Loneliness Is a Warning Sign to Be Social - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/loneliness-is-a-warning-sign-to-be-social <comment><USER2> As I've gotten older I've become more and more picky about who I want to spend time with.

It used to be, when I was a lot younger, that I would be pretty indiscriminate: as long as someone wanted to spend time with me, and they were nice enough, and we could find something to do together that we enjoyed, like watching a movie, playing a game, or just hang out and talk about something (usually meaningless), that would be enough.

But as I got older, I started to see that as a waste of time, and started to notice how little I had in common with the people I spent time with, and how rarely we talked about or did anything that was really meaningful for me, and it started to bother me.

So, over the years I've lost touch with most of my old friends.. and, as I'm not very social, and I'm usually quite content with my own companionship, I really haven't gone to the great trouble of finding new friends, especially now as my standards have gotten so much higher.

The result? I've pretty much no friends left. Occasionally, someone at work reaches out to me, but, really, I recognize that we have little in common, and I usually don't respond in kind. So I'm pretty much alone, and probably will remain so for the rest of my life. Usually I'm ok with that, but sometimes I notice some couples or groups of friends around me, having fun, laughing together, and it bothers me. But not enough for me to make a big change in my life.

<comment><USER3> >started to notice how little I had in common with the people I spent time with

What do you mean by this, specifically? I've wrestled with the idea of finding people I have more "in common with," but I've ended up at a place where I think the idea of "best friends" is kind of an overblown myth, or at least it's a LOT rarer than people think it is. What's the fun in hanging out with someone who's the same as you, anyway?

I'm come to realize that, while I tend to think I'm losing touch with old friends because "we don't have a lot in common anymore," it's far more often just because one or both of us is being a shitty friend and the relationship isn't giving enough satisfaction in return to continue investing in maintaining it for one or both parties.

>how rarely we talked about or did anything that was really meaningful for me

But really, if you always did "meaningful" things and always had "meaningful" conversations with your friends, then nothing would actually stand out as "meaningful." Maybe there are other reasons to converse and hang out with people than finding deep meaning in everything. Most people seeking out that deeper "meaning" tend to have to find it for themselves, they don't just discover a perfect group of like-minded individuals who can evoke the meaning of life from their deep, intellectual conversations with each other.

>sometimes I notice some couples or groups of friends around me, having fun, laughing together, and it bothers me

I think this is sort of a social darwinism version of the imposter syndrome. It seems so easy when you see a group of people laughing together. It seems like they just effortlessly entertain each other, but nobody sees the inner workings behind the scenes. Nobody sees the fact that Jenny secretly hates Stacy, but hides it because the group is fun to hang out with and Stacy is always there, or that Steve is dating Brian's ex and Brian says it's fine but really secretly hates it, etc...

This idea where you see couples or groups of people who just seem to effortlessly get along, and it seems like they aren't even trying is totally false. Sure, there are people for whom social skills come far more naturally, but relationships of any kind take effort by both parties to maintain and grow.

<comment><USER2> > What do you mean by this, specifically?

Well, I guess I can elaborate a bit. I have a bunch of obscure interests, and most people haven't even heard of them, much less share them or are nearly as interested in them as I am. I used to be ok with that, and would hang out with people who would want to talk about and do things that I have absolutely no interest in, but after a while I realized that I was wasting my time doing that.

I'd rather just spend the time by myself, reading about, learning, or doing things that I was interested in. One thing I take great refuge in is reading old books by or about truly great authors and people, and they're always interested in and talk about exactly the things I am interested in, simply because I choose to read only those books which are about what I'm interested in (or am open to becoming interested in).

From time to time, I've joined clubs or gone to meetups of people who are interested in one of the things that I am interested in, but then it's rare for them to be interested in the other obscure things I'm interested in. And I guess that's where I get too picky for my own good, as there's really little chance of finding people who share all or even a significant fraction of the obscure stuff I'm interested in.

Not that it has to be all about common interests. If I could somehow make a deep connection with someone I could see myself getting interested in some of the things they were interested in, or vice-versa. But that's hard to do if you don't already have something in common to begin with.

As to your point about what's happening behind the scenes of a superficially happy looking group of people, I recognize that it may not (and probably isn't) quite as idyllic as it looks on the surface, and that recognition gives me even less reason to seek companionship with other people. There's often a lot of pain and effort involved, and for me it's just not worth it. It's so much easier and simpler to just stay my own best (and only) friend.

<comment><USER4> There's nothing wrong with the path you've chosen for yourself but I can say based on my anecdotal experience that human social dynamics, particularly in groups, can be counter-intuitive and are definitely a "you get what you put in" kind of thing (not to be confused with being a doormat for your "friends").

I think it's remarkably important to surround yourself with people that are _meaningful to you_ ; that to me is different from _things in common_. Having things in common helps provide a medium for bonding but it's rarely the specific activity that is the focus for bonding, it's the shared experience that is.

There are lots of people that I call friends with whom I have little in- common, but there's a specific experience I've had with them or perhaps one specific thing to bond over that has created a strong connection.

Meaningful conversation is important too but I often find that _trying_ to have a conversation _I want to have_ can be productive. Many people are actually very interested in different ways of thinking or approaching life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I moved into an apartment alone about a year ago now. I absolutely delight living alone and being by myself in a way that I didn't think was possible. I was worried that I'd be lonely and miserable, but I'm not. Sometimes I want some company, but usually I'm content to spend time alone reading or coding or, hell, just thinking.

<comment><USER6> I experienced something similar. Having my own small apartment was one of the best feelings I've ever experienced in my life. I'm a bit antisocial, but not severely so. I'm more introverted than anything else, and I discovered that I'm incredibly productive when I have a space to myself that I can retire to whenever I want and over which I have complete control.

All my life I struggled with issues related to introversion, and having my own apartment basically solved all of them overnight. I've never been more social in my life than I was when I lived alone. The reason is simple: I was always able to recharge and never got to the point of being consistently drained.

I've been conflicted ever since with how I want to live the rest of my life, as living alone is in conflict with a lot of other goals that are also very important to me, like marriage.

<comment><USER7> I'm currently dealing with if I want to rent out an apartment by myself or if I want to find a roommate/friend to share it with. On one hand, YAY NO PEOPLE AND FULL CONTROL OF THE PLACE; on the other hand, I don't want to get depressed when I start missing seeing people when I get home. I feel like living on my own would help me so much socially/physically/emotionally than finding someone to room with.

<comment><USER8> Roommates should be seen as a business transaction. I would not rely on then for social interaction. Some of the horror stories suggest they could be very detrimental to your mental health. Also a quick way to find out you don't like your friend as much as you thought you did is to live with them 24/7.

<comment><USER7> That's true. I believe I make enough to manage a decent-to-nice apartment on my own, so I won't have to have a roommate to make rent. Right now, I'm just saving up and paying off student loans and my credit card and casually looking at apartments near the city and my work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> About living alone: There's a huge difference between being alone because you want to, and being alone by lack of choice. At first time I lived alone in my hometown it feels marvelous. I can study, work or bring anyone I want to my home without nobody pissing me off about whatever I do. Nice. But I tried the same living in São Paulo and I felt absolutely depressed. Reason? Simple: Lack of company when I want to. At my hometown I could visit my brother and my friends whenever I wanted to. I can't say the same about São Paulo (800km far away). Then I learned the lesson and share my home since then. At the moment I live with 3 people, which feels nice and balanced. My own privacity, my silence, my space, plus people to talk to when I want to.

<comment><USER10> that's the difference between solitude and loneliness. Sometimes you need solitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I miss being alone so much I could cry. It wasn't long ago that I could get up in the morning to my empty apartment, stay in my apartment all day (I worked from home), and only see people when I felt like it. Throwing massive parties for 50+ people every month or so works amazingly well for both socialization _and_ increasing your social standing.

Nowadays I work from an office with a bunch of other people around me at all times. When I come home, there's my girlfriend. Sure I love her and I definitely can't afford my own rent, but sometimes I just wish I could come home to an empty apartment, you know?

Late nights are the last bastion of aloneness I can get. But how long can I maintain a schedule of going to bed at 2am or 3am and being bright and ready at the office by 10am? it works for now, but I'll be 30 next year. Surely there are limits.

The funny thing is that this prevalence of forced-upon social contact makes me too tired to build a real social network. I just don't have the energy to hang out with friends, or even much inclination to see them. This often makes me feel lonelier than I ever did when I spent 90% of my days alone.

<comment><USER12> My fiance is extremely introverted. We eventually realized that she needed this "apartment to myself" feeling at least once a week in order to function in the real world and do the extrovert obligations she needed to do. So we instituted "introvert time", where I work late until around 10PM and leave our place to her for about five hours after she gets home.

This is enough for her to take the time to walk around undressed, read articles, make some food, watch junk TV and enjoy the silence before I get home. Relationship-defining quality of life improvement. I similarly enjoy working late knowing it is creating value (as opposed to feeling guilty and conflicted, which eventually becomes burnout). Highly recommend it.

<comment><USER13> curious... what are you guys gonna do when you have kids?

<comment><USER14> He currently works overtime to give her time alone. Only thing that changes is work stops solving the problem of how to be out of the house.

<comment><USER12> This. I will take the kids somewhere to do something while she is alone. Otherwise same deal. It is worth it net net.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is one of those things that just can't be reiterated enough just for the sake of those who need to hear it -- either for the first time or again.

> Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed,

Our modern obsession with failure is really the problem. If "failure" wasn't a thing, we'd get up and do something, but instead we give ourselves reasons to attack ourselves and make it some existential threat, all the while thinking exercising our intellect will solve all our problems.

Thinking of loneliness will only make you lonelier. Instead, if one acted on it, the natural progression would lead to relationships, love, and babies. Perfectly natural course of action.

Fuck failure. Whoever got you thinking you are a failure is an idiot, so punch them in the mouth, even if that person is you. At least that's doing something about it!

</comment><comment><USER16> I work at home and program for a living. I just went to an AA meeting for the first time in a long time. I quit going 6 mos. ago because I disagree with the program's focus on god, but the loneliness of being isolated at home drove me back. My AA friends welcomed me back. When I got home, I took my blood pressure (I have high BP) and noticed it was much lower than I expected. Edit: I like solitude and can handle and enjoy a lot of it, but there is such a thing as too much for me apparently.

</comment><comment><USER17> I moved out from Bay Area, where I had tons of friends. I would go out every other night to hang out with my friends. Talk about startups and upcoming tech stuff and lots of beer off course. But then I found myself in a loop, same old routine. I decided to move some other state, where I am complete stranger. Its been 5 years since I left. Do I get lonely? Off course I do. I would be lying if I won't. But, I don't get depressed. I don't let my brain get in "trap" of convincing myself that I need 100 friends and I need to socialize more. I picked up lot of other activities. Started learning french. Playing guitar and tons of other stuff I thought I would never get time to do.

<comment><USER18> well, as always, this is generalisation and individual experiences may vary ;) (is this grammatically correct?).

This is not a critique of your argument, but most of the time if discuss these kind of articles (or general psychological things) there are always counterexamples. This is the real world, not math.

<comment><USER19> Since you asked for feedback:

> this is generalisation

Should be: "this is a generalization". It's understandable though.

> This is not a critique of your argument

Again understandable, but should be something like "I am not criticizing your argument".

The rest is correct I think. Hope I got everything right, I'm not a native speaker either :)

<comment><USER20> As a native en_GB speaker, "This is not a critique of your argument" sounds perfectly idiomatic to me

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think it wouldn't be wrong to guess that HN hosts a larger loner base than the general public. Most of us are introverts and we start life with a hindrance when it comes to interpersonal relationships. As we grow older, the gap between our communication skills and general public's grow wider. (It seems very similar to relative age effect.*)

In a different world where communicators are scarce, we would be forced to be better communicators by our peers and elders; like we push children to learn math and science, or (lately) programming. To our detriment world is full of able communicators and they can't understand why we can't communicate better.I think of it this way: I sincerely can't understand why a person fails to understand basic programming concepts like a while loop and the communicators (extroverts if you'd like) can't understand why we can't handle small talk.

The problem grows bigger and harder to handle because our natural inclinations are toward subjects that are deemed smarter(scarce I'd say) and we start seeing ourselves smarter and more skilled which leads to superiority complex: We start thinking and behaving as if we are above the things that make us feel inferior in the first place. We start to think that we create tangible things while others babble all day. We become living examples of Dunning–Kruger effect when it comes to interpersonal relations.

Nobody likes a smartass, so people leave us alone with our huge Egos.

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

<comment><USER22> I strongly disagree with most of what you have described.

A lack of interest in certain topics or unwillingness to engage in particular activities does not automatically imply that I think those are below me or that I'm superior. I'm simply indifferent.

This is a popular misunderstanding that people keep repeating over and over again "Oh he doesn't like X he must think he is too good for that.".

Second I disagree with the notion that complying with the social norm is "social/communication skill" while an unwillingness to conform, or being slightly different from the norm somehow means defective or low "communication skill".

I know damn well how to conform and make everyone approve of me and praise me for "communication skills" but I simply don't want to.

If I don't dive into the smalltalk that's because I have no desire to do so, not because of my communication skills.

It's like a bunch of introverts blaming the others for not having good "solitude skills".

How come we don't fault extroverts for not being able to shut up for a while?

<comment><USER21> My point to take was communication is a skill and like every other skill, there is a gap in understanding between masters and novices. It happens everywhere; expert carpenters forget how they first started so they can't relate to their apprentices. In every practice, the basics are ingrained into master's psyche and they can't understand how you can't handle such a simple task.

In every skill there are protocols to learn as a beginner and small talk is where you start when it comes to communication. I think that people are like programming languages. Each one of us are Turing complete, but each one of us are suited better for different tasks.

Small talk is the "Hello World" of human interaction. You start understanding other people's syntax and how they function through small talk. Extroverts understand that innately. You can't move on to deeper subjects with another person until you understand what they are made of.

We tend to dismiss small talk as unimportant so we fail to build rapport with our peers. Without rapport, our relations and the topics we discuss stay shallow. We start misjudging other people as shallow based on our interactions, failing to recognize our indifference toward other people is the root cause of this shallowness.

Communication is the pillar human society is built upon so it is a good idea to master its intricacies. Especially in this age if you want to build anything worthwhile, you have to have a deep understanding of how to communicate with others. If you have that understanding kudos to you.

We generally fail to understand that, and my first comment was exploring why I personally failed and became lonelier over time, hoping that it might help someone in a similar situation since being and feeling lonely is not good for the long term.*

To answer your last question; I think "mindfulness" is just introverts blaming others for not having good solitude skills and doing something about it.

Thank you for this interaction.

* There is a longitudinal Harvard study on happiness, you might want to watch the TED talk of its director : [https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good...](https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone who has bad social anxiety, I find that forcing myself to be social seems to have a much more negative effect on my health than being lonely.

<comment><USER24> It goes away after you have tried talking to strangers a thousand times. Living in a big city helps. You won't see them twice if you fuck up. State something obvious and see how it goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I only feel lonely when I'm with people.

<comment><USER26> This resonates a lot with me. Whenever I participate in a social gathering there are already long-established "cliques" and they just talk among themselves. I feel this especially at wedding receptions -- I find myself awkwardly walking around while everyone is chatting, and I'm just wasting time until I feel ready to make my irish exit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What on earth is with that headline? It's like saying "hunger is a warning sign to eat." Gosh, really?

<comment><USER28> Maybe it has to do with the fact that Western society emphasizes individualism?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The article was fine, but what an unhelpful headline. It's like saying "Depression is a warning sign that you need to start being happier."

The time in my life where I most struggled with loneliness, I had just moved to a new big city. I went out looking for social experiences literally all the time, but never found the people that I could form deep friendships with. Transient social interactions and passing friendships, sure, but deep social relationships just take a long time to form. Eventually I moved to another city where I had more friends, and now I'm much happier.

Loneliness is just psychologically crushing.

</comment><comment><USER30> Who would have thought that feeling bad about something is a warning system. It's just like physical pain, it's emotional pain. Pain acts as a regularizer of the learning functions that the brain optimizes.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does loneliness cause depression and loss of mobility, or vice-versa, or is there another causative factor behind all these things...? Intuitively, it probably works differently for different people.

</comment><comment><USER32> It is the contrary to me, the older I get the more I want to be social than to spend time alone, I used to be a lonely wolf, now I like reunions.

</comment><comment><USER33> Duh</comment>


A Note of Positivity for the Recently Laid-Off - <AUTHOR> https://blog.basilgohar.com/2020/03/30/a-note-of-positivity-for-the-recently-laid-off/ <comment><AUTHOR> Though the sting and specter of looming layoffs is still fresh for everyone, and news about the pandemic seems gloomy, I think we can all use a bit of a note of positivity.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, really helpful!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I get a new domain for the product I'll launch? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
My colleague and I will soon launch a landing page for an upcoming product, which is basically a mobile app.
We are debating whether we should get a new domain for this product of if it won't make a difference.
Our "main" domain, the organization's one, is 6 characters long and ending with .com.
Our product's name is also 6 characters long, so our landing page would be abcdef.ghijkl.com.
Another point that was mentioned was e-mails, will it be a problem to have an e-mail like firstname.lastname@example.com? <comment><USER2> I've typically combined both options. The shorter domain (abcdef.com) is just a pointer to the longer one (abcdef.ghijkl.com).

Emails with subdomains in them sure are rare, but not non-existent. Especially if you live overseas .co.uk etc. Imagine emailing firstname.lastname@example.com. Pretty extreme.

But still, I see this sort of thing with .edu email addresses, often separating out the name of the school from the particular study, then the lab itself. I did something similar to this with my old 90's era domains.

