Reddit takes a new direction - <AUTHOR> http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2012/feb/13/reddit/ <comment><USER2> People tend to think of online communities as democracies where the freedoms they're accustomed to from their normal lives apply.

So when a post gets deleted by a moderator, people tend to think of it as a freedom of speech issue. There's a whole constitution out there specifically defending anybody's right to create a pro-Nazi subreddit, and to otherwise post anything they please on the site so long as it's not illegal, right?

Not really.

Not at all, in fact. Reddit is not the United States. It's Reddit. Online communities are not democracies any more than your back garden is a democracy. You pull weeds, plant seeds, and otherwise encourage the plants in your garden to comport themselves in a manner that ends up with a pleasing result. It's your garden, so you have the absolute right to pull weeds. The weeds get no say.

Reddit seems to have forgotten this for a while, and as a result they started sliding until they became, well, Reddit. The community we're currently discussing this in, on the other hand, has been a lot more conscientious in cultivating the type of garden it would like to see. And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan.

<comment><USER3> * And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan.*

I am honestly not sure we can say that at all. I thoroughly enjoy both hn and reddit, _for completely different reasons_. Sure, from a strictly legal standpoint, it isn't censorship or a constitutional issue, but at the same time, the "anything goes" attitude in places like 4chan and reddit allow for a lot of creative gems and interesting discussion. People instinctively recognize that while you may have to schlep thought he muck to find those gems, it is still important to have an "anything goes place". People will feel betrayed when they put time and effort into making the community what it is, and suddenly the rules are changed on them -- all their effort has been co- opted or may be co-opted, for something they don't want. It feels slimy.

(yes we are all aware there is no contract or law or whatever, blah blah legalistic point missing, but the decency of it is still in question).

All that being said, I also like the curated, well organized topical community of HN, because sometimes I just don't want to wade through the crap, but that occasional preference switch doesn't diminish _either_ form of community building.

<comment><USER4> For fucks sake. Is that really so hard to understand? Pedos can't trade their images anymore (whether legal or not). That's the extent of the limitation. How the fuck is that supposed to turn Reddit into something radically different? It's this one tiny thing. It's not some big change that changes Reddit.

It's not so hard. Some people just want to be deliberately obtuse. The slippery slope is a fucking fallacy!

<comment><USER5> > _"The slippery slope is a fucking fallacy!"_

Ugh. Here we go again.

The fact that the slippery slope argument _can_ be a fallacy doesn't mean that _all_ claims of slippery slope is automatically a fallacy.

People seem to think the fact that this word exists means they can use it in all contexts and be right.

[edit] And the slippery slope angle _has_ materialized in this particular case. No sonner had the jailbait subreddits fallen did people start clamoring for the shutdown of /r/beatingwomen, /r/deadbabies, and various other reprehensible subreddits. This certainly hasn't been a we-banned-jailbait-and- now-everything-is-fine deal that people hoped it to be.

<comment><USER6> The "slippery slope" argument can be made more strongly here - a few months ago /r/jailbait was shut down by the admins. There was a lot of hand-wringing about it, but they were eventually swayed by opinion and some media attention.

This time around there was a post on SomethingAwful talking about a few more subreddits, and they were all (including several that were explicitly 18+ content only) shut down immediately. For good or ill, we're not in danger of slipping down that slope any more, we're demonstrably sliding already.

<comment><USER7> /r/jailbait was shut down by the /r/jailbait moderators, not the reddit admins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't believe the narrow-minded approach a lot of comments here suggest. Most of the people seem to subscribe to the argument, which in simplified form says, (1) the subreddits were full of child pornography (2) the people who frequent these were "pedos" and therefore (3) it's a good thing that these got axed.

The terms CP and pedophilia are being thrown around without much thinking, the same way the general public thinks all who are on torrent sites are pirates and "hackers are baad and steal your CC numbers". This sort of blunt scare mongering demagogy is commonly used to create support from the masses, I am amazed that the HN crowd is also susceptible to it.

Here are the facts as I believe them, please point out the ones you think are wrong:

1) Some of these subreddits may have contained CP, the illegal ones were being actively removed by admins.

2) Calling pictures of 16-year-olds in bikinis CP is not very useful and dilutes the term.

3) What is legal and morally right usually does not overlap 100%. Law may say one thing about CP and people may feel another thing. This is OK. Also different cultures, of course, have different attitudes.

4) In light of (3), to me there's "definitely bad CP" and "tolerable CP". The moral distinction is not clear cut and the law does not differentiate these. The situation is similar to the 55 mph speed limit, people break it everyday (avg speed on I-90 is more like 75mph) but if you do 85 the police will get you. So there's a tolerable zone and to me (2) falls in that category.

5) One has to be very careful with these outcries because they have the effect of ratcheting the law machine ever more tightly. Remember, no politician will put relaxation of sex offense laws on their ticket.

But, please THINK A LITTLE AND RESEARCH before you pick up the pitchfork, e.g. read this (<http://www.economist.com/node/14164614>).

ADDENDUM: For (2), also consider the widespread use of young girls in advertising and movies, e.g. the Vanity Fair topless photoshoot of Miley Cyrus who was 15 at the time (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus#Controversies>). This is just one that came to mind instantly, _many_ more examples can easily be given.

<comment><USER9> _ADDENDUM: For (2), also consider the widespread use of young girls in..._

Don't forget child beauty pageants. That stuff is IMHO often borderline pedophilia.

<comment><USER10> I dont get this one. CBP does not reveal anything that would even remotely bring porn/nudity on my mind. I think its more a matter of your point of view. Same way I could say that an old man smiling at a 5 years old child on the subway has something dirty on his mind. There are chances but lets not get paranoid here.

<comment><USER9> I've come across them on TV from time to time and the children usually dress very provocatively and wear clothes and makeup that are usually considered "sexy" when worn by grown women. Worse still, they seem to often perform dance routines that are very provocative and sexual in nature. (eg see the end of little miss sunshine - real CBP seem to be similar)

<comment><USER11> This is what gets me. It's not CBP reddit that is a problem, it's the whacked out people (parents in this case) who are creating content that are the 'problem'. If you, as a parent, dress your toddler in provocative clothes and put them in a beauty pagent, then you're being ridiculously naive to think that people will only ever see this in an innocent light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I agree that the world is better off without forums where people can post their child porn or similar ilk, this policy change in reddit shows that there's in inherent issue with centralized platforms.

Back when there was usenet, everybody could post what ever they wanted (some news servers might not have carried the group, but there was no policing the source).

Same with blogs: You wanted to post content the masses dislike? No problem. But you want to post that same content to a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook or any of Google's properties, now the masses (and/or governments) dictate the content you are allowed to post.

To really make use of the internet's capability of providing an incredible freedom of content you can create and publish, you cannot use a centralized platform.

While sites like reddit or facebook might make it easier for other people to find your crap^Wcontent, they also make it infinitely easier to have it removed again.

<comment><USER13> It's a little sad, because there was definitely a sense, a few years ago, that Reddit was pretty much user-centered and therefore fully unrestricted, content-wise. You can choose what subreddits you belong to, or make new ones for whatever subject you want. The admins simply created the platform and set the defaults. Freedom!

But at the same time, everyone still _felt_ like redditors, even if you were on /r/investing or /r/TwoXChromosomes or /r/trees or /r/nudecycling. In fact, you could unsubscribe from all the default subreddits, and join a bunch of weird unusual ones, and so you'd probably never even _see_ a redditor who belongs to the "mainstream" community, but you'd still call yourself a redditor.

Unfortunately, we now see the downside of that group identity, because it didn't stop the reputation of the "bad" subreddits from bleeding over and tarnishing the group's. The subreddit boundaries failed, in the end.

<comment><USER14> That to me is exactly the core issue. It's not as if these people were staying in their obscure subreddit, they were leaking out into advice forums and posting IAMA pedo threads and so on, scoring upvotes due to typical young male contrarianism. It was all creating the general impression that this was acceptable behavior which was commonly discussed by Redditors.

(I saw a post from a sixteen year old boy describing himself as a "ephebophile" because he liked girls from school. It's just bizarre that kids are learning this sort of inside jargon and using it describe completely normal behavior.)

