What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/what-it-felt-like-in-hawaii-when-warning-of-an-in-bound-missile-arrived?mbid=social_facebook <comment><USER2> I live on O'ahu and was holding my phone when the emergency alert came in at 8:07am. I yelled "Oh my God!" and ran to show my wife the message. I've run through this scenario a few times in my head before and I knew every minute was critical -- so I went into action mode immediately. I told my two kids to get dressed _now_ because we were leaving in exactly 1 minute. The reason we were leaving is our house is single-wall wood construction with no sealed windows and no HVAC, which is pretty much the least ideal shelter possible in a nuclear fallout scenario.

The four of us were in the car on the road at ~8:09 and inside the local LDS (Mormon) Church 0.9 miles away at 8:12am. The church building is the nearest concrete structure with sealed windows and interior rooms that I knew I could gain access to. Unfortunately it doesn't have a basement, but very few structures in Hawaii do.

Thankfully, the doors were already open as there was a family inside doing some cleaning. We were the first to arrive and at least a dozen other families showed in the next 10 minutes. We all hunkered in the gym, some crying, some praying, most just in shock. The first glimmer of hope came when I read the first report of the it being a false alarm on Twitter at around 8:23am.

The whole incident was absolutely terrifying and I'm very upset that it even happened. But, we learned some valuable lessons and I'm satisfied with how my family responded to the incident. Overall, my plan was good and was executed about as flawlessly as possible. I realize we need to add a "bug-out bag" of essential items (e.g. medications, cell phone charger, hand-crank radio) that we can grab as we head out.

It most definitely helped that I had considered this scenario before and knew exactly what steps I would take. The one good takeaway is that this event has sparked many similar conversations state-wide (and beyond) of what to do in these situations. Here's hoping these plans never have to be executed again...

<comment><USER3> What will you do if you can't get into your church building?

<comment><USER2> I had considered that too and breaking a window to gain access was an option.

I'm not a member of the church, but I chose this building specifically as it was most likely to have other people seeking shelter there who also had keys to the building. Indeed, the first family to arrive after us lived a block away and I did verify they do have a key.

<comment><USER4>
        I'm not a member of the church

I'm atheist, but if things were going horribly wrong LDS would be high on my list of people to be around.

<comment><USER5> Pro: A bunch of them are nutty doomsday preppers, with a lot of food supplies in their basements.

Con: The polygamy, child abuse, and endless fast and testimony meetings get kinda old after a while.

<comment><USER6> Mormons stopped practicing polygamy in 1890.

<comment><USER7> How was that decided?

<comment><USER8> the law banned it.

note though all Christian religions claim to believe in a book, the Bible, that has people who practiced polygamy blessed by God. It's pretty hypocritical for any one who believes in the Bible to be against polygamy when the God that book is about blessed the practice.

<comment><USER9> Where in the Bible is this polygamy blessed by God?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm currently living in Japan. So obviously I have a plan for nuclear war.

First, I'm going to press send on the doomsday draft which is sitting in my e-mail.

Second, I'm going to go to youtube and play "We all go together" by Tom Leher.

Third, I got a bottle sitting in my desk that I'm going to pop open. Presumably I'll be in the office at the time so one final round with the coworkers.

The people in this article seem much more stressed and have not yet come to terms with the fact that sometimes life ends abruptly (nuclear or otherwise). If you actually get a nuclear war warning for real, my plan is just as good as any other. At least I didn't spend my last moments frantically running a bathtub and panicking.

<comment><USER11> I don't know about you but filling the bathtub is my instinctual reaction to anything that goes wrong. Job going badly? Fill the bathtub. Medical emergency? Fill the bathtub. Lost my house key? FILL THE BATHTUB.

<comment><USER12> Ah. I actually thought filling the bathtub was a measure to mitigate the effects of the heat wave and maybe the radiation as well.

<comment><USER13> I think it's so if you survive, you have clean drinking water for when the infrastructure has failed and you're waiting for rescue.

<comment><USER14> This is exactly the thought. Water is the #1 survival necessity but an enormously fragile resource. Electricity can go out, pipes can burst, water supplies can be tainted. Some people keep years worth of canned food around but almost nobody has a year's supply of water.

<comment><USER15> Don't forget that the water heater has 50 gallons in it.

<comment><USER8> not in Japan. Japanese water heaters are on demand heaters. I love them becahse unlike US style tank based heaters Japanese on demand heaters never run out of hot water.

<comment><USER15> Ok but maybe it's worth having a two stage system? In the event of the apocalypse..

Also a high school will have massive water heaters and a chiller..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Nearly forty minutes passed before a second message went out: "There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii._

 _..."It was a mistake made during a standard procedure at the changeover of a shift, and an employee pushed the wrong button."_

I've seen some shitty Admin Panels, but somebody "pushed the wrong button" and an end-of-your-world false alarm was going off for 40 minutes?! WTF?

<comment><USER17> Exactly my thoughts. Errors happen, Developers are lazy and interfaces suck. However this is definitly not a excuse, multiple things have to be completely wrong that it even could get this far.

<comment><USER18> I've built a lot of alerts. The "This is not a drill" text should not have even been entered until the system was fully tested and operational.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I live in New York City and I felt a small degree of panic when the reports showed up on Twitter. However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up".

If someone started firing missiles at the US, the risk that we'd start shooting them back seems high, and I think NYC would be a city that would get pummeled in retaliation. This is probably true for a lot of major coastal cities, especially Seattle, Vancouver, SF/LA, NYC, Washington DC, and Boston.

Fun NYC fact: the city is littered with fallout shelters: [https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfr...](https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfrxm- hYxu_E&hl=en_US&ll=40.807352561683786%2C-73.922393&z=10)

<comment><USER20> Growing up I got the impression that a fallout shelter was a purpose-specific room deep underground. So every time I saw the "Fallout Shelter" sign on a building, I figured it was built with one of these "secret underground rooms". Think dedicated, locked stairwell that goes a thousand feet underground; after all, that's how it was pictured in my "Way Things Work" book. When we went to the bank, it was something of an intrigue, where the door to this secret underground cavern really was and what was inside.

As I got to go into more city buildings throughout my life, I noticed many of the rooms designated "fallout shelters" were just some spare room in the basement, complete with ventilation to the outside and really, not much farther than a few steps to the front door.

There may be a lot of "fallout shelters" in NYC but I get the impression that the labeling wasn't very strict and that many of these "shelters" won't really protect you from "fallout".

<comment><USER21> Looked through the index of my early German (English translated, published around the 1960's, I believe) "The Way Things Work" volumes I and II and didn't see fallout shelters.

It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters?

I'm guessing (after having read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb") that this would be about when the hydrogen bomb came along.

It was sobering to read how dramatically more powerful the fusion bomb was compared to the first fission bombs. Suddenly the idea of going into a basement shelter to "survive" the blast became laughable. If you were far enough from the blast though your only comfort could come from a shelter from the fallout.

<comment><USER22> It's not laughable.

The building code in Switzerland specifies that residential construction must contain a shelter that withstands a 12 megaton blast at 700 meters. The country has more shelter than people.

Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.

<comment><USER23> >Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.

I think it was due to the opposite, actually. The development of Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) made many small nuclear warheads more valuable than fewer large nuclear warheads.

If an ICBM is a shotgun, then kiloton-level MIRVs are like birdshot, which is seen as more valuable than megaton-level buckshot.

<comment><USER24> Completely right. The major military uses of nuclear weapons are as sources of powerful shockwaves which are devastating to drag-sensitive targets, and as firestarters. In both cases, you can optimize for these effects over a given area by using 100kt-1mt warheads, and airbursts with overlapping blast radii.

The problem is that as yield rises, the losses to the upper atmosphere are proportionally greater, as is fallout. Multiple targeting with smaller warheads solves that as well, which critically allows for more efficient burning of nuclear fuel.

Finally, the larger the fireball, the more likely you'll have it touching the the ground leading to losses, and kicking up more debris which will mix with fission products and unburned fuel. Of course that's also one way to use a standard nuclear weapon in a manner more consistent with an enhanced radiation weapon, real "salting the earth" stuff. That is generally comsidered to be bad form, even among nuclear powers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A good piece of perspective on this -- it's what many civilians feel day in day out in places like Pakistan when killer drones are flying over.

<comment><USER26> Until it becomes the sad norm and you just get on with your life I guess.

<comment><USER26> (Just for clarification, this doesn't make it any better or less traumatizing. It is probably much more traumatizing, people just have to cope with it, because you can't live in constant fear forever.)

<comment><USER27> I have friend who in Jerusalem Israel during the second intifada. Terrorists were blowing themselves up on busses killing or maiming nearly everyone on the bus. Yet the locals continued to take busses because they needed to get to school or work and stopping normal life until after the terrorism stopped was out of the question. Not everyone can simply go on a vacation until everything fixes itself.

<comment><USER28> Reminds me of a half-jokey comment I saw a few times after one of the more recent London attacks: Non-Londoners were desperately avoiding central London; Londoners were complaining the Tube was delayed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's interesting how people (anecdotally) don't seem to have any plan for a nuclear attack, as opposed to, say, an earthquake or a fire.

I think there's a stigma around even considering the possibility. However, it makes sense to at least talk with your family about what you would all do.

