My Biggest Temptation - <AUTHOR> http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/23284176896/temptation

<comment><USER3> I used to blame and complain. Every one of my failures was due to something different. My name, my lack of capital, my poor confidence, where I lived, my nationality, my parents, my car, even my big ears.

Then one of my brothers died.

As painful as it is to write this, his death and only his death was the only thing that would open my eyes.

Life is way short to even complain. To pay attention to petty details. To yell at the waiter because the soup is cold, or my steak is not cooked. To give up when my code won't compile, even though I may not have the slightest clue why.

Its only been three years. My adventures as a re-born man have only just begun. The future, though a bit fuzzy, looks promising. I'm not sure if any of my ideas will take off, but I'm sure I'll enjoy each hustling for each and every one of them.

I've already made a good bunch of friends through this community. People so incredible that it blows my mind. People I actually look up to.

And even though browsing HN reminds me how limited my talents may be, it also pushes me to realize that limits are just rules. And rules are meant to be challenged.

I'm still not an optimist. Because we are all still going to die and be forgotten. What I am is a bit more practical. I call it an active life enjoyer (made up word).

My main goal is not to be rich (though it would be nice to have a new car, and live in a better place), nor to be famous (but having friends is cool). I don't even want to become the next big tech superstar. I just want my adventure to go as long as possible. And to enjoy every second of it. So far, so good.

To be totally honest, I founded my startup due to such attitude. What's the worse that could happen? I'm already not rich, not famous. Money comes and goes. But life. Life just goes. I'd rather live it in a way that when the time comes for me to depart, I can take my last breath and say: "Would do it again."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for sharing. Powerful story. Really appreciate it.

<comment><USER3> You're welcome.

Thank you for the nice words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _I need to clarify: I feel 100% happy now._

I've got to say, I still don't understand the obsession these days with "happiness". Who sits around reflecting on (and measuring) their happiness, as if it's some numerical, achievable end-goal? Not only that, the most important thing in life is not what you can do, but who you daily choose to be - <USER2> character and integrity. Money and things will fade, but character never dies.

Happiness is nice if it comes as a byproduct of life, but if happiness is really the pinnacle of that which we are striving for -- if it's really our greatest purpose in life -- we have a foundation softer than sand, constantly shifting with every direction the wind blows. Martin Luther King hints at his purpose in his "I Have Been to the Mountaintop" speech, noting that he's willing to sacrifice a long life for his purpose:

 _Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!_

It also surprises me that as someone who was a "devoted Christian for 25 years" who would at least have some Biblical knowledge, Ryan doesn't at least acknowledge the inherent spiritual incompleteness of placing his hope in worldly and material things - number six on his list being the exception. (Ecclesiastes, Ryan? Or Job 1:21? Or Phil 4:12?)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in an Apple store, so I don't have a ton of time to compose this, but here goes:

You can't make much of an impact on the world if you're not happy with your life. You'll spend most of your time trying to find happiness, instead of moving on to help other people be happy.

Now that I don't believe in 'saving' people (in the Christian sense), there isn't a higher purpose for me other than helping others find contentment.

Now that I've found contentment, I can start to focus on others.

Note that me finding happiness or contentment isn't because I've bought things or have cash in the bank.

It's the state of mind that my blog post talks about (and how I'm tempted to break out of it all the time).

<comment><USER4> _You can't make much of an impact on the world if you're not happy with your life._

This sort of self-centered attitude (i.e. "my own happiness must come before others") is the same line of reasoning that people use to say "you can't love others before you love yourself", but it's just not true.

Happiness often comes when we consciously decide to take the focus off ourselves (and all the moaning and worrying we do about our "unhappiness") and place it squarely on the well-being and loving service of others. It's a daily choice to lose ourselves in something far greater than our ego and its want of fickle satisfaction.

 _Now that I've found contentment, I can start to focus on others._

I'm not going to judge your motives, but I would question if you've really found true contentment -- you're living an extremely favorable set of circumstances in life (a great wife, kids, a fantastic business) that make it easy to be happy -- and yet here you are, writing a blog post about how it's still not enough. The business has to be bigger (more barns to build!), you want more money than 99.9999% of the world to retire early, etc. You know your own heart though.

I struggle with the same thing too on a monthly basis, the constant pull towards discontentment. I often find it's when I've stopped giving thanks daily and, consciously or otherwise, allowed myself to believe that "these material things matter and they are mine to have".

With that said, I would say true contentment is really understanding Job 1:21 and the perspective that brings.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not self-centered, it's just built into our species. I believe in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs>

<comment><USER4> You may "believe" in Maslow's hierarchy, but whether it is truth is certainly up for debate. Even the "Criticisms" section on the Wikipedia page you link has plenty of legitimate debate. As with most psychology, it is a soft science at best and pseudoscience at worst.

Through your own missions work, you must have certainly met plenty of people (or at least heard plenty of stories) of people possessing far less on that hierarchy than the average American who were far more content and held an "actualized" attitude about life.

The very highest definition of love (Greek - agape), often denotes self- sacrifice, something that certainly goes against the grain of an ego-driven desire for personal happiness. I'm sure you know it all too well as a parent and the many sacrifices you make for your kids =) I think we live too much of our lives worrying with an inward focus when the real answer is to take that energy and turn our focus outward to others. Self-centered may have been a harsh word, but it is what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The way I feel happy with my lot (despite wanting to achieve goals too) is to read and listen to history books. A large chunk of humankind has had to put up with heartbreaking misery and torture and learning about it makes me incredibly grateful to be living here and now, even if I'm having a bad week. Building up some empathy for my fellow man isn't a bad side effect either(!)

I'm currently a third of the way into "Gulag: A History" by Anne Applebaum. Good book but very hard to bear. Millions, including innocent Soviet citizens, were tortured, massacred, or worked to death over a whole 30 years. It puts waking up with a headache and having to drive to the office into perspective I find.. :-)

<comment><USER6> I don't understand the word "including". Do you mean that almost all of the prisoners were not Soviet citizens or they were innocent?

<comment><USER5> Well, quite a lot of the prisoners were not Soviet, for example, hundreds of thousands from Poland or even German Jews who fled Germany and then ended up in Russia's camps instead. I'm no historian but in this book, people from Soviet states like Lithuania seem to not be considered 'Soviet' in some sense - this term being limited mostly to Russians proper.

On the 'innocence' point, I'm talking by Soviet legal standards. People _were_ found guilty of all sorts of "crimes" at the time, but many were also never found "guilty" of anything and were merely picked up at random to meet labor requirements at the prison camps. In this book, they're split into "real criminals" (so murderers, thieves, etc), "politicals" (people who were targeted for their political affiliations), and then everyone else, including the innocents or _relations_ of the aforementioned groups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I assume for HN readers the basic needs (food,home,friends) are covered. After that, happyness is mostly a decision.

Are your goals life-changing? If you sell your current startup successfully, what would you do afterwards? Start the next one? Basically the same daily routine? Congratulations you are already happy. Maybe you didn't know that.

<comment><USER8> It's about expectations. If set your "'comfortable' profitability" at 50-70% net profit margin, you are bound to be unhappy for quite some time.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. The assumption that "there is no additional cost for each new customer once we reach profitability". Is a false one. If/when you reach profitability that will prove the market to competitors who will try to fast follow and drive up the cost for acquisition. There is no such thing as a stand-still net profit. You'll always have to work for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I must say I feel a bit bad for the writer, especially after the update. He reads, to me, as feeling a lot of pressure to self-identify as happy. As if a truly brilliant entrepreneur, a real success, couldn't struggle with, for example, anxiety.

He writes a post about experiencing anxiety despite his obvious success so far, about "constantly fighting" his temptation to feel bad about where he is, about his drive to dissociate from his current live in favor of an imagined "perfect" future life that's constantly changing. He's sharing a set of feelings I think a lot of people, especially ambitious people, can relate to.

But then he feels the need to say he's "100% happy." What does that even mean? Why does he (probably correctly) think that his social context demands that he be unnaturally happy, and that sharing inner struggles will be problematic for him as a public figure? I wish he was OK admitting that sometimes he's not happy. That inexplicably (and yet predictably), meeting one's goals often doesn't actually help you feel any better.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think goals are a way to drive yourself to do something productive/stimulating so that you don't get bored. However, the accomplishment of goals and fulfilling your every desire, albeit important, is not what makes a person happy.

I think happiness comes from something much more abstract. It is a visceral reaction to your life and everything in it. I truly believe that in the end, the thing that makes you happy in life is when you live uncompromisingly, upholding the beliefs/principles/truths/etc. that resonate deep within your heart; whatever they may be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good way to sum it up

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've come to realize I'd be more happy whenever I have more freedom. Freedom is quite abstract, but for me it envelopes economic freedom and freedom to make my own decisions in work. I enjoy my work as a software developer, but I hate the processes around it in a lot of company settings. I feel a company like Valve gives it's employees a lot of freedom and I wish more companies would treat their employees the same way.