I would expect the most important consideration is whether the ghijkl part is easy or well-known enough to remember instinctively, so it isn't muddled up with the abcdef part.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think it'll make a difference. There are probably more important things to worry about.</comment>


A few notes on failing intelligently - <AUTHOR> http://www.shopify.com/blog/14047861-why-you-should-fail-and-how-to-fail-well

<comment><USER2> Good stories here about the marshmallow challenge and the Titanic.</comment>


Ask HN: Google recommended adult diapers - why? - <AUTHOR> I'm an American citizen who has been googling for suicide for over a decade.  I've given my data over to Google for two decades.  Suffice to say, Google knows more about me than anyone or anything.  All of my email is hosted by gmail and has been for a long time.
I've been making final preparations for suicide in the past few weeks: Gave away my net worth, cut ties with peers, wrote my suicide note (also indexed by Google), and so on.  I inked and submitted the formal documents required to donate my wealth last week (no income or assets remaining), and sent a gmail informing recipients of the substantial donation, and that I will be falling off the grid.
I've been googling for / obtaining items needed to successfully complete a peaceful self-termination.  One thing I forgot to consider was adult diapers.  A few days ago, after I had written my google-indexed suicide note and after completing the wealth transfer (confirmed via gmail), Google showed me an ad for adult diapers, which is an ad unlike any I'd ever seen before that.  I wasn't searching specifically for items related to completing a peaceful self-termination at that precise moment but did search for fireman's masks a week prior.  The gmail-confirmed wealth transfer was completed 48 hours before seeing the ad.
As it turns out, I do in fact need to obtain such diapers and had forgotten to consider obtaining them.  Thus, Google was spot-on the mark in recommending them to me for a highly relevant purpose (to complete self-termination).  Since Google almost certainly has algorithms to determine probability of suicide, is it possible that Google determined that adult diapers were a relevant item to advertise to me after concluding that my suicide was imminent?
This isn't a coded cry for help, etc.  Thanks for respecting my privacy and addressing the inquiry about Google objectively.  Please do not flag this post.  With God as my witness, the above is 100% true to the best of my recollection. <comment><USER2> I'm trying really hard to do as you've wished and only address the question. So my thought is that Google probably thinks you are advanced in years (giving away wealth, getting your estate in order, etc), and that's why it recommends adult continent assistance.

</comment><comment><USER3> Did /u/botever reach out to You guys?

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey. I won't try to convince you of changing your mind. But before you do this, please consider that (a) there is nothing inherently wrong with you, and (b) Prozac might be able to help. I speak from experience, for what it's worth.

Come talk to me. [https://discord.gg/qaqkc9z](https://discord.gg/qaqkc9z) I'll listen. No judgements.

<comment><USER5> Shawn is a cyberstalker but he does provide decent company. You really should talk to him, you have nothing to lose.

Alternatively, or additionally, you can join us at the Cyantific Cat Cafe: Official Invite Link: [https://discord.gg/v3tHe4q](https://discord.gg/v3tHe4q)

I would be happy to jump in voicechat and talk about your issues. I am a pretty good diagnoser and have experience with a multitude of drugs and natural herbs. Graduated with a Premed degree cum laude.

Anyhow, best of luck. Merry Christmas. (even you Shawn.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Listen. There are more noble ways to achieve euthanasia than posting about Google advertisements and entangling strangers into what is either a personal crisis or a very sick prank. Consider what you have been doing here. You have posted this twice in as many days. Pay attention to your actions.

<comment><USER4> Let's just be supportive. A lot of times, people with no one end up turning to strangers.

It's no way to spend Christmas. I hope he comes and chats with us.

<comment><USER6> I felt the need to be direct as I survived. I have an inoperable medical condition and for many months suicide was desirable as euthanasia is not available in my country. Like him, I did a lot of research first. Unlike him, I did not make mysterious threats. I got a shrink. When I am at a late age, I may decide it best, perhaps even culture will, but right now, I treasure being alive. I have found a deeper peace with mindfulness and continue to live with the condition. Sometimes you have to face your options and your state of being, and that is often unavailable at those times. So I called out. I hope this person can find compassion and courage that they may not be aware of having. If this is a case of an ego with a personality disorder binging on suffering, I would still say to anyone, find compassion and courage and you will be surprised at what remains even when a way of living is no longer possible. That is all that's in my heart. You are very kind for your offering of openness, but don't forget to take care of yourself too.</comment></comment></comment>


Most used words in programming languages - <AUTHOR> https://anvaka.github.io/common-words/#?lang=py <comment><USER2> In most languages, the top words are self/this and function/def. On the other hand, in Go, the most common word is "err", and "if err != nil" are three of the top four words. I really wonder how big part of the code in Go is just propagating errors.

<comment><USER3> "err". Because "error" is too hard to type, right?

<comment><USER4> No, because error variables have extremely limited scope and the length of a variable name should be proportional to its scope.

<comment><USER5> Heh, I always use longer name variables for broader scope somewhat naturally, but only after reading your comment _realized_ that.

<comment><USER6>
        if theErrorReturnedByThePreviousFunction != nil {
             panic(theErrorReturnedByThePreviousFunction)
        }

<comment><USER7> A real brogrammer can write COBOL in any language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lots of uses of "the" in C++ code, massively skewed by giant projects that have the massive section of boilerplate copyright info in a comment at the top of every single file. I didn't realise until I looked at this, but although that's really common to see in C, C++, and Java you barely ever see it in the languages that I spend time in (Rust, Haskell, C#, Python, various flavours of Lisp, JavaScript).

<comment><USER9> Wait another fifteen to twenty years or so until Python and Javascript are "enterprise ready" and this will change.

<comment><USER10> At least nobody is keeping a revision history at the top of the file any more.

<comment><USER9> You'd be surprised...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would be nice to see Haskell included; would ".", "$", "<$>", "<*>", ">>=", etc. count as words? ;)

Made even better by the use of the language's logo as the word clouds shape; the Haskell logo is ">λ=" [https://www.haskell.org/static/img/haskell- logo.svg](https://www.haskell.org/static/img/haskell-logo.svg)

<comment><USER12> Added: [https://anvaka.github.io/common- words/#?lang=hs](https://anvaka.github.io/common-words/#?lang=hs)

Unfortunately the symbols will not show up, because I'm ignoring them: [https://github.com/anvaka/common-words/blob/master/data- extr...](https://github.com/anvaka/common-words/blob/master/data- extract/ignore/index.js#L4)

<comment><USER11> > Added: [https://anvaka.github.io/common- > words/#?lang=hs](https://anvaka.github.io/common-words/#?lang=hs)

> Unfortunately the symbols will not show up, because I'm ignoring them

Makes sense. I notice that some funky unicode stuff has still managed to come out quite high, e.g. ⊇ ("superset of or equal to") :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The layout algorithm for the word cloud is awesome! How is it made?

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately it's not using size as a metric like mouse word clouds. This confused me at first. Look at the size of 'err' in the go layout.

<comment><USER12> It uses it as long as there is enough space. Once it fails to find a rectangle to fit a new word, it tries to reduce the size of the word.

In general, word clouds are bad for comparing sizes. For that reason I used plain list in the sidebar on the left (or at the bottom if you are on mobile)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The slow adoption of modern C++ is very apparent. Some things not event listed: forward, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, tuple, constexptr. nullptr is much lower than NULL and move is quite low. These features are now 6+ years old! ;)

<comment><USER16> Smart pointers realy need a native way to be specified, similar to how we use & to declare references and * for pointers. Filling your code with shared_ptr<Something> and the likes is just not going to win the majority over, even if it's useful.

<comment><USER17> A common way is having a "using FooPtr = shared_ptr<Foo>" somewhere and then only use FooPtr. This also reduces the occurrences in that word cloud.

<comment><USER15> > This also reduces the occurrences in that word cloud

Ah, yes, very good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This might just be my Python upbringing, but... am I the only one to be troubled by Go's single-letter words? I've always found Go code very hard to read because it isn't self-descriptive at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> When you have a strong static type system like Go has, you don't need descriptive names that much, because even single letter variable names are evident, because the declarations are there, close to the variable names. It needs a bit of getting used to if you only programmed dynamic or scripting languages.

<comment><USER19> > you don't need descriptive names that much, because even single letter > variable names are evident

That's an annoying lie, and makes codebases in languages with genuinely strong static type systems (e.g. Haskell) much harder to read than necessary.

Hell C#'s type system is stronger than Go's, yet there is no such prevalence of meaningless variable names (first one comes in at #23, Go has 7 single- letter variable names in the top 23)

<comment><USER20> Still, I think GP's comment is interesting. I do agree that type name and variable/argument name can be redundant in statically typed languages, such as c++ or java. (I've never used Go)

For example,

        int getAge(Person p);

is clear enough, whereas

        int getAge(Person person) ;

is redundant.

Haskell does type inference, so even if types are static they are not explicit. That's why you still need explicit variable names.

<comment><USER21> I think that depends on the length getAge(). If it's 3 lines, 'p' probably is fine. If it's 200 -- which, perhaps it shouldn't be but that's another issue -- then person is probably a better choice because you may lose the original context as you scan the method.

Also in Java if you use intellij then you'll probably get 'person' as an autocomplete, which actually makes it roughly as easy to type out as 'p', (and a better choice if your entire team has standardized on intellij.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am quite surprised that "self" is so much more used than the next word in the list "if". I know many languages where "self" is not a keyword at all, but I cannot think of a single language where "if" is not a keyword.

EDIT: Ops, I missed that there is a language filter. Ignore my comment :)

<comment><USER23> I don't think if is a keyword in Smalltalk. IO might not have it either.

<comment><USER19> > I don't think if is a keyword in Smalltalk.

It's so not a keyword it doesn't even exist. At least in the Smalltalks I've used, they provided ifTrue: and ifFalse: (and compositions thereof).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Besides "return", C/C++ doesn't have a particular word that stands out. Probably because you just write write things. eg you don't put "function" in front of a function.

<comment><USER25> Yes, I also thought that a list for each language shows exactly what's wrong with that language. For some it's self/this, Java is import and return, etc. for C++ there's no clear winner, because it is minimalistic by nature (mostly due to C heritage of course).

