but I respect that she could put human relationships above politics. We need more of this.</comment>


How would the ancient Stoics have dealt with hate speech? - <AUTHOR> http://modernstoicism.com/how-would-the-ancient-stoics-have-dealt-with-hate-speech/ <comment><USER2> Great advice. Here is what the greatest psychiatrist of all times and probably the person who understood life better than anyone in the last century had to say about insults: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTPqOOPb39s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTPqOOPb39s) Yes I am a big fan of Milton Erickson :)</comment>


Ask HN: Open source software to self-host 30+GB of photos and videos? - <AUTHOR> I have too much media to share with friends and family for free on the cloud. I would also like to retain control over the files.
I think the best way to sum up what I'm looking for is an open source version of Google Drive's file browser that I can hook up to a hard drive and access over the web. Dropbox is also comparable.
Desired features (roughly descending importance): Loads thumbnails quickly, loads images on-demand as you scroll, allows larger photo previews, single file downloads, batch file downloads (as zip), video previews, light on resources (ideally will run on a small ARM computer), simple to deploy (preferably no php or web server configuration, etc), authentication, progressive jpeg.
I've tried OwnCloud, Seafile, h5ai, Expose, and Mediagoblin. Each was either difficult to deploy, didn't include enough features, or was too slow/would freeze. <comment><USER2> Can you elaborate on the problems you found with those providers?

I mean, I don't imagine running OwnCloud would be unfeasible on a Raspberry Pi or anything (I can't speak to the performance of that), but you'd need to set up Dynamic DNS if you're planning on running it from your home, as well as a way to traverse the NAT. You'd also be limited by your upstream bandwidth, and I think most ISP's actually "forbid" running a server.

as far as deploying it on a VPS (virtual private server, so like an Amazon AWS instance, Linode, etc), you'd be limited by their TOS, etc, but I honestly think that's the best option. OwnCloud looks to be pretty simple to actually setup though, but I guess I'd have to try it out to checkout performance.

As far as I'm aware though, and as much as I could google, there's going to be _some_ setup on your part.

So yeah, if you could elaborate a little more about what about each option _didn 't_ provide, we might be able to steer you closer to something that's acceptable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm fine with handling devops on the server setup. It's also ok to do most of the moving around of files directly on the filesystem, not through the web interface. OwnCloud was just too fat and slow. The functionality I need in theory should be runnable on a Raspberry Pi (although I'm using a more powerful Odroid C1+). The only computationally heavy part would be generating thumbnails which is an up front cost. Everything else is just coordinated file serving.

<comment><USER2> Were you trying to run OwnCloud on your Odroid (Neat looking device BTW, I might have to try that out)?

I tried running that on a 20 dollar/month VPS from Linode, and it seems to work/perform great.

We can continue over email if you'd prefer, since I'm also interested in setting something like this up (me at robert-novak.com).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I look for something like this too. I have 100+GB of photos which need to organized and some must deleted. I don't have time to organize this, so other family members can do this from their computers.

<comment><AUTHOR> This would be a nice feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know Google Photos is not open source, but would that be the solution if you could get it on your own machine?

How would you upload the files? Through web interface? What about backup?

<comment><AUTHOR> Uploading through a web interface would probably be too slow unless I'm on the same LAN. I'm fine managing the filesystem manually. So web uploading would be a nice feature but not necessary.</comment></comment>


Show HN: New platform reveals the Jamstack to non-developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.stackbit.com/blog/announcing-stackbit-studio/ <comment><USER2> We on-boarded Stackbit.com to our Jamstack web site, and it's been a great enabler for our non-technical folks - there's significantly less asks for adding/updating content. great product

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not a developer. But I know jamstack is the best way to build modern website, and this makes it easy. I like the integration with Netlify as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> Watched the walkthrough and it looks sweet. What kind of static site generators do you support under the hood?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, founder of Stackbit here. We currently support NextJS, Gatsby, Hugo and Jekyll with many more coming soon (e.g. Eleventy). One of our goals is being tech agnostic as we want to empower developers to pick the best tool for the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Welcome to the Jamstack, marketers :)</comment>


Facebook's Product Design Director Explains "Reactions" - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3057113/facebooks-product-design-director-explains-one-of-its-biggest-ux-changes-in-years <comment><AUTHOR> It's very interesting to understand the entire "thinking" process behind Facebook's new reactions.</comment>


DBIYF World Tour Retrospective (with numbers) - <AUTHOR> http://www.two-shay.com/articles/world-tour-retrospective

<comment><USER2> So basically you toured the world, met awesome people, ran some wicked classes on doing cool stuff with Databases and came back with an extra $10k in your back burner... I reckon that counts as awesome.</comment>


Google Maps now lets you find and catch wild Pokémon - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/03/31/can-now-find-catch-wild-pokemon-inside-google-maps/ <comment><USER3> I've always considered this to be the "killer app" for AR, when it's actually ready. Seeing people pull over their car during their morning commute to catch a Pokemon that caught their eye would be hilarious.

<comment><USER4> Yes and no.. I would not appreciate someone cutting me off because they need to grab that specific Pokemon.

And while I realize that would be more an exception than rule, it would still happen. It drives me crazy enough when people just slam on the breaks after they miss an exit/turn (just keep going until you can turn around, please) - <USER2> personally would not like that extra dabble of human reaction thrown into a commuter experience.

<comment><USER5> Please stop hindering cool stuff just because you have a sucky driving experience. You'll have a sucky driving experience regardless - assholes exist everywhere, Google Pokemon or not.

Edit: I see I'm being downvoted so I'd like to elaborate: Frankly, the behaviour of people on the road is and should be of zero concern to the developer of an app that has nothing to do with driving. Should the original dev behind the port of 2048 have stopped to think how many deaths his app would cause because idiots would play it while driving?

Maybe I'm biased because I find that too many people solve the transportation problem with cars when their use case is covered with bikes or public transports at lower costs. (Translation, I think that driving is stupid unless you got an excellent reason. Please don't list your excellent reasons.)

<comment><USER4> Sucky?

Sucky is being stuck in endless traffic or getting a flat tire.