From a broader community perspective, there's no reason to hang out a sign saying "creeps welcome here". They'll show up on their own, and its not as if Reddit needs their traffic.

<comment><USER15> This is definitely an oversimplification of the history. Censorship is an active topic of furious debate. r/SRS, which is for all intents and purposes Reddit's White Guilt, self-censors extremely rigorously even as it invades other subreddits (not officially, but essentially). r/lgbt splintered to r/ainbow due to heavy-handed mod censorship (with allegations of connections to r/SRS and its heavy-handed trolling).

You might say that this is all inconsequential board drama, and it is; but the arc of it ends with admin involvement. Until now, the admins have explicitly let mods handle their own subreddits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reddit is changing. It's currently in a renewed and stronger Eternal September. Bastion subreddits like /r/AskScience and /r/Truereddit are reduced to junk and fads. The hope for the group of moderated subreddits (Republic of Reddit) didn't really take off, it's just a handful of submitters.

The top voted comments on threads about censorship are mostly 1 to 3 _months_ old users. And now reddit (had to) surrender to a decadent SOPA-supporting forum and a bunch of trolls from /r/ShitRedditSays (wich starts to look like a *chan long troll instead of a bunch of ultra-feminists).

Sure, a lot of questionable/creepy subreddits shouldn't be there. But where's the line? And who draws it? Also, isn't this an ongoing process? Those subreddits can reopen in minutes with more subtle names. The censorship whack- a-mole is pointless.

It's weird how reddit was a bastion for resisting SOPA/ACTA but fear mongering in US can take over a site. It seems that's the real frontier and we are losing. Next up /r/trees and /r/atheism.

Like so many times before it's time to move on. I wish the best to the owners/admins, they were cornered and probably had a tough choice. And I sincerely hope the new users enjoy this new reddit.

<comment><USER17> Exchanging child pornography is illegal in the United States (as well as in many other countries). There's nothing unreasonable about stating in your TOS that you can't have a subreddit the very existence of which breaks the law. Sure, people can try to reopen these subreddits under different names, but once the rule is in the TOS, they can be reported on and shut down as a matter of routine. The same applies to warez. Like it or not, you can't operate in the U.S. while allowing your users to post links to warez.

/r/trees is not the same, and I hate slippery-slope arguments predicting its demise. Exchanging _actual marijuana_ is illegal in many parts of the United States. Exchanging _information about marijuana_ is not. You could download kiddie porn on /r/jailbait, and the fact that those images are actually hosted on imgur is unlikely to convince any court. But you wouldn't download marijuana on /r/trees, would you? If /r/trees or /r/atheism ever gets banned, it will be the result of a completely different kind of pressure. It won't be a straightforward extension of reddit's current policy on kiddie porn.

Reddit may or may not be dying, but its latest change of policy on kiddie porn will probably have little to do with its fate.

<comment><USER16> What are you talking about? Reddit had a very strong stance aginst CP already.

And there's a lot of _rules broken on /r/trees_ so it's far from safe. Like meetups to exchange or people giving tips. That's not legal in US and happens quite often there.

Same with /r/atheism, a lot of their content can be labeled _hate speech_ under US law. (IANAL)

<comment><USER18> There's no such thing as "hate speech" under US law. You can, for instance, proudly march down the streets of Skokie in Klan regalia bellowing about the need to "exterminate the Jews", safe in the knowledge that the First Amendment implications of doing so have already been litigated.

There are (dubiously) "hate crime" laws, but they pertain to violent crime.

In a similar vein, I'm not so sure about your legal analysis about "arranging meetups" and "providing tips" on marijuana forums. The reason mj forums don't want people arranging meetups probably has more to do with not creating an easy venue for sting operations.

 _(Disclosure: it's sad it took Reddit this long to apply this rule, and more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it.)_

<comment><USER16> You keep editing your post. My original "I stand corrected" is now out of it's meaning and it makes no sense to keep editing my answer. I expected better of you, tptacek.

<comment><USER18> I didn't edit it to change the meaning of your comment.

On this particular thread, I'd like to make sure my comments are as clear as I can make them: Reddit did the right thing, and the only complaint I can make is that they took too long and their reasoning wasn't great.

<comment><USER16> IMHO, they did the right thing in the _wrong way_ for the _wrong reasons_ at a very troubled time for the community. Also now there's blood in the water so I doubt this will be the end of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is a problem with online communities. Let's call it the problem of "false association". Humans have been forming communities for millennia. Inevitably, in these communities, there are bad apples. However, if there is a child molester that lives in my town, that fact does not (on its own) reflect poorly on me. Even if that molester was my next door neighbor, there may be a bit more suspicion ("how could you not know that was going on next door?"), but I am confident that 9 times out of 10 I would come away with my reputation unblemished.

Of course, before the internet, communities were a more-or-less involuntary phenomenon. They were defined by geography, history, a common resource, or a common industry. Contrast that to online communities that are largely viewed as self-directed, voluntary organizations. This is the view, I think, that will eventually have to change.

This view is poisonous for two reasons. First, as we see here, if anyone, anywhere in an online community (no matter how large) does something offensive, objectionable, or illegal, the knee-jerk reaction of society today is to allow that bad apple to spoil the bunch. Second, this makes it very difficult to form heterogeneous communities online. If I associate with people randomly online, I am a Google search away from being associated with a potential thief/pervert/whatever. The end result is that online communities become insular, or they can only function well under a banner of anonymity, but anonymity has its own problems.

Reddit, it seems to me, struck a useful middle ground: partial anonymity with history (I can create an identity that does not lead back to my real life identity, but can still build up a reputation). Unfortunately, Reddit is still a business. It seems to me that something like Reddit, but based on a distributed model, is what we need.

Let's call it...usenet

</comment><comment><USER20> The comment about "everything that's happened, has also already happened on LiveJournal" really rings true for me. Recent instance: the breast-feeding protesters recently descended on Facebook, which is mostly amusing to me in that they had waited so long. It would be interesting to construct a "here are the trials any internet community is likely to go through" handbook distilling these experiences.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not against Reddit's move, but I do think they're being more than a little naive if they think it will stop here.

hueypriest (Reddit admin) says:

 _/r/trees isn't in remotely the same legal area as CP stuff. Not even close. They'll ban /r/trees when they pry it out of our cold dead hands._

And yet, facilitating a drug transaction is almost definitely illegal. Posting torrent links is at least legally dangerous. Sure, these things haven't become problems _yet_ , but neither were the other things a couple years ago.

What the Reddit admins are saying right now is that anything goes, as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them. This is fine. The problem is that Reddit _doesn't know that they're saying this._ They think it's about CP, but it's not, it's about legal threat.

<comment><USER22> The slippery slope you describe simply does not exist. "First they took the CP, and I said nothing..." is not a valid concern, primarily because CP has _always_ been an issue, and whenever it's come up it's _always_ been removed from Reddit. This change in position is not nearly as large as it seems.

Contrast, as you seem to want to, with /r/trees. How many posts in /r/trees get taken down due to their questionable legality? How many posts in /r/letstradetorrents (apocryphal) get taken down due to their questionable legality? None and none. The nature of CP on the Internet is unique, and not viewed similarly to _anything_ else on the Internet. Reddit isn't saying "as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them", they're saying, "as long as it's not CP, and as long as it's manageable through an ad-hoc process."

Due to the SomethingAwful attack, or due to some other, unknown reason, the volume of CP was too high to continue to deal with it on an ad-hoc basis. That is all.

<comment><USER21> First, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be taking the position they are. In fact, I believe that Reddit should always make the best effort to comport itself to US law in order to protect the site's existence for its users everywhere. However, I am saying that CP is not the only possible legal threat and it is naive to assume that it will continue to be the dominant legal threat going forward.