<comment><USER26> _> for C++ there's no clear winner, because it is minimalistic by nature_

I presume I'm missing the sarcasm here...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Cool stats about Java. "import" is the most frequently used word. It looks like everything is already exist in Java, so just import all the things, some clue code and you are done.

<comment><USER28> Then why isn't this the case for python. It's as equally as kitchen sink, right?

<comment><USER29> Java doesn't have syntax for importing more than one member of a package in one statement.

Either you import a single member, or all with *.

Combine that with IDEs that auto-create the import statement, and there you go.

<comment><USER29> I just remembered: also, each class in Java has to be in it's separate file. That might very well be the biggest factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The world would be a much better place if self(Python) and this(Javascript ES6 classes) were implicit.

<comment><USER30> I disagree heartedly. Implicit code leads to easy to write hard to read. I'd much rather have where you are getting a value from be very explicit to not cause hard to see bugs as well as making the code easier to understand from a fragment.

<comment><USER16> I find it unnecessarely bloats code and in most cases makes it harder to read due to redundant text, e.g.

        # 1
        def length(self):
        	return math.sqrt(self.x*self.x + self.y*self.y + self.z*self.z)

        # 2
        def length(self):
        	return math.sqrt(self.x**2 + self.y**2 + self.z**2)

        # 3
        def length():
        	return math.sqrt(x*x + y*y + z*z)

I prefer version 3 by far. Unfortunately, Javascript decided to take the same path with ES6 classes which forces you to use this in the body. Fortunately, it does not force you to use this in the argument list.

<comment><USER31> I think that goes against the python dogma of "Explicit is better than implicit." In #1 and #2 there is no question about where 'x' comes from, while in #3 it could be a class variable or a global variable or from just about anywhere.

<comment><USER32> Huh, I experience python as quite the opposite of "Explicit is better than implicit":

\- No static types

\- A variable might belong to the scope of a method, object or class, depending on where it was first set and changed afterwards

\- Implicit execution of code on import of a module (__init__.py, including parent packages)

\- Any object is truthy or falsey, i.e. conditional statements don't require an explicit boolean

<comment><USER33> You can get the "Python dogma" with `import this`. "Explicit is better than implicit" is part of it, but so is "practicality beats purity" (and "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it, although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This would improve a lot if they filtered out comments.

<comment><USER11> Really? I think it's interesting to see "TODO" feature quite prominently in Python, for example :)

<comment><USER35> Perhaps both?

I also think filtering out comments would improve it - especially because so many source files include a copyright statement at the top, and the same licenses (MIT, GPL, Apache, etc) are found repeated in many different files and it distorts the results somewhat.

<comment><USER12> The copyrights are filtered out, because indeed there was a lot of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think it speaks well towards the ferocity and forced completeness of Go's error handling that err is the most used word.

<comment><USER36> I would say it shows that this is a place where the compiler could help :D

<comment><USER37> As much as I hate all the typing I do for error checking in go, I just don't think a compiler can handle errors that well on their own yet.

The explicitness of go's error handling forces you to handle every error specifically. There isn't a chance (for the most part) that you'll get an error from deep in the program that you can't easily handle.

Forcing you to handle them everywhere and anywhere forces error handling to be a part of your architecture.

<comment><USER36> Erlang took this other way around by designing a system that enable you to not handle all these errors.

I am more from this school of designing a system around the reality insteas of trying to patch it everywhere, praying we have enough fabrics to catch it all.

But it would meam rethinking how we build stuff. That was not at all a goal of Go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I do appreciate this, but word clouds really are a terrible visualization method for text data. With regard to the python example, I cannot grasp at all if the frequency of self and None are similar or drastically different. The table on the value is more informative and less likely to misread.

</comment><comment><USER39> Looking at Scala, the difference between val and var is huge, with val being at 2nd, and var at 38.

<comment><USER40> Usage of `var` as idomatic Scala is an oft used trolling mechanism.

I wonder what percentage of `_` usage is value/type discarding in pattern matching and type signatures vs. function application.

Would be nice to somehow ditch `case`:

        adt match {
          Foo(x) if cond x => ...
          Bar(x) => ...
        }

        pairs.map{ (a,b) =>
          ...
        }

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One can make very interesting conclusions based on purely this. Examples:

\- Python developers does not follow Clean Code (ala Uncle Bob) as much as Ruby , because if statement is more frequent than def and return.

\- Ruby makes it possible to write in a much more functional style than Python. OR Ruby developers like to develop more in a functional style than Python developers.

\- People don't really care about good variable names ("a" is a terrible variable name in scripting languages like JS and Python, still top 11)

\- PHP developers might practice "return early" in functions (more return than function keywords) OR their functions just do too much :)

<comment><USER41> _\- Ruby makes it possible to write in a much more functional style than Python. OR Ruby developers like to develop more in a functional style than Python developers._

I instinctively think you might be right (at least with your second statement), but what are you using as your metric here?

<comment><USER42> I am not sure if ruby devs like to do much functional style, the parent mentioned Uncle Bob and his influence on Ruby community with Clean coders. I think they are more into OO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I was really amused by the logos / names in the word clouds. Nice project!

<comment><USER12> Thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The Rust compiler seems somewhat overrepresented in this data set. I see "ccx", "fcx", and "CrateContext", which are only used in the Rust compiler itself.

</comment><comment><USER45> It is probably a sign of a good language that the words used most should be similar in frequency to their use in pseudo code. When words like "end" (Ruby), "self" (Python), "import" (Java), "err"/"error" (Go and Node) are over-represented, it's likely a sign that the language is introducing accidental complexity. By this metric Swift looks astonishingly sane.

</comment><comment><USER46> It would be interesting to see the frequency of words found in comments—TODO, FIXME, LATER, OMG—foreach language too.

<comment><USER29> Also, there is the glorious phrase "Should never happen", with 24 million results on Github: [https://github.com/search?q=should+never+happen&ref=simplese...](https://github.com/search?q=should+never+happen&ref=simplesearch&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93)

<comment><USER47> Perfect time to throw an UnreachableCode exception or something, hah

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Pretty cool! Some unexpected results, or at least not what I guessed. "summary" as the top for C#, "SELECT" all the way down at #43 for SQL, "err" as the top for Go (I'm sure that will spawn some pleasant discussion).

<comment><USER49> I think for SQL their sample includes just ".sql" files, which tend to contain schema definitions and data dumps, hence CREATE and INSERT. Most of it not handwritten also.

<comment><USER50> I was surprised by the SQL thing too; your explanation makes perfect sense!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is pretty neat! I was surprised to see that for SQL, SELECT was so far down the list.

I also wonder what the criteria is for which languages to analyze? There are a few other languages I would like to see, but maybe on github they aren't well represented...

<comment><USER12> Thanks!

I'm using file extension to differentiate between extensions.

You can request other languages here: [https://github.com/anvaka/common- words/issues/4](https://github.com/anvaka/common-words/issues/4)

As long as language's extension is unique, I think I can make a visualization of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Good site.

What did you use to get and analyze code and how much code did you analyze?

I thought about something like this but about variables, methods e.t.c. most used words or even variables name generator based on markov-chain.

<comment><USER52> [https://github.com/anvaka/common-words#how-was-the-data- coll...](https://github.com/anvaka/common-words#how-was-the-data-collected)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is really nifty, unfortunately it includes comments and so with thousands of files all including copyright notices, 'the' is the 3rd most popular word in c++ files.

<comment><USER12> I tried to exclude copyright lines as much as I could. I used "license markers" for that, but I might have missed something.

Here is more information about it: [https://github.com/anvaka/common- words#how](https://github.com/anvaka/common-words#how)

<comment><USER35> That's good to hear. I didn't look in to it in too much depth, I just thought it was strange that 'the' was so high for c++ so clicked on it to see example usage and got things like:

       ** use the contact form at http://qt.digia.co/contact-us.

       furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

       * This file is part of the LibreOffice project.

       // with this library; see the file COPYING3. If not see

So assumed licenses had not been excluded.

Having a brief look at the source, I think with the licence marking approach it's still leaving in quite a few lines from each licence (see above for examples).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Contrary to popular opinion neither `s' nor `t' are words. At least not in English anyway. :/ Or do they mean that these characters appeared as variable names?

</comment><comment><USER42> I totally expected "should" to be at the top in ruby. Code bases with 2:1 or even more test code to implementation code ratio = standard.

</comment><comment><USER54> So happy I couldn't find "goto" :)

<comment><USER52> You wish. It's #325 after you switch to cpp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Well, Lua's word list starts with index 0...

</comment><comment><USER56> anyone else find it at all ironic that the least common word in JS appears to be "validate"?

</comment><comment><USER57> Where do the language files get pulled from? GitHub API or web scraping? Or is it not file parsing and some other method?

Super rad project :)

<comment><USER12> Thanks! The data comes form GitHub snapshot, stored on BigQuery. Here is more details about it: [https://github.com/anvaka/common- words#how](https://github.com/anvaka/common-words#how)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I don't know whether I could believe this study as "foo" and "bar" aren't on the list.

<comment><USER59> Well I will slay my developers before they put the metasyntactic variables on master. I allow i to pass though. Go to j and you have O(n^2) and I will slay them again.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b summary is the most used word in C#! Only from comments! Amazing. EDIT: it looks like this is reading files that are common to all projects... which is why the sentence "// The following GUID is for the ID of the typelib if this project is exposed to COM" appears 459k times!