According to what I've read on the gov sites, it's very survivable for a lot of people if you take key steps: surround yourself with as much building as you can (the middle floor of a high rise, or a basement three stories deep, etc.) Shower and dispose of any clothing that may be contaminated. Wait out the initial 24 to 48 hours until you've gotten official instructions (a hand crank radio is good to have.)

Generally, having a first aid kit, water, and food, is common sense for any potential outage of the infrastructure.

Sucks to consider the possibility, but worth having a conversation.

<comment><USER30> I think many people consider nuclear war an end of the world event. Working hard to survive just to be left adrift in the ashes of civilization with likely long-term health effects seems counterproductive to some of us.

<comment><USER31> The US/Russia/France have already detonated thousands of full power nuclear weapons all across the globe, primarily for testing. Although major cities would be ash, with millions lost in the senseless conflict, life would go on. You'd likely only have health problems if you had acute exposure to the blast. If you live somewhere irrelivant, radiation exposure won't be much more of a concern than it already is currently; whatever enviromemtal impacts nuclear weapons have, have already taken place.

Though the standard of living for survivors is sure to plummet, as famine and other secondary problems start to take precedence.

End of the world? No. Set back industrialized society two centuries? Sure.

<comment><USER32> Why two centuries? Most areas of the world are extremely unlikely to be involved in a nuclear conflict and/or receive significant damage.

<comment><USER31> Two centuries is somewhat arbitrary, because there are so many assumptions in the notion of "large scale nuclear conflict" as is. Areas that aren't direct targets of nuclear weaponry will still suffer major setbacks, as supply chains for various goods and resources are disrupted. Present day problems, like hunger, access to medical care, and safe drinking water would just become magnified. For example, a nuclear conflict could potentially cascade into a much more dangerous famine, because supply for modern pesticides and agro- chemicals is temporarily destroyed. Supply chains for antibiotics could be disrupted, resulting in outbreaks of various preventable illnesses. If you total all the possibilities up, I suspect the secondary impacts of nuclear conflict would be worse than the actual warfare.

<comment><USER30> If oil production is destroyed, I assume the secondary impacts will be catastrophic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I always struggle with news interviews that go along the lines of "So you're entire family's been killed. _How do you feel?_ ".

I realise it's easy to lose the impact on people's lives behind a few words in a headline, and maybe I'm just too much of a cynic.

Pleasingly (to me) this article's focus on feelings has some real meaning: namely the widespread panic that was caused by the false alarm.

(Like other folks in the previous HN thread I hope constructive lessons can be learned at all levels from this)

<comment><USER34> I don't struggle with those interviews at all, they are outrageous and shameful.

There's an argument to be made about conveying the scope of a tragedy to the public but it's also pretty clear that cameras are being shoved in people's faces.

<comment><USER35> I feel exactly the opposite.

It's critical that the real impact of death and destruction be effectively conveyed in the media. All too often it's trivialized, sugar-coated, or made to seem like a video game.

People need to realize how devastating such violence is, instead of viewing it as a game or a joke, if there is to be any hope of reducing its incidence.

<comment><USER34> I mentioned that I understand that in the second paragraph and expressed that I don't think they do a good job of it.

Much of the media treats victims of tragedies like shit. All the time. It's a race to who knows where.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > and an employee pushed the wrong button

I would assume that was how it was explained to the governor, and that the actual system is software based (right?) - there couldn't possibly be an actual physical 'ballistic missile alert' button right next to the 'shift change' button.

In which case, the triggering of this alert is probably a bit more complex. However, this is treated as a sensitive system so there likely will not be an actual post-mortem on the incident

<comment><USER37> According to the Washington Post, it was a dropdown with two options next to each other - "Test missile alert" and "Missile alert". It's really that bad.

[https://twitter.com/ericuman/status/952719318688718850](https://twitter.com/ericuman/status/952719318688718850)

<comment><USER38> It's shocking it doesn't happen more often then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Anyone got data (Heartrate etc.) from Apple Watches / Fitbit / Other Tracking devices?

<comment><USER2> This [1] reddit thread has a fitbit graph.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/7q6hzg/average_card...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/7q6hzg/average_cardio_workout_for_the_state_of_hawaii/)

<comment><USER40> Is that for real? It looks too simple. I do appreciate your sharing it and think this sort of quantitative data is absolutely valuable in helping to measure externalities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Went through two major disasters. The most critical thing is to have a plan. Make everyone in your household aware of the plan. Then execute it, practice once a year if you can. Execution during the disaster helps distract you from the emotional turmoil.

</comment><comment><USER42> Must be a terrible thing, if anything good can come out of this I hope it alerts people to the horrors of nuclear war. I am puzzled by why we speak so much about global warming but almost nobody talks about nuclear war.

Global warming is not remotely as dangerous as nuclear war. Sure it will make crops fails some places, cause water shortage for some millions, force people to move off the coast etc. But it will not kill billions of people. Nuclear war could do that.

As long as the US and Russia stockpile huge quantities of nuclear weapons the whole world is in jeopardy. The number of times nuclear war has almost gotten triggered due to mistakes like this one in Hawaii is scary to think of.

How many human errors or hardware/software failures need to happen before one day, an actual launch of nuclear missiles happen by default?

These weapons are far too dangerous to stockpile in such huge quantities. There should be a push to reduce the stockpile to something like 20-30 missiles.

It isn't hard to imagine a president in the style of Donald Trump, acting irrational and making a rash and stupid mistake which puts the world on fire.

<comment><USER43> If nuclear war is that close to happening, then we are already too far gone to address it. Who is going to be the one to convince Trump to decommission some of America's nuclear weapons?

<comment><USER22> Putin has more nuclear weapons. Shouldn't he decommission his first? He has already risked kicking off WWIII several times. He took a chunk of Ukraine, broke two chunks off of Georgia, make a bunch of border incursions into NATO/EU countries up north, and is currently supporting a civil war in Ukraine.

The situation is pretty crazy. Russia is far from the world's biggest economy, yet it is the nation with the greatest nuclear capability. There is clearly a desire to hold the rest of the world hostage, strongly equating fear with respect.

Note that Ukraine once had nuclear weapons. They gave them up, being assured that Russia would not threaten territorial integrity and that the USA would help ensure this. We see what those promises were worth. Giving up the nuclear capability was obviously a mistake. There is no way that Putin would have annexed Crimea under the threat of nuclear retaliation.

<comment><USER44> I would suggest you take a bigger look at geopolitics. What Nato is, how it's made and how it's really an extension of the US army. Gorbachev was promised that America and Nato would not expand to the east. Little by little they encroached on Russia's borders and meddled with countries to expand there power. There are now Nato and American military bases at Russia's doorstep and Ukraine was set to be next. That is why Russia took a stand.

I don't agree with Russia's policies, also not an American, but just taking a look at the last few decades, you can see the build up and America is not innocent in any of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> During the Cold War in Poland we had no nuclear shelters only huge stockpiles of Lugol's iodine, which is said to be blocking intake of radioactive isotopes. It came handy after the Chernobyl.

</comment><comment><USER46> Stupid question: why would you fill up your bathtub?

<comment><USER47> Stocking up on drinking water or having a source of water to flush the toilet with (by manually refilling the tank).

<comment><USER48> Drinking water. Don't flush the toilet because you might eventually need the water in the tank too.

<comment><USER23> I've never understood this. What do you do when you need to defecate?

<comment><USER49> Poo in a bucket, put a lid on it. If the alternative is eventually dying of thirst or having to venture out into a contaminated neighbourhood, necessity compels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> You know how people born before 1985 felt when there was the ever present global thermonuclear war threat. We used to practice duck-and-cover in grade school. Woulnt help if very near a bomb explosion, but a little helpful from distant blasts. Plus there were near misses of a launch in 1962 and 1983 on news. Plus several other secreat incidents revealed years later. Contributed to hippie malaise that boober parents were fucking up the world.

</comment><comment><USER51> AskReddit is really good for these kind of questions. There's a large thread going on right now: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7q6gys/reddit_me...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7q6gys/reddit_members_in_hawaii_what_initially_went/)

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm amazed this isn't being considered a bigger deal - I would expect the government to announce a major inquiry into how this happened and what to do to prevent it ever happening again, and I would expect heads to roll.

</comment><comment><USER53> We sat next to a water tank on the side opposite of Honolulu. No other options. A year ago if we had gotten the same alert it would have just been wtf instead of terror. Hacker angle: we need different levels of emergency alerts. People turn them off because they don't want yet another irrelevant flood warning for some place 20 miles from them or an Amber alert at 3 am. In this particular case the lucky ones had them turned off. 38 minutes to send out correction. Just sayin

</comment><comment><USER54> This should give everyone serious pause. If this false alarm had been sent by NORAD (it has happened before, read Command and Control), it's very likely that several million people in both Koreas, Japan and possibly the US would be char-grilled nuclear krispies right now. There needs to be a serious re- evaluation of our alert systems and launch on warning posture.

</comment><comment><USER55> How close did we get to nuking them "back"?

<comment><USER56> The US military never thought that there was any nuclear attack inbound so not at all. The real danger was that either North Korea thought that this alarm was cover for us preparing for a counterstrike after we preemptively nuked them, causing them to decide to launch, or that Trump saw the news on Fox and ordered a launch and didn't let himself be dissuaded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I wouldn't be surprised if we saw PTSD.

<comment><USER58> In fact, I would say that it was the goal of this event -- inducing PTSD on a small part of the U.S. (the state of Hawaii).

