'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety –  how to stop the cycle - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/07/19/892728595/your-doomscrolling-breeds-anxiety-here-s-how-to-stop-the-cycle <comment><USER3> I deleted my Twitter a few months ago and my life is better for it. The need to be "in the know" was powerful, but I realized that I was consuming vast amounts of shallow information that resulted in shallow, uninformed opinions. I've been reading a lot more long-form articles and books; I've finished reading three books in the last month or so. When my Twitter habit was strong I would often start a book and give up 30-50 pages in, never to return.

I believe deleting Twitter also helped my mood. I am feeling more upbeat than ever. While circumstantial, I do attribute some of this change to no longer being bombarded by the negativity and one-shot-kill Tweets that are prolific on the platform.

<comment><USER4> The problem I've been facing recently is that long form also turns out to be a waste of time after you go through the most informational/influential pieces.

Lots of the articles thread the same water, dive into totally unnecessary details, or just tell a story that, while fascinating, does not really give you any important new information, or bury it in a few casual sentences, never elaborating on them.

For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with the character names and forms changed.

That applies even to some of the stuff recommended directly here on HN. I would not even dive into aggregators recommended here.

<comment><USER5> > _For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with > the character names and forms changed._

actual _new_ things are by definition rare. each thing can only be done _once_ for all of humanity. after that, its an iterative process with the occasional leap forward.

if you're thinking about technical or even worse self-help books: yes - <USER2> are very few that actually bring anything worthwhile to the table. thats simply because it becomes common knowledge if its correct to a degree where it has a significant effect.

if you're however thinking of story-books than ... you're just reading similar things. there is _a lot_ of written stories around - they admittedly usually have things like `conversation` in common, but how else would you write a book? by leaving everything blank?

<comment><USER4> > how else would you write a book

Maybe you don't.

[https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html](https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)

<comment><USER6> But then how could you fulfill your childhood dreams? This is all very important!!

/s

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As of a hundred comments, none seem to have mentioned that this is not inherent in _social_ media but in media in general.

Remember to take breaks from the news cycles (whatever flavor of news and outlet you prefer) and try to not get emotionally engaged in what is really quite distant from your actual life.

The news, wherever they come from and regardless of what they are about are mostly just a distraction from what actually matters, your own life, family and mission.

<comment><USER8> I realize this trick won't work for everyone, but a couple years ago I figured out a nice technique to combat all these problems, while still allowing myself to read the news: I made a pact with myself to only actively consume the news in a language I don't speak fluently.

If nothing else, I'm improving my language skills, so the time spent doing it is edifying, even when the piece itself isn't. The concentration involved in deciphering the article inserts some emotional distance that helps me not to get too worked up about what I'm reading. And, since reading in a language one doesn't understand very well is tiring, the whole exercise is self-limiting. It's literally impossible to get sucked in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A few weeks ago I identified doomscrolling, particularly in bed, as a major source for my recent sleeping issues. As a result, I took a major step back from Twitter in general, and especially forced myself to stop reading Twitter in bed, or even in the late evenings. This produced an immediate improvement in both sleep quality and overall mood.

<comment> rv-de In my experience reading on the smartphone is an underrated cause of sleep issues. No matter what I read and no matter how dimmed and red my screen looks - it certainly helps - but it still impacts my sleep negatively. The desire to keep your mind busy even right before or actually while intending to fall asleep is also an indicator for other underlying issues. If I stop engaging in these distractions I get a chance to actually face those and deal with them.

<comment><USER9> Distractions in general hurt sleep. I'm not convinced using the phone is any different than other distractions. Of course, sleep researchers say that doing anything at all in bed other than sleep and sex is a bad idea, but distracting yourself while not in bed too isn't helpful.

Naturally, I ignore that advice and still use my phone in bed. But switching from Twitter to doing other stuff helped significantly, because I can monitor myself and put the phone down when I get calm enough and sleepy enough to sleep. Twitter was preventing me from getting calm/sleepy due to producing anxiety. I do still read Discord, which sometimes can have the Twitter problem depending on what people are talking about, but it helps me keep from feeling completely socially disconnected due to using Twitter less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have started unsubscribing to any subreddit the moment I notice a post is generating a negative emotion. Nowadays my feed is mostly woodworking, cooking and photography.

<comment><USER11> I get it, I really do. Negativity is shit.

The world is a messed up place. Sure, we shouldn't be bombarded by this fact day in and day out, but I personally think it's a good thing to remind yourself now and then how fucked up the world we live in can be - to maintain a sort of tether to the "reality" of the world's current messed up situation; it puts a lot into perspective.

Any thoughts? Am I wrong for thinking this way? (P.s. I have not yet read the OP's article)

<comment><USER12> I agree with you. Actually I watch news regularly since my childhood and I've also heard the sentence "I don't want to see this (people suffering), this is terrible" Basically this would be actively looking away.

The world is indeed a pretty messed up place and it's sad we need Corona to be reminded of a lot of long-standing issues as they affect also other groups now:

\- lack of universal health insurance/insufficient social support systems

\- lack of pandemic plans

\- precarious living conditions are more prevalent than represented by social/news media

Actually very few news outlets even attempt to give global coverage, BBC is the only one I know of that somehow gets close to this.

Still, I try to consume news more responsibly. I stopped using Google News and instead subscribed to a handful of online papers/magazines that produce quality content.

<comment><USER13> >Actually very few news outlets even attempt to give global coverage, BBC is the only one I know of that somehow gets close to this.

Far fewer still, are news outlets covering child sex trafficking. But hey, "I don't want to see this, this is terrible, let's call it a conspiracy and move on".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yeah reading hacker news since 4 hours and didn't even planned to open it. Now the world is more dangerous and don't know if people are commenting or GPT-3 bots.

Any solutions to find sleep?

<comment><USER15> Read a really charming and escapist novel. Worst case, you end up staying up too late because the book is so good, but I haven't found anything more reliable for making me disconnect from the world and its churning. Substituting a book for Twitter for the hour before bed has markedly improved the overall quality of my life.

To get yourself into the habit, don't read anything on your "to read someday list of important books." Just pick the most notorious page turner you can think of.

<comment><USER16> I recommend Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

<comment><USER17> Whoa, slow down there, Satan.

<comment><USER18> ?? What?

Blood Meridian has dark moments in the narrative sure, but it's a _beautifully_ written book and _very_ easy spaghetti western adventure to get lost in before bed. It's not like you're dozing off reading The Necronomicon, c'mon.

<comment><USER19> It's my favourite book but it's hardly easy-reading for many people. It's grim and would challenge a few people I bet. I could read writing like that about the desert forever, but not everyone is so inclined.

I think everyone should read it, but I can also appreciate an "easy there, Satan"-type joke about it!

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I've read most of Cormac McCarthy's books, but I've never gotten past the first 50 pages of Blood Meridian. Even compared to Child of God, it just hit me in the wrong ways whenever I read it. Still hoping to get to it someday though!

<comment><USER19> Commit to it. It's sublime.

Last one I read was Suttree while over in the US camping in the South-East.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I use the following golden advice: don't bring your phone in the bedroom.

We bought a simple digital alarm clock and suddenly we both slept way better and didn't had any trouble to fall asleep.

Reading a book also helps putting your mind in an off state.

</comment><comment><USER22> Social media is addictive by design and it's easy to slip into these bad habits. Gloomy, sensational news/opinions is good for "engagement" metrics and that's what people inevitability find themselves drowning in if they don't create clear boundaries around usage.

At times, I've become so miserable from it that I've had to jump into a cold shower to snap out of the doom and gloom. Thankfully, the cold shower usually works and provides incentive not to fall into the habit again.

</comment><comment><USER23> I found my way to escape doomscrolling is to never user the homepage of Twitter. Instead I have lists set up for Friend, Interests (People who tweet science / tech news), and News outlets. I then bookmark those 3 lists, and only read the first 2 unless I WANT to read the latest news. I never seen 99% of the people I'm following, trends or adverts, I just see what I want to see on the platform.

</comment><comment><USER24> Quote: "Karen Ho, a finance reporter for Quartz, has been tweeting about doomscrolling every day over the past few months, often alongside a gentle nudge to stop and engage in healthier alternatives."

Now that right there is a finesse irony

</comment><comment><USER25> If you want help setting limits, I made an extension called Intention that many people find helpful: [https://www.getintention.com/](https://www.getintention.com/)

HN thread of its launch: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936742)

</comment><comment><USER26> Unfollow anyone who retweets outrage tweets, or posts low-effort content, follow people who post original, high effort content, and never go to the twitter's home page -- read only the latest tweets in chronological order. This will considerably reduce tweets that target emotional triggers or simply waste time.

</comment><comment><USER27> Maybe people should utilize social media for things they enjoy instead of solely sources of news. Of course people you follow will end up posting news anyway but it won't be solely stream of 'doom and gloom'.

<comment><USER28> I think news takes more of a front seat these days. Lots of history in the making.

<comment><USER29> History will always be in the making.

<comment><USER30> Sure, but sometimes the history involves a superpower teetering on the brink of fascist dictatorship, or a once-in-a-century pandemic wreaking havoc around the world. Events that will define the space of possibilities for decades to come.

At those times it's a bit more important to stay at least partially informed than when the biggest crisis is a new highway project going over budget or a political leader's extramarital affairs.

