Seven Navy SEALS Reprimanded for Actions Linked to Videogame - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/11/08/us/08reuters-usa-defense-seals.html

<comment><USER2> That's great marketing for Medal of Honor: Warfighter right there. I wonder if EA gave that to the NY Times.

</comment><comment><USER3> _> > The seven each received a punitive letter of reprimand and were docked half pay for two months..._

I wonder how this dock in pay compares to the amount they were paid as consultants by EA.

<comment><USER2> Less than they paid in taxes (with allowances, etc., they make $3-8k/mo). The letter of reprimand is the bigger deal, if it prevents promotion or assignments in the future, and potentially makes it so they can't get to 20 years and retirement.

<comment><USER4> One military analyst I was listening to on the news said that this would effectively end their careers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> MoH had some issues earlier with a MoH branded SOG tomahawk:

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-14-the-medal-of- ho...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-14-the-medal-of-honor- tomahawk)

[http://soldiersystems.net/2012/08/20/an-american- perspective...](http://soldiersystems.net/2012/08/20/an-american-perspective- on-the-european-perspective-of-eas-medal-of-honor-warfighter/)

On a side note I think there were a lot of neat ideas in MoH but sadly it seems the game had to be rushed out in order to beat Halo and CoD:BO.

<comment><USER6> Jesus H. Christ. My impression was that Medal of Honor/Call of Duty had turned into soulless, corridor shooters with no open gameplay at all, all the while painting a picture of a black and white world where you get to kill people for the crime of having a beard. This was bad enough, but that was just nauseating.

<comment><USER5> An odd way to begin a moral rant. Anyway nobody plays the campaign mode and all the high-speed low-drag cool guys have beards now.

<comment><USER7> Eh? It's not odd at all ... "Jesus H Christ" is a bog-standard exclamation with which to express extreme surprise/disgust.

<comment><USER5> Its a bog standard unclassy way to lose any moral high ground before describing someone else's choices as nauseating. Personally I am not religious but I still think its important to respect other people's faiths in meatspace and in threads on HN.

<comment><USER7> Er, no. It's _so_ common that it's essentially lost any religious connotations. It implies nothing about "faith", lack of faith, lack of respect, or anything else.

Maybe it originally had such connotations (and thus initially had shock value), but it long ago made the jump to a simple generic exclamation, and a rather mild one at that.

<comment><USER8> If that's your idea of a "mild" one what would you regard as religiously offensive?

<comment><USER7> It has nothing to do with what I think, it has to do with the way the phrase is typically used, and the reaction it gets: In normal usage, it's mild.

This is true of many religious words used in this manner ... they've pretty much lost any bite they once had. E.g. "God! <complain complain>" is similar: 75 years ago maybe you'd have had people up in arms over that, but these days nobody will even notice.

<comment><USER9> I don't think your goal is to offend. But I think we'd all be better off if we tried to make our points here without needlessly causing tangential offense.

And you're right: it has everything to do with the reaction it gets. Many would disagree about your characterization of it as being "mild," or whether it's "lost any bite," and there's the rub: whether or not that's correct is up for debate, but I'd also submit that it's largely irrelevant whether or not that is, in fact, as inoffensive as you believe it to be.

While you may not think it offensive, many do, and would consider it a thoughtless treatment of something that's important to them. We can all argue about whether or not that's reasonable, but it's the reality, nonetheless.

It's one thing if you know your audience, but it's another thing to be commenting in a public place.

Consider this variation:

\---

 _It has nothing to do with what I think, it has to do with the way the phrase is typically used, and the reaction it gets: In normal usage, it's mild._

 _This is true of many religious words used in this manner ... they've pretty much lost any bite they once had. E.g. "_ [racial epithet/gay slur/nationalistic slur/etc.] _! <complain complain>" is similar: 75 years ago maybe you'd have had people up in arms over that, but these days nobody will even notice._

\---

I'm sure inside those brackets there are plenty of things I could say that wouldn't feel offensive _to me_ , or even many of the people I'm around in the real world, but if I care about making my point without it instantly becoming about _how_ I made my point, then I'm probably not going to start my comment off with something completely irrelevant to my point that runs a non-trivial chance of offending someone who reads it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paradox of the Court - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_the_Court <comment><USER2> It's not a paradox.