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Technical Support will come riding through the apocalyptic wasteland on a technical, robbing those who for years refused to read the manuals.

</comment><comment><USER60> Any study/articles on how the boundary of starting a nuclear war and being the first one to launch a missile is much lower after that incident?

</comment><comment><USER61> Thanks for this, when I heard about the announcement my mind just went blank and I'm nowhere near Hawaii!

</comment><comment><USER62> 3 words: Software alert fatigue.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm waiting for the Colbert interview with the man of the moment

</comment><comment><USER64> Now let's think about the feeling of people in other countries when be attacked by US missiles.

</comment><comment><USER65> I think it's safe to assume the 100,000+ Iraqi civilians killed in the conflict in Iraq received no such warning. It's shameful how completely unaware most Americans are of the terror their MIC imposes on others.

Ironically, this incident in HI will feed the collective fears and the wrath of the MIC will extend further still. The opportunity to question the status quo will be lost.

<comment><USER66> Or the continued drone war that is inflicting a continuous terror on many civilians. Now considerd standard operating procedure and no longer mentioned in the media.

Imagine living your life not knowing if the coffee place you are visiting is in a drones cross hairs. Then image what kind of hate you would feel towards the country inflicting this terror on you.

This is not how you solve extremism and bring peace. This is how you make it worse.

<comment><USER65> Yup. The USA has actively created plenty of shitholes - in places where the faces are not pure European white - and that gets zero public reaction.

The current POTUS uses the word shithole to describe a group of countries and he's X, Y and Z.

Yeah, Trump is a moron. But the hypocrisy of the press and the public is a moral violation.

<comment><USER67> The USA has contributed to the development of plenty of flourishing economies. Panama is a rich nation thanks in large part to international cargo shipment. American tourists spend heavily in several other Latin American and Caribbean economies. South Korea is one of the most highly developed nations in the world, despite having been relatively poor prior to the Korean War. Canada and Mexico have benefited for years from NAFTA. World War 2 would have been very different for the Allies if it weren't for American weaponry and involvement. NATO may not have withstood the Cold War were it not for American might.

Maybe you can give some examples to support the narrative of Americans creating poor conditions in non-European countries. It's certainly not Afghanistan, which had been a warzone for a long time before 9/11, which provoked American involvement. And though it's possible, it's hard to argue that Iraqi instability was the sole result of American invasion, as Saddam had massacred several hundred thousand of his own citizens and was trying to change the ethnic makeup of northern Iraq to dampen Kurdish separatism.

So I'm not sure to which countries you are referring.

<comment><USER68> America's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't start after 9/11.

<comment><USER69> the first gulf war was in 1990 and the US was a party to it

<comment><USER68> In 1955 the US was part of the creation of the Baghdad Pact. In the 1970s the US supported a Kurdish uprising against the Iraqi government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I for one am convinced this is all part of a fear-mongering tactic of the US army aimed at psychologically pushing US citizen into supporting another war (crime). Unfortunately, Americans are all to easy to scare and the probability that they will in panic commit the most unspeakable of all war crimes (which they have already committed twice in the past) is much too high. The truth is NK couldn't shoot a missile at the US even if they wanted to.

</comment><comment><USER71> I saw a high-effort self-post on Reddit that gave a good framework for evaluating what might have happened. I thought it was good enough that I've recopied it here in full hoping that author appreciates reaching a larger audience and that discussion here might be better than that on Reddit. Repeating, I'm not the author of what's written below.

\---

 _A couple of possibilities for what REALLY went down in Hawaii yesterday_

I used to work on the Minutemen 3 ICBMs for a high profile company. Can't share too many details for obvious reasons. But I think the "mistake" of an employee accidentally pressed the mass alert button is very unlikely. In fact, I can think of a lot of things way more likely. Here's my two cents, in no particular order:

 _The threat was real, the missile was shot down_

As others on this subreddit have already pointed out, the amount of time it takes an ICBM to travel from Southeast Asia to Hawaii is approximately 20-30 min ( ~10 min to hit ICBM max speed of 7 km/s, ~7200 km, (7200/7)/(60) = ~17 min for total travel time of ~27 min, not accounting for earth's rotation in that time period). The amount of time it took for the false alarm to be sent out was 38 min. Now, the way the US's ABM system works is that they basically launch a giant chunk of metal at the ICBM and hit it really hard. The ABMs have no ordinance or anything, they just destroy the incoming missile through shear impact. However, even though our ABM system is the best in the world, it's still only successful around 50% of the time. So when the incoming threat was discovered, it would still be protocol to alert the intended target of the threat in the event that the ABM systems fail (and whatever other defenses we have that I don't know about). I think it's at least feasible that the threat was real, and the threat was dealt with successfully (and thankfully). The question that tears this theory apart is: why would the US not tell us they shot down an enemy ICBM? The most likely answer I can come up with is that Trump doesn't want war. Maybe he just talks a big game. Or perhaps it's not financially beneficial to start a war when there were no causalities. Whatever it is, it's not that we don't know who launched the missile. When those things take off we pretty much immediately know where it's going and where it came from. So if there was a real threat, the US Gov is for whatever reason not sharing this information with the public. Maybe they don't want to cause panic. I don't know.

 _The EAS was hacked to provoke reaction from Trump_

The EAS has been hacked before, it's possible that it was hacked again. The person or persons who hacked the system either did so for shits and giggles, which is extremely fucked up considering how many people could have died if we had retaliated, or they did so to intentionally cause a retaliation from Trump in order to make him look bad. See, ICBMs function on something called Mutually Assured Destruction. If someone like Russia launches their full force of ICBMs at us, we have that half hour to retaliate. In a situation like that, both countries lose. Using ICBMs against another country with ICBM's is essentially committing suicide. If we had launched missiles towards Southeast Asia, they would then have a chance to retaliate against us. I have hard time believing that any hacker would do this, but then, there are some truly crazy people out there. This could also explain why it took so long for them to send out the second alert, because the system was hacked or down and they needed to regain control or reset it. Also, if one of the employees didn't send the message, they may not have even known about it for several minutes after.

 _The EAS was commandeered by a disgruntled employee_

This is the scenario I find most likely. Trump tends to piss an enormous amount of people off. Perhaps one of the workers manning that operation decided to try and make Trump look bad by sending out a false alert. It certainly is a bit embarrassing to send an entire state into full panic mode on accident. This is going to be a national incident for several days still.

 _The monitoring system used to look for incoming threats malfunctioned_

This happens more often than you would think. The early alert systems are very sensitive. They're a lot better than they used to be, but they've detected false missiles before. I've heard of them being triggered by sunlight reflecting off large pieces of metal. They're sensitive for a reason, I mean better safe than sorry, right? Somehow, yesterday, the conditions were just right to trigger a false alarm. Instead of sharing with everyone how fallible the system really is, the Gov decided to blame it on a careless employee. It would cause a lot less panic.

 _The "false alert" was staged_

In an attempt to distract the MSM from some policy he is currently pursuing, Trump ordered the "fake" threat. Now the news cycles will be dominated day and night by this "mistake" allowing him to pursue his true intentions. Or, alternatively, he wanted to demonstrate to the people that the U.S has an early warning system, although I don't think this is likely as the amount of panic that the alert would have caused (car crashes, heart attacks, etc) would not have been worth it.

 _The mistake was exactly that; a mistake_

Honestly, I have a hard time believing that any operator could accidentally send out a message like that. These guys are trained for months before they are put at that station, and it seems to me like sending out a state wide alert takes more than just one press of a button. Also, the operator would have immediately noticed that the alert went out, and they would have been able to correct it much faster (not the 38 min that is did).

Whatever really happened yesterday, I don't think it was just an errant press of a button. But no matter what the actual cause was, this event was still a tragedy. Why? If there ever is a real threat and people get this message, they are now less likely to believe it, and that means they are less likely to seek shelter or prepare in anyway. Remember guys, don't let this turn into a "the Gov cried wolf" story. If you ever get a notification like this, your first thought should be finding shelter, then questioning.

Good night everyone.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7qax47/a_couple...](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7qax47/a_couple_of_possibilities_for_what_really_went/)

<comment><USER72> Regardless of the credentials of the poster, the fact that it was posted in r/conspiracy makes me think it's not that useful of a comment. r/conspiracy attracts a certain type of poster, one who finds possible consiparcy in everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Well, if Trump wasn't there we wouldn't be talking about this "engineering" problem. He is the one that triggered the whole nuclear story.

</comment><comment><USER74> Pedantic pet peeve: spelling it as Hawaii instead of Hawai'i

<comment><USER71> Is your peeve that you believe there exists some unwritten requirement that all place names must use identical spellings without consideration of the language they are written in? If so, I don't think this is reasonable.

Words are allowed to change when they are taken from one language to another. It's spelled (and pronounced) Hawai'i when written in Hawaiian. But when writing in English, as the article is, it's typically spelled (and pronounced) Hawaii.

<comment><USER74> Both the symbol/mark and the sound exist natively in English text and speech, so it bothers me in the same way someone might be bothered by mixing up their/they're or your/you're.

<comment><USER75> Yes the mark exists, but it has a completely different meaning. It's used in a way that's not a plural, a contraction, or an indication of dropped letters. The mark makes zero sense in English.

<comment><USER74> You could say the same about most symbols in words that are used in English but that are not from English. Your point doesn't stand.