For the aforementioned reasons I'll be starting a company with a friend in June / July of this year. This friend of mine will work on acquiring the leads (he's proven in the last few years he can get work for me) while my main focus will be on developing the solutions for the clients and guiding our clients through the realization process. With this company we will aim for the following goals: \- earn much more money, I expect I can make around 2000 to 3000 EUR more a month in this setting, though I have to spend some of this money on benefit my employer would normally pay for (holidays, retirement, etc...). \- use my own work processes (I'm not very fond of SCRUM for example - at least not in the way it's executed at my current employer). \- take a leadership / guiding role in some projects, especially since we expect we'll be able to outsource some work within a year or so. We've already worked with an Android developer from eastern Europe recently and this worked out well for us. We can imagine making use of more eastern European mobile developers if we don't have the time ourselves for the projects. \- be more flexible with my working hours. My currently employer wants me in the office from 09:00 - 17:00, while I prefer to work from say 09:00 - 13:00, followed by some relaxation / sports and work again between 18:00 and 00:00.

The money will help me gain more economic freedom once I've payed off my mortgage and student loan dept. I don't necessarily need to live in a giant house, but I would like to have a second home in a southern-European country from where I can work in the winter seasons - this is a long term goal I'll strive for.

I believe that by constantly visualizing my goals I will get closer to achieving them. I promised myself I will realize the above goals before I reach the age of 40 (currently I'm 30 years old).

</comment><comment><USER13> Man, I have this same problem. It's a real headache, but every now and then I have a feeling of clarity, like somehow everything is actually pretty OK as it is.

I don't make lists though - usually it's something I'm told by somebody else, like one of my sisters or my mother. Somebody who knows me and my life well. That usually does the trick.

But I can't independently convince myself of my own personal happiness at the drop of a hat when that demon of looking forward to the brighter future rears it's ugly head - I hope I can figure it out like you have!

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of this true story of 2 women:

Esther1 was the born to a very poor family. Her parents were killed in an accident when she was 8 so she had to drop out of school and raise her 3 younger brothers. She worked hard and never had anything material for her entire life. She was an old lady when I was a child. Some of the things I clearly remember her saying:

      "I love every one of you."
      "I can't wait to see you again."
      "We had a wonderful time!"
      "Don't worry. It'll be fine."
      "If you look for trouble, you'll probably find it. So don't look so much."
      "I thank God every night of my life."

Esther2 came from almost identical circumstances. She was even born and died the same week as Esther1. Some of the things I remember her saying:

      "Joe is so lucky. I could never get that lucky."
      "You can't beat city hall, so why bother."
      "Things would be different if we lived in a different neighborhood."
      "They all inherited a lot but we inherited nothing."
      "Life's not fair, sonny."
      "If only I had more money."

Esther1 was my grandmother. Esther2 was her neighbor. Whenever I have OP's temptation to worry about my own happiness, I just look at the 4 letters on the wall above my desk, "WWGT" (What would Grandma think?) That "fixes" me every time.

<comment><USER15> My folks are both Esther2s, and consequently I was until about 30. Then I started getting into various self-help things, aligning myself with others of like mind, etc... basically just doing whatever it took to cultivate PMA (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_mental_attitude>) and ridding my emotional lexicon of victim mentality.

I can't remember what the name for it (or even if there is a name for it), but one of the best tricks I've learned is to self identify any negative thoughts as they stream in... when they come, just acknowledge they exist, don't beat yourself up over it; but take a step back, imagine yourself in the 3rd person seeing you get wound up over it, laugh it off and relax if you can. If you can't that's okay, it's just like attaining any positive habit or trying to quit any negative one. Persistence and time will make things come around, as long as you want it and continue deliberately practicing to achieve it.

It was a process that took a couple years to sink in but surely will be ongoing until the day I die - the funny thing is, for years now, only my folks have been able to get a physical rise out of me (and perhaps rush hour traffic, haha). It's like some weird Pavlov's response. And of course there are times when a situation is just a little too tough, scary, or stressful, and I catch myself falling back on old patterns. In other words, when you find your comfort zones stretched, you also have to keep in mind that your mind will try to deceive you to keep you out of harm's way.

<comment><USER16> I'm reminded of this quote...

"…feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we're holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we'd rather collapse and back away. They're like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we're stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we are." ― Pema Chödrön

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can also try to distance yourself from the goals. Goals do not define your life or who you are, they are only things you want to do.

That way you can say, "Everything IS perfect or close to it now. By the way, I'll bump up my revenues 1000% and move to Cambodia."

The really hard thing is to retain the needed passion to succeed at those goals while remaining distant enough for them not to make you believe they are life defining events, as they usually aren't, even significantly big ones.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great post. I would add the following to the list: films and books. To many these may seem like escapism but I think the insight gained from such varying perspectives gives you better insight into your own life, and I've found it can enhance your "here and now" value system.

Paraphrasing Shawn Achor: you'll never reach happiness if it is always on the other side of some constantly shifting horizon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea - thank you. I guess that's why I love film so much. I helps me make sense out of my life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Off-topic, but this really stuck out for me:

 _I'd set this bar at 50-70% net profit margin. We can aim high because there is no additional cost for each new customer once we reach profitability._

That's a common misconception. You _are_ indeed spending money on getting each additional customer, you are just not accounting for it correctly. It's easy to consider all marketing/advertising/sales/customer service expenses as fixed costs, when indeed these costs go up with each additional customer you on- board.

Also, even if you reach the 50-70% profit margins, how sustainable would that be? The simple law of efficient markets dictates that you will have competitors who will be willing to undercut you. There is no relatively stable company out there that is able to make such margins unless they have constructed entry barriers around themselves (patents, laws etc.).

</comment><comment><USER20>
        Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

            - John Lennon

</comment><comment><USER21> To the commenters: Any time these off topic subjects come up they spawn some interesting discussions and comments.

With no facts, whatsoever. For fucks sake, reddit has more research citations than HN does in a discussion like this.

Thanks for contributing to the stereotype that technologists are the worst group when it comes to thinking that success in one field gives license to ignorantly spout opinions as fact in other fields.

References to the bible and self help books, no references to any actual psychology of happiness research.

I've got some all natural homeopathic depression/disappointment/malaise remedies to sell. I think I just found my target demo.

<comment><USER22> > I think I just found my target demo.

Startup idea! /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I read once (can't find the link now) that the feeling of anticipation is stronger then the feeling of happiness, which makes sense to me, because in nature only the adapting species will survive long enough. So having something to strive for might be quite important, maybe even more then feeling happy. And I don't just mean life threatening situations, I mean that we might actually want to "pursue happiness", not "have happiness". Ever thought about that?

</comment><comment><USER24> I define happiness in the very short term, kind of like Steve Jobs: do I want to get out of bed this morning and do the work on my plate?

Sometimes the answer is no, but most days it's yes. As long as I average more yeses than noes, I don't think about it much. It's when the noes pile up for more than a month that I think about making a change.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think ryancarson.com is down or incorrectly configured.

In case, you want to read it.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aryanl...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aryanleecarson.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F23284176896%2Ftemptation)

</comment><comment><USER26> I've found that by achieving some of my life goals, I haven't reached a point where I find myself content and without any more goals, but I do notice a huge improve in my average happiness compared to years ago. I find myself content instead with the fact that I'll always have awesome new goals.

</comment><comment><USER27> I really loved the line "It's like I'm waiting for the movie of my life to begin instead of realizing that I'm already living it." I feel like that a lot. I have to remind myself to focus on now.

</comment><comment><USER28> I prefer joy to happiness. Joy is more an attitude, whereas happiness seems to come from something "external", like I have bought a new car, that VIP said hi to me, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's always a conflict between goal-directed, sacrifice-oriented work patterns and life-directed, interpersonal-directed work patterns. If you're goal-directed, you're looking at that 100MM in sales. If you're life-directed, you're counting the days until the baby takes its first steps.

I'm unhappy with _everything_ I've read along these lines, and I've read a lot of it on HN and elsewhere. I'm also unhappy with my own balance many times. The problem is that both extremes are not lives I would want to have. I do not want to be a Buddhist, sitting around in loose-fitting clothing feeling perfect happiness. I also do not want to be a driven type-A sort that is counting pennies the last day of his life.

My best guess so far is to start out enjoying the struggle -- go freaking do something with yourself and the world. As you begin to gain traction, back off and actually have a life. The trick, of course, is learning when and how to back off, so I probably haven't added much to the discussion. :)

One thing I know for sure is I agree with this thesis: happiness cannot be just around the corner. It must be whatever you are doing right now.

</comment><comment><USER30> Reading this made me recall and reflect on a lot of things in life.

I am 27 now, but when I was 21 I used to think that I can be happy no matter what the situations in life. Soon I had to come to face with the reality. You need money to solve your own and the worlds problems.

Just like the author I come to always to the point _"Everything will be perfect when …."_.

And you will never be free, because first you will want a college degree, then its a home, then its a car, then clothes, and then in comparison with whatever everybody else has. And then as you have a family it just goes on and on...