<comment><USER19> > EDIT: it looks like this is reading files that are common to all projects…

Yeah, autogenerated files/comments feature extremely prominently e.g. the top two items for "should" in Ruby are autogenerated Rails comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Java: funny to see that "if" is used a lot to point to "visit oracle.com _if_..."

</comment><comment><USER61> Interesting that for Ruby the most used word is "option", is not even a Ruby but a Rails word.

</comment><comment><USER62> Interesting that in JS, `let` is ranked 536, far lower than I expected.

</comment><comment><USER63> Is anyone investigating how well these numbers fit a Zipf distribution?

</comment><comment><USER64> "that didn't work"

</comment><comment><USER65> Word clouds may look cool but they are horrible for conveying information. this should have been just a simple ordered list.

<comment><USER56> There is an ordered list on the page. If you're on a phone you can tap "show list" on the bottom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> django > try (20 vs 21) try again

<comment><USER67> In my django projects, I have many lines like:

        from django.<path> import <stuff>

for every try block.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> this study is worthless without a section on frequency of swearwords and virulence of same.

</comment><comment><USER69> and the most used word in .cs files is "summary"

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of meaningful and legible words out there

/s</comment>


The Power Macintosh G3 All-in-One: Function over Form - <AUTHOR> https://www.macstories.net/mac/the-power-macintosh-g3-all-in-one/ <comment><USER2> It used PCI slots to make finding expansion cards easier from the PC side of things.</comment>


We Are Tracking What Happens to Police After They Use Force on Protestors - <AUTHOR> https://projects.propublica.org/protest-police-videos/ <comment><USER2> The city of Philadelphia has four cases listed, and three of those cases have criminal charges filed. Thank you District Attorney Larry Krasner for working to uphold the rule of law!

</comment><comment><USER3> A sad but not too surprising outcome. The US is not the only place with laughably bad police accountability though.

For a quick estimate, switch the filters and take a look at your scrollbar shrinking once you go to "Pending".</comment>


DC gov publishes full voter file online including address, political affiliation [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.dcboee.org/pdf_files/ListOfRegisteredVoters051616.pdf <comment><USER2> Weird.. it's on their homepage [https://www.dcboee.org/default.asp](https://www.dcboee.org/default.asp)

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a pretty bad privacy breach.</comment>


23,000 HTTPS certificates axed after CEO e-mails private keys - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/23000-https-certificates-axed-after-ceo-e-mails-private-keys/ <comment><USER2> Oops Trustico server allows arbitrary RCE incl root shell: [https://twitter.com/svblxyz/status/969220402768736258](https://twitter.com/svblxyz/status/969220402768736258)

see also [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/BLvabFwcJqo)

<comment><USER2> did they __really __generate the certificate pair server-side?

pkiJS / WebCrypto² API are a keygen¹ replacement so that you can let the browser generate the certificate pair client-side. If the user isn't informed that key generation happens locally then maybe it looks as if the certificate is "downloaded". But with these methods when implemented correctly, certificates never goes to the server (and is saved locally).

I'm not a fan of the above approach even though Mozilla sells it as safe: e.g. internal direct access to the OS RNG (instead of doing it in JavaScript Math- random() which led to a lot of critic throughout history of browser based crypto) , since the browser is still a sandbox, and IMO unsuitable for private key storage (even just for a few seconds).

Would be interesting to know how trustico implemented this. It's somehow so crazy and negligent a thing to imagine. There is no explanation to why they didn't just implement it using standard software stacks for PKI (primekey has a jboss thing they could have used). Literally copy/pasting things from SO or some example code found in the manuals from WebCrypto would have been better than what they did. These guys have "trust" literally in their name.

EDIT: Tippfehler

__

¹ [https://github.com/w3ctag/wiki/wiki/keygen](https://github.com/w3ctag/wiki/wiki/keygen)

² [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_API)

<comment><USER3> Stupid question: I thought it was accepted practice [1] to generate the private key server-side so long as you don't store after the user's downloaded it? (Not that Trustico followed that part either.)

[1] though not something I would endorse!

<comment><USER4> Why would it be? It's going to end up in lots of places it's not supposed to be. Better generate the private key where it's needed and never have it leave the system.

<comment><USER3> I said I don't endorse it and don't think it's a good idea but e.g. you can have AWS generate your private key (for SSH though not for a cert AFAIK) with the warning that they can't recover it if you lose it.

I just figured there might be some compromise to accommodate users who don't know how to generate their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A question I still have is what Trustico _hoped_ was going to happen here. Was there some arrangement where if the certs have to be revoked they get a refund?

Trustico also don't seem very clear on what exactly they're accusing Symantec of, the Ars article quotes them

"We believe Symantec to have operated our account in a manner whereby it had been compromised" and "We believe the orders placed via our Symantec account were at risk and were poorly managed"

In the relationship we're talking about here, a reseller to a CA, basically the only valuable information that can be compromised is payment instructions. All the important seeming cryptographic stuff? All of that is allowed to be public by design, the CSR, the Certificates themselves, any validation messages used - all public thanks to asymmetric cryptography.

Symantec got in trouble last year for inadequate (in fact basically non- existent) oversight of their RAs, particularly the Korean CrossCert. Unlike a reseller the RAs were trusted to do the domain validation themselves, so if CrossCert said "We checked and it's OK to issue a Thawte cert for www.example.com with this key" then Symantec just did it and didn't ask any questions (though they do seem to have checked they got paid...). Resellers aren't trusted with validation, they're just glorified sales people who just take a cut and help with price discrimination, what's there to "compromise" months after you cease the relationship?

<comment><USER6> I suspect the logic was something along the lines of "Symantec has acted in an untrustworthy manner (enough to get them distrusted by several major browser vendors) therefore we consider all our customer's certificates that were issued by them to be untrustworthy ("compromised") and want them revoked."

Still doesn't explain why they thought that revoking 50k of their customers certificates with less than 24-hours notice would be a good idea though. That really just seems like shooting themselves in the foot.

<comment><USER7> Can we take a step back even further? I can't figure out the logic that got this started:

 _" These Private Keys are stored in cold storage, for the purpose of revocation."_

Like what? Why? Since when do you need a private key to revoke a certificate?

I feel like I understand certificates really well, but .. am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was very irresponsible from the CEO, but should not have been possible at all.

The private key should be generated where it's used, a certificate signing request created and sent to a certificate authority. After the CA makes sure the CSR is legit, they can sign the certificate without seeing the private key.

Copying the private key outside the server is an unnecessary risk. Giving it to a third party such as a CA or allowing them to generate it, moreso.

<comment><USER9> They said in the article they kept the private key to simplify the revokation process. Thus, very likely they also generated the private key.

It's a bad practice promoted by issuers that want to sell a "managed" or "value added" service corporate IT is so fond of. The lesson here is that there's a lot of IT people that don't grasp the basics of key management.

<comment><USER10> The road to security hell is paved with intentions to simplify.

<comment><USER11> That's the most succinct phrasing of the problem of security vs. users (and customers) complaining about what they perceive as the inconvenience and complexity that accompany securing digital assets.

<comment><USER12> I like to say (and it's not original) that security and convenience are two endpoints of one continuum.

You can't get more of one without moving away from the other.

There are a few rare near-freebies, but they always have a gotcha. And you'd better understand what they are before taking advantage of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One part that is missing is why did the CEO say those certs were already compromised before they he mailed them? He mailed them sort of as proof they are compromised?? Im confused. Any thoughts?

From the article:

"When Rowley asked for proof the certificates were compromised, the Trustico CEO emailed the private keys of 23,000 certificates"

<comment><USER14> He's arguing that the various issues that lead to Symantec being gradually distrusted mean that they believed all their existing non-expired, non-revoked certificate were compromised (in the sense that they should not be trusted) and should be revoked.

Maybe it's just me, but a company who stores their customer's private keys, sends them around in a ZIP file via email and has a trivial code injection vulnerability on their site, with a process running as root, is probably not the one I want to make that call.

<comment><USER15> > Maybe it's just me, but a company who stores their customer's private keys, > sends them around in a ZIP file via email and has a trivial code injection > vulnerability on their site, with a process running as root, is probably not > the one I want to make that call.

On the flip side, if a company with such little regard for security thinks there's a problem with the Symantec, you've got to wonder. They're basically saying "we're dangerously incompetent, however even _we_ can see that Symantec are broken" \- and might actually have a point.

<comment><USER14> Symantec is already getting distrusted and the Web PKI community has decided on a plan that minimizes user impact while doing that. It's very doubtful that a company as incompetent as Trustico has the expertise to come up with a more well-informed decision or a better approach. Certainly attempting to get 50,000 certificates revoked immediately without doing any work to reissue those certificates prior to that is a terrible approach.

Considering the fact that they recently switched to a new CA partner, a more likely explanation is that this was a misguided attempt to somehow keep their existing business rather than let DigiCert pick them up somehow. Obviously it failed in a spectacular fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _As the holder of the root certificate used to sign the TLS certificates > Trustico was reselling, Symantec was ultimately responsible for ensuring > this requirement was being followed, although in fairness, there was > probably no way for Symantec to detect a violation._

This is in some sense the scariest part in the whole mess. Root authorities might have responsibility, but the basic logic of cert resellers makes an error like this easy and undetectable.

</comment><comment><USER17> > When Rowley asked for proof the certificates were compromised, the Trustico > CEO emailed the private keys of 23,000 certificates

Voilà, compromised certs!