I'm talking about the disregard people have for the safety of others at times while on the open road. I want a safe drive, you want pokemon on the side of the road - I think somewhere on the path to those goals there are enough compromises we would both share.

Reply to the edit:

>Frankly, the behaviour of people on the road is and should be of zero concern to the developer of an app that has nothing to do with driving.

You want app developers to take possible use-cases and completely ignore them? That doesn't seem like a very good user experience.

> Maybe I'm biased because I find that too many people solve the > transportation problem with cars when their use case is covered with bikes > or public transports at lower costs. (Translation, I think that driving is > stupid unless you got an excellent reason. Please don't list your excellent > reasons.)

You are biased, and confirm it with your parenthetical statement.

People are going to own and use cars despite what your opinion on use-cases is. I personally would rather developers keep that in mind instead of just throwing a whole ton of crap out there that may actually affect my personal safety.

That said, I think the second point is slightly deviating away from the original topic.

<comment><USER6> How about I, as a developer, "consider your safety" by only releasing my app in European markets where bicycling is more popular than car-travel?

<comment><USER4> I think it'd be highly inefficient to specifically consider only my safety.

I'm also pretty sure they drive cars in Europe. How does your suggestion aid someone in Germany that just got clipped from someone pulling over unexpectedly?

Also, your suggestion brings up a thought: I'm sure that driver laws differ from country to country in Europe. You're going to need to build some sort of UI/UX that complies with those laws if you want the app to be used freely while driving.

<comment><USER7> It is illegal in most countries including Germany to use a hand-held device while driving. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_driving_safet...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_driving_safety)

Having the app switch off when the GPS calculates you are traveling faster than 30kmh would be an interesting hack.

<comment><USER8> > Having the app switch off when the GPS calculates you are traveling faster > than 30kmh would be an interesting hack.

The Japanese carrier docomo have an Android app to stop you from using your smartphone while walking, the latest menace to public safety.

[https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/info/news_release/2013/12/03_00....](https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/info/news_release/2013/12/03_00.html)

<comment><USER7> Even switching off the touch capability would be worthwhile, so you could only use voice. (hands-free)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shameless plug, but I'm working on a similar mobile game : Mobbles (Our tagline is actually Google Maps + Pokemon) [http://www.mobbles.com](http://www.mobbles.com)

I'm not that unhappy it's an April fool ;)

<comment><USER10> Pretty cute creature designs. Nice work!

<comment><USER9> Thanks! Needless to say, we used to play a lot of Pokemon in our youth...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a question not being asked: when did Nintendo allow for its IP to be used outside of their platform(s)? Is this just an extension of the animated show or is it an extension of the game? From the way this works, it looks like this is the answer to their current sales woes?

April Fool's joke or not, but it is quite impressive to see Nintendo's IP being used for a game of sorts outside of their own hardware.

<comment><USER12> I'm a bit surprised Nintendo hasn't released their own pokemon app for iOS/Android. Though I guess they're seen as a competitor to the DS these days...

<comment><USER13> Probably that; port the Nintendo games to a non-Nintendo platform and nobody will buy Nintendo platforms anymore. I'm pretty sure Nintendo's hardly ever released any of its IP outside of its own platforms.

<comment><USER14> Are people still buying Nintendo platforms anyway?

<comment><USER15> They have sold more than 40 million 3DS units.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For anyone who'd like to cheat:

[http://pokemonaprilfools.wikia.com/wiki/Sorted_by_Pokedex_No](http://pokemonaprilfools.wikia.com/wiki/Sorted_by_Pokedex_No).

<comment><USER17> Wikia is one of my favorite platforms enabled by the internet. In hours after any new content is released (whether it is a game, movie, book, etc.), it gets thoroughly documented and compiled by a distributed community.

<comment><USER5> Wikia is a good idea wrapped in a company that is shady as fuck and has no competition outside the gaming market.

They have a history of treating their community like crap, forcing wikis they buy (uncyclopedia for example) to destroy their brand and move to *.wikia.com. They encourage content farming (copying content from other websites with no regard for the license etc) and, worst of all, their wikis are more ad infested than a Windows 98 computer running IE6 after grandma has had her dose of free smileys.

Hey, entrepreneurs of HN: ever thought about solving the wiki community problem? This is a problem worth tackling if you figure out a way to make it cheap to tackle and monetize it (possibly by offering sub-monetization to your wikis, letting communities pay their editors and running an actual community economy). This is a freebie - but do PM me if you tackle it I want to see it in action!

<comment><USER18> Totally off topic but I really need to say it, a good example of bad wikia behavior was the unofficial guild wars wiki, that went down in quality and lost a lot of contributors when it moved there myself included, they forced a terrible layout just because they wanted ad space everywhere ruining the experience.

<comment><USER5> I recommend looking at gamepedia for gaming wikis. They're not great (plenty of ads still) but at least they don't force a stupid layout. Also curse is massively better community-wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Side effects of the Pokémon Challenge may include extreme excitement and a sense of accomplishment. Do not operate the Pokémon Challenge in Google Maps while driving or operating heavy machinery. Our hiring committee must first battle to determine who can best judge the Pokémon Master. The battle date has yet to be set, so the role of Pokémon Master is not yet available."

Aha, well played, Google.

</comment><comment><USER20> I guess Google wants this April's Fools day to be the 'very best'

</comment><comment><USER21> Nothing near me, but I found several Pokemon around the Google campus in Mountain View.

Did they statically author these with set GPS coordinates instead of dynamically generating them around you?

<comment><USER22> I think they're all static or randomly assigned to the same spots. I see some around the Googleplex, Manhattan, Tokyo, and Paris. But nothing near me in Atlanta.

<comment><USER23> I think they're hard-coded to appear in places that are the real-life locations of Pokemon games, and they tossed in the Googleplex for fun.

For instance, the latest Pokemon iteration is quite obviously based on France [1], so that's why Google put creatures there.