The decision of the court should be that the payment isn't due yet, not that the contract is invalid. Unless ancient Greek law requires the contract to be thrown out because it was tried in court or the case was clearly frivolous (IANAAGL) the decision should uphold the validity of the contract, not invalidate it.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get started with photography? - <AUTHOR>

Hi. I've been interested in photography for about a year now but I've never gotten around to actually doing something about it. I've looked up a couple tutorials, checked out a couple cameras, but I'm not really sure how to start. So, I turn to you all for advice. How would you advise a photography-newbie to start off? Equipment? Pointers? Thanks! <comment><USER2> Well, I am far from an authority or expert, but really all it takes is getting a half decent camera with a hand full of manual settings, a half decent tripod and start clicking. Click a lot. Luckily with a digital camera and a 2GB memory card, you can click until your finger is sore and all you have spent is time. You will learn a LOT from doing just this. Play with macros and landscapes, day and night, still and action - just shoot. Load em up in Gimp or Photoshop and go to town (might I suggest playing with Shadows and Highlights (PS) to get some instant gratification).

Since you say that you have been interested for a year, but have not taken the steps to start, I definitely would not recommending running out and snatching up a thousand dollar camera - for all you currently know, you might not like the process as much as you do the idea. I can personally recommend the Canon S3 IS as a decent entry level point and shoot with some nice manual settings for under 300 bones - I bought this camera a couple years ago, so if anyone knows a better comparable inexpensive one, by all means chime in. First thing you will want to do is get the CHDK AllBest hacked firmware and familiarize yourself with it - it lets you do a LOT with the camera that the default Canon firmware will not. As a bonus, it will not hurt your camera or replace your Canon firmware - just turn it back off and on and you are back to normal (see CHDK website).

My next camera will hopefully be a Nikon D300, but I definitely would not run out and grab one as a starter. You want something that has some nice automatic functions as well as the manual options - without this, it will be easy to get discouraged.

Also, a fun thing that will whet your appetite is to grab the aforementioned tripod, set your CHDK settings to take multiple exposures of the exact same thing and load them up in PhotoMatix (Mac/Win) or Qtpfs (Linux - I use this). HDRs can be really fun to work with and you can get some interesting pictures with the modern HDR programs (they do the leg work for the lazy.. _cough_ myself _cough_ ).

Like I said, I am not a pro, just a dude who likes to take lots of pictures. Get bored, check out some of my pics I am most proud of: <http://flickr.com/photos/mattezell/sets/72157601781859375/> <http://flickr.com/photos/mattezell/sets/72157605580120812/>

</comment><comment><USER3> What's your end goal? What do you hope to achieve? For me, I wanted to get to be good before I had kids, so I totally immersed myself for a little while for fun. Now I have a 2 month old little girl and I've backed off, but I'm happy with the photos I'm taking of her.

The suggestion of <http://photo.net/> is a good one. I'd also recommend <http://dpreview.com/> for gear and <http://photosig.com/> as a place that you can see other peoples' work, critique and be critiqued.

The "National Geographic Photography Field Guide, 2nd Ed." was an amazing book that got me started in terms of understanding photography. (And it looks like it's been replaced with the "National Geographic: The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography".) The book essential is in two halves. The first half talks about the mechanics of photography... how shutter speed relates to aperture relates to film/sensor sensitivity (ISO) relates to focal length relates to distance to the subject relates to... etc. All of that is half of what I think you _really_ need to know in terms of the mechanics. The other half is light. The second half of the book talks about a myriad of photo subjects and the approaches to photographing them, rules of photography (in terms of composition) and so forth.