<comment><USER31> >Sure, but sometimes the history involves a superpower teetering on the brink of fascist dictatorship

Boy, did you miss the point of the article and discussion

<comment><USER30> In a nutshell, the article says that reading a lot of scary news causes anxiety, and if you listen to your therapist and steeply limit that reading and spend your time eating ice cream and watching cat videos instead, you can reduce that anxiety.

Sometimes anxiety (fear, rage) is well justified. Sometimes large-scale threats are real.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This article really only touches the surface of the issue and, despite hinting at deeper problems, refuses to acknowledge them.

A potentially endless stream of seamlessly accessible information (aka continuous scrolling down) is bad, not because of the content read, but because it manages to manipulate the user into going on and on and on and on.

The article touches on that tangentially ...

> Aldao, the director of Together CBT, a clinic that specializes in cognitive > behavioral therapy, has worked with her patients to cut back on > doomscrolling.

... but fails to point out that the conclusion is not to control which content is being taken in, but to ban doomscrolling altogether, because it's some form of automaticity making you more perceptible to being psychologically manipulated.

That's why it's so successful and that's why it's so bad.

That's why patients are being treated with CBT, because apparently that's what it takes to get her to stop doing it _instead of her simply stopping doing it_. She simply can't.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have found it useful to RTFAs on Twitter/Facebook, not just read the clickbait, anxiety inducing headlines.

Not always, but many stories have some nuance that's missing in social media outrage and replies.

Like I said, not always, but it does help anxiety to get all the facts. Especially when I ruminate on something after seeing just the headline or the replies.

</comment><comment><USER34> From my own personal experience: back in March, when COVID started getting out of control, I found myself desperately trying to get access to more and better information from experts in the field. I turned to twitter, to try to get more and better information on the subject. This inevitably turned into 'doomscrolling'.

I felt that there was a lot of nuanced scientific opinions that reporters were doing a poor job of communicating. I get that often deeply technical topics are complicated, but I think more than anything else COVID has helped how unprepared media has been in communicating these complex topics.

And it's not just COVID; it's been a range of subjects such as law (Trump's immigration ban) and elections (in particular the 2020 Democratic primary and all the media coverage over Bloomberg's supposed supremacy in the race). I think overall journalists are well intentioned and can be trusted in most situations, but it's clear to me that there are systemic failures in communicating complex subjects.

</comment><comment><USER35> I love HN because there is no risk of doomscrolling.

Articles here point to the real diversity of what is happening.

<comment><USER36> I love HN too, but I'm dubious it "points to the real diversity of what is happening." It mostly just has politics turned down to 2-3 out of 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I remember someone I knew in college who read twitter a lot. It made him angry all the time and kind of unpleasant to be around. Eventually he quit and was much happier. I wish my mom would do that.

</comment><comment><USER38> I need Twitter for support for my product, but I don't really use it that often. So a while ago I set it up to be basically write-only: I use Zapier to send me emails for @mentions and relevant search terms, and I reply to those from a TweetBot instance which only has columns for mentions and the same search terms. So I can reply if something needs replying to and send product updates, but otherwise I don't see Twitter at all. It's been a huge time saver and mental health improvement.

</comment><comment><USER39> Doomscrolling at least is passive. The active version I think would be "Doomsaying", which I have become addicted to I feel.

Going through my comment history, I often find it littered with comments that give a sense of hopelessness and inevitable misery. Highly cynical, sometimes toxic, wouldn't feel out of place among the lamentations of the undying. Not sure how I got this way, but probably came after a long history of doomscrolling.

</comment><comment><USER40> While I wish I have more will power to actually stay away from my phone, especially at bedtime, the second best solution I found useful is to set timers for addictive apps. If I use up the allotted time for an app, it will be disabled for the rest of the day. Also there is Focus mode on Android that disables distracting apps while working.

</comment><comment><USER41> You're better off unplugging entirely. Forgo all forms of news and pop media for at least 6 months and focus on your life. You'll be happier and you'll get shit done.

I think a lot of this has to do with the West not really doing anything to address death. It's out of sight and out of mind, so when it's knocking at our door we are feeble minded and scared because we are ignorant of the cycle of life and death. Everyone you know will die, but confronting this fact head on breeds a very existentialist kind of anxiety that we've failed to address in our societies.

This is the underpinning of doomer type behaviour. Eastern philosophy tends to have meditations where people remind themselves every day that today might be their last. You might think this sort of thinking breeds depression, mental illness, etc, but it works out for them very well.

The West could learn a lot from this, but alas that's a pipe dream.

<comment><USER42> There is certainly a Western philosophical/religious tradition of meditating on death, for what it's worth. It's why I love Lent and the traditions/rituals around it - "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Here's a very contemporary take on it that I came across recently, blending the eremitic nature of the Covid lockdown and the cause of praying for those who have died of it: [http://www.stbedeproductions.com/office-of-the-dead- revisite...](http://www.stbedeproductions.com/office-of-the-dead-revisited/)

You might also enjoy _The Slavery of Death_ by Richard Beck, who blends his training in clinical psychology with his religious background to argue basically what you're arguing - that we try very hard to pretend death doesn't exist and that it works poorly - and from there argues that our fear of death should be understood as the primary problem of humans from a theological perspective, and that sin is a result of that fear, not a root cause. (He does draw on Eastern Orthodox thought to make that point, but I think that's not as far east as you mean by "Eastern," if I understand you right.)

<comment><USER43> Yeah, I think it's specifically the _modern, secular West_ that has this terrified, anxious relationship with death. The more religious communities seem to think about it much the same way as they always did, and people on social media keep using this to make clever gotcha arguments about how religious people aren't really "pro life" because they're not desperately freaking out about death and trying to stave it off however they can during the pandemic. Somewhere along the line, the idea that death is an inevitable part of life and that sometimes trying to desperately stop it no matter what is a futile act of hubris became so alien to parts of the population that they can't even understand how anyone could think that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> One thing I found useful was installing Sudoku on my phone. If I feel the urge for a dopamine hit from the internet I play a have of Sudoku instead. It gives me a hit but without the anxiety and I find the focused thinking it causes very helpful if I'm procrastinating.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is the reason why I added a sentiment filter to the rss reader I built. Now I can put together a few rss feeds in a folder and filter out bad news, needs some more work but it gives good results already. (Https://aktu.io)

</comment><comment><USER46> There are a lot of suggestions for "long form" and "books" here. Are none of you keeping up with this pandemic and what your country/state/city recommended behaviours, laws and bylaws are?

<comment><USER47> You can switch on the radio once a day for half an hour and get a full update while you make breakfast or something - doesn't need any more than that really. And no chance of commenting!

<comment><USER46> That makes sense. I'm confused by the people who are saying "I _only_ consume long form" or "I _only_ read books".

If they said, "I dropped facebook/twitter and now get my news in short bursts from the radio"; I would have thought them wise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The worst part is the moment you realise Twitter wants you to feel this way, they could actually only feed you positive things but instead they see it as their moral imperative to push this anxiety on you.

</comment><comment><USER49> My problem is scrolling, doom or otherwise.

<comment><USER50> I'm curious if there's any existing effort to provide media on smartphones without scrolling. Not just "non-infinite scroll", actually no scroll. Like, you have a page of text and to get to the next you swipe to flip, or tap a region (like on ereaders).

<comment><USER49> I think that would be an excellent addition to the iOS Safari reader mode, where your intent is already to change the behaviour and look of the web page. That reader mode has saved me from a really badly formatted web page many times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Yeah I hate this. I signed up for 1 email newsletter, axios, for a morning and evening update. Thats plenty of news. You just have to quit cold turkey if thats not enough. If your on facebook you can use plugins like facebook purity to filter out 90% of the junk. That's the only social media that I actually pay attention to. I'm sure there are other filter programs for twitter and similar out there.

</comment><comment><USER17> I got a Nokia 8110 4g to use as a secondary phone during not-work times. Can't browse much on a phone with a tabless browser. Also, it is very 90s cool.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is something I noticed a while ago. Some people just seem to be addicted to the feeling of impending doom. It's really tiring because the most of these topics are akin to someone standing with a sign saying "the doom is right around the corner" but then it turns out that around that corner there's just an another dude with the exact same sign.

</comment><comment><USER53> "Focus on what you can control" addresses the root of the problem. It's good to know what's going on in the world, but there's no point in stressing over it. I know it can be hard, but once you convince yourself these things aren't worth your energy things get a lot more pleasant.

</comment><comment><USER54> The circumference of the situational threat awareness of a deer is around 100 meters.

For the vast bulk of the human experiences, our approximate level of situational threat awareness wasn't all that much different.

It's unsurprising that unmediated, we expand that circumference and simultaneously experience a proportional increase in our general level of anxiety.

</comment><comment><USER55> I definitely found myself wasting more time recently scrolling through Twitter e.g. in the evening or when compiling code. I actually quite like the site but I find there's more and more irrelevant stuff on my feed so I don't really like feel like I get as much value from it, yet the addictive nature of the feed still makes you refresh it.

I was aware I was doing this but didn't do anything about it until I was prompted by this article, which I think was posted on here recently: [https://craigmod.com/essays/how_i_got_my_attention_back/](https://craigmod.com/essays/how_i_got_my_attention_back/). For me it really hit the nail on the head about wanting to reclaim your attention a bit, but that these companies have thousands of people working on systems to try and claim your attention for themselves, so it's no wonder it's hard.