[1]: A map of the Pokemon X / Y world: [http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/194c63lohgnayjpg/original.jp...](http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/194c63lohgnayjpg/original.jpg)

<comment><USER24> Definitely hard-coded. But I have a feeling they got Google employees to choose places on the maps by telling them to choose places they like or something like that (without mentioning what project this is for).

The reason I think so, is because some places seem to be residential, like they're places you would live at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I feel like they must have someone working on the April fool's prank year- round.

<comment><USER26> Someone? More like an entire division with an own budget. Looking at the video of this gig, they have a helicopter(!), a crew of actors (maybe employees) a full-sized camera team and a few GFX-artists.

It's understandable why Google is one of the "hottest" companies in tech right now.

<comment> rkuykendall-com Technically, wouldn't that just be... the advertising department? I mean, writing, production, distribution, GOALS, are all... the exact same as advertising.

Only better, because good April Fools projects are awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This would probably be more popular than Ingress if they did it right. And yes, combined with the "other" AR (augmented vs alternate) it would be revolutionary.

<comment><USER28> Seriously, what are they waiting for. I'm not a teenager anymore, but If this was a serious app I would totally go catch a few, granted as a joke. And kids would go crazy over this, every single one already has the pokedex( smartphone ), that basically has all required capabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I know that this was released on april 1st, and it probably an april fools day thing, but it could be a genius way to keep street view up to date.

New building get constructed? Put some Pokemon there and people take pictures from all angles for you.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't think this is a joke. It is a fully functional application/game and judging from the partnership with Nintendo there is more behind this.

The video is really good too:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YMD6xELI_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YMD6xELI_k)

<comment><USER30> Yes Larry announced that he's leaving his position so that he can catch 'em all.

<comment><USER30> Ok, got it, no joke about April fools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So far the best luck I've had is googling landmarks (eiffel tower, white house, grand canyon, etc.). Will be interesting to see the compiled list of where they are all located once people start finding more of them.

<comment> laconic-io Got one in Everest

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm surprised that the Google Maps team didn't work with the Ingress team to make this a proper AR game. Maybe there wasn't enough time, or they thought it was too complex?

</comment><comment><USER32> Tangentially related, for those interested, I just revived an app that I found a while ago to run on recent ruby/sinatra to make pokemon creatures [https://github.com/cpg/pokemaker](https://github.com/cpg/pokemaker)

</comment><comment><USER33> Where's the distance measuring ruler gone in the new maps? Pokémon is a higher priority?

</comment><comment><USER34> I actually thought this (indeed) to be a killer app.. But i checked it out and had problems with terrain identification with Google Maps...

Not a killer app for AR, but just a casual game like Ingress (mentioned in another app also)

</comment><comment><USER35> [https://www.war2map.com](https://www.war2map.com) This is the most "complete" strategy game on Google Maps

</comment><comment><USER36> Now if only it didn't run dog ass slow and/or crash my browser. Seriously, what was Google thinking with their "new" interface?

</comment><comment><USER37> CERN is a second pokemon lab/center. Bunch around there. Also some searches for town names worked: "Palette", etc.

</comment><comment><USER38> Holy shit this is for real! There's a pokemon two blocks away from me LOL.

</comment><comment><USER39> I was really surprised to see nothing at the Game Freak offices.

</comment><comment><USER40> Thought it's first 1st April joke.

</comment><comment><USER41> How to catch Kecleon?

<comment><USER42> He's #71 on the list at [http://pokemonaprilfools.wikia.com/wiki/Sorted_by_Pokedex_No](http://pokemonaprilfools.wikia.com/wiki/Sorted_by_Pokedex_No). Just go to any of the places listed by his name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Pleasantly surprised to not find a single post about Google privacy issues. _keeping my fingers crossed_

<comment><USER44> But you just made one..</comment></comment>


Why it's Better to be an Asshole - <AUTHOR> http://structureanddiscipline.com/on-being-an-asshole/ <comment><USER2> This is just pathetic.

<comment><USER3> Some of the conclusions are wonky, but the line of reasoning is not that far off, and the facts he references correspond reasonably with discoveries in the field of evolutionary psychology.

I also can relate to the implied personal narrative, of the once nice guy sucker, who in utter disgust with the results that he got from it, transforms into the asshole like a butterfly from the cryssalis ;-)

I'm a little older, and have had a large number of relationships and flings, and whilst this guy sounds a bit embittered, his approach is not a bad starting place, and certainly much better for you than the present beta bitch climate of social justice where feelings are more important than facts.

Maybe the guys being critical of the article should consider listing the parts they most strongly disagree with.

Then again, this topic is a bit off from what HN is intended for...

<comment><USER4> Evolutionary psychology is still largely confined to the theoretical and suffers a lot from retrospective curve fitting[0] (for the current state of the field). So it's ironic you're accusing the current generation of being blinded by feelings

There's a lot, of less junk research on the importance of altruism in human society that seem to present the opposite conclusions (disregarding the false dichotomy between being "nice" and confidence etc)

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology#Recept...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology#Reception)

[1] [http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/978...](http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341065.001.0001/acprof-9780195341065) (sci-hub if you don't have acedemic access)</comment></comment></comment>


Hong Kong domestic helpers from Indonesia, Philippines struggle through protests - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3031541/hong-kongs-domestic-helpers-indonesia-and-philippines <comment><USER2> Communist party owned paper. Have you heard any story about actual hurt other than by the police. There is no truth in it.</comment>


Entire Google search result pages are now ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/gvdsu1/entire_google_search_result_pages_are_now_ads/ <comment><USER2> Reminder: it's been 4 months since Google said they would roll back their ads with favicons. Surprise! Nothing's changed.

"Every Google result now looks like an ad" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823)

"Google backtracks on search results design" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210)

<comment><USER3> I don't see any favicons on my desktop search, which is what the links reference.

Mobile favicons had been around for some time prior to those articles and continues to have them.

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I'm still seeing them.

Are we talking about the same thing? They aren't _actual_ favicons btw, they are composed of text with the word "Ad" but formatted and positioned to look like exactly like favicons.

<comment><USER3> Ah yes they did change the ad indicator as you described, but that's not what the pushback was against.