As you get to know more, you'll see that your question is kind of like "How to get started with computers?" There's so much to it, it's hard to say. Perhaps your goals warrant a Digital SLR, perhaps they don't. I can tell you this, though... a good photographer with a bad camera can take better photos than a bad photographer with a good camera.

</comment><comment><USER4> Read <http://photo.net/> Most especially the introductory "textbook" and the product reviews. This will give you a decent foundation of basic terminology and available equipment.

I would suggest starting with an SLR camera, even if financing restricts you to getting a film SLR camera. Add a prime lens, possibly 35mm or 50mm. There are pros and cons all over the place, but that's why you should read photo.net. :-)</comment>


Learnings from Client-side and Server-side rendering in Backbone.js - <AUTHOR> http://mrjoelkemp.com/2013/11/learnings-from-client-side-and-server-side-rendering-in-backbone-js/

<comment><USER2> Nice writeup. But a large part of the main point seems to be surprise that client-side rendering isn't going to be indexed by search engines:

        > It occurred to me that the hype around client-side rendered apps
        > is still alive and kicking. It's not the first time I've heard
        > server-side rendering negatively referred to as an "old school" technique.

        and ...

        > Chalk that up to my ignorance, believing the client-side rendered
        > app-of-the-future hype, and not caring about SEO until the organic
        > traffic numbers came in.

This should _not_ be a surprise. Obviously, if you only render content on the client, then search engines aren't going to see any of it. Client-side-only- rendered applications should only be for private pages, user's workspaces, and web _applications_ — pages that a search engine will never see, regardless.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jeremy. You're right and the point is obvious in hindsight.

I think the end of your comment should be shared with others; for those that are eager to try, but not fully aware of the consequences of client-side rendered apps.

I'd like to include your statement somewhere in the post to further emphasize the point; I hope that's okay. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How about just sniff the user-agent and deliver perfectly rendered views/fragments of your SPA through a serverside PhantomJS process to crawlers?

If you used backbone routing properly this shouldn't be a problem.

Or, use one of the "Full-Stack" Frameworks for Javascript which merge the client and the server almost completely. Derby.js comes to mind, maybe even meteor.

[edit]: you mentioned PhantomJS in your summary, didn't see it. But you don't mention why you didn't use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right about not mentioning why I didn't use it. Thanks for bringing this up.

I had the rare opportunity to re-imagine the profile app in the context of another app that was being built from scratch and went with the server- rendered approach.

The phantomjs approach is totally valid. Thanks for reading!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a bit afraid of this. Is it so hard for Google to run PhantomJS and crawl JS sites. If google reads CSS display:none correctly why it's so hard to make the JS crawling work... That's madness. This SEO ( Google ) stuff is making decisions for frameworks and tech-stacks. That's bad, it has to be the other way around. I don't want to make websites for Google I want to make them for the users.

<comment><USER5> I'm not Google's biggest fan, but I don't see how they're to blame for developers removing semantic meaning from their pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first con needs a bigger cavat because image size and number of requests play a huge part in browser rendering. This is probably why the mobile app was so much slower than the desktop app. The small minified js file that contains your app has little performance hit.</comment>


Introducing Dynamic Training for Deep Learning with Amazon EC2 - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/introducing-dynamic-training-for-deep-learning-with-amazon-ec2/ <comment><USER2> "We are running computer vision models developed in MXNet to measure the freshness of waffle fries." AI solving critical first world problems right here.</comment>


Microsoft's Twitch competitor Mixer doubles down on audience participation - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsofts-twitch-competitor-mixer-doubles-audience-participation-season-2-features/ <comment><USER2> "We gamified our game watching platform so you can play games while you watch games"?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Original title: _Microsoft's Twitch competitor Mixer doubles down on audience participation with 'Season 2' features_ (19 too long)</comment>


Why do publishers still issue hardbacks? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/book-clinic-why-do-publishers-still-issue-hardbacks <comment><USER3> "The hardback is a mark of quality"

I disagree. A major mark of quality (other than the writing) is the paper it's printed on, and the publishers often pick the poor, yellowing, easy-tearing newsprint paper, almost newsprint quality.