I made a few small changes as a result of this:

\- I used Screen Time on my iPhone to block all apps except essential ones (clock, calendar, notes, Philips Hue) for the first hour of my day

\- I logged out of Twitter on my Firefox and instead logged into it in a container tab, which takes a few extra clicks to open

\- I logged out of Twitter on my iPhone, so I have to log in to access it

\- I didn't install Twitter on my new iPad

I've found these changes have made a big difference - I think particularly blocking apps in the morning. It feels like if you can "control" your attention a bit more in the first part of your day, that continues somewhat throughout the day, then adding in the slight hurdles to access the site throughout the day causes you to stop and think "do I really want to do this?" when your reflex to just open a new tab and type "tw<enter>" or to scroll while you're stood in a queue or whatever kicks in.

I still do browse Twitter and other time wasting sites a little bit, which I'm fine with, but I feel like I'm doing it more conciously - sometimes after a long day I'll think "I just fancy sitting on the sofa and reading the news and looking on Twitter" and I'm fine with that, as it's something I've chosen to do.

It's only been a few weeks so I don't want to speak too soon, but I'm feeling really happy with this approach so far, without having to go atomic and delete Twitter entirely as I do get some value from it.

</comment><comment><USER56> See "The Program Dependence Graph and Its Use in Optimization"

[https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS395T/2009fa/papers/ferr...](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS395T/2009fa/papers/ferrante87.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER57> > Still, you incessantly scroll though bottomless doom-and-gloom news for > hours as you sink into a pool of despair. This self-destructive behavior has > become so common that a new word for it has entered our lexicon: > "doomscrolling."

Imagine having the guts to call a behavior "self-destructive" when you are directly complicit in that behavior, and knowingly contribute to the effect by having a doomsayer bias for better clickbait.

Look no further than the current NPR frontpage to expose the hypocrisy: "The End Of $600 Unemployment Benefits Will Hit Millions Of Households And The Economy"

They know the effect that titles such as these have on people, yet they continue. It's as if a food vendor laces their food with heroin and then claim repeat customers are being "self-destructive".

<comment><USER46> Do you have a suggestion for a "non-hypocritical" title for that article? Or are you saying NPR shouldn't be reporting on the cessation of one of the few pandemic response programs that help the average person?

<comment><USER47> That title's editorialised.

How about just '$600 Unemployment Benefit Scheme to End'?

<comment><USER58> It seems like you're using "editorialised" as a pejorative, but I don't necessarily understand how it's negative. Nothing about the headline is hyperbolic or an exaggeration.

The string of events from "unsafe to work" —> "cannot work" / "went to work sick" —> "no benefits" does have a direct impact on the economy, unless I'm missing some section there.

<comment><USER47> > It seems like you're using "editorialised" as a pejorative

No it's a dispassionate statement of fact.

Sometimes when I'm choosing not to get too wound up in current events I just want to know what's going on expressed in the simplest way possible. A briefing. I'm sure their opinion here on the impact is extremely sensible, but sometimes I'm not interested in anyone's opinions, no matter how obvious or sensible.

This thread was about how to avoid getting involved in people's opinions and just learning the essential facts that you may have to do something about, like a new law to wear a mask, wasn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I built an app to limit browsing on my Mac... Been perfectly happy without reading the news.

[https://focuslite.app](https://focuslite.app)

</comment><comment><USER60> Interesting that the "More Stories From NPR" right below the article is a clear invitation to continue your doomscroll-workout. /s

</comment><comment><USER61> Does anyone have suggestions for sources of more positive short to medium form reading material?

</comment><comment><USER62> I would like to challenge the idea of "being informed".

So I went through some health issues in the last few months and I had to radically lower my stress (used to be in politics - that thing will kill you ;) ). So I "unplugged". No media, no social media. No talking politics.

It was like a MASSIVE weight was lifted of my brain. I looked around and realized ... I, at that moment, was a bright spot in a sea of darkness.

Everybody was depressed, anxious. The only thing anybody is talking about is how bad things are. Try looking for movies or TV shows to watch ... that are NOT dark/depressing/negative/cynical etc. You'll have a VERY hard time finding them today. I've gone back to watching old movies and TV shows from better times. We're living in dark times. Literally.

So, back to my challenge:

World has changed and the ROI of "staying informed" has changed. Specifically, the PERSONAL cost (effects on your mental and physical health, quality of life, quality of relationships etc.) has changed - it is now astronomically high. We all "know" that social media and media companies are spending ridiculous amounts of capital devising ever better ways to keep their "users" stressed so that they keep coming back and keep staying on their platforms.

But the "users" are US. And we're also the ones paying for it. With our health. With our quality of life. With our happiness.

So .. is it worth it?

Let's think about it. Will you knowing every daily-politics titbit really ... change anything? Has it ever in the last few decades? So why pay the PERSONAL COST of knowing what [insert crazy person from other side] said today?

What I propose will be good for your, personally, but I would argue, will also be better for democratic political systems: take a step back.

If you're not ACTIVELY FIGHTING A POLITICAL BATTLE RIGHT THIS WEEK then you don't need to know what's going on this week. You don't need more then 10 minutes every week/ every two weeks to pickup any and ALL news that's actually relevant to you. If something big happens in the meantime ... trust me, you'll know. People will tell you.

But what does ACTIVELY mean. Well first it means you IN THE FIGHT, your spending non-trivial amount of effort lobbying, organizing political groups etc. Most of you are NOT in the fight. But even if you think you are ... as was I ... there's a second parameter: can you win? Do you really have the Minimum Required Resources to even have a chance? Because you probably don't. Most modern "grass roots" groups don't. I know, I lost years to this mistake. Nothing wrong with that - it just means you should be focusing on getting the Minimum Required Resources first. But there's the catch: social media companies, with their numbers of likes, irrelevant impression numbers and the like are giving you a _feeling_ like your changing something. But you're not, you really aren't.

So, step back. See the bullshit of the standard Divide and rule[1]/Bread and circuses[2] propaganda, that's keeping you distracted so you don't notice the big trends that ACTUALLY matter.

So step back. Stop spending your emotional energy on daily outrages. Spend a few minutes a week following the big trends so you know who to support when it comes down to it.

Now for my most radical proposition: the only thing that really matters in politics is money. Those who _spend_ money to rule ... rule. No, taxes don't count as you're not the one spending that money.

So spend some money. First support some NGOs who are ACTUALLY fighting (with lobbyists and policy proposals) for the big picture stuff you care about. Then support a party or a candidate that listen to those NGOs. Make sure to tell them so and to switch your support when they go astray.

Then unplug for a week.. The world of politics will still be there next week.

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

</comment><comment><USER63> Great to have a name for the problem.

</comment><comment><USER64> I don't like the implication that mental health is just feeling good. Maybe if more people would read and understand the news, _and feel bad about it_ , they'd be willing to do even trivial things like wear a mask.

In my opinion, good mental health should be considered to be that your feelings align with reality. If reality sucks, it's not mentally unhealthy to feel bad about it. Feeling bad should spur making changes to make it better.

<comment><USER65> If you were paying close attention to the news in Feb-April, you were being told not to wear a mask.

<comment><USER64> Even if it were as simple as you make it sound, which I disagree with: _so what?_ Our understanding of the world improves over time.

<comment><USER65> Not really. Almost all of the research that supports masking was done years ago. I spent March getting shouted down in various places because I read that research and concluded that people should be wearing masks. It took a machine learning researcher of all people to bring people around to what was obvious to anyone who spent a few hours reading scientific research.

The average reporter for a newspaper simply doesn't have the time to actually understand a topic. They talk to a few people, and with the current political environment, everything they hear is agenda driven.

Spend your information gathering time in a more productive way. If you really feel you need to be up to date, read the week in review section of one of the national newspapers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Why take a cellphone into the bedroom when you're trying to sleep? Just don't do it if you are weak to the temptation of doing it if you do take it into your bedroom.

<comment><USER67> I put mine on quiet (basic Android feature) during sleep time, and its my alarm in the morning. It also gets charged overnight, and in case of emergency I can call emergency services. Its a no-brainer to take my smartphone with me to bed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> > You see that coronavirus infections are up. Maybe your kids can't go back to > school. The economy is cratering.

Anxiety is a normal response to these external pressures. And anxiety isn't going to go away until we address these pressures.

I'll throw in some other amxiety-inducing but solvable external pressures: homelessness, affording rent or health insurance, being forced to choose between going to work and getting coronavirus vs getting fired, precariousness, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER69> the hypocrisy of this story is thick, from a news organization where every other story (and that's not much of an exaggeration) is about how we're all going to die from covid because _everyone else_ is being a jerk in endlessly various ways.

but to their credit, they did air a story recently featuring maria hinojosa, founder/host of latino usa and the first latina host at npr, that was not especially kind to npr itself (spoiler: she left and was more successful as a result).

<comment><USER70> Not to mention the journalistic malpractice of calling victims of being threatened with a firearm and having their vehicle attacked randomly "right- wing extremists", and then wiping the evidence of their false allegations from the internet without retracting or apologizing for it. The individuals who attacked the victims were charged by police. [1] [2]

NPR is in the same class as the rest of the mainstream media who don't bother to vet stories they lather with political bias.