Couldn't tell if that was supposed to be the idea. But amusing nonetheless.

<comment><USER16> I can't tell if the logic was "we shouldn't have these keys so the certs are blown" or "watch, I just compromised the certs!"

Either way, it's very much a case of "my neighborhood isn't safe - because I keep committing crimes there."

edit: Oh, reading the Mozilla page it's also "we allowed code injection on the cert generation page". That's even worse.

<comment><USER18> Also, that script was running as root

[https://mobile.twitter.com/taviso/status/969230138956136448](https://mobile.twitter.com/taviso/status/969230138956136448)

<comment><USER16> Hah, _seriously_?

...I wonder whether the keys would have been more or less safe if, instead of all that, they just uploaded them unsecured to Pastebin. At least then they might have gone unnoticed, instead of being handed straight to possible bad actors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "We haven't finished getting to the bottom of this and don't have the post- mortem yet but this is very bad and you need to revoke all of these ASAP"

"We're not revoking 50k certs without a damn good reason"

"Attached is your reason"

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h You gotta admit, it's a terribly compelling reason. And I do mean terribly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> God I hope my co-workers in the PKI group would say "hell no" if our CEO came and asked for the private keys. Show some damn backbone.

Though on 2nd thought, maybe having a society with a good social safety net and collective bargaining for workers would be a good foundation for a positive outcome in that situation.

If workers are afraid of losing their jobs because they'd lose health insurance and other vital benefits then they'd be more likely to cave.

Sorry but being from a former socialist country in the top 5 world ranking of living standards I can't help but make it a social discussion.

<comment><USER21> The issue wasn't "CEO gets what CEO wants," but that the private keys were even retrievable by someone else than their holder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The mozilla.dev.security.policy thread linked in the article is a much better read:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/wxX4Yv0E3Mk)

tl;dr: Trustico told Digicert that all 50k of their certificates should be revoked, without specifying a reason as to why they were compromised. 50k is a LOT of certificates, so Digicert asked for details. Trustico then sent Digicert the private keys, and Digicert said "Welp, guess _now_ they're compromised".

<comment><USER22> > _Finally -- the CSR /key generation form page incorporates JavaScript from > at least 5 or 6 different companies (including ad servers), which would > allow any of those third parties (intentionally or through compromise of > their own) to capture generated keys. This is a reckless amount of exposure, > to the point that even if the keys were generated completely inside the > browser and never exposed to the server (which does not appear to be the > case), I would consider them compromised at the time of generation._

Also, wow. That's extremely reckless.

<comment><USER16> Jesus. That means it's not just about "offering revocation" and storing them on the wrong side; even people who didn't use that option are completely compromised.

<comment><USER5> If you generated your own Private Key and used that to make one or more CSRs, you can show any fool the CSR and no harm will come to you, at least on the cryptographic side. Upload it to 4chan, print it out on a T-shirt, doesn't matter.

Any certificates produced are worthless to everybody except you, because you have the Private Key, and a _competent_ Certificate Authority (in this story that's Symantec or DigiCert, not Trustico) should only issue certificates for the names requested in the CSR, not any other names.

A customer who did things sensibly (their own Private Key, make a CSR etcetera) and used Trustico say in 2016, needn't be concerned that these development will end with their certificates unilaterally revoked on Trustico's say-so. They might not want to do any more business with Trustico, but there's no particular reason this incident should affect their feelings about DigiCert or Comodo or any of the Symantec brands (Verisign / Thawte / RapidSSL / etcetera) now controlled by DigiCert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Seems to me that Digicert is tactically forgetting to say what they said to Trustico.

Additionally there's not an issue with Trustico having access to the private keys. It simply means you are trusting Trustico and if you accept that it's no different from trusting Google or Facebook or your bank with your private data.

<comment><USER24> So what's your response to this?

 _> Finally -- the CSR/key generation form page incorporates JavaScript from at least 5 or 6 different companies (including ad servers), which would allow any of those third parties (intentionally or through compromise of their own) to capture generated keys. This is a reckless amount of exposure, to the point that even if the keys were generated completely inside the browser and never exposed to the server (which does not appear to be the case), I would consider them compromised at the time of generation._</comment></comment>


Photos of an NSA "upgrade" factory show Cisco router getting implant - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/

<comment><USER2> "A document included in the trove of National Security Agency files released with Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide details how the agency's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit and other NSA employees intercept servers, routers, and other network gear being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert implant firmware onto them before they're delivered."</comment>


Blizzard Employee Discusses Advantages/Uses of C++11 for Game Engines - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AjRD6mU96s <comment><USER2> Needs '[video]' appending to this title

<comment><USER3> Slides are available here if you can't watch the video: [https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2016/blob/master/Presentatio...](https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2016/blob/master/Presentations/Game%20Engine%20Using%20C++11/Game%20Engine%20Using%20C++11%20-%20Jason%20Jurecka%20-%20CppCon%202016.pdf)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can software engineers help stop climate change? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Reducing power consumption with more efficient computation can make a difference, but I think the real difference is creating software that enables more efficient resource allocation outside of just computation.

Uber, for all its faults, has reduced the market for car ownership. The car manufacturing process will consume less resources due to better utilization of each car. Self driving cars will take that even further, with cars being fully utilized without the human limitations of a driver.

</comment><comment><USER3> Killing the current web frameworks would probably do it. Gigabytes of RAM and constant processor time for basically text and images. I don't understand how all this bloat is accepted and encouraged.

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't that what was behind the growth of static site generators in the last 18 months?

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe by replacing Electron based apps with native versions /s

</comment><comment><USER6> You can participate in the next global climate strike.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can you stop cryptocurrency? No? Then probably not much.</comment>


Launched Grupa.io = Airbnb but for Product Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://www.grupa.io <comment><AUTHOR> The rate at which product ideas and startups are generated outpaces rate of talents entrants; Hence the talent pipeline scarcity problem. There's the scramble to hire and retain software engineers as Businesses become software enabled, and companies seek to "own" their resources/talents. Also, human potential of existing talents are limited and underutilized due to 9-5 work mode and labor contracts/laws. The current work models which was once suited for manual labor, no longer applies for creative work, hence "Engineers seek for more flexible options and the opportunity to do their best work with their crew and at their terms"

Although Freelance platforms offered self employment, but they are broken as they are designed for projects, not PRODUCTS (which are built iteratively). Plus they offer no guarantee for work and management of products.

"Product Engineering In The Cloud" calls for the need to reinvent commitment (how we find and engage talents), and how we build Products; This is why we built Grupa ([https://www.grupa.io](https://www.grupa.io)) ; a platform that provide access to elite engineering teams using iterative-subscription model to product engineering</comment>


Ask HN: It's 2011 Sphinx or Solr? - <AUTHOR>

Our existing platform at rgbdaily.com is solid LAMP.  As we approach our first round of PR we noticed that the MySQL fulltext search we had implemented on RDS was simply not cutting it with increased volumes. Sphinx looks like a winner, but Solr seems to have a lot of the hearts and minds of the SaaS crowd.  Any ideas from people who have had to make the choice, we really don't have time to evaluate both?  Sphinx seems like hours to implement and we have already started. <comment><USER2> Having now been exposed to both...

If you ever want to use it as a caching system ... solr is the way to go.

I personally think very highly of Sphinx, yet be aware that Sphinx will return ids not "content".

When handlesocket was announced [1], for me the gem other than the obvious was this nugget of information.

"No duplicate cache When you use memcached to cache MySQL/InnoDB records, records are cached in both memcached and InnoDB buffer pool. They are duplicate so less efficient (Memory is still expensive!). Since HandlerSocket plugin accesses to InnoDB storage engine, records are cached inside InnoDB buffer pool, which can be reused by other SQL statements."

Knowing that with the latest version of sphinx your can make use of their Query format via code or via the mysql console... it has me more sold on Sphinx than solr.

We use solr where I work, it is nice to use and coming features will make it better...

The most annoying aspect of solr for me is, you cant index elsewhere and easily merge it...

Either are miles better than fulltext search.

Perhaps list a few of your needs and requirements then we might be able to see if one stands out ahead of the other.

[1][http://yoshinorimatsunobu.blogspot.com/2010/10/using- mysql-a...](http://yoshinorimatsunobu.blogspot.com/2010/10/using-mysql-as- nosql-story-for.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks fresh,

I'd love to get rid of MyISAM. Doing the course of alpha testing it was corrupted once and that never happened with our InnoDB tables. Also, looking at Tokutek as the long term solution for all tables. The jump from InnoDB to Tokutek is straight forward if fulltext is taken out of the mix. I really wish Tokutek biz dev would talk to Amazon about offering the storage engine in RDS. Any who, can you speak to the maintenance profiles of the two? It seems like Sphinx is pretty hands off. Also having many years of Java experience, I feel like Sphinx might be a better bet if I start off running in a memory constrained environment like an EC2 small or medium.</comment></comment>


I created a site helping people to have a new life from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://mynewdream.eu <comment><USER2> Asks you a bunch of questions about yourself then you need to provide an email address to get any results. Don't bother.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you feel about Medium, where almost every story now is premium? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> If they don't want me to read them, then I simply won't read the stories.