Then they stick a hardback cover on it and sell it for £££.

Come on publishers, if I pay decent dosh for a book, hardback or soft, don't skimp on this.

<comment><USER4> In France the standard became de "livre de poche" edition, the "pocket-book". Fits well on shelves, kind of uniform format, softcover, so it is easier to read/transport, good paper quality.

I have grown with this being the standard and to me when I see US hardcover books at $50+ I don't understand it: it is bulky, hard to read in a cramped place like a subway (or toilets!) No two books are the same size or color and it is printed with so much spacing that it looks like kids books or the kind of dissertation formatting I used to do when the teacher asked for 20 pages and I only had 5 pages of material.

<comment><USER5> I think it's that books, particularly hard backs, are in a pseudo- artwork/collectible category. There are times I've liked a paperback so much I bought the hard back and never opened it, just to have the "pretty" version on the shelf.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's a weird thing. Some books seem to be vanity items. But even in that respect, I find the US format weird: all books are dissimilar and are harder to fit in typical furniture.

I do prefer the look of this: [http://a52.idata.over- blog.com/2/25/73/36/Photos/Bibliothequ...](http://a52.idata.over- blog.com/2/25/73/36/Photos/Bibliotheque/100_1143.JPG)

to the look of this:

[https://www.archimag.com/sites/archimag.com/files/styles/art...](https://www.archimag.com/sites/archimag.com/files/styles/article/public/web_articles/image/Biblioth%C3%A8queLivres.png)

<comment><USER6> That's comparing books by a single publisher in what looks like a very specific series, with paperbacks from different publishers.

The former - the one you prefer - looks institutional to me, like something a hospital or childcare home would buy in bulk, at a discount, to provide reading material for the unfortunate inmates.

The latter has a lot more distinctiveness, and is chaotic since the book designs individually try to grab attention, so that they sell themselves in a bookshop. I don't particularly love the result, it's an artifact of how books have been sold over the past century, but it's preferable to the former by some distance. It's far easier to spot a book whose cover you know in the second style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nils-m-holm Hardcover books are a pleasure to read, especially if they are smyth-sewn. You can identify a smyth-sewn book by placing it on a table and opening it in the middle. If the pages stay flat on top of each other, it is. The pages of a case-bound hardcover will separate from each other and stick out, and a softcover book will just close and fall over.

And that is exactly why hardcover books are a pleasure to read: it takes little effort to hold them open. A smyth-sewn hardcover you can pretty much put on a table and leave it alone while reading it. When reading softcovers, my fingers often get tired before my eyes do.

<comment><USER7> I bought a hardcover Le Guin anthology recently after balking a bit at the price. But then I was amazed to find it stayed open when I put it on a table and very happy to have paid the premium! Now, thanks to you, I know there is a name for this technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always thought this was just price discrimination, extracting more surplus from readers by bifurcating them into two groups. Hardbacks are released first. Everyone who really wants it now needs to shell out more, even if they don't really care about the physical properties. Then the paperback is released to attract the more reluctant readers.

<comment><USER9> That's exactly what it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The question is, why would anyone want a paperback? It's clearly a format for disposable or travel books, which are easily replaced with a digital media. Paperback are not suitable for repeated readings and a really high-quality paperback, if there was one, would be prisewise on par with a hardcover anyway. I don't get paperbacks.

<comment><USER11> I would agree, but somehow ebooks cost same or more than paperback books... and they also come full of DRM.

Not to mention licensing nightmares - i wanted to buy one ebook in english.. and i couldn't because someone else had rights to distribution in UK, so i couldn't order US ebook as i was from europe. To make matters worse - <USER2> publisher/rightholder/whatever had no plans to even release an ebook.