 _Contrast, as you seem to want to, with /r/trees. How many posts in /r/trees get taken down due to their questionable legality? How many posts in /r/letstradetorrents (apocryphal) get taken down due to their questionable legality? None and none. The nature of CP on the Internet is unique, and not viewed similarly to anything else on the Internet. Reddit isn't saying "as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them", they're saying, "as long as it's not CP, and as long as it's manageable through an ad-hoc process."_

I agree that it is not yet a problem. Reddit has not yet been taken down by the FBI because of widespread drug trade on r/trees. Nor have they been sued because of torrent links. What I question is how long it will take before these things become issues?

What I'm asking is: what is it about CP that makes it the only possible legal threat that Reddit can face? Reddit is still a maturing community that can evolve in many different ways. Reddit's policy is _not_ about CP specifically, it's about credible legal threat. This is not what they say, but what they mean. If you think otherwise, I invite you to tell me what they will do if a non-CP related legal threat comes along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Policing a community is where humans excel and policies/computers fail.

I ran a community once, with around 30k active users. Definitely not big, but we faced the same problems. Our solution was simple, aside from adhering to the law: "Mods delete what looks icky".

We felt that automated systems would always fail (users would use "4" instead of "a"), and strict policies always led to debate about whether something was allowed or not.

Instead we tried to recruit mods that knew the community, the direction it was heading and were able to keep a level head. Sure, someone went overboard once in a while and deleted o.k. stuff, but we'd just remove their mod privileges and reinstate what they deleted (thinks were removed from the database 14 days after they were marked as "deleted").

We were never accused of harboring pedophiles, or going overboard with removal. Those that complained about free-speech were always radical political groups well outside of "acceptable" for most communities.

The key is to find moderators in line with the community, in a benevolent dictator way. No idea if reddit could find enough of those, but it worked well for us and should scale with community size, as reddit has a larger pool to recruit from.

<comment><USER24> The problem is that reddit mods are self selected from within their communities by the other mods in that community. The quality of the moderators varies wildly and most subreddits are not run very professionally (obvious exceptions like /askscience exist).

Sure reddit has overall mods but they do not usually get involved and communities manage themselves which usually leads to a lack of coherent policy in regards to what is acceptable and not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Doesn't every website that gets used by the unwashed masses eventually have to deal with this problem? How does facebook or youtube deal with it? How did AOL deal with it?

Is the issue just that Reddit is run by a smaller team than these larger companies?

<comment><USER26> Facebook is obviously thriving as a business but arousing indignation and ire over their policies, which ban breastfeeding photos but allow hate speech.

So I woud say they have decided to live woth a certain ongoing level of shitstorming as a cost of doing buiness.

<comment><USER27> Facebook does not ban breastfeeding photos in general - [https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=340974655932193#Does- Face...](https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=340974655932193#Does-Facebook- allow-photos-of-mothers-breastfeeding)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What about utilizing the community to police this undesirable content? I'm sure that opens up other exploits but if the community wants to stay healthy, it has to take responsibility for itself and not just rely on the admins to come up with a magic algorithm that will solve the problem.

<comment><USER29> Reddit isn't one community, it's sort of like usenet, there are lots of sub- communities that can easily be oblivious and invisible to one another.

<comment><USER30> This is the reason I scoff when people try to describe an average "Redditor". With the sheer amount of traffic coming through their site it's impossible to come up with an accurate generalization of what the community as a whole feels, even with the small percentage of traffic actually commenting and voting.

I would like to see a lot more emphasis be put on the decision between serving the will of the users, establishing a set of ideals that Reddit chooses to run things by, or a mixture of the two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's surprising how people have these discussions and don't discuss Metafilter - the discussion site that works.

What has set Metafilter apart from slashdot, K5, Digg and Reddit was that after the initial burst of building a good community it became $5 to join.

That keeps out the morons and pays for moderators to get rid of the asshats.

If HN wants to keep up the quality before the hordes arrive it'd be a good move here too or it will be a matter of time before the idiots kill the place.

</comment><comment><USER32> "I originally cut my teeth on sites and services that, frankly, make 4chan and reddit (today's all-too-frequent bogeymen) look like a knitting circle."

WUT NET WUZ THIS GUY ON? K5/adequacy/early slashdot/b3ta/whatever... nothing like the internet of today. the volume of users alone leads to emergent (gross) behavior that before was drowned out in an invisible minority. USENET, IRC, same thing. You could find shady things if you looked for them, but no one (I knew of) actively did. Occasionally gross stuff would pop up in a listing of newsgroups, but you just didn't click.

No one envies reddit, but they should've changed their policy earlier. Better late than never.

</comment><comment><USER33> My biggest concern over all this is that the policy change came so quickly after the SA thread (similar timeframe as the Anderson Cooper clip). Even though startups and usually praised for moving quickly, I agree complete with the OP that this can be a major directional change (positive or negative) for Reddit overall. This kind of stuff should be thought over long and hard, rather than come down from their parent company. Reactionary policies that sprouts from avoiding bad PR will be good for the short term, I just hope they thought it all out what they will do in the long term.

<comment><USER34> Not that I'd like to defend this move, but it probably has been on the table for a long time now. /r/jailbait was banned and reinstated enough times for the discussions to have gotten old in reddit HQ by now.

<comment><USER33> So the result of the discussion was to keep all the other questionable content available until a PR shitstorm starts to brew?

If they already made a decision why would they not act on it at the same time /r/jailbait was banned?

This whole thing smells like they got their hands forced, which is what worries me.

<comment><USER35> my interpretation- they were WAITING for an outside party to speak up about it, so they could say "well, x party forced our hand" to shift the blame. Reddit (the company) is _terrified_ of upsetting its userbase, lest it go the way of Digg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think playing the 'endless game of whack-a-mole' really is their only option in the short term. Yes, it can get expensive. But if they want to continue on their current insane traffic trajectory and gain a wider audience, they need to be on top of the human moderation process.

This traffic report isn't accurate, but the trend is right (from what I've heard): <http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/>

</comment><comment><USER37> Every time I see k5 get mentioned, I get all nostalgic and think there will never be a community as eclectic as k5 ever again...

<comment><USER38> I get similar pangs of nostalgia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Reddit is open source. If anyone thinks that this will ruin them then step up to the plate and compete on "freedom of speech"

</comment><comment><USER40> Y'know, it's one thing to be against laws that are ostensibly made in favor of prosecuting child pornography because they can be abused to censor things that are politically unpopular... it's a whole other bucket of beans to be against removing stuff that's basically child pornography because you think something that's politically unpopular might be removed.

<comment><USER41> > basically child pornography

Nothing that got banned was "basically child pornography." That's why there is blood in the water.

<comment><USER40> It was a collection of subreddits for the purpose of eroticism focused on children. It wasn't child porn, but it's as close as you can come without actually getting arrested.

You're full of shit if you're trying to tell me otherwise.

<comment><USER42> The subreddits are as close as you can get to being illegal, but I think there's still a large (or at least significant) difference between the two. My only basis for that is my gut reaction, but I think it was what jquery was getting at. Not that they're truly unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's interesting, I think, how much sheer emotion there is behind these child protection issues. Is there anything more emotionally provocative than the thought of harm to your children? Your own flesh and blood, who you've raised from before they could crawl. The amount of emotional and physical pain you've gone through (and willingly continue to go through) for your children far surpasses any other possible source.

Of course, people do overreact sometimes, but I think this is our instinct for a very good reason.

<comment><USER44> I think the strength of the emotion is perfectly understandable. The unfortunate side effect is that it makes rational discussion very difficult - because it's such an emotional issue, it's easy to misunderstand what others are saying, or to see something as much more black and white than it actually is.

The worst part is this emotional response is so easy to exploit. It can be "think of the children" laws with unintended (or intended) side effects. Or, like in this case, it can be used as a weapon to attack a person or community (even if I agree with the outcome, this particular instance feels like SA attacking Reddit either out of genuine outrage or, more likely, for shits and giggles).

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Reddit had the biggest hissy fit of all about how child porn laws like SOPA were going to go too far and ruin the internet. And here they go banning anything involving a bathing suit.

The hypocricy is strong in this one.

<comment><USER46> Uh, SOPA wasn't a child porn law. It was a copyright enforcement law. By definition it didn't cover anything regarding illegal pornography, because illegal things aren't subject to copyright.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've been banned from posting articles on some larger subreddits some time ago. My political, economic and historical opinions aren't welcome for some reason.