They briefly changed desktop search to include favicons next to every native search result, making it way harder to quickly see what was and wasn't an ad (since every result had some image next to it). They rolled that back and it has not returned (yet).

Check the screenshot from the first article you linked for the difference.

<comment><USER2> Ahhh... right you are. Thanks for the correction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sure, but if you are interested in buying a mattress, are those not where you generally want to go anyway?

I suspect the mattress hobby community is not very large.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, and DDG's results for "mattress" aren't much better:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mattress](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mattress)

Basically a map listing three mattress stores, followed by two ads. Then finally a few non-ad results, but still stores selling mattresses.

If you're on desktop, there's a bonus ad on the right sidebar, below the definition.

<comment><USER6> I see a couple of mattress stores, a wiki ad, a facebook group for the first couple of mattress stores, something russian and then more mattress stores. Nary an ad in sight, (got uBlock origin and javascript off)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyone should be using uBlock Origin. There is no reason to see ads anywhere on the internet.

<comment><USER8> There is, not willing to pay for content.

<comment><USER9> Can you think of any content (software, for example) that is produced without advertising?

<comment><USER8> No, but that doesn't mean content producers have other sources of income, specially when those consuming it aren't willing to pay them.

<comment><USER9> Agreed; so figuring out how to sustainably meet (and ideally exceed) people's basic needs is important to safeguard content production.

Meanwhile, I don't think consumer expectation of free service is likely to change, and expect there's a market for ad-free reimplementations of existing services.

<comment><USER10> I've seen some ad-free alternative, but they usually have much less budget on promoting themselves, so harder to reach the critical mass (for network effect)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious what kinds of sites people think _should_ be returned for a search term of "mattress", if not mattress shopping sites?

<comment><USER12> Comparisons of mattress materials or brands, histories of different mattresses used by cultures, forums for mattress aficionados, tutorials for making your own or modifying mattresses, general mattress information or facts, other random weird shit the internet used to have about strangely niche subjects that have way more people dedicated to them then you'd expect you'd only discover by searching random terms then you find there's a whole world of weird things dedicated to this niche topic, say mattresses in this case, that you'd otherwise never know about.

<comment><USER13> what is a "general mattress fact"? If you typed "mattress Wikipedia" you'd get a bunch of mattress history and facts, so it's not exactly hard to find what you're looking for, but it's probably the case that most people who type just "mattress" are looking to buy one. If that weren't true, why would Google show so many ads? It's not like showing a million ads is going to trick a seeker of general mattress facts into buying a mattress they don't need.

<comment><USER14> It's trivial to find "random fun mattress facts" by Googling for exactly that, but thanks to link and content aggregators, instead of flipping through channels on the tee-vee, we scroll for miles with our thumbs. Before commercial interests took over the web, it was full of weird and wonderful sites by hobby enthusiasts, built in their spare time that would have random weird facts and stories. For better or worse, _that_ Internet is behind us now, so it's rare to come across that sort of treasure trove of a site. (To be clear, there's better _and_ worse today, compared to the Internet of yore.)

What's the case here, is that mattress store owners, in the conversion to online sales, have purchased, not only the adword for "mattress", but paid for all manner of SEO tricks and hackery in order to drive their site to the top of the results. Far in excess of what a hobbyist could or would bother with.

It's a long shot, but the long tail of the Internet says that this has happened at least once. Someone was just poking around came across a random mattress myth or fact page, and found out that something they hate about their mattress isn't something they have to put up with. Whether that's "being tricked" into buying a mattress they didn't need, I won't say, but it still tickles an intellectually curious itch that I didn't even know I had, to find out that it's illegal to purchase a mattress on Sundays in Washington.

A single word query like "mattress" is vague and starting from first principles, we live under capitalism, assume everyone's trying to sell you something, and a search for "mattress" proves to be no exception. Same goes for if you search for "windows". Second link is how to get it (for $199).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well didn't how Yahoo die to a certain extent? I remember back when Google first came on the scene - we were all using Yahoo. Yahoo was an ad-filled ungodly mess, while Google was clean and _fast_. People switched over really fast.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you scroll down on that page, pretty sure there are non ad results. Seems disingenuous to say it's the entire page.

<comment><USER17> With infinite scrolling what's a page?

<comment> em-bee a screenfull.

so therefore, if all i see is ads at first, it's entirely reasonable to claim that i get a page full of ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would really love a search engine or keyword that lets me exclude pages with ads (or too high an ad-content ratio).

</comment><comment><USER19> there is always this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397615)

kinda stuff being posted here and it gets approximately zero traction

So how else do you expose the ad to eyes other than getting meta by making postings like GP?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a great way for Google to make all the margin of mattress sellers.

</comment><comment><USER21> Even when there's not a lot of apparent advertising, a large portion of the high ranking pages are ads or referral links disguised as informative content.

</comment><comment><USER22> on the bright side, it's now easy to compete with google

<comment><USER23> I'd like to see someone develop a search engine that was optimized for finding web sites based on categories, such as non-commercial, enthusiast, blog, academic, companies, merchants, etc..

My favorite google flavors are google scholar and google news, which seem to more or less do what they say.

Too many search engines seem to have crowded out the web search function with widgets for ads, local properties, wikipedia, media companies, etc..

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think the map portion of that screenshot is monetized.

</comment><comment><USER25> Duck Duck Go, [https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)

It's good enough. And when you don't get what you want, you can use the google bang code, !g in front of your search.

DDG should be your default.

<comment><USER4> With my adblocker off it doesn't seem all that different in having mostly ads and a map on the front of the page.

<comment><USER26> DGG lets you disable ads in the settings: [https://duckduckgo.com/settings#general](https://duckduckgo.com/settings#general)

But the main difference is that DGG chooses ads based only on search term, as opposed to tracking you and collecting your data across the entire net.

<comment><USER13> so iow, less relevant ads that are more likely to just get in the way and not be a product I want

<comment><USER27> The service has to monetize somehow? Unobtrusive, non-retargeted aren't a dealbreaker by any means for me, and I loathe the ads industry in general</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Tablet Heads to Verizon - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestreet.com/story/10664179/1/exclusive-apple-tablet-headed-to-verizon.html <comment><USER2> I love all of the speculation on a device that no one knows anything about. And unless that person is Steve Jobs, anyone who says they know anything about it is lying. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if even Verizon and AT&T didn't know what was happening.