<comment><USER12> This is it for me. If I'm going to buy a book, I'm not going to buy DRM, so my choices end up being paperback or hardcover. I prefer to read paperback because it's more portable, so that's what I end up buying.

If ebooks without DRM were available, I'd probably buy a lot of them. However, DRM drastically reduces the value of an ebook for me, so they'll have to drastically reduce the price of an ebook for me to buy (or maybe have a reasonable rental option). Until then, I'll buy paperbacks and restrict my ebook reading to my library and copyright-free titles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is harder for me to understand is why do they still use softback. Whatever I buy - I want it to be as heavy-duty as possible. Whenever I can choose between paperback an hardback I'm always buying a hardback unless the price difference is too serious. I don't even see how do softbacks make any sense to exist today when you can get an electronic book whenever weight and production cost are among your major concerns.

<comment><USER12> I would _love_ to buy ebooks, but they're riddled with DRM, which makes me feel like I'm renting instead of buying, so I just don't. Finding DRM-free ebooks is pretty rare, so I stick to paperbacks, especially since they're often similarly priced.

If I could reliably get DRM-free ebooks, I'd buy a ton of them.

<comment><USER14> You probably already know this, but just in case: you can trivially strip the DRM from Kindle books using the free Calibre software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I stopped buying physical books for most of what I read after my last move, but I missed having books around as decoration, conversation starters, and things to loan or for guests to read. And I didn't want to have a bookshelf that reflected only what I read decades ago. So now I've decided that for anything I read that I think is among the best I've read, that I'd unconditionally recommend to anyone, I go buy as nice a physical copy as I can find. This keeps me from having to lug around books that I'm not especially proud of, and leaves me with a wonderfully compact bookshelf full of things I genuinely love.

</comment><comment><USER16> _" Hardbacks are also more profitable for publishers: they will often sell at twice the price of their paperback equivalent but do not cost twice as much to produce."_

That was a mistake of the print-on-demand machine enthusiasts. They generated disposable paperbacks. E-readers ate that business. Now, a machine that prints and binds good hardbacks on demand - that might be useful.

</comment><comment><USER17> If I need to put a hardcover book down for a moment, I can leave it open on a table or desk. Paperbacks won't stay open like that.

This is particularly annoying if I need to copy or reference something from a book on a separate device of piece of paper.

</comment><comment><USER18> Same reason vinyl outsells CDs? If you just want to consume the content, there are cheaper choices, but for something you want to save and make a statement with, hardbacks are superior.

</comment><comment><USER19> I only ever buy print in hardcover.

The last paragraph sums it up well; I'm almost solely digital now, but if there's something I particularly enjoy, I'll hunt for the hardcover.

</comment><comment><USER20> If I'm buying fiction from an author I know and like, that I think I'd like to last for decades (and maybe leave to my children one day) I'll buy hardcover. That's maybe half of my fiction purchases.

For authors or books I'm unsure of, or just trashy stuff, I'll buy Kindle.

For technical books, I'll usually try to buy non-DRM PDF or eBook from the author, or failing that, a paperback.

I periodically (like, once a year or so) try to strip the DRM from my Kindle collection and back it up, but I basically assume that they could disappear at any time, so I don't trust them for anything I consider important.

I used to use an iPad2 for reading my Kindle books, but it's too slow to open the collection now (since I have a few hundred Kindle books). I'll likely get a Kindle reader of some sort one day, but for now I just read them on my phone most of the time.

<comment><USER21> Curious, do you find iBooks (Apple Books) on the iPad2 any faster at opening books or scrolling lists of books? Or is it about the same as the Kindle app?

<comment><USER20> I don't have anywhere near the same number of items in my iBooks app (only a few PDFs actually).