So it happened that I went with relative of mine to check out a luxury flat he was about to buy here in Bangalore. As I was checking out the flat with him, he asked me if I would buy if I had the money. And then he asked me to reply with an honest opinion. I paused for a moment and replied... That I would like to buy it now, but I would like to buy it now just because you are buying it. And I'm comparing myself with you, but If I were you and in your shoes then probably I would like to buy what somebody else in your peer group might be buying it. And that might mean a super luxury flat.

I realized a simple fact. We are never free. We are always a slave to the question that the author asks _"Everything will be perfect when …."_

We will never be happy because we need money to solve our problems and buy all we want to buy, no amount of it is ever sufficient. And the answer to that is not 'stop having expectations'.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think the answer is to "stop having expectations". The key is realizing you need very little to be truly happy.

<comment><USER30> >>The key is realizing you need very little to be truly happy.

Although I agree with you in principle. But so as long as we have feelings, comparison and desires to match someone else is inevitable. I've tried a lot, but I keep ending up with...

        Why can't I have a car like him.
        Why can't I have a home like his.
        Why can't go on a costly vacation like him.
        ...
        Why can't I have <insert anything> like him.

And that never goes away...

<comment><USER31> I live on less than $40k a year.

I have a wife and 2 little girls. We have a house, 2 cars, and a motorcycle. All of our vehicles are paid for and we have no revolving credit.

I am HAPPY. Poor, yet HAPPY.

The secret is that I stopped thinking: "Why can't I have a car like him?" Instead, I started thinking, "It must suck to work as much as he does," or "I'm glad I don't have debt like him!"

I have everything I need and quite a few things that I want. I have money in the bank to buy just about anything I'd like to own, within reason. I did not achieve financial freedom on what is considered poverty level salary by desiring new fancy things.

It took me 4 years of credit counseling and BARELY making it buy each month to realize all of this. It was not an easy lesson. But now, I have friends making over $200k that are envious of me.

I'm not right or wrong. My method isn't better than acquiring awesome stuff with tons of money. I have found that time with my family is more valuable than money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can anyone comment on what happened to this link?

</comment><comment><USER33> If you like who you are you will be happy.

</comment><comment><USER34> Very well written. I have a similar feeling. We strive for happiness _in future_ but sometimes tend to overlook our current life and how happy things are.It just depends on how you look at it. Lately, I have been wondering what is missing in my life even though I have a great wife, great family, great friends, healthy life (so far:)). I guess it is just a startup itch that I am looking to scratch. Other than that, I feel pretty good.</comment>


The Tragedy of Ethiopia's Internet - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-tragedy-of-ethiopias-internet <comment><USER2> Posting this from Addis. I have internet. The Ethiopians I know all have smartphones and internet. Viber is similarly popular to text messaging. I am very confused about this article. Lots of things are restrictive here but the article is super overblown. Maybe only 3.7% with wired internet? I'd believe that, everyone uses mobile here.

<comment><USER3> I find Vice is super interesting until they do a story on the place you're from and you realize they have zero idea what they're talking about and the entire article is nonsense.

I've stopped reading anything they put out.

<comment><USER4> This is the same reason I stopped reading The Economist. Great witty writing, until they write about my country and get lots of things wrong. I have to assume it's the same with their articles about industries and places I am not familiar with.

<comment><USER5> My browser history over the past few months is riddled with 20-minute bursts of trying to find the wikipedia page for a certain cognitive fallacy that is related to what you and your parent comment are talking about.

The gist of it is that we tend to trust the authority of the media, up until a point where the the media incorrectly or disingenuously reports on something that we are an expert on. This theory disagrees with what you and your parent comment are saying and instead contends that as soon as they switch to another story, we continue to trust their authority on other topics without any kind of diminished reputation.

I feel like I'm going crazy, but I am almost certain this page exists and my google-fu is continually failing me.

<comment><USER6> How about this: [http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the- gel...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann- amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you)

<comment><USER5> Yes! That's it! Thank you!

I'm amazed that this is actually not an established theory, as I believed it to be. It explains why this doesn't have a wikipedia article, because it's really just the musing of some guy.

[http://english.stackexchange.com/posts/244277/revisions](http://english.stackexchange.com/posts/244277/revisions)

<comment><USER6> I think it's pretty well established, for example, Heinlein writes about the same concept in his 1980 _Expanded Universe_ (and it might have been from the text in an earlier version), saying the news magazine _Time_ , I think it was, had never gotten it right in the situations he had eye-witnessed.

Thing is, it's just not going to be acknowledged by large groups of people; for example Wikipedians won't like it because it totally undercuts what what they base verifiability on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just as a counter datapoint, my experience in Ethiopia was very different. I was sometimes three hours from the nearest paved road and yet I would have full cellular signal, and often even 2G or 3G connectivity.

I had no issues browsing the web, using my VPN, or doing anything else. I was with a group of about 40 people, and we had about 10 or 15 local Ethiopians in our group. None would be considered privileged or rich, and they also all had regular Internet access either on their phones or at Internet cafes. Their nearest real city was Mekele up in the North. Almost all of them folks in our group had Facebook.

Even at the top of the Gheralta mountains we had strong signal. It was actually mind-blowing how much cellular coverage we had in the country.

[https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100191249027242&se...](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100191249027242&set=a.10100191248972352.1073741825.3101830&type=3&theater)

[https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos- xfa1/v/t1.0-9/2...](https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos- xfa1/v/t1.0-9/252500_10100191249057182_439081566_n.jpg?oh=86f57b582960181ff0887592fe85bea0&oe=572E7FBD)

[https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos- xfa1/v/t1.0-9/4...](https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos- xfa1/v/t1.0-9/480443_10100191249256782_531346896_n.jpg?oh=209746a0d67e8f5de174f67811067443&oe=57375A9B)

<comment><USER8> I've never been there, but many stories I've read have mentioned good cell signals in the middle of nowhere, Africa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get this bit: "...Security experts told me that there is no evidence Ginbot 7 has ever undertaken terrorist activity, and the organization is not on the US State Department's list of terror organizations.

Ginbot 7 is largely a collection of exiled Ethiopians who operate outside the borders of the country they wish to change. According to an ESAT report, Ginbot 7 has attacked government soldiers, which Zeleke confirmed to me."

Surely attacking government soldiers qualifies as a terrorist activity?

<comment><USER10> No, it counts as military activity. Attacking _civilians_ with the intent to scare the populace at large counts as terrorist activity.

While there is no single definition of terrorism, attacking civilians instead of soldiers is a common theme among the most popular definitions.

<comment><USER11> This really depends on the spin the government in place puts on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is from Addis, the capital. Its a very common experience that not only the Internet but electric power too is intermittent, sometimes for days. People use mobile data carefully, because its expensive. Also, sites are filtered based on political content. There is no commerce or whatsoever business activity using the Internet due to restrictions and/or service reliability issues.

</comment><comment><USER13> I used to be in Addis a while back (happy to see so many people in the comments posting from A.A)

Decent internet can be tough to find outside the capital and the local telco generally reacts to service interruptions with "meh, they'll just have to deal with it" e-commerce is starting to pick up slightly but definitely has a ways to go.

The surveillance is real. I know people who are not politically active have their phones tapped, would get their new text messages read (couldn't open their inbox and would see the counts of new messages go up and down randomly) to the point where they were physically surveilled in broad daylight with plainclothes and uniformed people tailing them and entering their home (they eventually left)

There's also blame to go around for the Diaspora as well. Often times some will believe they know best just because they were educated in the West and have the false confidence to think that only their perspective is correct and will voice it adamantly (to the point where I've seen "evidence" that was clearly fabricated). Theres very little compromise when it comes to political perspectives which squashes meaningful discussions before they ever happen and exacerbates things further.

Access to the internet just isn't as high a priority there as keeping everyone on the same page when it comes to developmental priorities. There's certainly some positive signs when it comes to the speed at which things have changed in the last 10 yrs but it's important to recognize diminishing returns when you see them. I wonder if a state-led development model like Ethiopia's will be equipped at all to spot that when it happens and adapt quickly enough.</comment>


Thanks Apple, You ruined my day  - <AUTHOR>

For those who don't know what happened today .. please read this subject:
http://www.graphitas.co.uk/blog/2013/10/ios-7-activation-required-error-on-iphone-and-ipad/
Apple did it again, they destroyed my iPhone with their stupid decisions.
Apple suddenly decided to disable the iOS 7 on their developer devices. And they did not give us the option to upgrade to the latest public release.
They are asking us to activate our phones, but they are bringing down their activation server.
They are asking us to restore through iTunes, but the worst software ever made (aka : iTunes) is crashing during the restore.
They are asking us to make a recovery mode, and BOOOM ! The device has been formatted and it returned to the factory setting, every thing is flushed !
Thanks Apple .. You ruined my day.
BTW, I am going Android. At least I can deal with my mobile as a USB drive where I can do simple "Drag & Drop" away from the stupid iTunes ! <comment><USER2> You're talking "I have serious issues on BETA software!".