Edit: I.e. it doesn't make it a reason not to use it. Even in English there are many sounds that are not pronounced how they're written. We still take the effort to put the 'w' in 'sword', but most will say 'sord'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Everyone is talking about nukes... I doubt nk has a compact nuclear warhead that can fit on a ballistic missile. Maybe in another 5-10 years, but not right now.

They most likely have chemical and biological weapons, as confirmed by the nk soldier that defected and had anthrax antibodies in his blood.

<comment><USER77> We already know they have compact nuclear warheads

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/north...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/north-korea-now-making-missile-ready-nuclear-weapons-us-analysts- say/2017/08/08/e14b882a-7b6b-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html)

<comment><USER76> Well that sucks. Guess I'm behind in the news. Wow, that's a lot of nukes... 60??

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> It's reasonable to assume that a adversary can and will use overreaction against perceived threads as a strategic 'unconventional weapon'. Unconventional defence would include educating a modern populace on critical thinking, thread model evaluation and even things like stoicism.

[https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?t=14m5s](https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?t=14m5s) is relevant, in which the fear of the thing killed 1500, while the thing in reality is benign.

</comment><comment><USER79> If someone did launch a missile, and it were destroyed with a secret weapons system, this is precisely the timeline (alert, not a drill - passage of 30+ mins to write a cover story about shift change, "oh sorry false alarm") and news articles I would expect to see.

The only thing we know is that we won't ever receive the truth.

Can you imagine how much worse it would be if the story were "US anti-missile defense destroys weapon headed for Hawaii"?

<comment><USER80> The likelihood of this being the case seems so close to nil. For one, the coverup required would involve thousands of military and non-military personnel. But secondly, if we really did destroy an incoming warhead, well, that would constitute an attack — _the_ attack — and I can't fathom the US military not counter-attacking.

So no, I don't think you have to worry about that. Just a fat fingering, no more.

<comment><USER79> > For one, the coverup required would involve thousands of military and non- > military personnel.

Over a million people have a TS clearance.

As for not fathoming the military counterattacking—that is an excellent motive for keeping such an event secret.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> I find it really annoying that top two articles on HN are completely separate from engineering. Since when have posts from news sources been able to not just make it to the front page, but dominate the front page?

Years ago, coming to this site helped me to become an engineer and changed the way I think about problems. But now I don't get that, and instead get plenty of feel-good articles and useless posts that don't contain any real information. I think the articles here should be different from the front page of reddit, but increasingly this viewpoint has become unpopular here.

<comment><USER82> You might find it useful to read the HN Guidelines [1]

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER81> So any article under the sun is relevant for HN? That's definitely not the case as mods frequently remove posts, and as much as they would like to be, mods are not arbiters of intellectual curiosity.

<comment><USER83> The guidelines are vague, but the site was still never intended to be exclusively about engineering - hell, initially it was called Startup News.

I find it useful to look at the submissions by the site's creator[1], before he passed over the site's management to others, back in 2014. As you'll see, it actually has very little engineering content, and on the contrary, has many articles from mainstream sources.

I'm sure HN has ebbs and flows on the ratio of engineering articles, but it was never supposed to be dedicated to those; maybe you just joined at a moment when the ratio was bigger.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Campaign to take down Amazon is being funded by Amazon's biggest rivals - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/campaign-to-take-down-amazon-is-being-funded-by-amazons-biggest-rivals-2019-09-20 <comment><USER2> Hearing the shopping mall owner in this list of people wanting to discredit Amazon is hilarious.

Just last week we were at the mall. Not only did they not have my size, but the people working there couldn't be bothered to help or even check if there's any more inventory. This happened at two three different stores (shopping for a jacket) before we left. When I did ask for help, the 20 somethings working there practically looked offended.

Why the hell would I get in my car next time, and spend 20 minutes of my time to drive to the mall when

1\. You don't have what I need 2\. The people who work there can't be bothered to help, even those that really aren't that busy

I should pay for gas and the 40 minute round trip, not to mention the time wasted in these stores?

Yeah, it's Amazons fault these business owners refuse to innovate or even just not provide a horrible customer experience.

You're not entitled to my business.

WalMarts a cancer that literally did price out all the local shops in the town where I grew up in Arkansas. Now that Amazon threatens you, they're bad for consumers.

</comment><comment><USER3> They aren't going to beat Amazon through competition. They just aren't as talented as Amazon. But they very well could get rural senators to write amazon-destroying legislation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazon FBA is the key to the success of Amazon and reason most sellers can scale. You can sell few items on Shopify or eBay but if you have to scale nothing beats FBA.

our startup has been trying to deliver the "Amazon experience" for websites and we have seen this problem with almost all major sellers

</comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21027657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21027657)</comment>


FounderDating Success Story: Tapactive - <AUTHOR> http://founderdating.com/success-story-tapactive/

<comment><USER2> For anyone thinking of joining FD, be aware it does cost money if you're "accepted". That fact is buried at the bottom of the FAQ page and not obvious from the "how it works" section of home page.

Connecting technical and non-technical founders is a bit lopsided (not unlike real dating) and I understand charging a fee can be a useful filter. I'm just curious to see how this will play out.

<comment><USER3> hey callmeed -

just a reminder that it is a curated network - everyone is reviewed and referenced.

pricing is actually listed on our About page along with more details here: <http://founderdating.com/about/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have no idea how my wife deals with me working 60+ hours... of the 5 years we've been together, 3 have been in "start-up land"...</comment>


Gmail Creator Paul Buchheit on Joining Google and Becoming a Great Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://triplebyte.com/blog/interview-with-gmail-creator-and-y-combinator-partner-paul-buchheit <comment><USER2> Starting to learn programming by being curious enough to hack around on PC games seems to be a common theme. Being stubborn and willing to struggle for a few years to figure out what you're doing seems to be crucial as well. I do wonder if modern / closed mobile platforms (and shorter attention spans) are going to let the next generations have the early programming experiences that kids "hooked" enough to spend the time it takes to love and learn the craft.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Working with Paul is one of the things I miss most about working at YC. Besides being interesting to talk to about pretty much any topic, I remember analyzing the data on how accurate YC partners were at reviewing applications to YC and Paul being top despite spending the least amount of time reading each one.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who just started working at a startup, I definitely resonate with the idea that you learn a lot more quickly and get to operate above your level. Of course, for him that meant creating Gmail.</comment>


Bitcoin's civil war threatens to blow up the cryptocurrency itself - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/937312/bitcoin-btc-is-tearing-itself-apart-again-and-its-price-is-yo-yoing/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand why Core believes the fees and confirmation times are not a huge problem. Or am I misinformed, does Core have a plan to fix this?</comment>


Google forcing date of birth request on login.  - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/tlNzS.png

<comment><USER2> They can't make you tell the truth, so lie. I use Jan 1, 1980

<comment><AUTHOR> If I recall correctly, google+ started asking for ID scans.</comment></comment>


'Built To Be Flexible' - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/11/08/built-to-be-flexible

<comment><USER2> I read each post by Gruber (and he writes a lot), but I can't help but feel like the guy is stuck in some world where Apple is still fighting "the man" and trying to free us, and yet in reality Apple has become the man. I don't mean to speak negatively against Gruber because he is a great blogger, but the reality distortion field hits that man hard.

To discuss this particular story, the idea that Android just steals from the best competitor - that's probably true. I don't see why that is a negative though. Imagine if only Xerox had mice, or only Opera had tabs. Companies should be stealing the best ideas from their competitors, and then coming up with new ideas to one-up them. Apple isn't afraid of this, they stole plenty of ideas in iOS5, and they executed them well. Notifications from Android, lock screen from the jailbreak community (specifically LockInfo), and iMessage from Blackberry. I don't think there's anything wrong with this idea-copying, it makes the product better and that's good for consumers.</comment>


Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter review - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2012/07/02/thunderbolt-gigabit-adapter <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be better to simply have a Gig-E port?

<comment><USER3> It doesn't fit. The RJ-45 connector nearly the same size (possibly larger) than the edge of the retina MacBook Pro.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which OSS licence? I don't want one specific company to touch it? - <AUTHOR> I do not want a company to directly or indirectly to use my open source project. This includes everything. Forking, using it as a service from others and etc.
And the rest of the people and entities can use it with MIT licence.
Is there any way to achieve this? <comment><USER2> You can license your project however _you_ would like to. You absolutely can have a license with text that is similar to the MIT license, except with a clause saying that company X can't use it. However, as other commentators here point out, you could not, in good faith, call that "open source" under the standard, accepted definitions of that term.

So the answer to "is there any way to achieve this?" is twofold. If the question is "can I achieve this and still legitimately use the term 'Open source software'?", the answer is a flat-out "no". If the question is "can I set it up legally in this way, without regards to the terminology", the answer is yes.

A license is a pretty free-form thing. You can write whatever text there you want. You may wish to consult with a lawyer, in order to get some legal assurance that what you wrote makes legal sense and will hold up in court. This is especially true if you want to be very sure that you didn't accidentally leave some loophole in your wording that will allow the company you dislike to use your project against your will.