So some analyst thinks that Apple will use a chip from Qualcomm. That could be almost anything. Qualcomm makes a lot of chips.

But if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it would probably be one of their Gobi chips that does 3G data in both CDMA and GSM. But that doesn't mean it will be a Verizon exclusive.

I highly doubt that Apple would produce a tablet that would work exclusively with Verizon. Why? Because of the iPhone. The iPhone is currently only with AT&T. How many people would want one account for an iPhone on AT&T and another on Verizon? The Mac ecosystem is self feeding... they want you to keep buying more Apple gear. Two mobile devices, split between two wireless carriers, isn't Apple's MO.

That being said, I'm not convinced the fictitious tablet will require 3G data. Why would it? If it's a media device, you don't want to pull down HD video over any sort of 3G service. For that, you'd want to stick with wifi.

Okay, so where would this leave us? My guess: a new iPhone that is GSM/CDMA compatible (Gobi). And then with tethering built in to the phone ( _cough_ AT&T), you can connect your tablet to the phone via wifi to download your morning paper. This is just as far in left field as any other prediction.

<comment><USER3> Who says that the customer would need an account with the carrier? I'm not sure if AT&T does it, but Sprint (Kindle), Verizon (all sorts of industrial shit), and T-Mobile (Peek) all sell bulk low-use data access to companies for use in embedded products.

<comment><USER4> I am guessing, if this tablet is for real, it would not be "low-use data access" device. Web browsing, downloading movies and music, etc all require relatively high bandwidth.

I was having a discussion about this very subject yesterday with a co-worker, I brought up the idea of tethering when one is without wifi, I feel this option would be the most likely. Thus not undercutting iphone sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is completely baseless. Some analyst at a finance firm thinks Apple's tablet is going to run on Verizon? What are they basing it on? Oh, there's nothing you say?</comment>


Mark Jacobstein: Out of the Loopt, into CRV - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/10/04/mark-jacobstein-out-of-the-loopt-into-crv/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how the Loopt guys are feeling about this.

It just occured to me that in the corporate world, employees have to worry about losing their jobs. Conversely, in the startup world, founders have to worry about losing their employees (especially if PG's thesis from his latest essay is true).

</comment><comment><USER3> All of these articles keep saying that Loopt is available on Sprint... I can search for it on my Samsung A900 and it comes up "Loopt - Free through 2007!!!" but when I try and load the application I get "Error We're sorry, this item is unavailable"

Am I the only Sprint user that can't get Loopt or is it unavailable for everyone?

Edit: Just tried to sign up at the Loopt website and got "We're sorry but Loopt is not yet supported on your phone model." Seems odd, the only Samsung phone they support is the A920.

<comment><USER4> Ah, the wonderful world of mobile apps. The way I see it, a company like Loopt needs to do some or all of these feats:

\- get someone to buy a handset to support an app they've never used (because it's not on their current phone)

\- develop for a handset that is very popular but is going to be removed from the carrier's lineup in a few months, most likely in favor of an incompatible model

\- predict which kinds of phone potential customers (by age, metro area and income) will have 3-6 months from now

\- deal with the wildly varying capabilities and interfaces of different handsets

\- target the market of people who are technologically-savvy yet do not have a Blackberry (because BBs have their own thing going on) or an iPhone

Yeesh, I'm amazed that anyone has the stomach to develop for this market.

PS: Then there's the network effect, of course -- people you want to communicate with should also have supported phones.

<comment><USER3> I figured I was safe with getting apps developed for my phone first because the Gmail application used my phone as the reference platform. I guess not.

<comment><USER4> I'd guess you're in the "popular but about to be discontinued" column then. Carriers keep introducing new phones without much regard for how great the old ones are, because they need to get people to re-up by offering them new hardware that's somehow more capable. Maybe you can get Loopt on it, for example.

And besides, it's basically untenable to develop for a platform that will no longer available at retail by the time that version is ready. There could be half a million handsets out there, but can you imagine press that says "it's available for seven phones, three of which are no longer sold"? Ouch.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scrapy: New Python web crawling & scraping framework (built on Twisted) - <AUTHOR> http://dev.scrapy.org/ <comment><USER2> Awesome, now somebody go back in time 3 months and release this so I could have not spent that time writing the same thing (okay, not exactly the same, mine isn't nearly as pluggable).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This looks quite promising and I look forward to trying it out. I wonder how it will work compared with my current approach of using Mechanize and BeautifulSoup, along with the threading module.

<comment><USER2> For long-running, large jobs I can tell you from experience it would work about _a gazillion times faster_. Especially if you drop BeautifulSoup for something like lxml.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. BeautifulSoup can be quite slow(unless I'm doing it wrong, which I probably am).

It accounts for 98% of the time of a current job I'm running. If anyone can provide some tips it'd be much appreciated.

<comment><USER2> It's rather unlikely you're doing anything wrong. IIRC, BeautifulSoup docs acknowledge that it is rather slow.

Also, if you don't make use of the methods that extract/unravel object trees, they may not be properly GC'd, leading to further slowdowns. I can't remember the method names exactly (might be destroy() and extract()), but they're in the docs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anyone is interested in doing a small project for us using Scrapy (and lxml and whatever else), please drop me an e-mail.

</comment><comment><USER5> Please, tell me why scrapy better than wget? I can easly call wget from my python scripts...

<comment><USER2> wget is synchronous while Twisted is an asynchronous networking engine. This means that you don't need to wait for a request to finish before making another one (or making pancakes, or doing whatever you want).

I essentially wrote a parallelized version of scrapy which has the ability to make hundreds of requests per second, depending on available CPUs. You could never achieve that level of performance using wget.