Wow that really proves who you are. I think Android is just the device for you. It really fits to people like you. Because it's from Google, so you will never see the _end of beta_ stuffs.

I always see scary warning messages for each time when I download beta software from Apple website. I still don't understand what kind of people are using beta OS for their private device, not for test device.

<comment><AUTHOR> Who said "I have serious issues on BETA software!" ?? Did you read that anywhere in the thread?

Please read carefully and read the attached link before you comment!

<comment><USER2> I read the article before I comment, and actually there's only two sentences about the problem.

Apple BETA devices around the world have been receiving the error "Activation Required". Apple has placed an expiry date on their BETA versions, this forces users who are still running BETAs of iOS 7 to update to the current version.

WTF? You said it was BETA.

Still, you're blaming other people for your fault. You're developer. You were recognizing what will be happen with BETA OS in worst case, and you just didn't prepared for it. Dedicated testing machine is _required equipment_ for BETA OS. You didn't bought it because you treated it _optional equipment_. That's right for regular development, but not for BETA OS. So you thrown your primary phone into the risk of the test machine.

If you're work for a company, blame your boss who forced you to use your personal device. If you work for yourself, then blame yourself.

And welcome to Android. You don't need to worry about Apple's parenting, but instead, you need plenty of different devices for test. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had zero issues upgrading, not even restoring, from the iOS 7 developer builds to the final release. Just download it from Dev Center, option/shift- click on Update in iTunes and feed it the IPSW.

Granted Apple's way of forcing the upgrade here is painful but it's more than possible to upgrade without issues and without bricking your device.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is that Apple did not give us the ability to do OTA update, then they suddenly with no prior notification they decided to deactivate the developers devices, then the forced us to put the device in the recovery mode to restore it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it so hard to deactivate auto updating for a beta version? It's not fun to have a brick in the pocket when you are traveling. Not everyone has 3 iPhones for testing purposes only. We are talking about hundertthousands of beta users? That's not "Apple Thinking" about details, come on, that's embarrassing.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is what I mean, I am a developer and I own one iPhone device because it is costly to own an iPhone! So Apple should respect their developer and simply email them that they have to manually update their iOS 7 to the latest through the IPSW file (Although it should be updated automatically through OTA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You are supposed to backup the device before installing a Beta. You can easily restore from the backup.

</comment><comment><USER6> Welcome to the beautiful open world of Android!</comment>


A Student Loan System Stacked Against the Borrower - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/business/a-student-loan-system-stacked-against-the-borrower.html <comment><USER2> The student loan system is propping up weak real estate markets in college towns by using guaranteed student funds from student loans to pay for outrageous rents. Many of these communities would not be able to afford their lifestyles (see. Davis, California vs. Woodland, California rental rates) if it was not for the fact they the student loan money is being laundered through attending students, and funneled directly into the local economy through increased rents and cost of services.

At this level it's a scam.

As anecdotal evidence, my father went to Berkeley when there was no student loan structure, and the community was considered a poor real estate investment, since it was commonly known as a 'Student Ghetto'. A term which has since disappeared as rents in Berkeley are among the highest in the East Bay. All on the back of the students financing their housing costs on student loans.

Again, it's a scam.

The students don't get a better education than my father, and while the housing might be nicer, it's debt that they have to pay well into their later years, as opposed to being able to graduate debt free.

My father thinks this is directly attributable to the death of the student free speech movement and other student political enterprises, since being forced to accommodate ones debt takes priority over trying to change the world, or fix the system. In short it becomes a type of indentured servitude, where lower and middle class people are unqualified for good paying jobs without the debt, and with the debt, they are forced into high level debt maintenance, and can't have any other discussions about where society is going, or how it is getting there.

<comment><USER3> You're throwing around the term "scam" a little too easily. Berkeley rents obviously have a lot to do with Bay Area rents for the past 20+ years.

<comment><USER2> You are right. Partially it's emotional language for me, and the other part is that I do feel that the money is being laundered through the students. But you are right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "A report issued late last month by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau supports this view. Even though the economy and labor market have improved, student loan borrowers are experiencing high distress levels compared with borrowers with other types of consumer debt, the government report found. More than one in four student loan borrowers are delinquent or in default on their obligations."

1 in 4 are delinquent or in default. Read that again.

This situation is a failure mode, and is only fail-safe for the lenders who forced it there. This means that on some level, the lenders knew their interest rates were impossible to keep up with, yet knowingly went forward anyway because they knew they could get away with it. The USA's system is utterly bought out against the common good. At this point, I think we'd be better off with a widespread boycott of student loan payments in order to bankrupt the lenders. They can't call collections on all of us, and there would be riots if they tried.

I know that a lot of people are jaded as a result of societal failure to address the student loan crisis. These intentional failures for the sake of profit have long term consequences, as nearly everyone can blatantly see.

"Some 41 million Americans owe $1.2 trillion in student loan debt. The median debt burden among borrowers was $20,000 in 2014, up from $13,000 in 2007."

This is an entire generation worth of people that have been cursed to start their adult lives with an anchor around their neck. As though the brutally competitive ultra-hostile economic depression they graduated into wasn't enough to weigh them down to begin with.

To top it off, the boomers find a way to hold us in contempt.

<comment><USER5> This is dangerous. Just as dangerous as, say, the government taking over a bunch of uncollectable housing loans. Or the United States federal government renouncing all its public debt.

If there has been illegal acts, they should be rectified. But saying "I really don't want to follow through on what I agreed to" just because minds changed is not justifiable, and sets a an ill-advised precedent.

<comment><USER6> > But saying "I really don't want to follow through on what I agreed to" just > because minds changed is not justifiable

Great attempt at a moral hazard. It's a business contract. Default on the contract, face the consequences. There is no "right" or "wrong" about it.

If at anytime you can default on a debt without consequence, or minimal consequence, it behooves you to do so.

<comment><USER7> >Great attempt at a moral hazard. It's a business contract. Default on the contract, face the consequences. There is no "right" or "wrong" about it.

You can't default on student loans, right? So we're all good.

<comment><USER6> You can actually! It's just a bit harder than traditional debt. I just helped a friend walk away from ~$120K in student loan debt.

<comment><USER2> Any link? This is news to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "It brought a case against Discover Bank last summer, saying it inflated the amounts it said borrowers owed on their loans.

Discover Bank paid $18.5 million without admitting or denying wrongdoing."

These fines are just a calculated cost of doing business for companies like Discover, Sallie Mae, etc. They take the likelihood of getting caught breaking the law, multiply it by how much they'll have to dish out when they get caught, and subtract that from what they'll make by extorting their "customers."

In this case, Discover made a good financial decision on their part. Hooray for creating value for the shareholders.

<comment><USER9> I literally took a course in Finance while in business school in which we were taught how to run these calculations (obviously the 'governance' week of the course). Pretty scary to think people actually sit down at their desk and knowingly run the numbers and decide from there. But that's what you get when hardly anyone who commits a blatant crime like that generally is held accountable (i.e. individual culpability, e.g. individual fines or jail time), and the only negative (a fine) is already priced into the model, and the individual's rewards are a promotion. That's a system that, essentially, delivers incentives for crime and it's insane.

<comment><USER10> ...Literally? Not just the figurative "course in finance" we all hear so much about?

<comment><USER11> No, they actually picked up that course and moved it somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I'm in arrears on my student loans. I'm one of the millions that is.

The first few lines of this article sums it up completely as to why.

"Between misdirected payments by one of the companies servicing his loan and the abusive collection tactics he encountered when he fell behind ..."

These companies that bought the loans on cheap from the secondary market, make more money from penalties they they do from loan servicing. And they have as many tricks up their sleeves as they can discover to help make that fact true.

They are the true sharks in the whole equation, with guaranteed support from the government and the tax payers.

I recommend that every last student default as things are now. If I were in charge of writing new laws for new student loans, which I am definitely not, I would allow them with three additional conditions. 1. They qualify for personal bankruptcy like any other consumer or investment loan, 2. they could NOT be sold off but would be held in a public trust fund, initially funded by public money, and topped up as needed, and 3. (Scandinavia does this) make repayment a modest surcharge in one's income tax. Make a lot, pay a lot and pay off fast. Make a little, pay a little and maybe never pay it off.

<comment><USER12> > They qualify for personal bankruptcy like any other consumer or investment > loan

You can't do this, nobody will pay them back. I'll take 7 years of shit credit for 200k cash, thank you very much.

<comment><USER2> Then don't give them the loans. That's how the system works. And if they don't get the loans, force the colleges, and the college towns to compete for the lesser funds.

Why should student loan originators get a free ride, when other consumer or investment loan providers don't?

<comment><USER13> Because the thinking was that by allowing access to higher education to less well-off students, you could end or reduce the classism and perpetuation of same.

A loan for which no collateral can ever be repossessed necessarily has a different economic profile than a personal loan and even moreso than a real property loan.