My point? Reddit began banning political opinion long before it banned kiddie porn. Reddit's admins don't give a damn about freedom of speech and opinion.

<comment><USER48> You've touched upon an incredibly grey area. Most forums will ban trolls, but therein lies the problem: define "troll".

I don't know what you said, where, and in what context... but I don't give benefit of doubt on this. Nor do I think you're guilty either... all I do know is that running a community is hard, and one of the things that the people of the community look to moderators to do is to keep the peace.

A difference of opinion can be minor, or major. And depending on the topic it can be quite offensive to some.

Have you considered that within a particular subreddit that the moderators were just trying to keep the peace? Has anything stopped you from starting your own subreddit to voice your opinion?

<comment><USER47> > I don't know what you said

The below article was deleted from the queue in r/politics and I've been unable to post articles in politics and a few other subreddits ever since, using a particular handle from a particular IP.

Ron Paul's Challenge to the Left: [http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/a-question-of-morality- ron...](http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/a-question-of-morality-ron- paul%E2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-left/)

My point stands: reddit has been complicit in silencing political opinion long before it began worrying about whether child porn should be allowed or not.

<comment><USER49> The behavior you're describing (not being able to submit from a certain user account from a certain IP) is a result of reddit's quite sketchy spam filtering mechanism. Unless you have been notified that you've been banned from a certain community, your posts are simply being absorbed by the spam filter.

You have also mistaken the views and actions of a specific community for the views and actions of the site owners. Anyone (yes, even you) can go start a subreddit whenever they want, and restrict content however they want, even if that includes suppressing information they don't agree with or banning users with whom they disagree. The idea behind reddit is that people show their support for a specific community by frequenting and contributing to it. If you don't agree with the way a community is being run, you are free to find a better one or even to start your own.

<comment><USER47> My posts have been actively deleted, not just caught in a spam trap.

I'be had discussions with subreddit moderators and reddit admins. The majority of them dislike my political opinions, thus the active censorship.

To restate my point: reddit has been actively deleting unpopular political opinion long before they thought about restricting kiddie porn.

That kind of prioritizing is what's been instrumental in the herd of geniuses that now inhabit reddit.

<comment><USER50> Reddit and r/politics are not the same thing. Subreddits are user-created forums moderated as those creators see fit. Each subreddit chooses what it wants to see, how it wants to be moderated, and who will moderate. A particular sub community not welcoming you or your ideas is completely different from site-wide moderation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's a business decision, plain and simple. Get over it.

</comment><comment><USER52> It's simple, shutdown anything criminal and keep the rest open.

<comment><USER53> Sadly it's not that simple. Even if that were the only rule, illegal where? The rules aren't even uniform among the 50 US states, not to speak of city/county level, or other countries.

I think that the (unique?) problem with child issues is that if you allow things that are clearly not illegal (just 'creepy'), you'll draw a community that 1) Looks illegal from the outside and 2) Will, with very high probability, be doing illegal things over the messaging system or private/side boards.

To the greater world, 1 and 2 are enough for a high profile lawsuit or media blitz that would effectively be a death penalty for the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I confused about why he thinks it ironic that Nabakov is banned... I mean, it got grandfathered in when child porn laws were written, somehow, but it is certainly fiction about a paedophile, right? Anything that bans other kiddie- fiddler fiction while allowing _Lolita_ is quite obviously inconsistent, and those in favor of this inconsistency probably ought to examine why they like _Lolita_.

<comment><USER55> It wasn't grandfathered in; it's unconstitutional, in the U.S., to ban _Lolita_.

It would be pretty unfortunate if literature couldn't even seriously deal with the subject! (Incidentally, it's pretty hard to read _Lolita_ as being _pro_ -pedophilia; if anything, it's an extended, mostly negative investigation into the protagonist's psyche, although many pages in literary journals have been spent arguing over how to interpret it.)

<comment><USER56> The First Amendment is pretty clear that freedom of speech/press is protected only from Congress and legislation: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

Companies and/or websites can ban almost any speech or writing they would like. It's not unconstitutional, because corporations aren't considered a governmental/Congressional body.

<comment><USER55> That's true; I was objecting to the claim that it was "grandfathered in when child porn laws were written". The reason a _law_ couldn't ban it is because of the First Amendment.

<comment><USER56> Definitely agree that Lolita is a written text and not a visual depiction of children engaged in sexual activity. So it's not covered by child porn laws, and is still protected by the First Amendment.

But wanted to highlight that the law _can_ ban speech, despite the First Amendment. For example, in 1982 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that child porn was not protected by the First Amendment:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_v._Ferber>

Laws can also ban material deemed obscene. The Miller test is the standard there: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the CIA Stole a Soviet Satellite (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://warisboring.com/how-the-cia-stole-a-soviet-satellite/ <comment><USER2> They borrowed it. After all, the Soviets got it back?

When I read the subject I thought the article would be about the CIA taking a Soviet satellite from orbit in one of those secretive shuttle missions, but no.

<comment><USER3> "You cannot prove I stole the moon, but I did put it back"\- or something like that. Borrowing an orbiting satellite would be something to brag about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> By far the most fun to be had in the intelligence world is Foreign Materiel Acquisition.

Acquire, disassemble, document, re-assemble (+1 part), return unnoticed.

NASIC wrote up a fun article last year about their FMA program [1].

[1][http://www.nasic.af.mil/News/Article- Display/Article/1010245...](http://www.nasic.af.mil/News/Article- Display/Article/1010245/acquire-assess-exploit/)

</comment><comment><USER5> My favorite movie on this topic is Ice Station Zebra: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063121/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063121/)

<comment><USER6> favorite... do you have other recommendations? Sounds like a great genre

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And the NSA finessed this to work with multiple servers being sent from a manufacturer.</comment>


How We Replaced React with Phoenix - <AUTHOR> https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-we-replaced-react-with-phoenix <comment><USER2> If your entire react application can be replaced with 3 lines of javascript, you probably didn't need react

</comment><comment><USER3> Not to bust on what they're doing, but it seems like React may not have been the best initial choice. However, it seems like the investment time aspect means the chance of learning is worth more than the "best tool" aspect.

I like that they were able to admit to not doing something the best way and then shared how they made it better. It makes me more curious to try out Phoenix as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> So a blog post complaining... about using the wrong tool for the job. So next post will be... "How We Replaced Phoenix with Rails".

<comment><USER5> > wrong tool for the job

> "...Phoenix with Rails"

Isn't Phoenix designed to be like Rails and do things Rails does? That'd make them pretty similar (though not the same, of course) tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Elixir is riding a hype-wave similar (but much smaller) to JavaSciprt ~two years ago. "I rewrote X for almost on reason with framework Y and experienced a result."

Still cool though. Advancement is tons of fun, and as we know there are now 4 ways to skin a cat.

</comment><comment><USER7> A screenshot of the app would help make more sense of this to an external audience. Right now it sounds like just a blog with comments, so not sure why a custom app was needed in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER8> "sprinkle javascript" ...LMAO

<comment><USER4> I always sprinkle my JavaScript

<comment><USER9> But how do you decide to stop sprinkling your JavaScript and go full blow React (serious question)?

<comment><USER10> When "sprinkling Javascript" turns into "making sauce for the spaghetti you've been cooking", it's probably time to consider React or something similar.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Where to find the best tech-ideas? - <AUTHOR> At the moment I am looking for a new (side) project. I would love it to be with (recent) technology. It would be great if it has a little complexity to it. Where to look? <comment><USER2> My projects are usually a solution to some problem so I usually go looking for problems.

Whats a problem at work?

In your personal life?

What do you not like doing?

What repetitive task do you do a lot?

Where do you spend your time and what on?

Anytime you think why.

Look on stack overflow if there is a problem that keeps coming up its because the solution isn't good enough.

Here and on reddit I look at what other people are complaining about, or excited about.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can join us on dailyprog.org. We are a community of programmers chatting and trying to hack stuff together. We share a server over ssh and we talk on IRC.