[1] [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbEIlsUUcAACYht?format=jpg&name=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbEIlsUUcAACYht?format=jpg&name=large)

[2] [https://www.wave3.com/2020/06/18/protesters-arrested- followi...](https://www.wave3.com/2020/06/18/protesters-arrested-following- altercation-with-driver-downtown-louisville/)

<comment><USER71> You're extrapolating from the evidence of one event to all (or most) events. What you're calling "journalistic malpractice" is possibly an editor with a story in need of a picture (everything has to be visual to sell the story), asking the photog pool for a suitable image. This happens all the time. Timing matters though. In the instance you quote, if the original story was published before the police charged the attackers, then the journalists made an honest mistake. Otherwise we'd have to wait for the entire judicial process to reach completion before making any comment. E.g. you seem to implying that because they were charged by police, the attackers of the vehicle were in the wrong, but that can't be known until a conviction is reached. The point, I'm making is that journalism is an exercise in trying to parse and publish what is known 'at the time'.

I think your comment about mainstream media is mostly unfair, as the same accusations can be made against most non-mainstream media. I'd also suggest that NPR are one of the better mainstream media orgs, but that's just my opinion. The parent poster made one case for why - they are willing to host their own critics. Not too many news orgs are willing to do that.

<comment><USER72> No, they had a narrative they wanted to push: "right-wing attackers victimize noble protesters", and since there were only a few examples available, they had to pull stories and footage from the many instances of when _protesters_ attacked vehicles.

I don't know you personally, but if you're like 99% of left-leaning urban professionals, you're not aware of those instances, because you're only exposed to a portion of what's happening. I'd suggest following a broad spectrum of people on social media from the left, center, and right. You'll be surprised what the mainstream left media leaves out.

Right-wing media does the same thing, by the way. You really have to watch both to give anything resembling reality. It's a big problem, and it's getting worse.

Even (decidedly left-wing) Brian Stelter featured this problem on this week's Reliable Sources on CNN. For example, mainstream media is happy to cover what they view as the malfeasance of the federal law enforcement officers in Portland, but they fail to show the acts of the rioters that played a role in their deployment (burning buildings, destruction of property, menacing cars, etc). To be clear, I personally think their deployment was probably unwise, and that politics played a large role. However, Portland's mayor has consistently refused to crack down on whatever label you want to put on the violent protesters wearing black. That adds significant complexity to the situation.

NPR was the most neutral of any major news organization up until the past 2-3 years, when they've undergone major changes and now put out mostly ideologically-driven pieces like other outlets on the left.

I do give credit to many local media outlets, who are often the only ones asking the hard questions, like this local outlet in Portland:

[https://youtu.be/2yAzRnfzgwk?t=1218](https://youtu.be/2yAzRnfzgwk?t=1218)

[https://youtu.be/2yAzRnfzgwk?t=1022](https://youtu.be/2yAzRnfzgwk?t=1022)

<comment><USER69> > "NPR was the most neutral of any major news organization up until the past > 2-3 years, when they've undergone major changes and now put out mostly > ideologically-driven pieces like other outlets on the left."

it's been more like 5 years, at least since the snafu of the last presidential election. but even as i criticize npr, i expect them to change for the better, being "public" and certain shows/hosts providing valuable news without spin (at least not much intolerable spin).

certain hosts/shows on the other hand are basically unlistenable, like michael barbaro on nyt's the daily, with all of its melodramatic, self-righteous cynicism designed for the superiority-complex set. it's disgusting pandering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> drevil-v2 The problem with this that there are actually massive cultural and ideological changes been imposed on the western society at this time. We are being dragged to the hard left across multiple institutions. Some of us might not want that

Ignore it and you will be the quintessential lobster slowly being boiled to death.

<comment><USER73> Maybe I am confused and I didn't understand what you mean, but if you mean "hard-left" in the political sense, I feel I have to disagree.

In a lot of western country, the "hard-right" has won: Trump in the US, Johnson in the UK, Orban in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil, ... And in some other country they are maybe the strongest they ever been in recent memory (France, Belgium, arguably even Germany). I cannot think of any "hard-left" president/prime-minister that has won in any country recently. Moderate left maybe, but no hard-left. So if anything, the institutions in power are dragging us to the "hard-right", not really the opposite. Sure, some institutions have always been a left stronghold, but until now, it doesn't seem that they had really any impact in shifting the power balance ...

<comment><USER74> The OP said "cultural and ideological", not political.

<comment><USER73> Culture and ideologies are very much political.

<comment><USER58> I think OP is going to meet resistance against the claim if people assume (maybe incorrectly) that they're talking about the United States. I can't speak to other places</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rails 3.1 will secure passwords out of the box - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activemodel/lib/active_model/secure_password.rb

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Gawker for bringing password security issue back into limelight.

<comment><USER2> agree. it's too bad that Django, out-of-the-box, is still using SHA1+salt. it'd be nice to see it switch to bcrypt or something similar.</comment></comment>


31 Books Like Ready Player One - <AUTHOR> https://readthistwice.com/books-like/ready-player-one <comment><USER2> Somewhat weird selection; I'm surprised it didn't include "The Circle", by Dave Eggers. That has a similar "always connected" feel to it.

I guess this kind of blog-spam/affiliate marketing stuff is quick and easy to produce though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, added The Circle. I'm sad it looks like a blog-spam to you, this list was shaped after a big discussion we had on reddit. I'd appreciate if you could point out a specific book that doesn't fit thematically or at least stylistically.

<comment><USER2> The reason it feels like spam is because the summaries look like they were scraped from Amazon/similar.

There's no discussion about the books. Instead it is filler-content:

          "Full of high stakes, thrillers, and fantastic twists and turns, fans of Ready Player One are sure to love this addictive read." --BuzzFeed"A potent commentary on how much we're willing to give up to the lure of technology." --EW "A fantastic journey from start to finish." --Hypable New York Times bestselling authors Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller ...

That tells me nothing about the plot. The world. Why it is related to Ready Player One. It even mentions that book in the information - almost like there is no effort behind it, and just random books pulled from other sites with no care, no attention, no real link at all.

(i.e. scraping and pattern matching. Not real curation.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the descriptions are generic book descriptions and not specific to this list, but the list itself is curated. I see your point tho, you'd like to see context on why we selected these specific books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I didn't really liked Ready Player One so ...

</comment><comment><USER4> Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (Mar 03, 2014) is the best for me.

<comment><USER5> Ender's Game is good, but Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide are one of my favourite Sci-Fi books and totally underrated. Though I admit I don't remember which I liked better.</comment></comment>


PHP versus ASP.NET, Windows versus Linux. Who's the fastest? - <AUTHOR> http://misfitgeek.com/blog/aspnet/php-versus-asp-net-ndash-windows-versus-linux-ndash-who-rsquo-s-the-fastest/

<comment><USER2> I've seen 40-50% improvements from APC in PHP, it would be interesting to see these same tests with byte code cache implemented in each platform.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fascinating. Hopefully this research will dispel biases on both sides.</comment>


Goodbye Instagram, hello Ello - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/goodbye-instagram-hello-ello-45df3d8754ec <comment><USER2> >There's no bots >Virtually no spam

I signed up for Ello way back in 2014, and forgot about it. I literally didn't sign into it again after signing up, but in early 2017 I started getting user following emails. I just glanced through the dozen or so emails I have and most of them feature a nude photo for the profile.

While I'm at work I can't look into this more closely, but I have a feeling these are very similar to the bots that are rampant on Tumblr which have very similar user profile pictures.</comment>


The world's most boring journal: why it's good for science - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-worlds-most-boring-journal--and-why-its-good-for-science/2012/03/01/gIQAwZf4kR_blog.html?wprss=linkset <comment><USER2> This is not a new idea. The Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis (<http://www.jasnh.com/>) has been around for a while. Nice to see it gaining momentum, though.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best tools for salary negotiation and career advancement? - <AUTHOR> Hello. I made a smurf account to ask this question. I'm on my second "real" job in the tech world where I moved over from a smaller, but well known tech company in an entry level SWE role to roughly the same role in a much larger company, but have been getting paid about the same. In the mean time, I've delivered 2 real projects, one of which I've had total ownership of. Considering my first job wasn't located in the Bay Area, I feel as if I've started from a much lower pay scale that will compoundingly affect me. What are the best tools to show my manager with whom I've asked for a one on one person meeting, to show some empirical data about my market value? And what are some best case practices for being upfront and transparent about these negotiations. Anecdotally a coworker and mentor I've found have intimated that I should've been hired at a more senior position and that regardless of position I should be paid more. FWIW I think that I am and that others consider me a good team player. I'm trying to convey that I'm worth more to both other companies, and internally to our company as well.<p>EDIT: Fixed a broken sentence for clarity, and added one too. <comment><USER2> Check out a site I made called [http://levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi) for a comparison of career ladders and compensation ranges. It should give you a good idea of what to negotiate for and what part of the breakdown (base, stock, bonus) to nudge on

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this. Seems miles better than Glassdoor or any purported salary website. Do you have any idea what is the most effective part of compensation to negotiate or does it change too much company to company? Having the data is one thing. Leveraging it is another.

<comment><USER2> It's pretty variable and changes a fair amount from company to company, of course startups have way more leverage on stock compensation side whereas some already large companies such as IBM basically pay you a base salary and not much else.