Absent those protections, you would see a very different (read: people who need loans won't qualify) student lending market.

Whether that's good or bad is a matter of which there will be a variety of opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does the fact that you can't get rid of your student loans via bankruptcy mean that students should get the lowest rate possible? Since the creditors will get paid? It seems ridiculous that not only can you not get rid of the loands through bankruptcy, but also that you're not charged lowest-interest-rate deals for them.

<comment><USER15> Student loans are at below-market interest rates and are guaranteed to be available in quantity. The market does not generally offer non-secured signature loans for $20k to $140k to people with no credit history or limited credit history and no income. When it does, it charges literally 10+% more.

<comment><USER16> I only care at what the banks' interest percentage is. Student loans should be at that. And that's 0.25%

Student loans are 8%. And that's bullshit. Theyre making 8% on us for absolutely nothing. And they get guaranteed repayment, since default risk is 0 due to garnishments.

<comment><USER17> This doesn't sound right. The markets are populated with people who will invest hundreds of millions of dollars to outcompete other firms for sub-penny advantages on trades, and, contrary to popular belief, the largest and most successful of those firms are not making so much money that they're upending the finance industry.

So if somebody is making 8% for doing "absolutely nothing", can you explain why somebody else isn't taking them to the cleaners by offering to do the same nothing for 7.9%?

<comment><USER16> That's because the interest rate is set by Congress. Captive audience.

In essence, there's no reason to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why is the face of these stories always someone who majored in something like "media arts"? Can the reporters not do better? Are they just mining their social circle? Does making it intentionally representative of the kind of person who makes poor life choices to begin with generate extra hate-links?

<comment><USER2> Says a person on a technology forum. Without the media arts people who do you think does your UI, and your UX, and all your graphic design work, and makes those snappy Apple commercials. Or works for all those ad companies that you love so much. If anything, he is part of your ecosystem.

<comment><USER18> The existence of people who do jobs like that does not imply that $50K sunk into an academic degree on a related subject is a good investment, unless Temple somehow has much better outcomes than other art / design related programs.

Regardless of the payoff, the weird thing is that stories in this genre really disproportionately mention people with degrees in some art / design field, like MFA-in-puppetry guy.

[http://www.thenation.com/article/audacity-occupy-wall- street...](http://www.thenation.com/article/audacity-occupy-wall-street/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Laws preventing bankruptcy on student loans is tantamount to indentured servitude imho; ergo a violation of Thirteenth Amendment. See Debt Bondage.

<comment><USER2> You are correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The companies I have to deal with for my loan for the most part are absolutely disgusting. Two out of three do not allow me to setup recurring payments and do not send email reminders before payment is due. They only let me set up scheduled payments two months in an advance. To keep a rhythm I try to pay every month at the same time, however the worst company does not count those monthly payments against what is owed every 3 months on a random day. Theres no email reminders but if I'm a day late I immediately get an email saying how much I owe and how much extra I have to pay now.

<comment><USER2> And if you dispute it, you still have to pay the penalty first before you can pay any of the outstanding loan amount, allowing them to hold the funds and determine, with your funds in their hands, whether or now the dispute is valid. Imagine 9 out of 10 times what that will result in.

Once you've lost control of the money, you've lost the dispute. The money is the only leverage you have in the dispute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Student loans have low rates, slow payback lengths, lenient default terms and government assistance. How are they stacked against the borrower again?

<comment><USER2> Low rates compared to what? Wall Street banks?

Lenient default terms compared to what?

Government assistance for the borrowers in what form?

And stacked against the borrowers due to the rapacious secondary market servicers. More money can be made off late fee and penalties than off simply servicing the loans, so they do everything in their power to make that the case, including misdirecting funds, misstating loan amounts, requiring burdensome documentation, while at the same time setting penalties on accounts.

<comment> norea-armozel It's why I won't refinance my student debt since all of it comes under an income based repayment. At worse, I will get dinged in 25 years for the remaining as a tax bracket jump, but I hope by then Congress will be forced to even drop that provision since it would literally sink quite a few people's fortunes who would be eligible and active voters.

<comment><USER2> You are smart. Good thinking. The best solutions, like this, should be available to us all.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should Paywalled Articles Be Penalized? - <AUTHOR> Hackernews is basically the front page of my internet. I view the front page multiple times a day, and enjoy reading the myriad interests of the community. Lately though, I've noticed my experience taking a turn for the worse - repeated articles with paywalls hastily slapped in front of them.
Perhaps I just have a fond view of the past, but paywalls didn't seem nearly as prevalent a year ago, and it seems like this problem is only going to get worse before it gets better (if it gets better at all).
I doubt this will get much traction, but I want to open up a discussion as to potential approaches HN can take to remedy this situation. Should paywalled articles be flagged visibly as such from the front page (so I know not to bother)? Should they be disallowed entirely? Is this just a made up problem, and I'm just yelling into the wind? I'm not sure. <comment><USER2> If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. Please see:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

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

and [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20paywall)

Paywalls suck and are annoying, but HN would be worse without WSJ, NYT, the New Yorker, the Economist, and so on. Hopefully someone will eventually fix publishing on the web, and then we won't have either the paywall problem or the paywall complaint problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> Usually some kind person posts an Outline link or an Archive link to the full article in the discussions. But I've also seen those get buried in the discussions about the article. My problem with paywalls is that even if you pay, most of them [1] still thrust trackers (including third party ones) and scripts on you. I find that to be evil. So I refuse to play that game with them and stay away.

To your point, what I'd like to see is a non-paywalled link, whenever shared by someone in the discussions, "pinned to the top" without any votes for it (or assigned a fixed number of votes). Considering that the default interface of HN is all about minuscule fonts that most people won't even notice, the "web" option is not discoverable by everyone (and seriously, what does "web" even mean when you're already on the web?). Hence a pinned comment with the same font and size as the rest of the comments, but with an indicator showing it's pinned.

[1]: As an exception, Ars Technica is the only bigger site I know where a paid subscription means you don't get any ads or trackers.

<comment><USER4> >Usually some kind person posts an Outline link or an Archive link to the full article in the discussions.

OP is probably asking because recent changes broke all the common workarounds for some major sites:

1\. HN's built-in "web" button (basically a Google redirect)

2\. outline.com

3\. archive.org

Currently all three workarounds are broken for New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

<comment><USER5> They seem receptive to an _entirely clean_ incognito browser. If you haven't cleared cookies and history etc or relaunched the usual workarounds fail. There's a few addons that will automate.

Turning off JS works for 9 out of 10 paywalls. There's a selection of addons that let you turn on or off JS on a per site basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No, if anything they should be prioritized (though perhaps below ShowHn, AskHn, and notable bloggers.

Where hacker news aggregates articles interesting to the technology community, many of the best researched articles are going to be from outfits that are selling articles instead of a captive audience.

Given the ire of digital advertising, invasive targeting, Amazon fake reviews, Facebook uninstalls, and Google avoidance; it seems that paying publishers for articles would be the top course of action to avoid bias, idea pollution, clickbait, etc.

The next similar source of topical information that's not tracking, only selling viewers as consumers, and has any viability is volunteers posting personal non-monetized blogs... Which would lack funding or efforts to journalistically research. That is at least absent state media companies like the BBC.

<comment><USER7> Like digital advertising sucks becuase tracking and privacy implcations. I dont think that is a good reason alone to promote pay walled articles. Alot of these sites even if you pay track users. So no dang differnce, but now a lot people cant read the article.

<comment><USER6> /s/can't/choose not to

While I suspect the average hacker news commenter can afford the discretionary income to subscribe to the nytimes and Washington Post, I also suspect most have access to the publications at their local public library, if not more locally at their place of business, or other places with news publications available.

As a "news aggregator site" , I suspect there is some quality increase if the community has enough interest in news to put some of these minimal efforts forward.

The quantity of nytimes articles posted and the popularity of those from votes to comments to thorough discussion indicates that a significant portion of the community derives value from these paid sources.

To be contrary, the times gets many more posts than the BBC, nih, and posts from other available free sources (Berkely, Stanford, MIT student papers or research) seem much more rare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> t-h-e-chief I wouldn't say penalised. They should very likely need to be titled appropriately though. ie.

Paywall: <some shitty NY Times article>

That said, some other articles should highlight that they are paid for by think tanks or whatever other shitty agenda agency is behind them.

</comment><comment><USER8> How about labeling them?

Eg for old links we have (2016), we could have eg: (2016, paywalled)

</comment><comment><USER9> I hate this pervasive attitude that paywalls are some sort of annoyance that sites just "hastily slap on" for no reason. They do it because the subscription is _how they make money, so that they can pay people to write all those articles that you want to read_.

Thousands of us pay for the subscriptions that enabled those articles to be written, while others complain about how annoying it is that they can't read them too. If you find that there are a lot of articles from a site you want to read but can't because of the paywall, that should be a hint that it's probably worth paying for.