</comment><comment><USER3> Who?</comment>


The Pancake: A Less Annoying Way To Move Through Google Street View - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/04/introducing-the-pancake-a-less-annoying-way-to-move-through-google-street-view/ <comment><USER2> The writeup doesn't emphasize that they actually had to do some rough 3d reconstruction to allow you to move to the buildings like that. This was a mixture of lazer and stereo vision.

<comment><USER3> I wondered what they were going to do with the LIDAR sensors on the Street View vehicles.

Maybe they didn't even know what they would do with it, but decided it was better to throw LIDAR in from the beginning and figure out what to do with it later, rather than having to drive every street in the world twice.

(Or maybe they used that data for the 3D models of buildings in Google Maps and Google Earth?)

Anyone know if the cars have any other sensors that haven't been utilized yet? I'm guessing they also recorded WiFi and possibly cell tower locations for geolocation.

<comment><USER4> Huh, I assumed it was just fairly-smart geometry estimation. How else could they compensate for the LIDAR hitting cars & people?

<comment><USER5> They've made multiple passes by now, you would assume there aren't always going to be cars or people in the way. There could easily be some data scrubbing smarts in there, too, like knowing that a 3 story building doesn't suddenly jut out to the road in its lowest six feet (notice, for instance, in Brooklyn, the stoops aren't considered part of the building surface).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's amazing how much small little tweaks to the ui significantly improve the experience of an application. Implementing this was probably quite difficult, but the simple ui works so well.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not used to double-clicking on the internet, so it took a bit getting used to. Very nifty, though.

<comment><USER8> Y'know, I was thinking "right on", until I realized that I'm very used to double-clicking Google maps as a zoom shortcut. So I guess it conforms to the site's general usability theme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love it. Improves navigating city streets beautifully. More open areas see an improvement too but not by as large a margin.

One feature I'd still love to see is to control the zoom level with the mouse wheel. Especially with the Pancake, I found myself accidentally zooming in, and having to search for the tiny zoom out button.

</comment><comment><USER10> It works surprisingly well. Makes you wonder why nobody thought of it all this time. Even if the 3D building stuff didn't exist, the pancake for moving in 2D is very useful.

<comment><USER11> Makes you wonder, but then again this sounds like just the kind of thing that some 10 year old user interface patent will suddenly turn up on... snapped up by an IP troll during the fire-sale of some long-dead CAD company.

<comment><USER12> 3D games have been doing this sort of UI for ages. Still, the 3D reconstruction work being applied to real-life images is quite impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love it!! I've been using Live (I mean Bing) maps lately because of the bird's eye view. This new and improved Street View might get me back to Google Maps/Streetview.

<comment><USER3> The bird's eye view in Live/Bing maps is kind of scary. I can practically see in the window of my old apartment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is fantastic. Now they need an option to disable the big yellow line and arrows.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't understand how they animate the transition in Flash. Is it 3D in low- res?

</comment><comment><USER15> I have to say that I love using Google Maps to visit different cities. I went to London last fall and was able to see some streets I walked down as well as others that I wanted to walk down but didn't. I can only imagine the street view images will slowly be taken down, until rather than having a nearly continuous street we will have photos here and there and blackness in between. Interesting that all the street view photos have to be re-done in Japan with the camera 18 inches lower to preserve peoples privacy behind residential walls. Wonder if that will be done in the rest of the world. Anyway, it's a really great time waster. Thanks Googlites!

</comment><comment><USER16> Definitely an amazing upgrade.</comment>


Rocking the Stocks of Your Favorite Bands - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/rocking-the-stocks-of-your-favorite-bands/ <comment><USER2> Cool. But do the bands pay dividends?</comment>


Dystopian sci-fi is making us fear all new technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-08/15/dystopian-scifi-is-damaging-us <comment><USER2> The argument made in this article is somewhat... disingenuous. The author states, "science fiction has always built our culture powerful frameworks for thinking about the future." He argues that much of the "future" we now live in was predicted by science fiction of the past, and he portrays this fact in a positive light. But then he makes a logical about-face and warns that "the very real danger here is man's tendency to look to his illusion for inspiration"!

The problem is, his argument is that science fiction has always been a startlingly good predictor of the immediate future, but now that science fiction warns us of dangers and should perhaps inspire extreme caution—now that science fiction is saying something the author doesn't want to hear—we ought to ignore it as dangerous and silly imaginings.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps the argument could have been better phrased, as it could be read to indicate that science fiction is a good predictor, whereas in reality, science fiction has always been not only a bad predictor, but actually worse than you would expect from random chance.

The point the article is trying to get at is that science fiction used to _inspire_. Sure, we never did get hyperdrive, terraforming or sentient robots, but people raised on such stories gave us weather satellites, flu vaccines and cell phones. What will people raised on more recent science fiction give us? I hope the answer doesn't turn out to be a world where we bicker over politics until we run out of fossil fuel and sink back into the mud.

<comment><USER4> I think it's hard to pinpoint cause and effect here. Science fiction in the golden age was the product of an interesting coalition of nerds, dreamers, rocket scientists, hippies, and idealists. It was a product of a very optimistic age, and it was also built by, and for, a niche audience.

Most of what passes for sci-fi today is a far more mainstream product. Mainstream products tend to closely track pop culture, which to a large extent, tracks socioeconomic conditions. Today's stuff is really just romance, thriller, or adventure tropes with sci-fi window dressing. The recent fascination with dystopian futures reflects the current zeitgeist to some degree: we're living in a more uncertain, economically unstable age than the sci-fi writers of the 40s through 60s were. Everything was looking up-and-up back then,[1] and the sky really seemed to be the limit. These days, people are more skeptical and more concerned. We are getting a literature (and cinema) that is equal parts fear and escapism.

It's certainly possible that dystopian sci-fi is creating a feedback loop, and that it's making us more scared and more cynical. But I don't see compelling evidence for a causal or directional effect there. More likely the directionality is the opposite: people seem to be buying that stuff, and so the publishers in the market select and publish more of it. What we're seeing is largely an artifact of selection -- by the publishers and studios, and accordingly, by all the dystopian stuff floating around in pop culture.

I wholeheartedly support the call to action in the article, namely, that "It's time for us to dream again." But that's easier said than done. The market wants what it wants. Publishers want what the market wants. Few people are in a position to challenge that consensus. Perhaps it will take a few breakout hits of a more optimistic, exciting, less morbid vein to change things up a bit. I would certainly back any ambitious Kickstarter projects of that nature.

[1] A notable caveat is that Cold War nuclear paranoia played a discordant note in the overall melody here. The effects were interesting, and the interplay between bold optimism and end-of-the-world panic made for a rich and complex output.

<comment><USER5> Go back and read "Repent, Harlequin" or _The Forever War_ or or _Make room! Make room!_ or "Solution Unsatisfactory" tell me that all sci-fi from that age is all up and up. Go read the _Dangerous Visions_ anthologies compiled by Ellison.

I think you'd be a bit surprised by how "optimistic" a time that was--for all the rocketships, there was also a large state security apparatus, huge civil unrest, and great existential threat from the Russians.

<comment><USER4> I didn't say that "all sci-fi was up and up." I don't think you and I are in any real disagreement. I think you're misreading my comment a bit. Alternatively, given the rambling and unstructured nature of my comment, I'm probably not being clear enough. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article couldn't miss the mark more completely if it tried.

Distopian sci-fi is just a mirror of our current political climate, and fears that already exist. Human fears, that don't require fictional technology.

You don't need a time machine to see militarised police, imprisonment without trial, apartheid, terrorism, corporations influence over government, ethnic cleansing, privacy stripped bare, perpetual war, 1% of American adults incarcerated, etc. These are human problems, human politics, human fears. Sci- fi is just a sandbox that avoids polarising people.

Even if I humour the author and talk about new technology, it's rational to be concerned about how technology will put more power into the hands of people who are already adequately demonstrating their distopian leanings.

It's not the technology we're afraid of.

<comment><USER7> Funny, I was thinking the exact opposite -- I think the news is so bad and the politics is so polarised and the fiction is so grim because the world is better place than it has ever been, and we don't know how to deal with it.

In the developed world we're living longer in bigger houses with more cars. Our food is better, our toys are cooler, crime is at record lows... Life just isn't enough of a struggle for us any more, we don't have any excuse for not being happy, so we go out of our way to find some unhappiness, or to make it for ourselves.

Obviously there is plenty of dysfunction to go around, and we should demand better, but the "sky is falling" narrative is popular because it _doesn 't_ ring true, not because it does.

<comment><USER6> We're absolutely living more comfortable lives than we did in the middle ages, or in the 50s, or whenever. That wasn't my point. I don't agree with the "things were better in the old days" sentiment either.

Suspect I wasn't clear enough somewhere; feedback appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neal Stephenson identified this same issue, and created Project Hieroglyph as his solution. They're about to release their first anthology of optimistic, progressive sci-fi short stories this fall. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is absurd. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd hear from Stalin, or something. The author is claiming that fiction should only celebrate the glorious future we are surely destined for, and never promote ideas which might inspire doubt or bad feelings about the grand project of technological progress.

All this moody, gritty ambivalence about what the future could become? That just encourages people to reflect and think about stuff, rather than working hard and uncritically towards a goal that - while we might not even understand it - is definitely awesome in every way.

<comment><USER10> The trouble is that it encourages the kind of "critical thinking" that we often see regarding, say, GMOs and nuclear energy. To most of the population "skepticism" seems to mean "believing the loudest, scariest person in the room," not "I've got some reading to do." When people _do_ decide to read, they use google which heavily skews its results away from the expert consensus and towards sensationalist outsiders.