<comment><USER3> This is great. I was running threads on a current crawl job but the real bottleneck is BeautifulSoup and not the network. So splitting the project into threads(while it helped about 10%) wasn't really necessary and Twisted probably would have done the trick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> anyone knows how the memory leak happened? I use scrapy to fetch some data out, the total network in/out is about 400M, but the memory usage of scrapy gained about 1.5G.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can it simulate a browser as well as HtmlUnit?

</comment><comment><USER8> I want to ask people here thoughts on frameworks, this looks well suited to a project I have, but it is built on Twisted and the preferred option of frameworks seems to be Django, now I'm a PHP coder, who is just about to step up to the python challenge so I am thinking it would be better to start with a more established framework? Thoughts would be most welcome.

<comment><USER9> Django is a framework for creating web applications. Twisted is a framework for network programming. Scrapy is a framework for scraping web pages.

If you're thinking about learning web development with Python, I'd suggest Django. Other Python web frameworks are TurboGears, Pylons, Web.py or Cherry.py. Django tends to have the best documentation and probably the largest community right now, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah just what I needed and on the day I needed it! Thanks HN for posting it and the creators for making it.

</comment><comment><USER8> is anyone from scrapy here, i have some tech questions? is there an irc group?

<comment><USER10> I am looking for some community action for scrapy. It looks useful for a project I'm working on currently using BeautifulSoup but not digging the sluggish performance.

I am having trouble resolving the docs to the code. Is there an IRC, mailing list or forum?</comment></comment>


'Star Trek' Failed to Reckon with Our Greatest Threat: Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://catapult.co/stories/star-trek-failed-to-reckon-with-our-greatest-threat-climate-change-parenting-children <comment><USER2> This is a stunningly bad piece of writing, wherein the author 'criticises' pieces of work for not foreseeing what came later. _Star Trek_ was written by writers in the 1960s and addresses issues that were prevalent in the 1960s; _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ is similarly focussed on the late 1980s and early 1990s.

We've already caught up with some of the events that formed the supposed historical backdrop of both series (the supposed Eugenics Wars of the 1990s) and they didn't happen. There's occasional mentions of Leningrad which strongly suggest that history was expected to play out somewhat differently in other ways, too (either no fall of the USSR or at the very least no renaming of cities).

So what? They're products of the era that they were written in. Relax.

P.S. _Discovery_ isn't really Star Trek anymore — perhaps the Pike spin-off series will revert to the original. The inherent stupidity of running a starship on mushrooms and darting around the galaxy following pathways of a giant fungal network that somehow evolved to violate the laws of physics is just... demented. Stop trying to impose any logic upon it.

</comment><comment><USER3> World War III brought industrial activity down to almost nothing, handily ending the threat of global warming.

<comment><USER2> That kind of misses the whole "tipping point" aspect of climate change, wherein crossing a certain threshold is an (essentially) irreversible act.

One could argue that any realistic scenario for WWIII would (unfortunately) involve a broad thermonuclear exchange, and therefore a probable "nuclear winter" scenario, but that global chilling is temporary and the climatic system would revert to its warming trend shortly thereafter (after at most half a decade or so).

<comment><USER3> Shortly after WWIII humanity made contact with an alien race, and initiated technology-sharing agreements that one can confidently assume included non- carbon-based energy generation, as well as environmental remediation techniques.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you get unrestricted cash? - <AUTHOR>

I have a bunch of ideas but no money to implement them.
I'm looking for unrestricted cash to try out a few of those idea.  I have an idea on how to build it but the idea uses such "eccentric" business methods that it would give anyone who believes their MBA class or have typical financial knowledge a heart attack.
What options do I have besides moonlighting?  Where can you find people who aren't typical investors and who love unlimited "risk"? <comment><USER2> Are there people who "love unlimited risk" and give "unrestricted cash" ? Sounds like an oxymoron.

If you have produced a significant company that has gone public or has been acquired you may have some luck

</comment><comment><USER3> I would look for drug dealers and film producers (seriously).

<comment><USER4> Drug dealers? Never ever, unless you want to end up dead on the street when your biz fails

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Ask HN: How do you get unrestricted cash?

There's no such thing. All money has strings attached. My recommendation is that you learn how to acquire restricted cash -- the only kind -- by demonstrating that your ideas deserve support, compared to other ideas the money might support instead.

When you ask for money, you're immediately competing with every other human being on the planet. Make no mistake about it -- your ideas will only be supported if you can show that they have merit. And the burden of evidence is yours.

Welcome to reality.</comment>


Drug overdoses tied to 24-fold rise in organ transplants - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/16/health/drug-overdoses-organ-transplants-study/index.html <comment><USER2> ... from an increase in donor _supply_ , not patient demand.</comment>


Show HN: geohub.github.com - locate your github friends - <AUTHOR> http://geohub.github.com/

<comment><USER2> This looks like wheremyfriends be for github — very cool :) I did something similar [0] the other day for facebook friends, so it's cool to see this, too.

I like that you can hide the people you only know from forks.

[0] <http://wwikt-peterldowns.dotcloud.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat! This would be an interesting direction for Github to explore.

You could take it even further - It would be great if there was a way to figure out who has written (for example) a Computer Vision system in Go in a geographical area. The ultimate recruiting tool.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow. About to move to another city, and turns out there's a person there on the list. This tool is really cool!</comment>


Twitter terror arrest: cause for concern - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jan/18/twitter-terror-arrest

<comment><USER4> So, you know, what the hell do we do? Every day there's a news story like this: "Man/woman/child does totally innocuous thing X; is expelled from school/arrested and jailed/has house raided and burgled by police/beaten/shot." Every single story, it could have been me. I make offensive jokes, do funny-looking stuff with technology, and hang out with other people like myself. I have an interest in not getting fucked over for no reason.

What do we do? I don't have any idea what to do. As far as I know, no politicians are offering to change this situation. Is there some way to fix this system?

<comment><USER5> OTOH we occasionally read the story: _Terrorist posted comments on Twitter feed before smuggling bomb onto plane_.

In a way, it's our fault (us being the public). When we demand childishly that our security systems be comprehensive and infallible enough to catch every single would-be attacker, we _inevitably_ end up catching a bunch of false positives in the net as well.