IMHO ideas doesn't matter much (nor technologies even if I have my preferences).

</comment><comment><USER4> I left freelancing and took a job in a new industry (commercial real estate). It wasn't long before I found my SaaS opportunity and began building the MVP</comment>


A Prayer's Chance: The Scandal of Mental Health in West Africa - <AUTHOR> http://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/a-prayers-chance/ <comment><USER2> The full article is paywalled.

</comment><comment><USER3> Uninvited and super annoying audio starts playing within 10 seconds when I open this page. And not just one, but two audio streams overlapping each other. Took me a minute to figure out why my background music suddenly went to shit. Didn't expect Harpers website to be so spammy. I have adblock and made no difference.

<comment><USER4> That's funny, I disabled Adblock but still didn't notice anything autoplaying. I do share your frustration with the Harper's website though, it's a great magazine but their digital strategy is really backwards. I even went so far as to email the owner of the magazine about it, and he responded by mailing me a hard-copy of a journal article about how people absorb information more readily in print than online -- which I found strangely charming but it also implied that the problem starts at the top...</comment></comment>


Debunking the tragedy of the commons (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/08/25/debunking-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/ <comment><USER3> Interesting article, I didn't know that "tragedy of the commons" was used to argue in favor of private ownership, rather I always thought it was used to demonstrate the need for some amount of regulations for things that cannot be meaningfully privatized (the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, the streets we use etc...). So pretty much the opposite of what the original author argued for apparently.

It's also interesting that the article points out that in practice communities self-regulate to avoid the issue of over-using a shared resource. It seems it doesn't work so well in a globalized economy. While social ties might work well enough in rural England in the 17th century to self-regulate sheep herding it doesn't seem to translate very well to our modern society where the "commons" is the great coral reef dying or coastlines getting submerged tens of thousands of kilometers away from me.

<comment><USER4> > It seems it doesn't work so well in a globalized economy.

It doesn't work because we are essentially at the stage where nations take on the role of the individuals in the original example. Countries have much to gain by quickly exploiting the resources common to all countries before the others can. This leads to the tragedy of the commons on a global scale.

We need world government with real power in order to solve this problem, just as national government has solved it for more local issues.

<comment><USER5> > We need world government with real power in order to solve this problem, > just as national government has solved it for more local issues.

The problem with world government is that you would need sign on by literally everyone, permanently. As soon as you had a serious disagreement and tried to enforce it against a sufficiently powerful country without their consent, we would have at best the dissolution of the world government and at worst World War III. The American Civil War at world-scale is not a pretty picture.

The system we have now works much better than that. When someone is cheating, the countries that don't like it put sanctions on them until they stop. The sanctions aren't severe enough to fight a war over but they cost more than the cost of doing the right thing, which resolves things for all but the most obstinate countries.

The problem with climate change seems to be that countries lack the will to actually use those methods. If most of Europe and China got together and signed an agreement to all put sanctions on any country that didn't meet a per-capita carbon emissions target, that would be the end of it. But apparently they don't have the stones to actually do it.

<comment><USER4> > If most of Europe and China got together and signed an agreement to all put > sanctions on any country that didn't meet a per-capita carbon emissions > target, that would be the end of it.

Which would be the beginning of world government. Agreed upon rules with clear consequences for breaking them. Right now there are consequences for doing what the major players do not like, but the rules are not written down beforehand.

<comment><USER5> > Which would be the beginning of world government.

No it wouldn't, because it isn't a government, it's a relationship between fully independent states.

If a federal judge orders an Alabama school superintendent to do something as a matter of federal law, that superintendent is either going to do that thing or be arrested by the feds, and nobody is going to stop them. That's what a government looks like.

If the EU tells the US to cut carbon emissions or face sanctions and Donald Trump tells them to piss off, nobody is going to arrest Donald Trump and anybody who tries to is going to be met with force. Europe can then impose the sanctions, and the US can either give in or suffer the ramifications _as a country_ , but at no point is anyone who refuses to comply going to be held personally responsible by an external governing body.

Moreover, each government's tools against the others are roughly symmetrical. If the EU wants to put sanctions on the US they can, but the US can just respond in kind. That hurts both of them and they both know it, so (absent corruption) they won't do it unless it's something sufficiently important. Which means you don't get the insane policies like we have in the US where the feds start micromanaging everything just because they can get away with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Summary: There is no way there could a commons could be abused because no one in a pre-capitalist society would be selfish enough to need to. Capitalism (privatization) only cares about short term gains. Tragedy of the commons is a political myth designed to extract resources.

I would make a couple of points.

1\. This article quotes Marx unironically as an argument.

2\. Even if I bought the argument that commons were actually great and capitalism ruined them, Tragedy of the Commons is still a useful way to describe collective action problems.

3\. Corporations choose long term viability over short term profits all of the time. (A great example is Gifford Pinchot convincing the US lumber industry that it was in their interest to effectively manage forests long term).

4\. Community ownership is not the same as government ownership.

5\. There are cases where privatization or local ownership can lead to great outcomes: ([https://www.npr.org/2011/10/10/140445502/to-save-wildlife- na...](https://www.npr.org/2011/10/10/140445502/to-save-wildlife-namibias- farmers-take-control))

I feel like framing environmental problems on capitalism is a big mistake (socialist countries arguably have had much, much worse track records). Good environmental policy is usually just that - good policy; not overtly socialist or capitalist.

<comment><USER7> 5a. I think the NOx and SOx auctioning markets are also a great example of privatization schemes that have been wildly successful (there's basically no acid rain in the US anymore). There's an argument out there that privatization in these two markets has been no better than regulation, I mean but it's almost a silly argument, because in the US regulation had zero buy-in, but privatization was acted on, so it got the job done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A much better article on this topic:

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/284/5412/278.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/284/5412/278.full)

Any serious discussion of 'debunking' the tragedy of the commons should mention Elinor Ostrom, the only woman with a Nobel prize in Economics, which she won largely for her work on governance of the commons.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the mental model is useful.

I think of it every time I stand at one of those coveyer belts to pick up luggage in an airport and the crowd slowly creeps in closer, each person trying to get a better view by standing in front of someone else, who then does the same.

Always fascinating to observe the group dynamics and the designs (like a painted line to show you how far back to stand) used to try to informally enforce the norm that helps everyone get their case easily.

I'm not sure you can abandon every good idea that's been abused, even if it's got a weird origin story. But I've not personally witnessed it being used to support privatization, I can see how someone would get annoyed if they kept seeing that happen.

<comment><USER10> > the designs (like a painted line to show you how far back to stand) used to > try to informally enforce the norm that helps everyone get their case > easily.

There's two layers to your example: the part where the conveyor belt itself and its affordances[0] encourage certain group dynamics, which you can change through design (aka interaction design), and rules and regulations to discourage that without changing the affordance of the conveyor belt (the enforcing of good behaviour that you mention).

For example, to really speed things up you would need to parallelize: use multiple shorter conveyor belt loops, each handling with luggage from different sections of a plane (say seat 1 to 15, 16 to 30, etc). That requires organisational overhead though. It also wouldn't work in situations where everyone in the front of the plane had check in luggage, and only a handful of people in the back.

But that presume we want to optimise time for luggage pick-up. If we go back to the crowding behaviour you mentioned, the issue is everyone wanting to stand next to the belt, and close to the point where luggage is thrown on it.

The former can be solved by maximising conveyor belt length vs surface area by making it "snake" more, more people can stand next to it in the same area. However, lengthening the belt makes it take longer for luggage to move all the way around it, and you can't speed it up too much without making it difficult to grab the luggage. The second can be mitigated by having multiple spots through which luggage is thrown on the belts.

... you know what, now that I think about it, baggage carousel design could make for a fun little Indy game a la Freeways or Minimetro[1][2]

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

[1] [https://captaingames.itch.io/freeways](https://captaingames.itch.io/freeways)

[2] [http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/](http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Elinor Ostrom would agree. She received the Nobel prize in Economics in 2009 (after OP's article) for her work on "Common Pool Resources" and the institutions that successfully manage common resources.

Noticing that commons are not always managed to tragedy, as noticed by OP's article, her motto was "A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory".