Once a book is open, it's ok, but it just took 40s to open the app. That actually seems a little quicker than it has been, so maybe Amazon has done some work on the app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As book author the royalty on hardcover books were higher compared to the softcover books. But still the ebooks were the better deal as they gave the highest royalty. Personally, I enjoy buying nice hardcover books. The Folio Society books are gorgeous

</comment><comment><USER23> I know a of relatives who only buy hardbacks -- even if all they're reading is one-read genre stuff.

Myself, I tend to buy paperback, read and then donate. If the book was good and I want to keep it for my personal collection. I track down a hardcover copy.

</comment><comment><USER24> As Hyphen Press explain, hardbacks used invariably to be bound properly, but now they are often simply paperbacks between boards.¹ Signalling alone as above is the correct explanation. Cloth books can have practical advantages, such as the possibility of rebinding, but modern hardbacks mostly lack them.

1\. [https://hyphenpress.co.uk/journal/article/bookbinding_survey](https://hyphenpress.co.uk/journal/article/bookbinding_survey)

</comment><comment><USER25> Hardback books seem like a magnet for collectors (hoarders) they know they could more conveniently get the book as an ebook or from the library but they are buying them primarily as an item to store on a shelf. I have seen people buy books they don't even intend to read simply because the hardback is well decorated and the edge of the pages is gold.

Perhaps they think the sight of a large bookshelf full of books they never read makes them look smarter. They are probably right as well.

<comment><USER26> Why disparage collectors by conflating them with hoarders?

I purchase books both to read and to collect if they are well-made pieces of art.

It seems you have something against collecting such things based on how you frame your comments though. I personally do not understand the desire to disparage another person because you do not see value in collecting books.

<comment><USER25> You are correct. I am critical of the practice of collecting items that have no continued use to the owner and would be better off sold or gifted to a new owner who could get more use out of it.

I will admit though that they can serve as art and part of the room decoration which is a valid usecase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm mostly digital but i recently snatched a paperback... which reminded me I'm growing old because the font was too small for me :)

So I guess in the future I'll get more hardbacks instead of less. They tend to use larger fonts, and sometimes (if the paper isn't crap) even have better contrast.

<comment><USER28> This depends on the book (or perhaps the publisher).

For example, I just bought the Illuminatus Trilogy in one cheap paperback, and it's got a _terrible_ typeface, it looks like a smeared typewriter.

But all other books I've bought the past couple months (mix of paperbacks and hardcovers) have had clear typefaces. In fact I never noticed typefaces consciously until seeing this book which takes a noticeable amount of effort to read the fonts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Simple answers are, because people still buy them and they can charge more.

</comment><comment><USER30> My impression is that paperbacks from US publisher tend to be superior to their hardbacks.

But for constant use such as library books get, hardbacks might hold up better.

</comment><comment><USER31> Price differentiation. Well known theory in economics. It's like asking why do ppl still release movies in cinemas.

</comment><comment><USER32> My reason for buying them wasn't mentioned as far as I saw--I like them better.

</comment><comment><USER33> A good solid book printed on good paper is a joy, a gem.</comment>


FTC's top consumer protection official can't go after 120 large companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18129572/facebook-uber-ftc-conflict-interest-andrew-smith <comment><USER2> Here are the financial disclosure documents published by Public Citizen and obtained by a FOIA request from the first paragraph: [https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foi...](https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foia_appeal_response_11_30.pdf) .</comment>


Meet The JavaScript Framework That Might Save HTML5 From Itself  - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2013/12/05/javascript-engine-famous-html5#awesm=~opdEebjri4Vslg <comment><USER2> This thing keeps getting hyped but all I've seen so far is this periodic table demo which doesn't really do very much - just move some images around with css 3d transforms. I mean, it looks nice - but it's not very functional. Have there been any demos of useful, interactive, data driven apps or interfaces?