<comment><USER4> I have to say, I am quite skeptical of that "we." There's a small media feeding frenzy every time there's any kind of "security" hubbub, but how many normal people actually support these measures after reading accounts of them? How many would support them if the media climate were more levelheaded? Precious few, I suspect.

(Based purely on my anecdata talking to friends and family, it's 0%, but I'm sure there's a minority of folks around who really do support such things.)

Look at the recent "underwear bomber" escapade. There, we had much more credible circumstantial evidence pointing at the suspect in advance (e.g. the dad's phone call about him.) That is a hundred times more damning than this Twitter post -- although still not terribly damning, if you ask me -- and yet, he flew. Was there some great popular outrage that we didn't catch him in advance of his flight? Not as far as I can tell; mostly, there was a great CNN and op-ed outrage.

<comment><USER6> I'd guess the way the Paul Chambers incident was dealt with was as harsh as it is because the underwear bomber story happened about three weeks before his tweet. No one in the chain of people he dealt with wanted to be in the position the person who said don't worry about the underwear bomber is in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Compare to Eliott Madison's arrest for tweeting information about the police movements during the illegal police assault during the Pittsburgh G20 summit. His obviously unconstitutional charges were withdrawn.

Conclusion: Twitter is good for protesting in Iran, bad for protesting in the USA.

<http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/united-states-v-madison>

<comment><USER8> Reading that link, it looks like only the PA charges were dropped, and the NYPD is still building a case against him.

<comment><USER7> :( You're right, I celebrated too early when I heard the PA charges were dropped.

Also, thank you Hacker News for ignoring my baiting statements about the police. It'll take 5-7 years for the courts to rule one way or another about the legality of the police action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This whole case seriously pisses me off, the 'world we live in' is the one we make.

<comment><USER10> Precisely - knowing nothing about the details of this case, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't some automated system that flagged him, but rather he was ratted out by a "concerned" (read: paranoid) citizen.

<comment><USER9> It's funny, some of the worst things that we used to scold the eastblock for are now part and parcel of everyday life.

And nobody lifts a finger.

edit: if anything it is the 'concerned citizen' and the buffoon cops that need a talking to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He made a threat.

I think it's in bad taste to make public bombing threats, even as a joke. It's just not respectful to the people who have to dig through this shit and interdict the real bad guys. As societies, we have limited resources with which to investigate threats that are made, and our governments have an obligation to investigate each and every threat that's made, even jokingly on Twitter.

The reaction is totally over the top, granted, and I'd rather they spend their time interrogating trust fund Nigerians recently returned from a Yemenese vacation, but there should be a penalty for making joking bombing threats, in the same way that you shouldn't go around yelling 'fire!' in a movie theater.

Criminal prosecution is ludicrous, though.

<comment><USER9> He never made a threat, he made a joke.

One that you may think in poor taste but I thought it was well within the acceptable. Blow up an airport because they don't have their planes landing on time ? Sounds _very_ realistic to me.

We've had a guy _executed_ because of these overzealous clowns <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes>

I think to investigate is fine, to arrest is _way_ across the line. If these guys can't tell the difference between a legitimate threat and a bloody joke then we have other problems than terrorism.

I'm mad enough about this to write about it in a way that I possibly shouldn't but I am seriously past caring:

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/I+am+a++terrorist%2C+and+so+are+y...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/I+am+a++terrorist%2C+and+so+are+you%2e)

Let's see who is brave enough to turn me in.

<comment><USER12> Something doesn't feel right in all of this case. Like we are missing something. I suspect there was some otherp particular reason the police were worried he may take extreme action secondary to the tweet; it would explain things more clearly.

There us also a double standard with some of the people outraged over this. Hundreds of people are reported eah month as veiwing kiddy porn. The majority are innocent but you will struggle to find too many people who will disagree With them beig investigated.

If a concerend indvidual, perhaps someone who knows he guy, as worried by what he read and reported it what do the police do? They just have to have a look; I mean ok they went much too far (assuming the story is accurate and this guy wasn't, for example, difficult or refused to cooperate etc.)

as I said, I can't help feeling there is a touch more to this than a busy body stalking Twitter :-)

I'm ac

<comment><USER9> > Something doesn't feel right in all of this case. Like we are missing > something.

I have a very hard time imagining anything short of this guy having a history of blowing things up that would be reason enough for an arrest.

> I suspect there was some otherp particular reason the police were worried he > may take extreme action secondary to the tweet; it would explain things more > clearly.

Because you would hope that that would be the case ?

That's just wishful thinking on your part I'm afraid, I have absolutely no problem in believing that it happened the way it has been described, by now the police is well aware this thing is going to blow up in their faces if there was even a remotely plausible reason they would have trotted it out on a leash for display by now.

> Hundreds of people are reported eah month as veiwing kiddy porn. The > majority are innocent but you will struggle to find too many people who will > disagree With them beig investigated.

Being investigated for the possession of child pornography because of anonymous tips makes it far too easy to smear people and to use the police as attack dogs in personal vendettas.

It also basically gives the authorities carte-blanche to go and investigate anybody at all claiming there was an anonymous tip, and I think that for that reason alone this ia a bad development.

I realize you may probably disagree but if a person is 'so concerned' about this that they would report you but not concerned enough that they would make that report without being anonymous then it is most likely a sick prank being pulled on someone.

If it weren't then there would almost always be someone in the vicinity of the individual being reported that would have the balls to face the perp over this and make a non-anonymous report.

The lucky few child pornographers that only have cowards in their circle of acquaintances we'd have to learn to live with.

> If a concerend indvidual, perhaps someone who knows he guy, as worried by > what he read and reported it what do the police do?

I would think that even a personal visit is one step too far, a simple letter that would state that the guy is because of this 'flagged' and if there is any indication that there is more to it then it might be time for doing something about it. Until then make sure that when he gets on a plane that his luggage gets some extra tlc.

> as I said, I can't help feeling there is a touch more to this than a busy > body stalking Twitter :-)

You have a lot of faith in the law, which is nice. I've seen tons of incompetence far worse than this so I'm very much on the side that has absolutely no problem believing the story as it is told.