</comment><comment><USER12> Ha - Ha - Ha, some self serving debunk this is. Marxism is a failed theory - but the Tragedy of the Commons(TOTC) is an observation of reality - <USER2> reality of people whose grasp exceeds their ability to restore what they have consumed. The TOTC is the truth of man's nature - that the nature of man is intrinsically corrupted by the same aspect of organic life as the urge of an amoeba to eat first and starve the other amoebas...?

</comment><comment><USER13> The commons was developed thousands of years ago in order to be dismantled hundreds of years ago to illustrate why capitalism is inevitable.</comment>


Ask HN: Become a high frequency trader? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
I'm a regular here, but staying anonymous for obvious reasons. I'm a hacker in a variety of languages (Python/Ruby/Java/JS/etc) and have been a 'startup guy' (founder or early stage employee) for my last couple of jobs. Had a lot of fun, worked on cool problems, met great people.
Now I have an offer to work at High Frequency Trading firm to write very fast code in C/C++/Erlang. Just like a startup, there are a lot of very smart people, the problems are interesting (getting response times down to fractions of a millisecond is something I've never done before ...), and I'd make a lot of money (~200K cash, my first year). The firm is structured so that each 5-10 person group has almost complete autonomy, and it seems very startupish and entrepreneurial.
Is there any reason not to go do this? It seems perfect - why don't more hackers take this path? <comment><USER2> Have a look at:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1435450>

I'm actually going the other way from low-latency pricing/trading to the startup world. And with that move I'm accepting that chances are I'll make less money at my startup than I could working in finance.

But money's less important than you think it is, it has diminishing returns. The difference between $30,000 and $50,000 can be a huge impact to the quality of your life, the difference between $180,000 and $200,000 is barely noticeable. Once you have enough money to live comfortably extra money essentially just means a bigger house or a nicer car, which in the overall scheme of things have fairly minimal impact on your happiness.

Also it can have other negative externalities, do you really want to be worried if the girl you started dating actually likes you or is just attracted by the fact you work for a prop fund ? - and I'm not kidding about this, on one online careers advice forum where I helped out (hence my background is somewhat public) I regularly got hit on by girls who are obviously interested in me because of my job (no that's not a good thing).

Basically what I'm saying is don't do it purely for the money, if it's what you're passionate about then do it, but if your passion lies elsewhere then follow it.

<comment><USER3> I have to second this.

If you consider the industry very "interesting" then go for it, but I would say think wisely about it.

Finance is one of the most self-indulgent industries out there (more so even then something like Art), you will be spending a lot of time with a lot of people that spend their time thinking about either how to make money (usually trying to find a way of cheating the system) or people who have already made their money and are now preachers of the free market.

I would recommend that you go check them out for a week if you can, especially if you are new to finance. It's not for everybody. Check out a few of the popular blogs (FT Alphaville is a good one) and see if you would be capable of living in that world.

The same way that hackers love to code and talk nothing else, quants talk markets and nothing else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did it for a long time. I learned a lot. A lot of my coworkers were really talented hackers.

I don't see the downside.

</comment><comment><USER5> If my previous experience in the field is any guide, this should be a rewarding experience for you.

> Is there any reason not to go do this?

It is likely to be a high-stress job. Also, the turn-over in the industry tends to be very high.

And someday your grandmother will hear something about high frequency trading on Oprah and decide that your work is evil.

> It seems perfect - why don't more hackers take this path?

Not many are invited. Traders accept only the very best.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Is there any reason not to go do this? It seems perfect - why don't more hackers take this path?_

I think in the past alot of east coasters did take this path. But with NY coming into it's own with in respect to start-ups. That is starting to change. I would do it for the domain knowledge alone.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do it for a year. Make $200k and then get out to do something for you. Unless you like the job.

Personally it's one of those of those industries, like defense, I don't think I'd want to work for long term interesting problems or not.

</comment><comment><USER8> Do it, I worked in HFT for a year and enjoyed it. It's a small and secretive world. People that go this route don't tend to start up "how to" blogs on HFT, and you'd likely be shunned by the community if you did.</comment>


US Slams Visa Ban on Election Riggers in Nigeria - Daily-events https://daily-events.com/forums/topic/us-slams-visa-ban-on-election-riggers-in-nigeria/?mref=Oluwole <comment><AUTHOR> I think maybe Nigeria should file a Visa Ban on Election Riggers in the US.

I think there's a pretty well-known one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.</comment>


Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science Book is Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.wolframscience.com/nks/ <comment><AUTHOR> Announcement post - [https://backchannel.com/a-new-kind-of-science-a-15-year- view...](https://backchannel.com/a-new-kind-of-science-a-15-year- view-4f5668abe54f)

</comment><comment><USER2> If you can't sell I suppose you can give it away. The dead-tree versions make excellent bookends and doorstops.</comment>


Autodeploy from GitHub Using AWS CodeDeploy - <AUTHOR> http://crypt.codemancers.com/posts/2016-12-26-autodeploy-from-github-using-aws-codedeploy/ <comment><USER2> I tried for hours to mess around with a simple deploy from github to EB or even a plain EC2 instance.

In an Azure web app it took me five mouse clicks and 10 minutes of research and learning.

We happily update master and don't even waste think cycles on what's wrong with the server or deploy config.

It just works.

Why can't AWS make it that simple.</comment>


Can AI Write Pop Songs? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/06/29/in-stargoons-car/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=Paris+Review+Daily+Weekly+20170702&utm_term=Paris+Review+Daily+Weekly+20170702&utm_content=Paris+Review+Daily+Weekly+20170702&bt_ee=/CeGRlN2Sp6DBPdo3s8etN+MDYo58q2xiIGOK/XyFsw/zoUO6mCtR0VHRKtiAsbT&bt_ts=1499001081597 <comment><USER2> Having listened to the song linked in the OP I was blown away, but then:

> I ought to note that a human being is involved in all this: the French > composer Benoit Carré, who took the raw data generated by the CSL and > matched it to audio from existing recordings [..] Benoit then arranged, > produced, and mixed the tracks that resulted from this collaboration. Carré > has also written the words.

I feel like there's a big difference between "AI creating music" and "AI as an assisstive tool for creating music".

<comment><USER3> But in the early 90's I sat in on a seminar by a music prof at my university, he was working on AI generated music. His vision was that it would be an assistive device; basically labor saving for composers.

At the time his students were doing automated compositions and I was blown away by the quality at the time. Definitely his students were already at the stage of partially composed music - basically just a songwriter who needed a good arranger / producer.

Given some of the work I've read on RNN's, I think this is really close to being fully automated. 5 years, maybe, and stuff like this will be fully automated.

<comment><USER4> I think this is the future of AI in music, not just pop.

It's trivially easy to write a mediocre song. All it takes to turn a mediocre song into an above-average one is a clever turn of musical phrase; be it melody, harmony or rhythm or all three (typically it's all three). As a songwriter you're constantly generating options for you to choose from. "What chord goes well after this one but doesn't sound too predictable? What direction can I take this melodic idea in? My chorus is boring; is there something I could do rhythmically that would make it more interesting?" You're constrained by your own imagination, which itself is constrained by what kind of mood you're in, what you've eaten or drunk, energy levels, etc.

How nice would it be to have a super-charged co-writer that could spit out 20 alternatives that you would never have thought of. They don't even need to be perfect alternatives; simply enough to jog your head into a different frame where you can proceed to refine and build from.

<comment><USER5> That's interesting, but in that scenario, how important is the composer really?

Couldn't we just connect the variable output of the AI to some kind of Mechanical Turk-style focus group, feed those results as inputs back into the AI, and repeat that process millions of times? Might that produce a better song than an individual composer?

I've seen interviews with some modern artists, and they'll often take inspiration from decades-old hits (which are essentially de-risked melodies) and apply them to a modern template. I'm assuming the bigger labels already focus-group the output and make revisions. This seems like something that could eventually be automated.

<comment><USER4> I'm looking at this from the standpoint of someone who likes to write music. If I'm the composer then I'm important. :-)

<comment><USER5> Haha, fair enough. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the article: "Franchise a rock band."