You are going to have to write the text of this license yourself (or pay a lawyer to do it for you): you're not going to find much of this kind of "almost-OSS" license out there for you to base yours off of, because in general, those who want to license their software as OSS actually do want a fully OSS license. But there are a few examples, although not _quite_ identical in spirit to your "use case" (excluding a particular company) but instead different variations of not-quite open source. For instance, you can take a look at MongoDB's SSPL ([https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side- public-license](https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public- license)), and Redis Lab's RSAL ([https://live-redislabs.pantheonsite.io/wp- content/uploads/20...](https://live-redislabs.pantheonsite.io/wp- content/uploads/2019/02/Redis-Source-Available-License-PDF.pdf)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for going into details. Since then I learned a lot about copyleft, GNU GPLv3, and much more. Maybe mentioning a company name in a licence is not really what I need after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is certainly a way to do this, but by definition such a license would not be "open source." See clause 5 of the open source definition: [https://opensource.org/osd-annotated](https://opensource.org/osd-annotated)

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand and thanks for your reply.

> "must not discriminate against any person or group of persons"

Do you think "group of persons" is same as mentioning of a company name?

I am just trying to find a proper/correct solution to achieve this problem.

<comment><USER3> Yes it is the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A good compromise that would keep things equal for everyone would be to use a strong copyleft license (GPL). Normally when I think of specific scenarios involving companies using it (a real issue that has come up for me before), GPL was strongly considered as an option. Not to prevent them from using it, but rather to ensure that they don't use the free software to gain a further advantage without giving their own improvements to that same software back to the community.

<comment><USER5> GPL only requires them to contribute their changes if they distribute a version of the software with those changes. The AGPL defines distribution to include hosting SaaS, but that may not be applicable to whatever the OP has written.

<comment><USER4> True, I have been trying to steer clear of the "centralize everything on our servers" trend in tech lately so I keep forgetting about that one...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Your property, you have the right to do disposal, it is not important to comply with the open source definition.

</comment><comment><USER7> What's your objective for the project?

You can do anything, but a weird license restriction is going to turn off many potential users. I don't know or care about who you dislike, and my counsel will not sign off on deploying something that cannot be used by some random people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Idea was to prevent licence violation. It is hard to do anything as an individual against companies that violates OSS licences. But since then I learned much more about licensing, and I think I changed my mind. I won't be mentioning any specific entity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Instead of targeting a specific company why not prohibit the use case you don't like? Otherwise I have to agree with others that this seems retributive and childish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really good point about use case specifications. I sure will be researching my options. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is antithetical to the entire notion of open source. It also sounds like a childish tantrum.

<comment><AUTHOR> Things are not always black and white as you are stating it to be. I just want to know if there is anything like this done before or is it possible/right to do it.

I am also open to listening why i shouldn't go this route, but not the way you are trying to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why?</comment>


Show HN: Try the Colemak keyboard layout as a Qwerty touch typist - <AUTHOR> http://mmlkrx.github.io/colemak-typing-simulator/

<comment><USER2> I really like Colemak. Did the transition to it some months ago and used [http://www.typingstudy.com](http://www.typingstudy.com). What did you use?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool. I used Tarmak[0] at the time, which allows to only change 3 different keys for each level. That way one doesn't loose too much efficiency.

[0] [http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=1858](http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=1858)</comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Is there an easy way to post to Facebook as you can to twitter? - <AUTHOR>

With twitter, it's as simple as this:
http://twitter.com/home?status=hello+there
Is there something like that for Facebook? <comment><USER2> Bookmarklet for Sharing on Facebook (I guess that one is FF specific):

      javascript:var%20d=document,f='http://www.facebook.com/share,l=d.location,e=encodeURIComponent,p=.php?src=bm&v=4&i=1255717032&u=+e(l.href)+&t=+e(d.title);1;try{if%20(!/^(.*\.)?facebook\.[^.]*$/.test(l.host))throw(0);share_internal_bookmarklet(p)}catch(z)%20{a=function()%20{if%20(!window.open(f+'r'+p,'sharer','toolbar=0,status=0,resizable=1,width=626,height=436'))l.href=f+p};if%20(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent))setTimeout(a,0);else{a()}}void(0)

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you share a url with an arbitrary message?

[http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<url](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<url) to share>&t=<title of content>

I tried changing the title above but Facebook ignores my change.

<comment><USER2> Clicking the little bookmarklet in my browser pops up a window that allows me to add a message. I would say make the bookmarklet, click it, then see what message it sends to the server.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Is There No New "Einstein"? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://www.everythingimportant.org/relativity/no-new-einstein.pdf <comment><USER2> This is a very interesting question, but unfortunately in this case the author's answer is just the standard scientist's whine: "There's not enough funding for my kind of research".

Better possible answers include:

a) The time isn't right for the emergence of another Einstein just now

b) There are several around, we're just not paying attention

c) Einstein was really more of a media phenomenon than a physicist, and he wasn't really any more of a genius than several of his contemporaries, and several of ours.

d) There are so many more physicists nowadays than there were a hundred years ago that it's harder for one to stand so far above the others

e) Physics is almost over -- there's still things still left to discover, but no surprises on the scale of relativity or quantum mechanics left.

I'm not actually arguing for any of these possibilities right now, just saying that they are possibilities more interesting than Lee Smolin's "can has more money?" article.

<comment><USER3> Actually, to my great surprise, "give my field more money" was only one of his suggestions. It was, in fact, the last suggestion of his, and (at least to my reading) least important.

The rest of his answer is quite reasonable, and doesn't even need new money:

1\. Seek out people with different points of view and invite them to join the discussion. 2\. Give money/influence to individuals, not to large fiefdoms/research programs.

I think he is quite right on this. In at least one area the author mentioned (foundations of QM), even a single person with different views can be beneficial to a department. At Rutgers (where I got my Ph.D.) the math physics group has a single advocate of a deviant view. The department would be weakened if we replaced him with a normal scientist of equal quality.

Diversity of ideas is important, and we definitely don't do enough to promote it.

<comment><USER4> "Diversity of ideas is important, ..."

Wouldn't that be, diversity of _informed_ ideas is important?

Why might it be that people with the background to have an informed opinion on something do not show greater diversity in those opinions? (Or maybe they are there, and politics keeps them out of the inner circle?)

<comment><USER3> >Why might it be that people with the background to have an informed opinion on something do not show greater diversity in those opinions?

For one reason or another, one viewpoint gets a leg up on the other one. After this, life is easier for those with the mainstream viewpoint, and new people join the establishment.

Case in point: I'm working on a paper right now in foundations of quantum mechanics. I did most of the work with Bohmian mechanics as my mental model (as a result of being exposed to a "deviant"). That viewpoint helped a lot, and I probably wouldn't have built my model without it. Note that the model is completely justifiable without it, but it's an unmotivated magic trick.

I've given talks about it from a non-standard perspective. People attack that. I've also talked about it, pretending it's black magic that yields a result everyone knows. People love that.

The result is the same, but I have an easier time promoting it if it looks mainstream.

It's no wonder people stick to the establishment. Even I'm going to stick to the establishment when it comes time to submit the paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, when you compare the free, male, non-laboring population of Ancient Athens with the entire educated population of the world today, you have to wonder where all the Socrateses, Platos, Aristotles, Aristophaneses, etc, etc, etc, are hiding. Using the roughest possible statistics, every mid-sized town should have a few.

<comment><USER6> When you compare the educational prerequisites needed to discover something _new_ nowadays and the educational prerequisites needed in Ancient Athens, you have your answer.

Most reasonably bright high-school kids can understand Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, etc. A few can even rederive their findings; there were a couple times when I was growing up when I had this great insight, only to find out that it had been discovered by a dead Greek guy 2000 years ago. But unfortunately, discovering the same stuff that the ancient Greeks discovered doesn't count as noteworthy anymore. The bar's been raised a little higher.

Same goes for most fields. Lots of college CS students can implement a Lisp interpreter now; it was a big deal when McCarthy did it in 1960. When Tchaikovsky wrote his violin concerto, he gave it to the best concert violinist of his day, who took one look at it and replied "This is unplayable." Now it's standard repertoire for dedicated high-schoolers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Two reasons. 1) The achievements of modern day scientists appear less amazing than they really are. 2) The achievements of scientists of the pass seem more amazing than they really were.

There are quite a few candidates for a modern day "Einstein." Stephen Hawking or Michio Kaku, for example.

</comment><comment><USER8> The simple truth is that great scientist are simply a a rare event. How many scientists with the capacity of Einstein have there been? Newton, maybe Aristotle and Archimedes. That's four in the last two thousand years.

The capacity of scientists (genius, output or however you define it) most probably follows a powerlaw with a lot of mediocre scientists, a few outstanding (Louis Pasteur, Henry Cavendish, Louis Maxwell) and only one true genius for every two centuries. Since we had a genius that broke through in 1905 we will statistically have to wait for quite a while for the next one.

<comment><USER9> _How many scientists with the capacity of Einstein have there been? Newton, maybe Aristotle and Archimedes. That's four in the last two thousand years._

Look, I admire these guys as much as anyone. But Zombie Einstein himself would come back from the dead and smack you if he heard you claim that, e.g., Maxwell wasn't as smart as he was. Einstein figured out special relativity by staring at _Maxwell's_ equations, after all.

I also look forward to your battle with Zombie Leibniz, who will be pretty pissed off at your one-sided exaltation of Newton. Although it's understandable that you didn't choose to anger Zombie Newton. Nobody does that and lives.

Having actually met the late Hans Bethe before he died, I assure you that his zombie will pack a mean slide rule. We're talking about a guy who discovered the main sequence, wrote the book on solid state physics, _and_ served as the theoretical lead for the Manhattan project in his spare time.