We have to do a great amount of work to fix "skepticism" before encouraging it will be a universally good thing.

<comment><USER11> > The trouble is that it encourages the kind of "critical thinking" that we > often see regarding, say, GMOs and nuclear energy

Let's be fair here:

1\. Companies like Montsano aren't exactly doing wonders for the 'face' of GMOs.

2\. Nuclear energy _could_ be made safe, but many of the reactor designs that people tout have not been proven, and they also don't take into account the human factor. Much of what happened in Fukushima can be chalked up to the human factor. I think that it's disingenuous to only talk about nuclear power from the technical side without considering lax oversight on the human factor.

3\. I think that there is a very real fear that as the barriers to entry come down on 'garage' genetic modification, we could see someone accidentally (or purposely) create a deadly disease in their garage.

<comment><USER10> 1\. How heavily have you actually looked into this issue? The first time I was forced to do my homework on this subject was for a school project (5 years ago, IIRC) and I was blown away by two things that ran completely against the "informed" opinion I had developed by passively consuming media. First, the professionalism, restraint, and abundance of goodwill gestures I saw coming out of Monsanto (see: their press releases, their research papers, and their stance on terminator genes). Second, the extent to which Monsanto's political adversaries were willing to lie and intentionally mislead in order to pursue their objectives (see: Percy Schmeiser, the Seralini paper, Greenpeace's Terminator Gene media sprint). My preconceptions going into the project were astonishingly far from the truth -- they were the exact opposite of it. If your intent is to be fair, that means considering both sides of the story and trying to determine where the truth lies. Be honest with yourself: have you actually done this for the Monsanto/GMO debate? Or have you let your political view align itself to that of the news articles that occasionally percolate through your feeds (as I had done)?

2\. I don't recall disingenuously talking about nuclear power from only the technical side. You are correct to note that the discussion should revolve around whether or not we have the technology to account for human error. You are incorrect to assume that the discussion in the corresponding academic, industrial, and regulatory circles does not revolve around this matter. "Technology has failed to take certain kinds of failures and human errors into account, therefore technology can never be expected take enough failures and human errors into account to be made safe" is a very defeatist attitude of the precise variety that TFA was complaining about. It's the lazy conclusion that dystopian SF authors default to in order to sound profound and relevant without wading waist-deep through boring technical analysis (which is what you need to do to actually _be_ profound and relevant).

> Much of what happened in Fukushima can be chalked up to the human factor.

Straw man. Just like software engineers don't dismiss UX problems by saying "there's nothing to be done about stupid users," nuclear engineers don't dismiss catastrophes (hypothetical or actual) by saying "there's nothing to be done about stupid regulators." Instead, they find a way to fix the human problem by using the technology at their disposal. That's their job and they're quite good at it.

Unfortunately, there is ~50years of lag between industrial best practices and the point at which we can evaluate the safety record of said best practices. The first academic nuclear reactor was constructed 70 years ago. The first commercial nuclear reactor was constructed 60 years ago. Fukushima was built 50 years ago. 45 years ago, the mode of failure that did it in was discovered and corrected in new designs. Still, it's quite correct to note that the safety practices of nuclear engineers 50 years ago were not robust to mismanagement (which would have retrofitted or retired the reactor). But that has little bearing on the question of whether or not the safety practices of nuclear engineers _today_ are robust to poor regulation, and that's the question that is relevant to our policy regarding new reactors. I'm convinced that today's safety practices _are_ robust to poor oversight. Robust enough to make them an extremely compelling alternative, in any case.

3\. How is that relevant to commercial GMO development?

<comment><USER11> > I don't recall disingenuously talking about nuclear power from only the > technical side

I apologize for my wording. It wasn't directed at any specific individuals.

> "Technology has failed to take certain kinds of failures and human errors > into account, therefore technology can never be expected take enough > failures and human errors into account to be made safe" is a very defeatist > attitude

I never said that. I am not personally anti-nuclear, but I do tend to see people pop up that sweep issues under the rug in their pro-nuclear comments. To be fair, these aren't necessarily the academics that are working in the field. [

[Also to be fair, I think that it's worth taking people whose livelihood is tied to the industry with a grain of salt too. Sure, they don't want the industry to sink, but that doesn't mean that they won't sweep issues under the rug that they don't think are relevant or that will "Never Happen" or that "The Liberal Media Will Blow Out of Proportion."]

> Straw man.

I wasn't intending it to be. I was just stating a fact.

> 3\. How is that relevant to commercial GMO development?

Well, GMO stands for genetically-modified organism. It's not always food-/crop-related, so I tossed that in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh balderdash. Sci-fi makes us _think_ about the _possibilities_ that new technology will present, dystopian or not. Many of them are positive. Many of them are negative. To simply ignore the negative aspects would be folly.

I suppose George Orwell and Yevgeny Zamyatin were just big ol' downers who wanted us all to be miserable?

No. They just mused on what's _possible_.

</comment><comment><USER13> The author calls for creators to present a new future world that is optimistic and to me, that feels a little shallow and half baked. It is certainly not subversive, it is naive.

We are out of the pure postmodern cynicism, but the rebuttal isn't a swing back to modernism as the author seems to vaguely hint at. Personally I subscribe to the idea that we have moved into a new cultural period that many call Meta-modernism. There are many other theories alongside this, Digimodernism and 'New Sincerity' being the ones I've heard the most about. Point being is that this new approach blends the cynical with the optimistic to have a more holistic view. Objectivity and subjectively co-exist.

In this frame, there has been a movement in the design world for the past ten years called Design Fiction that works in this space I think. Dunne and Raby at the RCA London pioneered it and sci-fi author Bruce Sterling is an adamant supporter. From MIT Media Lab, Design Fiction is:

"How to provoke discussion about the social, cultural, and ethical implications of new technologies through design and storytelling."

In short, it creates objects that imply worlds of the future. It is not completely dystopian, nor is it completely optimistic. Those views are left up to the viewer to decide on. I definitely feel this approach is much more valuable than the authors' knee-jerk out-of-date push to happy-up sci-fi.

</comment><comment><USER14> But who is to say that all pessimism is wrong? There are very good reasons to be concerned about artificial intelligence ([http://intelligence.org/ie- faq/#FriendlyAI](http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/#FriendlyAI)). Robots really could create mass unemployment. It may be possible for people to create engineered plagues. Technology is making mass government surveillance extremely cheap and effective. Military technology increasingly favors the side with the most money.

</comment><comment><USER15> The article doesn't really justify the thrust of the headline, there's no support of the 'fear all new technology'. Sci-fi shows certain things as technology run rampant sure (Transcendence comes to mind), but it often shows the effects of a societal problem. Using the Hunger Games, which they mention, there's plenty of far flung technology but the dystopia boils down to a wealthy elite exploiting a lower class that they've subjugated through a bloody war.

Do people _really_ fear new technology? The last real story of fear I can really remember was the LHC and the concerns about black holes, and that was a tiny minority that were given far more media exposure than they deserved. Maybe the Glasshole thing, and fear of decreasing privacy, but that's also a fairly tiny percentage. Most people seem pretty happy when a new technology comes along that improves their life.

<comment><USER16> Fear of AI is widespread: [http://www.thinkartificial.org/web/the-fear-of- intelligent-m...](http://www.thinkartificial.org/web/the-fear-of-intelligent- machines-survey-results/)

<comment><USER15> That's a tricky one, but for people that were afraid of AI itself as a technology the numbers are lower than the people who aren't. The numbers for people afraid of how humanity will use the technology are overwhelming, is that specifically because of the technology or is due to our mistrust of our fellow humans? The technology plays a component of course, possibly a large one, but it's hard to quantify whether it's the technology itself that induces fear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I actually found Clog Magazine's (no link print-only) take on Scifi and its effect on society more convincing. The authors argued in a 100 page issue with several essays that we built the futures we imagined in SciFi.

In otherwords, we need to stop imagining terrible futures so maybe we'll stop building terrible futures. Our future is defined by what we can imagine, and if all we spend time thinking about is awful things, then thats what we will bring about within a margin.

Its why Star Trek: The Next Generation is to me, the most influential and daring Science Fiction piece in the last 50 years, because Roddenberry dared to imagine a positive future full of possibility. And we've already built many of of the pieces of technology he imagined (Communicator, PADD, talking computer etc)

<comment><USER13> Ah cunt! CLOG: Sci-Fi is out of print! :( I would kill for that. Is there any way I could offer something for a share of that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As we become more powerful as a species I find nothing wrong with proceeding a little more judiciously; a little caution might provent us from going extinct afterall, all at least perhaps encourage a more equitable world and make us better stewards of the planet we live on.

The purpose of sci-fi as always been to provide ethical/moral thought experiments to provide insight regarding possible innovation. Sci-fi is just doing its job.

</comment><comment><USER19> I assume then that the widespread fear of, say, early locomotives, was due to the great popularity of science fiction in the early 19th century? Or possibly it's just that people have generally been a bit wary of new stuff for all of recorded history.

</comment><comment><USER20> it mostly makes us fear not the new technology, it makes us fear that other people will do to us using the technology.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why do I envision a sci-fi future only allowing variations on the Dummi Bears?

</comment><comment><USER22> You can see it right here on HN. Someone making cheaper blood tests? "They're planning eugenics to make us INVALIDs".</comment>