There were some good discussions on our HN launch post from a while back: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18349421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18349421)</comment></comment></comment>


Speea engineer breaks silence on Boeing's MAX 737 - <AUTHOR> https://www.kuow.org/stories/boeing-engineers-break-silence-on-max-737-read-this-letter <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20365770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20365770)

150+ points

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty weird that the dupe-detector didn't catch it. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Big Websites Start Running Bigger Display Ads. Big Mistake. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/01/big-websites-start-running-bigger-display-ads-big-mistake/ <comment><USER2> We don't know if it's a big mistake or not. Of course I'd prefer smaller, zero, or at least very well targeted ads, but whether the new ads are a big mistake or not depends entirely on the data: when the sites roll the ads out and do the analysis, they'll discover how the bottom line is affected.

In business, mistakes aren't generally a matter of opinion.

<comment><USER3> I'd rather be Apple than Microsoft, even if Microsoft makes so much more cash. But that's my opinion.

<comment><USER2> That's probably why you're not wealthy, which is fine, but it's something to bear in mind.

<comment><USER3> What I meant is the following: Contrary to what you wrote, there is opinion in business. There are strategic decisions to be made, which are affected by political and cultural goals. And these are off course opinions. As an example I wanted to have cited Apple against Microsoft. A culture that values making money with the right product over making money with as much products as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Once again, the tech blog assumes everyone outside its own industry is stupid. My guess is every one of those sites a/b tested those ads to see if they lead to significant drops in user retention, and found that the extra eCPM grossly outweighed that.

Of course, I'm assuming they're not stupid and know about basic split testing. But the people running New York Times are probably not as smart as Robin Wauters, who is making $10 an hour blogging in his underwear.

<comment><USER5> _Robin Wauters, who is making $10 an hour blogging in his underwear_

I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make with a bitchy statement like that. Are you saying he makes a lot of money for a blogger or more than he should for someone who writes in his briefs? Also, has he in fact admitted to working in his underwear or are you just trying to smear him? Perhaps it's just a popular sport around here to make ad hominem attacks on Techcrunch writers behind their backs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, make ads more annoying so that even Joe Average installs Adblock. Great plan.

</comment><comment><USER7> Six months from now, TechCrunch will quietly start running XXL boxes instead of the dual-skyscrapers it's running now, and we can all move on.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's kind of ironic that in the overlaid page, there's two skyscraper ads side by side right above the "fixed panel" and they take up the same space as it does.

I've seen the "pushdown" and find it's a great cue for taking a break from the computer.

</comment><comment><USER9> Humorously TechCrunch has a 300px wide ad sidebar on its pages.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been seeing more large, interstitial display ads on Forbes.com et all recently, and I think they are more promising than these formats.

I don't mind ads, but I don't like it when they're injected into the content so awkwardly that they detract from the experience. For example, I don't mind Hulu's full-screen ads, but YouTube's smaller overlays drive me crazy.

</comment><comment><USER11> And they neglect the fact that not everybody has wide display or high resolutions. From my google analytics, i still see people using 800x600. Wow.

<comment><USER12> Anecdotally, the place I work has people with wide screen, 19inch monitors that insist on using them at 800x600. It looks awful, but they're used to it being huge, and they refuse to change.

<comment><USER13> I've seen a few people like that before myself. I think that at least some of them know they can increase the resolution, and they try it, but they switch back before their eyes can adjust.</comment></comment></comment>


YouTube - iOS 4.0 on 3G iPhone (parody) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdk2cJpSXLg&feature=player_embedded <comment><USER2> It helps to 'turn off' Spotlight:

3G: Settings-General-Home Button-Spotlight search

3GS: Settings-General-Spotlight search

At least my 3G is almost usuable again.

</comment><comment><USER3> feels kind of like android</comment>


A debtors' prison in Mississippi - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/10/21/a-debtors-prison-in-mississippi/ <comment><USER2> The poor are an easy target for governments and private entities, simply because they are easy to abuse and there are so many of them.

Unlike the wealthy they simply do not have the time, money, resources, ability to unify and fight back as a single block (save some outraged protests and rioting resulting from attack or mistreatment by police, but those one can argue do more harm than good). If they don't have an extra $20/month, chances are they will not have time to sit and write a letter to a senator, or to call a lawyer or organize campaigns.

As the article put it, adding these fees and doing this is really an administrative step, it's just too easy not to do it. If they, say, tried to raise taxes on top tax bracket, that would turn into a long uphill battle probably. There would be local town meetings, letter to legislative representatives, calls to country club networks of friends and so on.

So as a result there are lots of payday loans places, high fees for courts, jail time (unless fee is paid on the spot), for the poor. Even once they go to prison they are turned effectively into slaves, they can't even call home because they nickle and dime there as well.

<comment><USER3> You're right, is it a logical outcome. Its inevitable if you let market forces dictate everything. There is a such a strong anti-government 'libertarian' streak to US domestic policy, that is essentially anarchism though. Which quickly defaults to oligarchy / despotism. One of the primary purposes of nations and governments is (or ought to be anyway) to protect the poor and powerless from the excesses of the rich and powerful, to level the playing field somewhat and ensure some modicum of fairness. Those in the US should look to extremely well run countries like Denmark with more socialist governments and strong legislation protecting its citizens. That is how a country ought to be.

<comment><USER4> It takes a bit of rhetorical agility to blame "Government officials fining the poor and imprisoning them when they fail to pay" on libertarians.

<comment><USER3> Well a lot of it because the prison system in the US is often privatised and run for profit, as is the parole company in the article. Everyone (including the local government) is incentivised to fleece the poor and there is nothing to protect them. Things that would solve this (based on other countries that dont suffer from these issues)

1\. Tax corporations and rich people more. Then the local government wont be reduced to fleecing the poor, also it would make the government stronger relative to large corporations and reduce their clout and lobbying power.

2\. Dont let private corporations run prisons for profit. (I dont think I need to explain why)

3\. Provide stronger legislation protecting the poor and services such as legal advice to make preying upon them less lucrative.

<comment><USER5> > 1\. Tax corporations and rich people more. Then the local government wont be > reduced to fleecing the poor, also it would make the government stronger > relative to large corporations and reduce their clout and lobbying power.

Government is a lot like any other entity. It will grow as big as it can. Even if you tax corporations and rich people more, the math for government promises still doesn't work out, government will still fleece the poor.

<comment><USER6> And now we've come full circle on how libertarianism is co-opted into arguing that it isn't the Government's role to protect the poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "All of which means that because Anderson was too poor to pay his $170 fine, his overall debt ballooned to $580. His fine more than tripled, solely because he was too poor to pay it."

This seems pretty much like the status quo. If you default on your credit card bill, and ultimately choose minimal payments until it's paid off, rather than bankruptcy, you'll end up paying several times the value of the original loan.

That said, if you go to the Biloxi court house's web site, they offer people the ability to do a payment plan for tickets, but they explicitly say "Remember that release on a payment plan is a privilege afforded by the Court and a violation of the payment order will result in your immediate arrest." I think that's pretty terrible since in this post-6th-amendment society, "arrest" is frequently indistinguishable from "imprisonment". Debt, especially something so trivial, should be a civil matter.

<comment><USER8> There's a significant difference, in that you _choose_ to take on credit card debt, but you don't choose to be fined. I don't have much of a problem with credit card debt ballooning if you screw it up, but state-mandated punishments shouldn't be that way, especially if failure to pay is because of an _inability_ to pay rather than simply not wanting to.

(To head off any "don't commit the crime, then" replies, do keep in mind that traffic enforcement is extremely arbitrary, filled with cases where following the law is substantially less safe than breaking it, and rife with profiling.)

<comment><USER9> In the case of traffic law, yes, you do choose very much to be fined.

What the law says or doesn't say is irrelevant in that distinction, it takes conscious choice (or carelessness: also illegal) to blow through a red light, or to park in a non parking area, or to drive over the speed limit. The law _in general_ is extremely arbitrary, and you run the risk of penalties when you _choose_ to break it.

The case of the guy in the article was the victim of an extremely broken system (outsourcing of payment plans? WTF?), but that doesn't mean the law he broke is somehow invalid.

In general, a failure of enforcement does not render the relevant law invalid.

<comment><USER8> It does not take carelessness to park in a no-parking zone where the signage is illegible, yet people still get fined for it, and there is typically no recourse.

It does not take carelessness to drive at the speed of traffic rather than turning yourself into a hazardous obstacle by driving 20MPH slower than everybody else, yet in many places this is a speeding violation.

It does not take carelessness to drive through a red light when the yellow is set so short that you don't get enough warning to stop for it.

Inconsistent enforcement may not render the law invalid in terms of whether it can be enforced on those who get unlucky, but it _does_ have major effects on the law's legitimacy in a moral and public opinion sense.

It is basically impossible to live life without violating traffic laws. So "you choose to violate them" is at best meaningless and really is just plain wrong. If we're all going to violate them then we need to at least make sure the punishment isn't completely crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If your blood isn't already boiling here are other examples: [http://jonathanturley.org/2013/04/07/the-rise-of-debtors- pri...](http://jonathanturley.org/2013/04/07/the-rise-of-debtors-prisons-in- the-us/)

<comment><USER11> And more, for support, not fines:

[http://www.alternet.org/economy/debtors-prisons-are-alive- an...](http://www.alternet.org/economy/debtors-prisons-are-alive-and-well- america)

[http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44376665/ns/us_news- crime_and_cour...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44376665/ns/us_news- crime_and_courts/t/unable-pay-child-support-poor-parents-land-behind-bars/)

I can't find the reference now, but the stats from a California government investigation showed that ~90% of people (i.e. men) not paying child support simply couldn't afford to pay. They were charged 20% interest, too.