Most of the major sites' subscriptions are very affordable, and they can only continue producing that content because some of us are willing to pay for it. Paywalls seem more common now because the old model of giving everything away for free _doesn 't work_.

<comment><USER10> The problem I have with paywalls is that I will not subscribe to a random site. Ever. It's not realistic for me to subscribe to the Times, WSJ, plus all the others. I subscribe to what I subscribe to.

Companies with paywalls will fail. They are failing slowly. The Times is perhaps most successful, but they are still spiraling downwards.

I think smarter companies will be ad supported or Patreon or some other business model that will work.

I don't begrudge bad companies for trying to hang onto their models. But what's annoying is when I forget about a paywall and click through to be annoyed.

I would like a feature in HN to filter out those articles because I can't read them. Circumventing their blocks is possible, but annoying.

<comment><USER11> If the company produces content that the rest of HN feels is quality content... maybe you should subscribe if you're interested in consuming the content?

You don't have to, but it's either that or perpetuate ad networks that spread malware.

<comment><USER10> I'm not interested enough to subscribe. It's cool that others find it valuable enough to subscribe.

But I think there are fewer and fewer willing each year, so they'll die out.

It reminds me of the record companies in 2000 who talked about value and whatnot while they all died off. It's cool that people liked paying, but the writing was on the wall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think one of the problems is that "paywalled" isn't always a binary thing; I can't count the number of times I've visited a link from HN and read an article, then gone to the comments to see people complaining about the paywall. And vice-versa - sometimes I find a paywalled article that none of the regular tricks seems to work for, but everybody's in the comments quoting and talking about the article. So it might not be as easy as just banning or labeling paywalled articles.

That said, it should probably be against the site guidelines to submit hard- paywalled articles; if the vast majority of the site's users can't read it, what's the point?

<comment><USER13> _> if the vast majority of the site's users can't read it, what's the point?_

Lots of articles from a particular paywalled publication getting submitted and upvoted could be taken as a useful signal that it's a publication worth paying for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's what the web link intends to solve.

It's not intuitive, and it's pretty kludgey, but it works. Click it on the next e.g. WSJ article that pops up and then pick the WSJ article from within Google's results - et voila, (likely) no paywall.

And the other sites... eh, if it's that valuable, someone will probably dump it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I do actively avoid links to paywall services and it can be a bummer to see multiple of them on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER15> Completely agree, it's decreasing my engagement because to me those articles are just noise.

I had an idea, perhaps HN could wrap content in outbound links (ie trackable) and disallow commenting/voting on content for users who haven't followed the outbound link? I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the voting is done based solely on headlines (and this is often reflected in the comments addressing the headline much more than the article - not that I'm completely innocent of that myself). People would probably be less likely to upvote something if they got paywalled</comment>


Lawrence Lessig: The made-up dramas of the Wall Street Journal - <AUTHOR> http://lessig.org/blog/2008/12/the_madeup_dramas_of_the_wall.html

<comment><USER2> It is pretty hard for someone not deeply immersed in the particular jargon of the debate to understand what Lessig is trying to communicate in his public statements. For example, this quote from Lessig's testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee is quite ambiguous:

"As I testified in 2006, in my view that minimal strategy right now marries the basic principles of "Internet Freedom" first outlined by Chairman Michael Powell, and modified more recently by the FCC, to one additional requirement — a ban on discriminatory access tiering. While broadband providers should be free, in my view, to price consumer access to the Internet differently — setting a higher price, for example, for faster or greater access — they should not be free to apply discriminatory surcharges to those who make content or applications available on the Internet. As I testified, in my view, such "access tiering" risks creating a strong incentive among Internet providers to favor some companies over others; that incentive in turn tends to support business models that exploit scarcity rather than abundance. If Google, for example, knew it could buy a kind of access for its video content that iFilm couldn't, then it could exploit its advantage to create an even greater disadvantage for its competitors; network providers in turn could deliver on that disadvantage only if the non-privileged service was inferior to the privileged service."

I understand how someone could misread that statement to support the view that Lessig is opposed to tiered content-provider access. I certainly did not get the point that Lessig wanted me to get when I first read his statement.

That said, journalists should try to get these things straight.

<comment><USER3> Instead of ranting on his blog, how about writing a nice letter to the editor? Newspapers screw things up all the time. I'm sure they would either a) defend the original story, or 2) issue a retraction.

Instead he wants to have a one-sided conversation. WSJ journal readers deserve better, and his blog readers deserve better. Do the right thing instead of trying to make everything into something that's bigger than what it is.

<comment><USER4> You are making assertions about what the man wants. Have you talked to him about that? Do you have any basis for your defamatory assertion whatsoever, other than observing that the WSJ has not yet published a Letter to the Editor from him?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a reader for more than 25 years, I cancelled my subscription to the WSJ when it recently changed hands and haven't so much a as peeked at it since. Considering it's current ownership I'm not surprised by this distortion

<comment><USER6> Just curious, what do you read instead?

<comment><USER7> Financial Times? The Economist? New Yorker? There's a lot of decent, event better, magazines and newspapers.

<comment><USER5> The WSJ was once a great paper, when it stuck to business and financial reporting and before Bartley, Noonan, and the current scum took over the editorial page. One could read the WSJ, NY Times, New Yorker, The Nation, and The National review to get a good healthy mix and diversity of strong opinion. I shudder to think what will happen if Murdoch gets his hands on the Times. Just my two cents, YMMV :)

<comment><USER2> WSJ has some of the best journalism on the planet. The editorial page is crap, but no other paper has as many in-depth articles about global markets. Want to read about China's problem with renegade mayors? Want to read about how western fishing policies are decimating African octopus fisheries? You're not going to read about that anywhere else besides the Wall Street Journal.

The closest approximation to the Journal is the Economist, and that's a weekly.

<comment><USER5> Well I certainly agree with your comment about the editorial page, though it was far better years ago, even including serious opposing views for balance.

However I would even caution readers with respect to the articles in the rest of the paper. I could no longer read an article about chinese mayors and give it any credence given Murdoch's ownership.

It was a sad day for me. The WSJ was the only online journal I ever paid money for.

<comment><USER8> "I could no longer read an article about chinese mayors and give it any credence given Murdoch's ownership."

Is there evidence of inaccurate reporting at the WSJ, or are you just basing this on the fact that Murdoch also owns Fox News?

<comment><USER5> I certainly have no evidence, as I mentioned I completely stopped reading it when Murdoch took over. Perhaps he will allow it to maintain it's quality. I've followed him for years, he used to own the South China Morning Post, at one point one of the few english papers available in Hong Kong. His flip flops with respect to the chinese government have certainly convinced me we don't share a lot of values.

I don't really watch TV at all, but occasionally view Fox in airports and such to keep up with what is on TV. I'm amazed that a lot of people actually watch that sort of thing as serious news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm very glad to see his response to what felt to me like a PR piece sponsored by the telcos.

</comment><comment><USER10> real transparency in journalism would be, below the title of the WSJ article, an update (a la tech blog like TechCrunch or VentureBeat) and link to Lessig's commentary.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Keep in mind it's now Fox news....

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I sent the authors of that article a pretty nasty letter this morning.

</comment><comment><USER13> Google response to WSJ art.: [http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/12/net- neutralit...](http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/12/net-neutrality- and-benefits-of-caching.html)</comment>


Building a location based iPhone App: from idea to my first users - <AUTHOR> http://missionlab.posterous.com/37126809 A blog post discussing my latest app release and some of the technical and design issues I had while building it. <comment><USER2> Great article. His observations of location polling strategies and battery life are spot on, so if you are interested in location-based services, read them carefully. When developing Jaiku Mobile (always-on rich presence sharing with location and other data) we learned same things.

There's actually two strategies that you've to manage: polling of the location (GPS usage) and sending it to the server (network usage). In 3G, there is a significant energy consumption cost, when you send small amount of data regularly to server, because the network stack has to be changed to higher- energy mode each time you send something over TCP/IP.

Even if you stay in a same location and the location data doesn't changed, you might need to send the data to server. Why? To indicate freshness of the data, server has to pinged to indicate that location data is still fresh, even if it hasn't changed. Indicating data's freshness can be important in tracking situation (e.g. Geoshare).

<comment><USER3> Did you ever consider using CellID to detect whether location has changed, before checking more precisely from GPS? Haven't tested it in a real product myself, but found this strategy in an old Symbian app, and it seemed quite clever -- especially in a 3G (or 3.5/4/whatever) mobile network cell size should be small enough that if the user is really moving, the CellID will also change quite quickly. And energy consumption to poll this is almost 0, assuming the device is a phone that is connected to the mobile network anyways.

<comment><USER2> Yes we used Cell ID and that was our main source of location data (GPS-enabled phones were quite rare back in 2006).

But cell id can change quite a lot even if you stay in the same place, depending on your signal strength.

Btw. did that old Symbian app happened to be called ContextPhone? It was a precursor of Jaiku Mobile.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your response. Was this all on Symbian platform? Does that platform give you access just to the active cell, or also the neighboring ones? I wonder if using the full list of neighboring cells could help, that's available at least via Android API.