Indeed, the list of dead scientists who were arguably as capable as Einstein is awfully long. You'd better start running. I hear that the tag team of Zombie Nicola Tesla and Zombie Michael Faraday is deadly even at long range, especially if you aren't properly grounded. And that's just the physicists... can you imagine the sheer _size_ of Zombie Charles Darwin's Army of the Extinct?

<comment><USER8> If you ever write a book on popular science in that prose please let me know. I wan to buy it.

<comment><USER9> Well, one of my favorite science books ever is _Molecular Biology Made Simple and Fun_ , and it reads kind of like this.

The science in the book is 100% serious, too, and at the approximate level of an intro course in college. I faked it for three years as a biophysics postdoc with the help of that book. Admittedly, the molecular biologists chuckled at my understanding of their field, the way you would chuckle at a precocious four-year-old, but at least I had a vague idea of _what_ I didn't know.

<comment><USER10> Thanks a lot. I was looking for a book like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Luboš Motl has several responses to this question on his blog:

<http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/06/why-no-new-einstein.html>

[http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/09/why-no-new-einstein- ii.htm...](http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/09/why-no-new-einstein-ii.html)

This one isn't directly addressed to the Smolin piece, but it addresses the "No New Einstein" question:

[http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/09/bad-physicists-and- populis...](http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/09/bad-physicists-and- populism.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Scene from the Big Bang Theory:

PENNY What's new in physics?

LEONARD Really nothing, except for string theory. But only then I can say, "My theory has certain mathematical consistencies"

<comment><USER13> The Big Bang Theory has surprised me in that it actually has truly intellectual jokes. I thought it would just be another stereotype-promoting, nerd-meets-hottie sitcom, but this one actually has some intelligent humor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a "scribd.com" link, but it looks like now it's smart enough to not bother with the wonky Flash plugin for Mac users, and just send us to the PDF. Yay!

<comment><USER15> I don't think so; I got a PDF as well in Opera and Firefox on Ubuntu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> New Einstein dropped out, built and sold his "Hot Physicist or Not?" startup, and now just likes to kick back and listen to some choons.

</comment><comment><USER17> There is one - J. Craig Venter. I know he's not a physicist but I think the comparison is valid.

</comment><comment><USER18> two words: computer science. All our great minds are busy learning how to program.

<comment><USER19> That's actually quite funny. I met a prominent CS professor at a major school (think top 10) who admitted he doesn't know any programming languages (C, java, etc.).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Net::Ops - Automate network devices configuration with Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maxmouchet/net-ops <comment><AUTHOR> Hello,

I wrote these Ruby library and scripts while doing my internship five months ago. Now I'm back to school for my third year of studies and I don't have the hardware and the time to continue to work on.

My main motivation to write this was to help people saving time when doing repetitive tasks. I worked in the telco. department of a big company and I realized that although people were really good at designing and maintaining networks they were wasting time on some basics tasks. So I wrote this little "framework" to make mass configuration changes on Cisco devices. For example, I used it to remove useless crypto PKI on hundreds of switches, and to rename thousands of devices to lowercase (and regenerating the SSH key).

I am not a good programmer but looking back at my code five month later I thought it was worth sharing it, if never some people are interested in it :)

<comment><USER2> Congrats on shipping! Have you considered adding your list of examples above to the README as well?</comment></comment>


Facebook Home suffering from poor Google Play reviews: 48% of users award 1 star - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/04/12/facebook-home-suffers-from-poor-early-reviews-as-46-give-it-a-1-star-rating-on-google-play/ <comment><USER2> Common complaints (after looking through a few pages):

* Only useful if you live and breath Facebook; it makes email and texts and phone calls second class citizens

* Removes all your widgets

* Would be better as a lock screen than a launcher

* Hides notification bar

* Quick Select only shows Facebook apps (and the most recent app)

It seems like a lot of complaints are from people who didn't really understand what they were installing ("Hey, I like Facebook! Let's try it!"), and were surprised when it turned their phone into a Facebook phone.

A lot of people seem to really like it, too, though.

<comment><USER3> >Hides notification bar

WHAT?! Why on earth would they do that? Knowing my battery and cell tower status is important!

<comment><USER4> They did that so that it's a fullscreen experience.

But I think this is also the reason that they chose to start with the Samsung platform, because they (my NoteII at least) allow you to swipe from the top edge to display the notification bar (yes, even with Home).

<comment><USER5> The "facebook phone" is an HTC.

<comment><USER4> That's true, and I don't know what they are doing to keep app notifications, time, and device status on the HTC phone if it remains fullscreen. I think we're all mainly talking about the feedback which the app is getting for people who have installed it on other devices which had their own launchers before installing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I installed it just to see what it was 'all about'. I pretty much agree so far with the 1-star reviews. It really would be something better left as a lock- screen. The application list is pretty terrible as well (and honestly other than access to the Facebook app, that seems to be all the 'Home' program is really giving you the ability to see).

Also, honestly, do people want to see their 'friends' all that much as the background to their phone navigation experience?

P.S: I ended up disabling it. I wanted to play with it for a day just to be able to say that I gave it a fair shot, but it changes the dynamic so far in favor to Facebook that it makes even dialing a phone contact problematic. Sorry Facebook, Messenger is NOT a replacement for my contact list.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps just updated with new permissions:

Other application UI

* Draw over other apps

System tools

* Read battery statistics

* Read Home settings and shortcuts

Your applications information

* Retrieve running apps

* Reorder running apps, run at startup

Phone calls

* Directly call phone numbers

The ability to arbitrarily run at startup, read what apps I'm currently running, and draw on top of them all concern me, and I've chosen not to accept the update at this time as a result.

<comment><USER8> Really? I would hope the users at HN would be more inclined to understand the needs of those permissions rather than fear mongering. You know the features of Home and you should know that to accomplish those features, it needs those permissions. Remember that Home is more of a shell app and the majority of its abilities come from the Facebook app. The app shouldn't really be accessing that information if Home isn't installed, but they are necessary for Home to run.

<comment><USER9> But isn't that an "interesting" choice? They could have just kept the extra permissions tied to the Home app.

The current way, even non-Home users are giving a lot more unnecessary permissions to the FB app. And FB isn't the most trustworthy company to give unnecessary extra permissions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I first read about it, I thought it sounded like something designed and dreamed up by marketing team with little regard as to whether it would be useful in practice.

<comment><USER11> That's exactly how it comes across.

For people who live Facebook as if its the sole purpose of the internet this app seams fantastic. Until they realize that the issues they've always rallied against on the website (typically UI stuff) will now be part of their device. Facebook is driven by ads and the research into fitting as many ads into a space as users will accept; how was a mobile app expected to be any different?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can't even try the app out. Who releases a big application that doesn't run on flagship Google devices like the Nexus 4 [1]? It's absurd.

[1] Google Play insists the app is not compatible with my Nexus 4 phone, so I can't even try to install it.

<comment><USER13> Someone who isn't targeting people who own a flagship Google device. There is probably very little overlap in the Venn diagram of people who go out of their way to get the pure Google experience and those who will truly enjoy and use Facebook Home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do poor ratings even matter for a super-brand-name application like this? I feel that if I want something like, say, Facebook messenger, I'm going to install it regardless of what its rating is on the app store.

(though I guess with something as "strange/new" as Facebook Home, ratings might matter in giving "on the fence" people enough confidence to try it out)

<comment><USER15> Sure. Facebook Poke did not receive a lot of positive reviews and has faded into obscurity. Likewise when Facebook was mostly an HTLM5 app and performed poorly, there were tons of negative reviews which prompted Facebook to refactor the app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a rehash of the aftermath of pretty much any new UI design. People dislike change itself far more than they dislike the actual change.

<comment><USER6> This is pretty separate from a UI redesign. This is a new application and then an integration with the existing Facebook app. I'd say there isn't grouching about the 'redesign' so much as 'Where the eff is my Android?'. I think perhaps there has to be a barrier of some sort between the phone and the user for a Facebook 'phone/home' to really work, but there is so much of a barrier that there is literally no dialer immediately available to you. There IS however direct integration with the Facebook Messenger, which I think is how they want you to interact with contacts... sooo... yeah. I don't think the grouching is similar to when the timeline stuff happened, etc.

<comment><USER8> "I'd say there isn't grouching about the 'redesign' so much as 'Where the eff is my Android?'."

People shouldn't be asking that; they're installing a launcher. Do people ask that when they install LauncherPro? I thought people generally understood that Facebook Home adds new Android-level UI features rather than just being a normal app that is launched from the app drawer?

<comment><USER6> How about this... try installing it and then come back and we'll have a discussion about it. I'm a 'power user' by far, far far, but I am pretty good about picking up on barriers to even normal users. They went too far with their 'integration'. This isn't a launcher so much as Facebook deeming to allow you to access your phone applications.

<comment><USER8> I've installed both the pre-release leak and the one released today on my Nexus 7. Try being less of a condescending "power user" and then we could have a discussion.

<comment><USER6> Wasn't pushing the power user part to say 'Oh ho ho, I'm qualified to talk here'. I was simply adding it as a caveat that I'm not a 'normal' consumer of these kinds of things.

Given that you have installed it you then saw how much it differs from the traditional android idea of a 'launcher'. It genuinely is hiding it all away. You can see the pathway that Facebook wants to push the users, essentially fully hiding the idea of having on phone contacts and messaging. That's why it's not really a launcher so much as Facebook allowing you access to your phone (IMHO).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh well, they thought they could simply "take over" the entire, front-facing experience of the phone. They probably would have had better success trying their hand at releasing a better widget, surfacing the same experience without removing the notifications bar, apps tray, etc, while being resizable and able to coexist with other widgets (eg. 1x4 Search, 4x4 FB, 1x4 App tray).