It's a common abuse of poor people: make them _pay_ for being poor. Pile on interest, charges, fees, etc. to double or triple their debt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just to tie this to Ferguson: [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/08/fer...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/08/ferguson- and-the-debtors-prison.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Social Justice is a big part of who I am. I get so mad when i read it and read this

> This means that poorer counties are more reliant on fines and fees produced > by municipal courts, which inevitably come from the poor residents of those > areas. Those governments then put pressure on police departments to generate > revenue by targeting residents for traffic offenses, jaywalking, and other > misdemeanors and petty crimes...

> The city got poorer. That meant less revenue from other sources. So the city > sought more revenue by imposing more fines and fees on its citizens. Which > of course only makes them poorer.

> Private probation companies have a strong incentive to keep people on > probation for as long as possible.

I live in a poor city with a school district where 90% of the students qualify for free lunch. We are privatizing Public Education to also feed off the poor take the money out of the community and are rewarded if the Public School system does poorly.

</comment><comment><USER14> The uncomfortable question that needs asking here is why are all these cities hurting for money so badly and the answer is us. We as taxpayers are constantly demanding and electing politicians who promise (and deliver) tax cuts. Then we turn around and bitch because potholes don't get fixed.

If you want your Government to run well, you need to goddamn pay for it. People need to grow up.

<comment><USER15> If you look at Federal revenues in constant dollars, other than three years during GWB's first term and the crash of 2009, tax revenues have risen steadily. We don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. Average spending per person when you combine Federal/State/Local is over $20K.

<comment><USER14> You think $20k is enough for every road, electrical line, sewer and misc. utilities that serve your home? Not to mention paying the officers that protect you (in theory anyway), the firefighters that are ready 24/7 to put your house out, the teachers who educate your children, on and on and on? Federal spending is out of control (mostly in defense) but local spending, the spending that actually matters? You think the measly share of that $20k that your local town gets is nearly enough to cover all that?

<comment><USER15> Oh I pay for my utilities as well, those aren't payed by the government. And as the downvotes rain upon my karma, so be it. Yes, $20k per man, woman, and child is plenty for the government to have. And if you think the problem with the Federal budget, you need to take a closer look at how much we're paying in entitlements...

<comment><USER14> Except "entitlements" refers to everything from welfare (which is what I'm assuming you're REALLY talking about) to insurance for Government employees, not the least of which are our soldiers, benefits to veterans and all the systems they rely upon, etc. etc. The other thing, Defense, goes to a 12 billion dollar plane that's never flown a single mission, a shitload of the most sophisticated and expensive armaments known to mankind, and on and on. One of these is necessary, the other is really up for debate.

<comment><USER15> What $12B plane are you referring to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> When the really big criminals (corrupt bankers and wealthy businessmen) cant pay fines they just declare bankruptsy (or their corporations do) and nothing happens to them. Afterwards they seem to be perfectly well off.

</comment><comment><USER16> Similar injustices in Georgia, with people jailed for traffic tickets: [http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/georgia- probatio...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/georgia-probation- misdemeanor-poor-jail).

</comment><comment><USER17> Isn't it vastly more expensive to jail people than reduce a 170$ fine that obviously couldn't be paid?

<comment><USER18> Not when you turn around and bill them for their incarceration (in theory, at least - there's that whole 'blood from a stone' thing going on).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If these fees were tied to income, we might not have a problem in a few months.

Yes, when a rich man gets a ticket; he laughing tells his wife over dinner.

A poor man gets a ticket; he could be at risk for being homeless.

Since they started to raise fees at every level of government about 15 years ago, I felt it's time to equate fees to income.

When the Rich guy comes home with a $7000 speeding ticket; the laws/fees will change--fast. I think they tie income to fee in Switzerland? Unless the rich are effected nothing will change, or at least that's been my experience.

(To all you think the poor never learn their lesson, there could be a quota system. For example, if the poor Speeder abuses the system, they would go back to paying these currently rediculious amounts.)

<comment><USER20> There's an aritcle in the Atlantic on exactly this: [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland- home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The more I think about it, the more I believe that the United States is the worst place to live if you are poor.

There are places that are poorer, hell I'm from a third world country. But I've never seen anyone in the third world show utter _contempt_ for the poor. No one keeps reminding the poor that it's their fault. We call them "unfortunate", Americans call them "losers".

The US is the only place where being poor is not just a material failing, but also a moral failing. Perhaps it is a natural outcome of lionizing your winners that you absolute hate your losers, but this is fast becoming a heartless society where one wouldn't want to live unless one is rich.

<comment><USER16> I would beg to differ. In India/Bangladesh, where I'm from, rich/middle-class people don't even think of the poor as human beings.

<comment><USER22> Corroborating this. In Islamabad, it's not uncommon to have people throw food at their servants squatting on the ground.

Or for another famous case: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_RWZCCLvdc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_RWZCCLvdc) (NB: the NO FEAR on the T shirts means they're part of the anti-terror squad)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > During a single week in 2011, Joseph Anderson, 52, suffered three heart > attacks and a stroke. The latter left the left side of his body partially > paralyzed. Later that year, he suffered a fourth heart attack. Prior to his > health problems, Anderson worked as a mechanic at a local Best Western. > After that disastrous stretch, he has been unable to work, and struggles to > get by on the less than $10,000 per year he gets in various forms of public > assistance

$10k/year is below the poverty level for a single person household. It is shameful that in a first world country someone can still be knocked into poverty by losing the ability to work due to medical problems.

</comment><comment><USER24> It isn't just judicial fines and such that are the problem, government as a whole has turned lower income into a debtor prison. They provide some food assistance, maybe living assistance, and such, then take away the free cash and even ability to drive with fee after fee after fee. Throw in sales taxes in some cities and the burden is greater.

However what this article points out is just flat out abuse and should result in government officials locked up. Just like previous stories about deals states cut with prison phone companies we have a justice system, if not most of government, which only exists to keep people poor and more controllable

</comment><comment><USER25> A few years back I met a kid in rural Michigan who was ticketed for driving without his glasses which had broken. When he was unable to pay the ticket he was fined in excess of the ticket by a judge. He had to drive to work to make the money to pay the ticket and buy glasses. And of course when he raised some money he paid the fine first rather than buying glass because it kept him out of jail.

Judges are supposed to have leeway to take these kinds of things into account.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's a shame that so many areas are so car-dependent that a driver's license revocation can be so damaging.

</comment><comment><USER27> If this resonates with you, consider joining/donating to the ACLU!

[https://www.aclu.org/donate/](https://www.aclu.org/donate/)

</comment><comment><USER28> John Oliver has touched on this several times.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjpmT5noto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjpmT5noto)

</comment><comment><USER29> > Private probation companies have a strong incentive to keep people on > probation for as long as possible.

Obvious... and crazy.

</comment><comment><USER30> A small group of individual rioters _two blocks from my home_. You'll have to pardon me for not wanting to encourage a repeat of this by sending a message that rioting near my home garners my political support.

<comment><USER31> Since when does supporting the righting of an injustice require you to also support rioting? I'm sorry, that just doesn't logically follow. You're confusing the tactics of a tiny minority with the substance or a huge movement.

<comment><USER30> Since riot-supporters consistently use political successes to advocate for more riots. This is a thing that happens consistently, reliably, and regularly. You see it right here on HN, where people argue that riots raise awareness and are thus a positive.

<comment><USER18> Do, please, provide citations that support your assertions that here on HN, people are arguing that riots are a positive thing that raise awareness.

<comment><USER30> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440455)

> Riots, on the other hand, seem to cause the media hordes to descend and at > least draw attention to the cause. It's hard to argue the fact that they are > at least useful for consciousness -raising.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps.

Although 'effective', or in this case 'useful' definitely does not have to be a synonym for "a positive thing", as you state.

<comment><USER30> I am using "positive" in the sense of "gainful", contextually meaning "furthers the cause in question".

<comment><USER18> It's a loaded word. A massacre on TV highlights the plight of the people under attack, be it genocide or otherwise. Would you describe the raising awareness from the descending media as a positive thing?

It's possible to separate the benefit of increased awareness from the negativity of the event in question. Your spin is more akin to "people think riots are good".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can't read any of these Washington Post articles because I've 'read my limit of free articles'.

<comment><USER33> google it then.

EDIT: To the downvoters. Try googling why googling the article will allow her to read it. Very meta.

<comment><USER34> Jeremy Ashkenas actually made a Chrome extension called "Wait! Google sent me!" that did this for you. It seems to have gotten deleted, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's always amazing to watch modern-day "educated" New York liberals discover things that every 12-year-old with a basic education in civics understood 100 years ago.

The lesson of this article: Government has only one means to carry out its policies: force (more precisely, threat of force). When you vote for a new tax or fine ( _cough_ Obamacare _cough_ ) you are voting for rough men with guns to take stubborn objectors away to prison. Period.

This is at the heart of the libertarian argument: government should be used cautiously, and the default position should always be _not_ to impose a law unless you're sure that force is justifiable and necessary.