Nope, it was not ContextPhone. Something for basic phone tracking.

<comment><USER2> Symbian gave access to the active cell only.

I heard a story that back then this was required by operators, because with good access to neighbouring cells and their signal strengths, people could easily build tools to compare networks in different areas and "prove" that one operator is better than the other. I don't know if the story is true.

You can do very accurate locationing with neighbouring cells and cloud-based database and some simple Bayesian modelling. Google does something similar with their non-GPS locationing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is a great idea. I would add one feature: send a 2nd text message when you're within 1 mile. (Or whatever distance you choose.) My girlfriend wants me to notify her before I actually get to her apartment. Having my smartphone do this for me automatically would be awesome! (This way I don't need to use my phone while I'm driving.)

<comment><USER5> A text message can't be sent without confirmation from the user on iOS.

<comment><USER4> Then a message should be sent to a server that forwards the SMS text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's a great app. I have wanted something similar for android. It combines the ease of text messaging without the commitment and participation required for Latitude or the like.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi ! Very nice idea, I like the app. A few comments :

\- Why the heck is it free ? I would have paid for it !

\- Can you make the web page for your follower display nicely on a computer web browser ?

\- corollary : could you allow direct sending of emails ? (rather than copy + switch app + paste)

\- on the web site, you could show screens of the app, not just the client.

Otherwise congratulations, it's quite nice and that would have been the next app I would have developed if I ever finish my current one;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I debated heavily between paid and free when I released it. I went with free initially because I felt I wanted to get a simple version of the product out there. At some point I might go the freemium root and offer a paid version with some additional features.

\- Emails are coming along with better formatting for desktop browsers

\- Thanks for feedback on the website!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome, well-thought post by a clear veteran.

"With GeoShare I was consistently fighting against myself not to add more features that I knew would be useful. This was a difficult thing for me to resist since I myself used the product daily and had a sense what I wished it could do. But they say if you're not embarrased by your first product then you waited too long."

'nuf said.

</comment><comment><USER9> Awesome. You should partner with UberCab: www.uber.com

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea I'll email them. I've also thought about approaching delivery-type services like Dominos.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if you couldn't white-label the technology and sell it to those types of businesses. That way they could apply their own branding and incorporate it into their existing sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congratulations on not only 'shipping' but documenting the process. I've been working on something technically similar, but with a very different application. Can't wait to share!

</comment><comment><USER12> does anyone know why the default location is cupertino in the ios simulator? i want to think it's because of speed (why take time to find your location during each run?), but i'm starting to wonder if it's because the difficulty in getting an accurate location lock on a wifi network for example.

i've found that detecting geolocation on a non-mobile device such as a laptop (even using the latest w3c navigator.geolocation standard) is pretty unreliable. it took me some searching to figure out that the function has an infinite timeout by default, which makes debugging interesting. sometimes just doesn't get the location at all. a professor had expressed the same sentiments in more length here: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3397585/navigator- geoloca...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3397585/navigator-geolocation- getcurrentposition-sometimes-works-sometimes-doesnt)

<comment><USER13> I'm sure the reasons are just a) they wanted to hard-code a location for the simulator, since it doesn't have a GPS, and b) Apple is located in Cupertino.

For my GPS-app, we have code to simulate fake GPS readings on the simulator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The alert has a "Do it!" button.

Reminded me of : [http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Do_It.txt)

</comment><comment><USER7> Another point : it's an interesting developer's perspective, but its lacking in numbers. Maybe too young for that ? There are no ads on the client nor on the app, and the app is free. Do you have a monetization plan ?

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this basically Glympse minus the timer element?

[http://gigaom.com/2010/12/17/8-apps-for-the-new- smartphone-o...](http://gigaom.com/2010/12/17/8-apps-for-the-new-smartphone- owner/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I mentioned that in the blog post under "The competitive scare"

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> wait a second, so none of the existing apps do this? is it because they have not thought of a simple thing like texting location url to a contact or they tried to lock in new users using twitter, facebook, etc. contact list import thing?

</comment><comment><USER17> awesome app! very useful for letting someone know where you are if you're running late for a meeting. Also cool to let friends know you are around if you're in their town travelling. Nice job!

</comment><comment><USER18> Been looking for this. Wonder why that doesn't happen more often.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great details on how to be a great mobile location app.

</comment><comment><USER20> Great article.

</comment><comment><USER21> Let this be a lesson to anyone working on a product. I've been building an app that does exactly the same thing for the last couple of months. You _have_ to be first to market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey -- neither of us is first to market on this one. I found out of others even as I was building it. I almost gave up but then figured I might as well go for it. I address this in the post -- the market it young and is ripe for plenty of products.

<comment><USER22> glympse? Ish, would like to connect with you. we build geo apps, and work out of the mission (in the us bank building on 22nd and Mission).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure we can meetup you can contact me at my twitter @ishish or email: ishish (at) gmail</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Phoneless in Paris - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33731981 <comment><USER2> One of the offices at my previous job is situated on rue de Dunkerque, about 150m from the main Gare du Nord entrance. My boss and the CEO (who was in Milan) were on the phone, while my boss, using the headphones, was walking towards the metro station. My boss was monologuing about some issue in production, went through the security gates, kept monologuing until he reached one of the trains, and told the CEO that he was about to get on a train and the communication would probably drop out. It's only then that he realised that he was talking to himself. He searched through his pockets but only found the end of his headphones cable, disconnected, and no phone to be found.

It slowly dawned on him that his phone had been taken just before he went through the security gates.

About two weeks later, the exact same thing happened, only closer to the office. His phone got stolen right from his pocket. He usually keeps his phone either in the front pockets of his trousers, or the inside pocket of his jacket. He lost 4 phones over the course of 6 months. His phones rarely reach the one-year-old status.

The other end of the conversation was a bit more comical: The CEO was listening to his COO, heard some commotion, then heard someone panting and street noises, cars honking. He figured that my boss had been run-over; he usually finishes that story by concluding that, in horror, he immediately posted about the job opening on job boards.

<comment><USER3> Just got back from Paris in June, and Gar du Nord is definitely rife with pickpocketers, but they are actually really easy to spot if you know what to look for. They were casing my wife and I every time we went there for a train.

Right now, the big thing is to send in kids with a piece of paper, asking you to sign it and give them a donation. The kids sometimes pretend to be deaf, and they basically demand a minimum donation of 8 euros. Their piece of paper is all crumpled and filthy, but the kids usually look like normal European 8-year-old girls, often blond and cleanly dressed.

However, somewhere behind these girls, probably 20 to 30 feet away, will be a handler. The few we saw were always old women who looked like Eastern European grandmothers, and were probably the "Roma" everyone likes to call out.

This handler floats behind the kids and watches where phones and wallets go when they're placed back in pockets. She then drifts by if you engage the kids. The kids are the distraction, she's the pickpocket.

Frankly, though, if you pay any attention at all to the areas around you at Gare du Nord, or anywhere else in Europe, it's very easy to see this stuff going down and be safe. We were warned a dozen times about theft in Europe before our lengthy trip, but really, you just have to behave as you would in Manhattan or in San Francisco.

Frankly, you can lose your phone just as quickly in the Mission if you're on a busy bus and not paying attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The guy was really really lucky, especially in Paris. I lost my wallet twice , but fortunately since I used to live in a small city (less than 100 000 inhabitants) I got it back.

But yeah, the subway or the train in Paris is absolutely not safe in general, avoid it if you can, rent a car or a bike, you'll enjoy the city way more if you are a tourist that way.

The Roma criminality certainly has to do with poverty, but I'm sorry they also have a specific culture and raised into a specific environment that favor criminal behavior. It's a disservice to dismiss it as "xenophobia" or something else when these people are heavily despised everywhere they go in Europe, and for obvious reasons. It feels like they don't even care about themselves and they have no self-love. There is more than 400 Roma slums around Paris, and when I say slum , I'm talking about the real deal, people leaving in "cardboard houses" in the middle of garbage. I don't think it's normal.

<comment><USER5> "Roma criminality"... "they have no self-love"... Sorry, but this is xenophobia, and Europeans are better than Americans at it. The systematic exclusion of groups from the mainstream creates extra-legal behaviors (or "culture", as you say) to make ends meet. Plus, Europeans love a scapegoat; it's part of a long, illiberal tradition on the continent.

<comment><USER4> > Europeans are better than Americans at it

Oh please, Ok, let's talk about the racism against blacks in US before talking about the alleged European xenophobia.

<comment><USER6> It never pays to generalize about a culture/race/society not ones own. Such effort gains little more than bigotry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've managed to avoid having any of my phones stolen since living in Paris. As a prank a friend of mine nicked it out of my coat pocket and since then I never keep anything valuable in them except winter gloves.