<comment><USER12> > because of anonymous tips makes it far too easy to smear people and to use > the police as attack dogs in personal vendettas.

I never said anonymous. (actually it was somewhat a bad analogy because the Police are pretty much legally bound to investigate even if they feel it is a personal grudge etc. particularly if the accuser is a child).

Anyway; I am not aware this was an anonymous tip. In a way those might be treated even more seriously.

> but not concerned enough that they would make that report without being > anonymous

I think that is naive. People get scared; especially if the threat is real! But as I said Im not aware this was anonymous.

> a simple letter that would state that the guy is because of this 'flagged' > and if there is any indication that there is more to it then it might be > time for doing something about it. Until then make sure that when he gets on > a plane that his luggage gets some extra tlc.

:( you really think that is a better approach. Firstly can you sere the media outcry about watchlists and targeting innocents without bother to investigate :) and I agree, it's very wrong.

I think that would be a massive OTT step. Go round, knock on his door and talk to him about it - i.e. establish if you need to investigate or drop it.

But I can see what might have happened (and I might have revised my opinion here); at some stage a police man was sat there and suddenly realised "shit, Im responsible for deciding if this guy is a threat" - and then the fear sets in that he might get it wrong and end up killing people. It's pretty irrational but people are like that :) so this copper makes a mistake - <USER2> needs to be disciplined ofc.

Im still not convinced there isn't a little more to this than meets the eye; something to convince them either this guy might go ahead with this threat or that he had the capacity to bring it off (even if it is something simple like he works in a job associated with explosives etc. - say a chemistry teacher).

7 hours questioning is _very_ excessive; either they were treating this as a really serious threat - or more likely he was non-cooperative (in which case he doesn't get any sympathy from me :P)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems like if a terrorist really wants to cause chaos, all he has to do is issue bomb threats from people's twitter accounts - by stealing the password via an XSS hole, or via a phishing attack, or by accessing the account via malware.

Depressing. Anyone who denies the value of anonymity in our modern society should consider the cost of having your identity associated with easily falsified forms of communication, like Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER14> This highlights the dilemma of social networking online. You tend to think that you're just chatting with your small circle of friends, using in-jokes and so on, whereas the audience may in fact be much bigger and be unable to judge isolated comments in their intended context.

</comment><comment><USER15> Similar thing happened a few years ago - somebody texted the lyrics of a Clash song to another band member. It contained the words gun and airliner - <USER3> resulted in special branch kicking the doors in. But the police deny there is a monitoring system.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/jun/03/terrorism.world>

(MI5/NSA - I think you are all jolly nice people who should get raises)

<comment><USER16> You're kidding right? In the article it says the guy sent the message to the wrong number and the recipient called the police.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> On the other hand, everybody would be pointing fingers at police if, indeed, he blew the airport sky high.

<comment><USER18> I wonder at what point you can give the police a pass for missing something? What is the threshold of reasonable? Based on this article, I guess we are at a point now where there is no threshld. Everything is a serious security threat. Rather scary.

Edit: This also reminds me of the "You can't say bomb on an airplane." scene in the movie Meet the Parents.

<comment><USER19> maybe someone should redo the Monthy Python "Spam" sketch with the term "bomb", in flight, to get everyone back down to earth

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> kids have been suspended from schools for decades for jokes like this, especially after columbine. meh.

<comment><USER19> people (authorities) should learn to realize what kidding is

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd like to ask what the public cost has been (and which continues to accumulate) for this line of pursuit. Both in outright expense, and in allocation of limited resources (thereby removing them from performing other work, pursuing other leads, etc).

Of course, the personal cost to the Twitterer has been extreme and will likely continue to accrue at a rate difficult to match against the resources the State can (wastefully) afford to invest -- afford at least for the moment, until its stupidity overwhelms even it.

(The caveat being that in democracies, the State and those resources are (purportedly) ours. Just blaming "the State" ignores our own culpability. If you don't like it, vote them out. If you don't know for whom to vote, inform yourself. If you don't like any of the choices, run,)</comment>


My React course is out and for you it's free - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@zanin_andrea/my-react-course-is-out-and-for-you-its-free-9e386b2fe1bb <comment><AUTHOR> Would love to hear any feedback</comment>


Mindboggling(ly simple) set theoretic question - <AUTHOR> http://therobert.org/stuff/newsyc.txt <comment><USER2> I suspect the solution lies in the phrase "in fact empty". The empty relation is trivially well founded. So look at why set membership for y should be the empty relation. I'll take a shot (with the caveat that I'm no logician, and I'm not entirely convinced by this argument myself).

It might be helpful first to remove x from the picture and define y as: y = {{y}} and y \neq {y}

First note that there can be at most one distinct member of {{y}}, which is {y}. So if there exists z member of y, then z = {y}. Then y is a member of z, and by transitivity, y is member of y, and so y = z = {y}. This contradicts the assumption that y \neq {y}, so there can be no such z.

</comment><comment><USER3> I took that class from Kunen at Wisconsin in the late 80s. But I'll be damned if I can find my copy of that yellow book or remember enough to be of any help.

I have to admit that I never really did understand forcing.

It seemed like all the logic professors at UW at that time, including Kunen, were getting interested in computer science.

Kleene was still around at that time, too.</comment>


Indian Central Bank banned cryptocurrencies without any basis - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/06/13/rbi-india-bank-cryptocurrency/ <comment><USER2> Not without any basis [http://ajitvadakayil.blogspot.com/2017/11/blockchain- bitcoin...](http://ajitvadakayil.blogspot.com/2017/11/blockchain-bitcoins- ponzi-part-13-capt.html)

[http://ajitvadakayil.blogspot.com/2018/04/blockchain- bitcoin...](http://ajitvadakayil.blogspot.com/2018/04/blockchain-bitcoin-must- be-kicked-out.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> this write is so lame, you're a ponzi scheme. do you even know how central banking works? fractional reserve banking? keynsian vs austrian economics?

oops. ignorance is bliss.

<comment><AUTHOR> and what is your "not so ponzi" fiat money backed with?</comment></comment></comment>