</comment><comment><USER18> So, I don't yet have a Home Phone, however, I'd just liketo point out: when the iPhone debuted - it didnt even have copy paste, video, and many many other features that most other phones had at the time.

I love how every product launch of every 1.0 is always "GAH! Why doesn't this debut item have all features that my 10th generation other thing has!!!"

</comment><comment><USER19> This is completely overshadowing the fact that Facebook, in its befuddled attempt to spark monetization, started charging for messages to people you're not a friend with (unless you don't want it to end up in the Other inbox, most users are not even aware of).

</comment><comment><USER20> The launcher itself is beautiful, but it is extremely jarring when a function within the launcher opens the actual Facebook app which is a really poorly done app, especially when compared to Facebook Home which is actually rather nice.

</comment><comment><USER21> Unlikely that it will help facebook's monetization problem [http://truvoipbuzz.com/2013/04/facebook-home-mobile- monetiza...](http://truvoipbuzz.com/2013/04/facebook-home-mobile-monetization- problem/)

<comment><USER19> Indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This item cannot be installed on your device's country.

</comment><comment><USER23> Can someone recommend a similar app that shows nice pictures on lock screens and backgrounds, but fetches them from sources such as Flickr?

</comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like a "new cola" case... Facebook might be "mobile first" but mobile users are not always "Facebook first"

</comment><comment><USER25> So is anyone actually gonna by the phone now?

</comment><comment><USER26> _the application had received 398 one-star reviews out of 834, or 47.7%, on Google Play, giving it an average rating of 2.3 stars._

1 Billion total users and less than 1000 reviews, of which 400 are really bad ones. But those reviews might set the trend

</comment><comment><USER27> I appreciate that scaling at Facebook must be another world to most developers but do they really have to start with such a small userbase each time? I knew the app was restricted to a few devices, but didn't realise it was US-only as well.

With the amount of scaling experience they have by now I'd have thought they had the resources to launch a little bigger.</comment>


Anna Wintour's Brand Anna - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576200722939264658.html

<comment><USER2> Not at all saying this shouldn't be here, just wondering what made you post it here. It doesn't seem like typical HN fair. (Not saying I object -- I'm female and clothes were always important to me, though my health issues have made that pretty non-obvious in recent years.)</comment>


Ask HN: Offsite backup, BUT without local copy of the data (with catalog)? - <AUTHOR>

The problem: if I have 1TB of data, I need to have 1TB of "local" storage to make incremental backups with most tools. That consumes space and disables me to store my incremental backups encrypted/signed/etc
There is obviously the not-so-space-technology of backup catalogs. For windows systems there are: backup4all and Genie-Soft Backup Manager that use those.
For linux I could not find one. The closest alternative I could come with is 'git add ./*', 'git-gc' and then storing the packfile offsite, but it's a bit unstraight method, I suppose.
Are there any free/OSS alternatives for both linux and windows, which you can tell me about? <comment><USER2> I know this thread is old, but I ran across it in a search. I use a tool called dar (<http://dar.linux.free.fr/>) that is along the lines of tar, but with extra features for dealing with multi-volume backup sets and diffs easily.

It lets you extract a catalog from the backup set that you can use locally as a checkpoint for doing diff/incremental backups. The catalog is really small, mine is ~10Mb for hundreds of thousands of files.

      ## here is the initial backup: backing up /nas to
      ## an archive set /mnt/usb/nas on a usb device
      dar -R / -c /mnt/usb/nas -g nas

      ## extracting the catalog from the backup and
      ## saving it under my home directory
      dar -A /mnt/usb/nas -C /home/dan/backup/nas-catalog

      ## I use the local copy of the catalog in my home folder
      ## when doing diff backups to another mounted usb device
      dar -R / -c /mnt/usb/nas-diff -g nas -A /home/dan/backup/nas-catalog

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't quite understand the use case. Do you want to backup data and then delete the local copy? I think that's more like archiving than backup, and it's not clear to me what "incremental" even means in that case. Or do you intend to keep your 1 TB of live data, but you don't want the backup tool to use any _additional_ disk space?

Speaking of catalogs, I wonder if Duplicity is what you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> The scenario is: keep my 1 TB of data and store backup completely off-site, without having local copy of it when doing increments (so the backup tool can not compare the original data and backup to find the changes, but need to consult catalog instead).</comment></comment>


MkDocs: Project Documentation with Markdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.mkdocs.org/ <comment><USER2> Recently played with [https://github.com/rust- lang/mdBook](https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook) as well and was very impressed.</comment>


China demonstrates new anti-riot robot - <AUTHOR> https://thestack.com/world/2016/04/26/china-anbot-robocop-police/ <comment><USER2> Gotta love folks who say "anti-terrorism" and "anti-riot" in the same sentence.

<comment><USER3> US govt takes that line. Remember to take care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is against humanity machine, 27 year ago in 6/4/1989, they use Tank to kill people in TianAnMen square, now robot replace Tank!

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems like they copied K5? [http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/08/09/robots- deploye...](http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/08/09/robots-deployed-to- protect-and-serve)

</comment><comment><USER6> What's Chinese for "ED-209"?

I can't get very excited about this. There doesn't seem to be a shortage of human thugs in the world, and people are far more dangerous than machines. The lack of robots didn't prevent all those deaths in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

</comment><comment><USER7> I understand that this is a solution. What I don't understand is, what problem is being solved here?

There are additional problems:

\- By being an untethered "telepresence" robot, it is vulnerable to jamming. And that's if people do not find any vulnerabilities.

\- The actual "police officers" will be far removed from the situation at hand. This creates a high incentive for abuse.

<comment><USER8> Last year while waiting at a bus stop in Hangzhou in front of an intra- immigration office, I saw a Chinese police officer (shove, kick, or throw (it was a year ago)) a protester from behind. She was part of a crowd of other protesters. It looked like the protester bumped into him seconds before, while being herded away from the office by the police.

The woman was already in front of him and walking away, but the officer's facial expression made it clear he was very agitated. It seemed like he just wanted to 'get back' at her for bumping into him beforehand. His impact made her lose her balance and she nearly fell to the ground.

Maybe having someone physically and emotionally detached from a physical setting could have positive benefits in some situations. I am still not sure whether the remote controlled cop is a good thing though.

As an aside, the broken internet in China is crippling entire generations of people into ignorant irrelevance. I don't think enough people appreciate the magnanimous ramifications of making an entire country deliberately ignorant.

It's not just Google and Facebook that are blocked, it's Chinese Wikipedia, Wordpress, and the free press in general. You need a license to publish anything. Corruption and blatant scandals can't get published without approval from the Party. All the state-owned enterprises, including the public universities, are run by the Party. The Party will not often allow anything to be published that exposes anything related to itself or its co-conspirators.

All foreign-hosted websites have soft blocks, where they will randomly not load, with no explanation given, subconsciously driving people to only use domestic websites that always work.

People have no way of protesting any of this without getting destroyed by the state, professionally or literally. Unless of course, they apply and successfully get permission from the state to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It looks more like a toy than a real deal. Just by watching a minute of video I've already found a dozen of ways to disable it, many more mentioned in other comments. In a current state, it's just a walking CCTV.

</comment><comment><USER10> A couple months ago I quipped about some sort of equivalent to "Poe's law" except in regards to fictional dystopias and reality. I wish that wasn't a thing.

</comment><comment><USER11> So now cop-tipping will be a thing in China?

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it just me, or does this robot look very..um.. kickable? I sort of want to kick it over~

<comment><USER13> Probably weighs hundreds of pounds and is bottom heavy. I doubt even tipping it would be easy.

<comment><USER14> If you need to escape one of these Daleks or whatever, just run up a flight of stairs. Until they get a hover upgrade they still work on wheels.

Spraypaint on its camera will make it blind, no need to kick it over then.

<comment><USER12> I'm looking forward to the day when those Japanese-style obstacle-course shows include "man vs riot robot".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You have ten seconds to comply...

</comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't seem like a smart design. Can't people just kick it over?

</comment><comment><USER17> How do you say "Exterminate! Exterminate!" in Chinese?

</comment><comment><USER18> Note to self, don't stand directly in front of leg grabber

<comment><USER19> That's ok, they come equipped with an egg beater and plunger as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hah, saw a photo of that "robot". Disney will sue them for copyright infringement since it's R2D2 look-alike.

</comment><comment><USER21> Serious question: which one of you is working on the EMP cannon designs to fight all of these fascist robots?

<comment> gene-h There are much simpler solutions to fighting the robots in the article. One could also score a sensor kill by draping a big plastic garbage bag over it. If one uses a space blanket or something that absorbs RF, one would disable it too. The robots in the article can only handle flat terrain. So putting down rocks and debris will severely limit their mobility. Entanglement is also a nice option to limit mobility. Simply tipping the robot over will pretty much disable it.

A lasso is a particularly entertaining option in the last two regards. One could lasso up said robot and pull it over.

Now if one really wants to get high tech we can do stuff like jam the lidars(flashing some LEDs) and sonar(making some noise). Without obstacle sensors like these, said robots are gonna be much harder to teleoperate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> it looks a lot like the Knightscope K5, which is being billed as a security measure against school shootings. [http://knightscope.com/](http://knightscope.com/) funny what each country is most afraid of...