<comment><USER36> > The lesson of this article: Government has only one means to carry out its > policies: force (more precisely, threat of force).

This is simply factually false. Government has all the means available to any other institution or person available.

You seem to have reversed the common definition of government as whatever entity or aggregate of entities exercise a monopoly on legitimate use of force into the idea that the government somehow magically loses access to every other tool that people and groups of people have.

<comment><USER35> All right, I revise my statement to "government has only one means to _enforce law_ : force"

I suppose there are some "policies" (not laws or taxes) which can be encouraged or enacted by spending money. Doesn't detract from my point though. This is still a humorous case of some over-credentialed nitwit at WaPo "discovering" what most educated _children_ should be able to tell you about the rule of law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What makes me skeptical of articles like this is the case studies seem to focus on people who appear to be behaving in the most ridiculous way possible. Taking a joint to court? Running stop signs on a suspended license?

If the situations profiled are commonplace, it should not be hard to find more sympathetic victims. That said, it is true that even if this is going on infrequently it is still an injustice and should be corrected... But the headline and article would seem to want to have us believe that we have whole prisons filled with debtors.

<comment><USER18> "Taking a joint to court?"

If, by 'taking a joint to court', you mean, 'had a joint in her purse, whilst being a passenger in a car that committed a minor traffic violation, and having the police officer demand she identify herself (why? She was the passenger in a traffic violation), arrest her, and take her from there to the County Courthouse', sure.

<comment><USER37> I was mistaken. The way the paragraph read seemed to state that she told the judge she couldn't pay and was fined, then fined for a joint found in her purse; I did not see the joint was actually discovered during a previous instance.

Still, if you are already in trouble with the law, it seems incredibly foolish to continue to willfully break it by carrying around illegal substances with you.</comment></comment></comment>


Can anyone retire in their 30s? Meet the people who say yes - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/nov/20/can-anyone-retire-in-their-30s-meet-the-people-who-say-yes <comment><USER2> When I worked at AOL in the mid-90s, I knew people who said they were going to retire in their 30s.

They had enough stock options and had seen enough splits, that by the time the stock reached a certain number above 29, they were going to cash out and retire.

That's retiring in your 30s.</comment>


The science of science - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/18618025?story_id=18618025 <comment><USER2> They are talking about Latent Dirichlet Allocation which was made by Blei in 2002 ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation> )

Here is video by him where he explains the basic model as well timeline- related hacks the article talks about - <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3077213787166426672#>

You can very easily play with LDA yourself with this toolkit - <http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/>

<comment><USER3> I think they're talking about this one:

<http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1183143727>

This work uses the correlated topic model, which extends LDA to model correlations among the extracted topics.

Edit: and this one [pdf]:

<http://www.icml2010.org/papers/384.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "If It Has "Science" in the Name, It's Not"

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately true. This seems to be a pop-sci cover of some data mining and semantic clustering algorithm for scientific publications. The author claims the groupings may be better than citations (less political, for instance) in showing how ideas impact a given research community.

<comment><USER6> People with last names in the "lower" part of the alphabet are also cited more than their higher-alphabetized counterparts.

<comment><USER7> [citation needed]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Classifying science sounds like a boring application of this algorithm. I'd be more interested to see it used for spontaneously identifying groups of related publications any kind, such as blogs.

<comment><USER9> Blogs are a simple case because the default is to refer to each other through inline hyperlinks.

I've also seen linguistic data mining studies done that suggest that blogs which commonly agree with each other, commonly agree with each other. For purposes of politeness, I acted astonished at this revelation.</comment></comment>


ASK HN: Github SSL Error? - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/s/nbb108caikkqvme/Screen%20Shot%202014-03-01%20at%208.52.07%20AM.png

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm seeing it on two networks (home wifi and work vpn). I googled for news, but didnt' see anything… anybody else running into it?

<comment><USER2> Honestly, no. I see a secure connection, and the correct DigiCert certificate is showing up. What does the invalid/inaccurate cert look like for comparison?

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like it was caused by the os x upgrade I did this morning.

Here's the cert chain: <[https://www.dropbox.com/s/mszr4ntkq9srl6f/Screen%20Shot%2020...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/mszr4ntkq9srl6f/Screen%20Shot%202014-03-01%20at%209.37.52%20AM.png>)

Here's one person's fix: <[http://benscheirman.com/2014/02/fixing-github-ssl- issue-on-1...](http://benscheirman.com/2014/02/fixing-github-ssl-issue- on-10-dot-9-2/>)

Here's the super user thread: <[http://superuser.com/questions/605900/why- wont-os-x-trust-gi...](http://superuser.com/questions/605900/why-wont-os-x- trust-githubs-ssl-certificate>)

<comment><USER3> Delete your stapled CRL cache and restart, its in /var/db/cslr</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"What's the typeof null?", and other confusing JavaScript Types - <AUTHOR> https://bitsofco.de/javascript-typeof/ <comment><USER2> No, the type of `null` is null. I was unaware of the implementation detail mentioned here, but the reason `typeof null` returns "object" nowadays is because that's what the spec says. In other words, `typeof` will lie to you, and is kind of a crappy operator.

(Also, FWIW, `function` is not a type. The type of a function is object, but this rarely comes up in real-world JS usage.)</comment>


Abandoning the Static Site - <AUTHOR> https://schier.co/blog/abandoning-the-static-site <comment><USER2> Sounds like he missed Netlify CMS. It's the best of both worlds; a nice simple CMS experience that builds on top of the elegance of static publishing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried Netlify CMS and found it to be clunky and unpleasant to use. Lots of time spent waiting for Git commits and images were a pain to set up and manage as well.

Maybe it's better now but, even if it was an amazing experience, it still can't provide the level of integration I want/need.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: With the death of Cyanogen, what options exist for a Free phone? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Cyanogen OS was not free, neither was CyanogenMod.

The Fairphone 2 has an official, monthly updated system that is mostly (beside firmware and other Qualcomm shit) free software. You can install it optionally, search for Fairphone Open OS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> LineageOs is the replacement for cycnogen,</comment>


Diabetes in your DNA? Scientists zero in on the genetic signature of risk - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10419.html <comment><USER2> Blogspam of [http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/24578-diabetes-in-your- dna-...](http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/24578-diabetes-in-your-dna- scientists-zero-in-on-the-genetic-signature-of-risk)</comment>


Video Games Getting Dumber-er - <AUTHOR> http://techzwn.com/2011/10/video-games-getting-dumber-er/

<comment><USER2> When Halo is a game that is "being adapted for a broader audience", I think we really have a problem.</comment>


Scamville Shakeout: Was Gambit The Right Fall Guy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/24/scamville-gambit-superrewards-facebook-zynga

<comment><USER2> The irony in all this is that the company that the apparent gambit was made with is actually called "Gambit".</comment>


Apple sued over use of iCloud name - <AUTHOR> http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/06/12/apple-sued-over-used-of-icloud-name/

<comment><USER2> It seems at this point it's more or less impossible for Apple to launch a new product using the iNoun naming scheme without stepping on somebody else's trademark. Even if Apple decided to convert their stores into delicious taquerias, they would find iBurrito already taken[1].

So it makes sense that they've stopped caring, announcing their products regardless of trademark status. The iPad and even iPhone [2] trademarks were owned by somebody else at the time of their announcements, and it doesn't seem to have caused any major trouble to Apple (aside from a likely lucrative payment for the other party).

[1] <http://www.pancheros.com/iburrito>

[2] <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2082362,00.asp>

<comment><USER3> It's strange how they just go in, get the deal done and never seem to be overpaying. You've gotta think that everyone who cuts a deal with Apple, later on when they watch the quarterly results roll in they're like "shit we shouldda held out for another 10 million".

<comment><USER4> If the payouts include stock grants I could see this not being the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I don't understand is why they did't by the icloud name.

Apple seem to have bought it in 2007 according to the whois records and icloud communications bought geticloud.com in 2005

Maybe it was too expensive for them to buy before apple snatched it.

<comment><USER6> Apple just bought it last month - the original registrant (ie. the 2007 creation date) of icloud.com is this company:

<http://www.cloudme.com/en>

<comment><USER5> Ahh ok, thanks for the clarification

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As far as I know you can use identical name for a different market. The question is how narrow can you define the market. Is it 'anything related to computers and networks', or we can say its 'voip' vs 'online music and documents and ...'.

Their biggest complaint so far seems to be that apple now completely overshadowed them in google's search results. Well, duh! Try to look for apple and see how far down you will find "Apple Corp." - the music label.

The fact that someone comes before you in search is irrelevant.

<comment><USER8> Incidentally Apple Inc. now owns the Apple Corps trademark and the Granny Smith green apple logo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, that didn't take long.

</comment><comment><USER10> _The goods and services with which Apple intends to use the "iCloud" mark are identical to or closely related to the goods and services that have been offered by iCloud Communications_

VoIP service is not identical to nor is it closely related to content synchronization.

<comment><USER11> The fact that it's in the same industry is probably relevant enough from a legal perspective, and I'd say the wording here is lifted directly from the legal act they're planning on using as the basis of their argument.

IANAL YMMV etc. etc. etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apple seems to have filed 11 trademark applications for icloud, in sectors ranging from storage, streaming, telecommunications, social networking, entertainment, clothing, footwear etc. So it's not surprising that they will receive tons of objections for their applications from anyone who owns a bussiness with "cloud" in it. I think these are usually settled.