One of the scams pickpockets play is to try and distract you. I don't know a lot of people so I avoid conversation with strangers on the street. though I might engage in the bar.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wouldn't another moral be that not all immigration waves bring the same kind of people ? Immigrants from asia have, everywhere ( to my knowledge), brang people that work hard, have children that do great at school, and only protest to ask for more police force rather than less (true story from a recent protest in the belleville district in Paris, because chineese (sometimes illegal) immigrants were often attacked by north-africans that stole their bags, knowing they wouldn't go see the police).

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is this behavior tolerated across all of Europe? Seems like they run the same scams in each country. Why don't the police run stings and arrest them? Or is it because the police are also on vacation when the tourists come in summer?

<comment><USER10> Well in Belgium it's because they arrest them. The cops put down their information at the station, and they are out 3 hours later. MAYBE later they are summoned for trial, months later. But good luck by then.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Frpjs – Functional reactive programming library for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/santoshrajan/frpjs <comment><USER2> I've recently been looking at the relevance and usefulness of FP in javascript, and I've just started looking at the Reactive paradigm, mainly in the Rxjs[1] library.

Is this built based on similar principles?

[1] [https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions/RxJS](https://github.com/Reactive- Extensions/RxJS)

<comment><AUTHOR> It is similar, though more on the lines of the video on the github page.

<comment><USER2> If I were trying to choose between the two, what reasons are there to pick yours as opposed to RxJS?

<comment><AUTHOR> You should pick RxJS. frpjs is new and has a long way to go. Conceptually it is different.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Maker of free games suggests how much to donate with fun visualization  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cheapass.com/about/howmuch

<comment><USER2> Pretty funny that "Street Performer / Homeless" is expected to pay more than "Student / Teacher" (probably accurate, too).

<comment><USER3> Depends where you live. You can make hundreds of $ a day as a street performer if you're good, and you have a good spot (preferably one with some tourists who havent managed to quite work out the exchange rate yet.)

Bonus points for being student at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would like to see an A/B test with and without that chart to see what the difference in donation rates is. I think the chart probably helps, but always better to gather data right?

</comment><comment><USER5> I hope for the sake of their wallets that people working at startups don't take this chart too seriously. Based on the job postings I've seen in the past 6 months an awful lot of people would be paying the "rock star" rates!

</comment><comment><USER6> I think comparing with other products (coffee at Starbucks, burger at McDonalds etc.) might be more effective.

</comment><comment><USER7> +1 for the reference to Edward Tufte/Charles Minard Napoleon map.</comment>


Light Posts in Tiananmen Square Are Just Like 1984 - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/gallery/iv9X9

<comment><USER2> Coming soon to America, except in creepier drone-shape.</comment>


Upgrading my HP 2910al to a 10GbE Fiber Optic Internet Connection - <AUTHOR> http://geekomatic.ch/2011/04/11/1302522420000.html

<comment><USER2> > Fiber optic transceivers are crazy expensive--easily equally or more pricy > than CPUs by both size and weight. I'm glad we don't need a long run!

Presuming you are connecting devices within the same rack, you can easily get a 10gbe card and relevant twinax cable for less than 500 bucks -- these cables have dedicated SFP+ modules on each end, eliminating the need for transceivers.

The switches, on the other hand, will cost you a pretty penny

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, twinax will not reach the meet-me room in your colo.</comment></comment>


A Guide to Post-Quantum Cryptography - <AUTHOR> https://blog.trailofbits.com/2018/10/22/a-guide-to-post-quantum-cryptography/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is one of the better introductions to post-quantum cryptography that I've seen. It's pretty light on math and it offers broad coverage; including some of the current state of the art systems under consideration by NIST.

An especially good focus here is the comparison of systems based on different classes of intractability assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER2> The general sense seems to be that you either get long keys or fast computation but not both?

<comment><AUTHOR> As of the current state of the art: yes, that's correct. Isogenies are slow with very small key sizes; lattices (and Goppa codes) are fast with large key sizes.

Isogenies are a good use case for e.g. constrained hardware that doesn't have much space but can tolerate longer key exchange turnaround times. Conversely you'd really want something like lattices for typical key exchange between a client browser and web server.

Code-based solutions have similar advantages and disadvantages lattices and are much older. McEliece is only slightly older than RSA. But because the structure of most types of error correcting codes, it has been very difficult to develop safe systems with the same versatility as lattice based systems. Code-based systems have fewer intractability problems available and virtually all types of codes tried to date have been broken - see research over the past two decades by Nicolas Sendrier, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is great. Deidre Connolly has been doing a pretty fantastic job of popularizing elliptic curve isogeny crypto, and her talk at Cloudflare is an excellent (detailed) intro to post-quantum key exchange:

[https://twitter.com/durumcrustulum/status/839279075315314692](https://twitter.com/durumcrustulum/status/839279075315314692)

</comment><comment><USER4> Talking about LWE, the author says:

> A major problem with this system is that it has very large keys. To encrypt > just one bit of information requires public keys with size n^2 in the > security parameter.

Can't this be solved by e.g. forcing some kind of random sparsity structure on the matrix and then compressing with a format like CSC or CSR? (probably just not understanding LWE completely)

<comment><USER5> The issue is that finding a class of sparse matrices that don't ruin the security guarantees is really tricky. This more or less is the approach that ring-lwe takes - the matrices can be represented as polynomials and therefore are only linear in the security parameter, not quadratic (it also speeds up all the other operations via FFT-type techniques). But even there you have to be really careful about how you're constructing these polynomials, which boils down to a bunch of fancy algebraic number theory.

<comment><USER4> Hm, I see. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've long hypothesized that quantum computers pose a threat to crypto- currencies. This article spurred me to dig a little deeper, and yeah, things don't look great long term for bitcoin [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609408/quantum- computers-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609408/quantum-computers- pose-imminent-threat-to-bitcoin-security/)

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://pqcrypto.org/](https://pqcrypto.org/)

<comment><USER3> Useful archive of papers, but pretty dated at this point.

<comment><USER7> Really? Darn</comment></comment></comment>


Irish politician calls for crack down on "open source Internet browsers" - <AUTHOR> http://www.finegael.ie/latest-news/2013/odonovan-calls-for-crackd/index.xml

<comment><USER2> Well, I'm glad Ireland's politicians have such grasp of the subject.

Someone should mention (in monosyllabic terms obviously) that most Tor nodes runs Linux, an open source operating system, also in serious need of a good cracking down.

      "Law enforcement agencies in the United States have recently taken
      action to address this issue, however it appears the solution was
      temporary as replacement browsers quickly appeared to ensure the
      continuance of the illegal trade."

I can't quite decide whether this is genius level satire, or serious.

<comment><USER3> It's genius level stupidity.

I don't know if you have ever had the experience of trying to explain something to someone so deeply committed to paranoid stupidity that they are actively resistant to new knowledge. You could try monosyllables, or even 'Quest for Fire' style grunts and grimaces, but the results will be the same. They tend to pick a few striking keywords from what you are saying (just the words, not any actual concepts), and they will run with those. Someone probably did try to explain to O'Donovan, but all he heard was "blah, blah, open source, blah, blah, blah".

I suspect that O'Donovan is not the originator of the initiative that he is championing here, but that he has been made privy to some insider information about an impending EU crackdown on internet anonymity (which politicians and bureaucrats hate as a matter of course) and he hopes to make political capital by taking credit for it.

<comment><USER2> > I don't know if you have ever had the experience of trying to explain > something to someone so deeply committed to paranoid stupidity that they are > actively resistant to new knowledge.

I have actually, but I rather naively assumed that politicians would have researchers or similar to make sure they can at least articulate the talking points they adopt.

> or even 'Quest for Fire' style grunts and grimaces

PMSL :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't worry everyone. As the article says, O'Donovan has written to the Chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Communications, John O'Mahony TD, who is well-qualified to see through this nonsense -- he was elected because of his fame as the manager of the 1998 and 2001 All-Ireland winning Galway Gaelic football team.

</comment><comment><USER5> So much here that is wrong...

But what does he mean with "Law enforcement agencies in the United States have recently taken action to address this issue (open source browsers)" in the last paragraph?

<comment><USER6> I assume the FBI exploiting Firefox in a previous version of Tor Browser Bundle (on Windows only!).

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/freedom-hosting- fbi...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I figure this is in response to the Silk Road extradition trial that's coming up (January 21).

[http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/man-faces- extrad...](http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/man-faces-extradition- to-us-over-alleged-link-to-drug-site-29912949.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Wait -- I've heard that most of the drug trade is conducted in US dollars. Let's crack down on those!

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm sooooooooooooooooooooo sorry</comment>


Artist Arrested by Detroit Police While Working on a Mural for the City - <AUTHOR> https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/arts/2019/06/22/sheefy-mcfly-arrested-detroit-police-street-art/1538157001/ <comment><USER2> "The disagreement led to McFly being arrested on suspicion of resisting and obstructing, as well as for a warrant that was previously issued for an old parking ticket"

</comment><comment><USER3> What's this have to do with HN?</comment>