<comment><USER23> Here in Britain we use them to prevent people jumping queues at the post office.

The parallel development of these globally does suggest we will be seeing a lot more drone-based policing in the future, and will be gleefully cracking open the inevitable can of worms when some of the accountability is removed from high pressure flashpoints and/or they have the ability to deploy lethal force.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Mmmm jam it's wireless and grab it. I want to steal one.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is scary.</comment>


Review my startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.gouniq.com We connect individual stores to one checkout. Any feedback would be great. <comment><AUTHOR> Well getting retailers on it doesn't seem to be a problem.

What we are trying to achieve is a shopping centre environment where buyers can jump in and out of individual stores without having to leave GU.

We have some PR campaigns setup and some online advertising ready to roll out.

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems nice and useful for designers.

How do you plan to get users both customers and designers?</comment>


Call for an urgent rethink of the 'health at every size' concept - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3995323/ <comment><USER2> This is significant as well in that it points out that people can legitimately struggle with overweight eating issues as the brain adapts and makes people more hungry. I struggled a lot with losing weight and continue to struggle with keeping it off. It's frustrating when some folks (presumably, who have never struggled with weight and eating, and the psychology issues with eating, such as eating to feel good and then feeling depressed because of overeating) say simplistic things like "just don't eat so much" or "try having a salad". It's not that being big is healthy; it's not. It's that breaking the cycle of being big is hard (for some).

<comment><USER3> I agree. Earlier this year I read an article highlighting just how extraordinarily rare it is to overcome morbid obesity in adulthood and maintain this progress indefinitely without medical intervention. Ultimately, we need to accept that our bodies, including the organ which gives rise to our behavior, are physical systems subject to occurrences entirely beyond our conscious control.

I've not dealt with obesity personally, but I would speculate that many of the people who enjoy "fat shaming" are unfamiliar with the experience of having internal conflicts which lead one to take actions that are obviously irrational, even to the person performing them. This is an area where more empathy would lead to greater mutual understanding and perhaps increase the probability of finding solutions. (Of course, finding this empathy is perhaps a similar challenge.)

<comment><USER4> I think you're touching on the heart of the tension behind the "health at every size" movement.

I know a couple of people who are big advocates of it, and surprise surprise, they're all pretty fat. They're still wonderful people, and I of course don't respect them less because they're fat. You know, for me, it's like..who cares? It's not my body. I'm even pretty sympathetic to how much difficulty they have doing basic stuff, just for having their joints and muscles carrying around an extra hundred pounds.

But it _really_ seems to me that what's going on is that they're reacting to the constant onslaught of fat-shaming and moral judgments with this ideology of "health at every size". There is a constant moralizing about fat people in our culture, like if you're fat you're lazy or bad or whatever, none of which is warranted.

But I think that's where things get muddled--culture turns fatness into a moral failing, wrapped under a sheath of health concern trolling. Reaction to the moral judging is to try and take away the health claims, when that's really kind of missing the point.

What _would_ be appropriate, I think, is to push for "human dignity at every size," you know, and leave the moralizing to stuff that matters. But that's not so catchy or easy to distinguish, I guess...

As for the actual health claims, I, for one, don't buy it at all, it seems obvious to me that carrying around excess weight is going to cause a number of immediate problems (joint strain, etc), to say nothing of the strain on your organs for being encased in excess fat. But the health stuff _is_ separate from the moralizing, and I don't know how you'd get the larger culture to separate out "you're fat and it's hurting your body" from "you're fat and you're lazy/stupid/etc".

<comment><AUTHOR> The HAES people don't seem to have a lot of respect for people at normal sizes. It's less "Healthy At Every Size" and more "Healthy at MY Size".

<comment><USER3> Perhaps so for some. The challenge for those of us who are not their size is to empathize despite the temptation to adopt a belligerent stance in response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nutrition is such a vast science, one where new theories and ideas are coming almost every month and one where the general public is either completely uneducated or working off of decades-old assumptions (such as following the surgeon general's dietary guidelines from the 70s or 90s). It's no wonder to me at all that a vast majority of people regardless of their current size have zero idea what to do to eat healthily.

I became interested in the Health At Every Size movement during its inception as part of recovering from an eating disorder and, at its core when it was first started, it had a very positive message- essentially "Hey, everyone, let's promote the idea that we all should eat healthy food and get exercise and do fun active stuff regardless of if we're fat or thin or old or young or tall or short." It was a direct challenge to the idea that you had to be a particular size to be active or to go to the gym or to do active hobbies. However very soon after inception it was perverted into a message of "It is entirely possible to be healthy regardless of how fat you get and if you are fat and your doctor says that you are not healthy because you are fat then it is your doctor who is wrong because it's never, ever wrong to be fat, ever."

Message #1 was great as it was all about promoting eating healthier regardless of your size, getting regular exercise that was fun and that you enjoyed doing regardless of your size, and about being gentle with yourself during that process- so stepping away from hating yourself because you were fat and instead doing something productive with that brainpower. Message #2 corrupted that into "You are perfect _because_ you are fat and if anyone tells you that you should be less fat then they're trying to abuse you and make you change to suit them."

I'm extremely excited about the nutritional research that's coming out regarding gut microbes and their potential impact on our health and weight because I imagine how awesome it'd be to go to your doctor, spit in a cup, and have it tell you what all you should and shouldn't be eating (due to genetics, microbes, etc) as well as recommend which probiotic you should be taking to get your gut bacteria in line.

<comment><USER3> I've long disliked the amount and kind of attention the mainstream media devotes to covering research in nutritional science. Not only does it confuse people, even those with scientific training, its vacillation also undermines the public's confidence that science is a valid approach to understanding the world.

Still, I'm not convinced that public confusion on the subject of nutrition is a leading cause of widespread obesity. An environmental or social explanation seems more probable than simple ignorance. After all, obesity is less of a problem in many less educated societies, despite an abundance of food.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> (2014)

The authors followed up this article with a subsequent article: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4039050/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4039050/)

</comment><comment><USER7> In modernity, hurt feelings are the ultimate sin, public health be damned.

<comment><USER8> Hurting peoples feelings does not improve their health. My guess is (I don't know you) looking down on fat people is one of the mechanisms by which you make yourself feel worthy. You are not doing it from their benefit. Believe me, it is a vanishingly rare person who is fat and doesn't mind it. The fat acceptance movement is about feeling helpless and just wishing people would stop giving you a hard time on top of it

<comment><USER7> _My guess is (I don 't know you) looking down on fat people is one of the mechanisms by which you make yourself feel worthy_

I can correct your guess, here. Looking down on my fat former self is one of the mechanisms by which I keep myself healthy.

<comment><USER3> We quickly lose sight of what it was like to have been a certain way. Whatever the origin of your unhealthy weight, and whatever purpose a negative evaluation of your past self serves, I think most would agree that derision is unhelpful as a tool for reducing obesity. On the other hand, its prevalence and the language many use while doing it seem to suggest that they find it gratifying. Some consider this a problem in itself.

<comment><USER8> I definitely think almost all of them find it gratifying but admitting to such is shameful, thus the pretense and alternative explanations like they care about healthcare costs for society

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're interested, Dr. Amanda Sansbury-Salis[1] has a book out, _The Don 't Go Hungary Diet: The Scientifically Based Way To Lose Weight And Keep It Off Forever_[2]. You can read the first chapter on her website.

[1] [http://www.dramandaonline.com/](http://www.dramandaonline.com/)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Dont-Go-Hungry- Diet/dp/1863255230](http://www.amazon.com/The-Dont-Go-Hungry- Diet/dp/1863255230)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 300,000 people die every year from Obesity. It's our #1 killer. And it can be solved by eating less.

See this study in the NEJM:

[http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701)

Discrepancy between Self-Reported and Actual Caloric Intake and Exercise in Obese Subjects

Of all the "diet resistant" subjects studied, ALL of them (100%) were grossly underreporting actual calories consumed and overexerting physical activity. Some of the people in this study were on medication because doctors had believed their self-reported numbers and believed they may have had thyroid or other metabolic problems.

Remember that "bariatric surgery" is just a way to get people to eat less by making it physically impossible to overeat. (Of course, people still manage.)

<comment><USER3> You haven't written anything I can show to be factually inaccurate. But the trouble is with one word: "simply."

Unless you subscribe to a metaphysical interpretation of human behavior, the fact that obesity is such a widespread health problem is _ipso facto_ strong evidence that some set of environmental factors is at play.

The insistence that this large population of people bear some kind of personal responsibility for their condition completely misses the point and is, in my opinion, an obviously useless suggestion to make. I'm not aware of any evidence that instilling a sense of shame in people who are obese is likely to ameliorate their condition, and the experience of many would seem to suggest it is likely to have the opposite effect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eating fewer calories than your body needs every day will always lead to weight loss. Certainly it's easier if you rearrange your diet, but that's a secondary point.

<comment><USER3> You're not engaging with what I wrote. The trouble is with refraining from consuming so many calories. The fact that so many people find this so difficult is proof enough that it is not "simple" in the sense of being easily accomplished, and that environmental factors likely contribute to its difficulty. Thus attention should be focused on discovering and addressing these factors, instead of applying social pressure to the obese to eat less.</comment></comment></comment></comment>