Some years ago I was backstage at a major rock event the day before the performance. One of the management types was explaining to me that they had two sets of everything, and three crews. One crew was at the current venue, one was at the previous venue, tearing things down, and one was at the next venue, setting up. I asked "so why not have two sets of performers and double your revenue? 'Cats' has two road companies. Barnum and Bailey circuses have two road companies. There are bands that replaced all their members over time and kept the name. It's all about the branding." A more senior manager, overhearing this, looked very thoughtful.

It's been done in Japan. AKB48 has three teams. They're organized like a sports league, with farm teams and regular turnover.

<comment><USER3> I'm not all that familiar with them, but isn't Gorillaz an entirely fake band? I mean, they don't have real human members, it's all virtual musicians.

In a sense, all the boy bands are basically the same thing. One runs its course, another springs up with the exact same formula. It'd be much more efficient without having to deal with human performers.

I think this franchise music thing is going to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given the relatively short, finite length of the average pop song; given the well known, restricted inputs; given that there is a general formula for successful pop songs; not only can AI write pop songs, it can (and will) write every possible pop song. At this point it's merely a question of a short amount of time, sub ten years perhaps, twenty tops.

The creation part will ultimately end up being the trivial aspect. Figuring out which of the billion songs AI create are any good will be the more difficult, time consuming filtering / discovery aspect (that will process partially at human-speed).

AI will create vast amounts of content/goods in the relatively near future (of all types, from VR worlds to pop songs to physical things automatically made by printing). A large industry will spring up around filtering that, deciding what's good, to then serve it up to people for popular mass consumption.

<comment><USER8> > ... sub ten years perhaps, twenty tops

I hope you are being sarcastic :) Even though pop songs aren't that imaginative, exponential growth means causes problems. We can't count all ways of ordering 52 cards using all the computers in the world in the history of the universe, and I bet one could come up with an algorithm for creating pop songs, one per ordering of a deck of cards.

<comment><USER9> We can count all the ways of ordering 52 cards.

It's 52!, or 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000.

Enumerating them is where it starts to get tricky.

<comment><USER8> Yes, you are right, I meant enumerate :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recently worked on a project that attempted to find harmonizing chord progressions for pop songs, given a melody. Since pop music has such predictable structure, I think AI generation is well within possibility.

[https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/ai-project- harm...](https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/ai-project-harmonizing- pop-melodies-using-hidden-markov-models/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Can evolution produce pop songs?

Just take a few pop songs written by professionals then do some descent with modification - and dump them all onto youtube. Cull the losers - rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER12> If Vocaloid sounded a little more realistic, humans could be completely removed from the process.

<comment><USER13> I look forward to the glorious future with infinite Hatsune Miku concerts featuring neural network produced music and AI written lyrics.

<comment><USER6> Right.

We may also get machine learning systems which take in recordings of existing singers and generate the data needed for a singing synthesizer. Automatic cover bands, at last. It will be worth it just to really annoy the music industry.

<comment><USER14> Maybe this is where Apple's AI efforts have been directed all along. Who needs a good assistant when you can piss of music execs even more?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of Microsoft Research's Songsmith, [1] (also known as MySong).

[1] [http://songsmith.ms/](http://songsmith.ms/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Has anyone fed the Real Book into a Markov Model (or I guess RNN these days) and seen what gets spit out?

All the music examples I've seen have been people feeding tracks because...people tend to have lots of MP3s lying around. I'm curious as to what you get when you work directly with the notation which conveys a lot more structure than a waveform.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just wondering. Why does the link have utm_source=boomtrain when its coming from HN

<comment><USER18> My guess: the link was probably copied from an email marketing campaign or newsletter with that UTM already attached.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pop evolutes. With machine learning we can create, say, every single combination of reggaeton, but every decade new styles appear. AI leveraging real creation requires AGI.

<comment><USER20> It's amusing that people down vote comments for which no formula exists...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The second this happens, will people tune out and revolt against it, making it no longer "pop"? What will be the post-AI pop music?

</comment><comment><USER22> >>> Can AI Write Pop Songs?

Doesn't matter. There is no value in the songs, they are easy to write and many are written in a day with the premise of becoming the next pop song.

Pop is about distribution and marketing. Control it and your songs will be the next thing played everywhere.

<comment><USER23> A lot of pop songs go through the hands of several different producers, each of whom might work on a specific element for a desired effect. In many cases these producers are selected for specific sounds deemed to be chartworthy. I would be very surprised if some of them are NOT using AI trained on extensive databases with the latest most popular and most lucrative music.</comment></comment>


Building a Vagrant Box for PS2 Development - <AUTHOR> http://mlafeldt.github.com/blog/2012/06/building-a-vagrant-box-for-ps2-development/

<comment><USER2> Wow, wish I had known about Vagrant before, this is amazing. Not to mention this is super convenient for various platform devs.

<comment><USER3> I hope Vagrant works for you, but I want to correct some expectations.

I like the idea of Vagrant. Most of us at work used to use it. The problem is that Vagrant uses Virtualbox, and Virtualbox on OS X seems to have all kinds of performance problems. The biggest issue was that lots of disk IO in the guest would cause it to freeze for 30-60 seconds. At the start of these freezes, the message `aio_queue_async_request: too many in flight for proc: 16` was printed in the system log. Increasing kern.aioprocmax didn't help. Neither did enabling or disabling various Virtualbox options related to disk IO.

We ended up ditching Vagrant for Parallels and VMWare Fusion with some semi- automated setup scripts.

<comment><AUTHOR> AngryParsley: To be honest, I haven't done that much performance-intensive stuff under Vagrant on OS X. Cross-compiling the PS2 toolchain took about 10 minutes on my 2011 MacBook Air. And of course it's a different matter when you want to use Vagrant in production at work. But I think it's just fine to compile some homebrew without much hassle.</comment></comment></comment>


Rough Estimates of the Dollar Cost (of Memory) of Scaling Web Platforms - Part I - <AUTHOR> http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/01/12/rough-estimates-of-the-dollar-cost-of-scaling-web-platforms-part-i <comment><USER2> I would've liked to have seen Apache/Mono (mod_mono) in there as well. I've been trying to make sure my ASP.NET sites are cross-platform just in case I want to move them over to a Linux server sometime, but I haven't had a chance to do any load testing on them yet to see how it compares to Windows Server or any of the other Linux app platforms.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you can get me an easy-to-follow setup/config, I'd be happy to include it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is just wrong.

The Virtual Memory Size (VSZ as he calls it in the article) is not what is important.

Measuring actual memory preasure and costs on modern Linux is pretty non- trivial, just look at this wiki page about Spam Assassin: <http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/TopSharedMemoryBug>

He needs to measure the real size of a multi-process daemon like apache by using a script like the ps_mem.py: <http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py>

That can measure the real memory use of each daemon, and while I don't think the overall picture will change much, measuring VSZ is just inaccurate.

<comment><AUTHOR> > while I don't think the overall picture will change much, measuring VSZ is > just inaccurate.

I agree... which means that your "it's just wrong" comment is inaccurate too, because the general relationship of the various systems to one another, in terms of memory usage, is not likely to change much: it's obvious that one way or another, Rails doing complex dynamic stuff with templates is going to use more memory than nginx serving static files, with other things falling in between.

Thank you, in any case, for the pointer to ps_mem.py. I am using a similar script, but it doesn't look at smaps, so I'll improve the one I have or use theirs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to see how a fairly straight forward webapp running on different web app frameworks compare. Lets say you write a simple polling app (similar to the Django tutorial example) using Django, Rails, ASP.NET/Mono, and Node.js :-) Write the app to use whatever features you can within the framework but with matching output, perhaps sans caching, and run them all on similar architecture where possible (apache/passenger maybe?) then see how those load tests compare. If nobody else does this than I might, I'd be interested to know what that looks like.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I think this would be a great idea. I'd like to see a set of traffic generators that exercise actual functionality not just ab/pageload tests too, that works more of the stack.

It should be reasonably easy to automate a deploy/test run in EC2 too, then you could do a big batch of comparisons with configuration changes, different db backends, tuning parameters, etc.