<comment><USER13> I quick search suggests that icloud communications doesn't own the trademark icloud in any categories. There 13 records in the USPTO database, 11 applications by Apple, one by Douglas Dane Barker and one by Xcerion Ab of Sweden.

<comment><USER14> Registration is not a necessary condition for enforcement of trademark rights (although it obviously helps). In some jurisdictions, of which the USA is one, an established history of use can be sufficient to establish rights to a given mark.

So while iCloud Communications do not appear to have a registration for the marks, that doesn't mean they have no rights to them.

<http://www.uspto.gov/faq/trademarks.jsp#_Toc275426680>

<comment><USER15> My understanding was that registration was necessary if you wanted to have standing to defend your trademark in federal court. Yet here I Cloud Communications is suing in US district court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No offense to all the companies that use the iNoun naming scheme, but they're kind of playing in a playground that Apple created many years ago. I mean.. had not Apple begun this naming trend with their prodcts, iCloud communications probably would not have been named iCloud Communications. In my opinion, this company name was piggybacking off of the reputation of products like the Apple iMac or Apple iPod to begin with, and with that comes a slight risk that Apple is going to use your name. iCloud Communications shouldn't act so surprised that this happened.

<comment><USER17> The first iMac was introduced in 1998 [1], while iCloud Communications say that they have been in business since 1985 [2]. Either they changed their name at some point, or they used "i*" before apple.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Mac_and_accessories> 2: <http://geticloud.com/why_icloud.html>

<comment><USER18> Odd. The filed legal paper says "iCloud Communications was formed in 2005".</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: No experience - how much salary should I ask for? - <AUTHOR>

I don't have any direct tech experience, but I do a lot of open source work on the side. This startup has invited me in for an interview and I'm sure they're going to ask for my salary requirements. One website where they listed openings stated between $80K-$120K for salary. Searching online I've seen ~$60K listed as starting salary for right out of school.<p>Any suggestions on what to ask for or where else to research? If I ask way too high (e.g., they think $60K I'm thinking $80 or 90K), are they likely to just say no or make a different offer? <comment><USER2> First off, open source work "on the side" is direct tech experience. It just so happens that you donated your work rather than being paid for it.

Second you should seriously consider the cost of living, and use something like this [http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of- living/](http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/) as a ballpark.

Third you should be candid with them, and don't offer a salary requirement unless they directly ask. Instead let them make a first offer. Generally if you offer too high they will simply offer what they had planned to see if you take it, and if you offer too low they will accept and save the extra expense of what they were really willing to pay.

Best of luck to you!

<comment><AUTHOR> >First off, open source work "on the side" is direct tech experience. It just so happens that you donated your work rather than being paid for it.

That's good context to think about -- it's really easy to get intimidated and think myself down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> First, I'd echo people here that say to be confident. You'll never sell yourself to others if you don't believe you are capable and a good worker.

Second, try not to quote a salary or range (at least at first). Before that, discuss their plans, where they are headed, your abilities, and how you can help further their goals. Here is a great post I recently found helpful, regarding the 'don't say a number first' conventional advice: [http://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/6059/2364](http://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/6059/2364)

Third, as to what to realistically expect, it depends on where you are located, the industry, your experience/age (are you fresh out of school, etc), and more. If they have really posted that they're paying 80-120k that is a great data point and a great advantage for you to know in advance.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're really unsure about salary, just ask them "What is the salary range budgeted for this position?". This would be one of my questions to ask at the end of an interview. Given that you have serious Python skills, they may give you a more lucrative offer than you'd expect!

Also, if someone really pushes you regarding your salary expectations, just answer "I want to make sure this is the right fit before discussing salary."

Since you're fresh out of school, check out sites like [http://www.salary.com](http://www.salary.com) and [http://www.payscale.com](http://www.payscale.com) as well as local job boards. Ask your friends/classmates and anyone with a few years of experience about starting salaries.

</comment><comment><USER5> -

I think that you should value yourself and not cut yourself short. (Looking at the worst scenario) It's one thing to have a bad job but then to have a bad job that pays you cheaply, is worse. The best scenario (on the other hand) is having a good job that pays you well. So think of a WIN-WIN situation.

The first thing I will look at it is the cost of living of the place where this job is. If it is in Cali or NY (where the cost of living is high), I wouldn't mind aiming your aim, however if it is the South (RTP, NC) where the cost of living is low, $60K is not bad.

Another thing is, do you by any chance have any degrees? BSc? MSc? Ph.D?

What schools did you come out of? If you look good on paper and you've done open source work, they'll be glad to pay you as much your worth.

What programming languages do you know and how how proficient are you in them?

At the end of the day, give them a good estimate, and if they are not with it, then try working with them. They did invite you for an interview, so Im guessing they really want to work with you.

EITHER WAY, I HOPE, PRAY & WISH YOU THE BEST.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply - that's helpful! I have an Ivy bachelor degree in a science field, it's in an expensive area, and I'm a core developer for a popular open source project...didn't think about it how you phrased it.

I know Python very well (to the point where I seemed to be at or above the level of the devs I talked to), and I've dabbled aside from that.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Waterbomber - a free mini-game for iOS developed for BlazeJam in a week - <AUTHOR> http://waterbomber.co

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm excited to announce the release of my new app called Waterbomber <http://waterbomber.co> for the iPhone and iPad. Try to put out a wildfire from the air through ten addicting levels.

This game was designed for BlazeJam 2012 <http://www.blazejam.com> in an effort to raise money for the recovery efforts following the Waldo Canyon fire near Colorado Springs, Colorado. The game was conceived and written by independent developers from Denver and Colorado Springs in 48 hours and then refined over the following week.

Available on the App Store for Free: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/waterbomber/id545815335?ls=1&...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/waterbomber/id545815335?ls=1&mt=8)</comment>


IEET Fellow Mike Treder is missing - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/ieet-fellow-mike-treder-is-missing

<comment><USER2> No one has heard from him for two days? Do police even investigate missing adults before a week has passed? The story may be missing crucial elements, but I don't think it's unusual for a grown man not to call his family for two days.

Also, what's a transhumanist and why is that relevant?

<comment><USER3> > I don't think it's unusual for a grown man not to call his family for two > days.

True, you may not call your wife for two days. But if you are supposed to call your wife and don't for two days, she is going to freak out, justifiably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check the local hospitals? This post currently says nothing about checking hospitals which is the most likely place "missing" people turn up.

<comment><USER5> The comments section of the main article (<http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/treder20120318>) mentions people trying to do that.</comment></comment>


Cassini's Grand Tour - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2017/09/cassini-saturn-nasa-3d-grand-tour/ <comment><AUTHOR> Cassini has completed its mission at Saturn. As predicted, the spacecraft lost contact with Earth Sept. 15 at 4:55 a.m. PDT (7:55 a.m. EDT): [https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/saturn-tour/where-is- cas...](https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/saturn-tour/where-is-cassini-now/)</comment>


The Google Plus 50 (ideas) - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisbrogan.com/googleplus50/

<comment><USER2> The author seems too optimistic in many occasions. Case in point: "You don't need Quora, if you can ask detailed questions in G+ and share them with specific Circles, etc." doesn't really resonate with me. Many of these platforms(stackoverflow, metaoptimize, quora) rely on the expertise of strangers.

</comment><comment><USER3> 34\. How long before we see our first Hangout live music "jam?" That's one record button away from being supercool. And one "name your price" Google Checkout tweak away from being instant micro content for sale.

This one isn't possible because you can only hear one person talking at a time.

<comment><USER4> I believe you hear everyone in the hangout session. It shows you in main screen whoever is talking the loudest (i.e. the focus), but you do hear everyone.

<comment><USER5> The latency would make this difficult. Even 100ms is a lot when you are trying to jam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was thinking over how Google+ fits in my everyday life. To me G+ is a perfect email addition, email with social networking. G+ allows me to address my posts to an individual, circles, public and have a social element to every way I communicate.

What I would like to see in G+:

* Search like in GMail

* Ability to read my email

Though, these are just my initial thoughts and we have yet to see how people would start using G+.

<comment><USER7> A thousand times yes for search. It's like the electric company branching into book sales but lighting their bookstores with torches.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Great article. I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the Google+ share, and then post them here, too, but it turned into a pretty long post, so you can read it here if you want:

[https://plus.google.com/117702410245683101961/posts/c6HhtSVG...](https://plus.google.com/117702410245683101961/posts/c6HhtSVGY95)</comment>


KubeEdge: Kubernetes Native Edge Computing Framework (Project Under CNCF) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kubeedge/kubeedge <comment><USER2> "Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm which brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed, to improve response times and save bandwidth."

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

</comment><comment><USER3> KubeEdge is the first Kubernetes Native Edge Computing Platform with both Edge and Cloud components open sourced!</comment>


A New One Time Pad - e-sushi http://www.ftnsa.eu.pn/ <comment> e-sushi Erm, just in case of doubt: no, that's not what cryptographers call a "One Time Pad". Maybe "snake oil" would be a more fitting term? Whatever they call it, please be smart enough to refrain from using their "invention" if you expect cryptographic security. (Naming only one of many reasons: the complete lack of cryptanalysis.)</comment>