Sort of like the programming language shootout but for webapps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apples:Oranges. Why not compare Rack or Sinatra to PHP, which would be a much closer comparison. Or, perhaps try CakePHP or one of the 1000 other php frameworks out there. Similarly, should be including web.py instead of Django. Comparing Rails to Jetty is pointless! Compare Rails to Spring/Hibernate.

<comment><USER5> There are a couple of different fruits being compared (and maybe making this more plain would avoid this kind of critique):

Apache, Nginx, the static servers are baseline connection costs.

PHP, Jetty/JSP, Mochiweb templated are one tick up, baseline connection plus the template cost. I'd like to see Tornado included here personally.

Rails and Django are full stacks. It would be nice to see Cake or Symfony included here and I personally would like to see Compojure as well but that's much more niche than the others.

Edit: If nobody beats me to it I'll do the date/time template in Tornado and Symfony this evening.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Edit: If nobody beats me to it I'll do the date/time template in Tornado and > Symfony this evening.

Thanks, I'm looking forward to seeing it!

<comment><USER5> Edit: Rather than fighting with escaping code in HN, here are scripts to setup symfony and tornado examples: <http://gist.github.com/275785>

The symfony one requires some more loving to the apache setup which is well documented ([http://www.symfony-project.org/getting- started/1_4/en/05-Web...](http://www.symfony-project.org/getting- started/1_4/en/05-Web-Server-Configuration)). The script suggests the frontend_dev.php to make sure things are set up right but for actual performance benchmarking you'll have to tweak your apache.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I'll have a look. By the way, you have no contact information or anything in your profile, so I have no way of getting in touch with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For everyone saying: "I'd like to see ...", give me some instructions on how to set it up on Ubuntu, and I'll see about adding them. That is part of the reason why it's a "Part I".

<comment><USER7> I'd like to see non-3D graphs. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, fixed the one that was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Jetty's initial heap size can be tuned.

Setting the initial heap to something small (say 16mb or 32mb), while having a decent max heap, would change those graphs a fair bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks. I'll collect some of this advice and then update the article. Part of what made doing this difficult is that some things I know reasonably well, and others not so well, so I had to trust some of the out of box settings.</comment></comment>


Awesome examples of CSS code box styling - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to tweak my TypePad blog to make code examples stand out. I googled for "CSS code box styling" but didn't like anything I found.<p>What styling tips of examples would you suggest? <comment><USER2> font-family: monospace; background-color: #fff5c7; color: #000; padding:1em; border:1px solid #ffe87d; line-height:1.5;

<comment><USER3> It is better to explicitly list the fonts that best match the body text before "monospace". Plus, I'd throw in Consolas and Andale Mono before "monospace" too; usually the default monospace font is one of the worst the reader has available to him.

line-height:1.5? That is too much even for body text set in Verdana. Coders are used to code being set solid (line-height: normal or tighter). Too much leading hurts the legibility of the code. In particular, since you have padding:1em, a blank line in the code will have considerably more spacing than there is between the code block and the prose.

<comment><USER2> "It is better to explicitly list the fonts that best match the body text before monospace."

What does that even mean? And I chose monospace only as not everyone has Consolas or Andale Mono installed.

As for the line-height: I went for a balance between easy legibility and still getting lots of text in the space. But I guess it's up to the OP to fiddle with the spacing issues.

<comment><USER3> You might have "Consolas, Andale Mono, monospace" if your body text is sans serif (since Consolas is sans serif) but "Andale Mono, Courier New, monospace" if your text is serif (Andale Mono and Courier New have serifs). I agree with you that "monospace" has to be at the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/></comment>


Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo's online search business for $20 billion - <AUTHOR> http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article5258258.ece <comment><USER2> If true, Icahn's recent purchase of 6.8 million Yahoo shares is rather timely:

[http://www.latimes.com/business/investing/la-fi- yahoo29-2008...](http://www.latimes.com/business/investing/la-fi- yahoo29-2008nov29,0,5381025.story)

<comment><USER3> I suspect that was so that he can try to push a deal like this through. If it were already more or less a done deal it seems it'd be asking for prosecution for inside trading.

<comment><USER4> Yahoo's insider blackout period began this week, so it's no surprise that he bulked up before he's blocked out for the next 6 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This will be good news for Yahoo, because Yahoo has the problem of being spread across all of the most competitive fields on the net - search, portal, email, video, sports. Taking away one part of this, frees yahoo up to focus on evolving the web instead of trying to battle the giants.

Microsoft is huge - it has the resources to tackle google on search. Let the two titans fight it out, and let yahoo go back to being startup-like, work on their developer tools, create an API for the web, build their email product, expand in the 3rd world and so on.

Losing search is not only profitable, it will cause an increased focus on creating money-making and competitive products out of the rest of Yahoos properties.

Assuming the new CEO is any good.

<comment><USER6> > Microsoft is huge - it has the resources to tackle google on search.

What exactly do you mean by "tackle"? Microsoft has enough software engineers, but they don't have enough time and search data to catch up. Google has enormous log files from user's search behaviour and experience battling search spammers. And this is what Microsoft is lacking and cannot buy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/29/reports-of-new- microsof...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/29/reports-of-new-microsoft- yahoo-search-deal-hard-to-believe/)

This is a false story.

</comment><comment><USER7> Buying only the search business is an awful awful deal. The new search business will still reside in yahoo's web properties. Yahoo will definitely neglect the m$ search advertising in favor of luring consumers to its display ads. This is like saying you are going to adopt a kid from a foster home and leaving her there.

Yahoo's strength is in its content not search. Paying 20B (which is more than the market value of yahoo) for search market share just doesn't make sense.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if Yahoo would be allowed to build a new search business. I'm sure they could do that for way less than $20 billion.

<comment><AUTHOR> A deal with MS, for $20B, will include a clause that says that MS will be the default search engine and search engine advertiser on all of the Yahoo's properties for a very long time. So what would Yahoo do with a new search engine?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know the source of this rumour?

</comment><comment><USER10> Yahoo's market cap right now is hoovering around $16B. So Microsoft wants to pay $20B for their search business?

</comment><comment><USER11> It is logical. Search is where the money is at.

For me the biggest business mystery in the world is why the adsense/adword model was not exactly copied ASAP by Yahoo, since that was making billions to your direct competitor.</comment>


Shipping Basecamp 2.0 for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://37svn.com/3807

<comment><USER2> As an iOS Developer I would not recommend using RubyMotion to "learn" just hunker down and learn Objective C it's really not that difficult to pick up. Currently I would also give the the same advice for Swift - You're better off learning Objective C and then learning Swift since there is still a lot of interaction between the two (this may change in the future).

<comment><USER3> That's pretty much exactly the reason the author said he rewrote it in Objective-C; so that he could learn it.

<comment><USER2> "I'm still convinced I wouldn't have gotten this far without RubyMotion, and as a learning tool its value is immeasurable."

I contest that this is not great advice for other people interested in learning to program for iOS, maybe for Nick it's applicable (I believe him) but in general, just learn Objective C followed by Swift.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't really looked in depth into merging separate iPhone and iPad apps, but I think they made a mistake by optimizing short term. When I get a new app, I definitely don't want to download two different apps: one for each device.

I think they'll be missing out when people download for a single device and miss out on the app on their second device.

</comment><comment><USER3> Basecamp for iOS is one of the shining examples of how well a hybrid mobile/html5 strategy can work. Every fellow developer has been genuinely surprised when I've told them that Basecamp Mobile is a hybrid app, even staunch native proponents. That's the gold standard of a good hybrid app.

</comment><comment><USER5> Did anyone else misunderstand the title and assume they were specifically targeting an older version of iOS (2 in this case)?

<comment><USER6> Exactly! Was expecting a post detailing how they still support the original iPhone since they care so much about every single one of their users :)

That said, they basically tell version 1 was RubyMotion, version 2 is ObjC and version 3 will be Swift, just for the sake of learning...

<comment><USER7> Same, I thought it was going to be about some super specific use-case where only old iPhones running iOS 2 would work.</comment></comment></comment>