It also rubs me the wrong way that their private beta is basically bringing people into their office to work for them for free so they can showcase the demos they come up with.</comment>


High-Performance JavaScript: Everything you've been taught is wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/pureclone/highperformance-javascript

<comment><USER2> I guess we should have warned everyone :)

There's quite a bit of good advice in the presentation.

One thing that I didn't see mentioned though is the difference between load- once and reload-on-every-page. Many of the worst JS abuses are from people loading 500k of JS every time the user clicks on anything. Apps such as Gmail or Google Reader only load the JS once then update bits of the page or an iframe as the user clicks around. That has some downsides of course, but it's the only good way to do something that's really JS-heavy.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it really surprising some people don't use the apps they are developing. If you're not using it day in day out heavily, how can you know what's likely to irritate users.

Use the app all the time, if it's slow or buggy you'll soon get irritated by it enough to fix it :)

As a developer you should be one of the biggest users IMHO

</comment><comment><USER3> I really wish people would stop this fad of rubbishing the reader in titles.

     "The best X you've ever seen"
     "Everything you've been taught is wrong"
     "Why you're wrong about everything"
     "10 things you don't know about X"
     "Why you'll never amount to anything"
     "All the code you write is rubbish. Here's how to do it."

etc

Most of the time the article doesn't live up to the claim in the title.

<comment><USER4> Best. Post. Ever.

<comment><USER5> Most. Overused. Rhetorical. Device. Ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> didn't know:

\- setting innerHTML is faster than dom manipulation

\- doing dom node manipulation is faster off dom (reinsert when manip is done)

\- is attaching a 'click' event listener really that much slower than setting node.onclick?

disagree:

\- onmousedown and onclick are different actions. onclick is inherently slower because it doesn't fire until after onmouseup. the difference is not 100ms, it's however long the user holds the mouse button. onmousedown should not commit the user to the action, since the user may decide not to do the action and needs a way to cancel it and void the action (ie: move the mouse off the target area before clicking). onmousedown, on the other hand, is an immediate commitment, so it can't be used for dangerous actions that the user may regret a split second later.

<comment><USER3> innerHTML is also really really evil. Apart from making for horrible ugly code, it plain doesn't work for many things (tables/forms have issues).

I'd take many of the points with a pinch of salt. Use profilers, and other debug methods to find out what works/doesn't work in your code.

For example the point about event listeners vs setting node.onclick. Perhaps it is marginally quicker. But will the user notice unless you add 1,000 event listeners? Unlikely. Might not even notice then. It all depends on where and how it's used. Also obviously you can't use .onclick if you want several event handlers attached to the same event unless you do that functionality yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lots of schools teach CS and say "Code it first and fix it later". They call this preventing "Premature optimization".

It's not totally wrong. But it's often wrong. The world isn't writing it's first program. Code that's too slow has a performance bug. And like any bug, it's better and cheaper to catch it early than late.

And you can't always use your own code. Eating your own dogfood is a reasonable idea but it can break the organization that is trying to fix and build the software. For example, if there's a bug in your new bug reporting system you'll lose the information that there's a bug and never fix it. And so on.

The performance gains that chip makers have given us have been stolen by the software makers to make generating software cheaper and faster, rather than being passed on to the users to make systems more responsive. Yes, there's a user benefit to having more software quicker, but that isn't enough.

</comment><comment><USER8> I hate the loading time between slides.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Minimize dependency on 3rd party library code" doesn't make sense especially when it's in the "write less code" section P15. Moreover, it's a really easy thing to say when you have seven guys fully dedicated to the view layer as compared to a two man operation doing everything....

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting product (Plaxo).

I've been looking for a web-based contact manager/address book. Plaxo is probably the best I've seen, but it still has major usability problems - trying to prune/combine contacts after importing was a nightmare. Is there anything better?

</comment><comment><USER11> Don't miss the video; there's a lot of detail here that's absent in the slides: <http://www.vcasmo.com/video/osnow/391>

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting he never mentions "eval()". Anyone notice any performance issues here?

<comment><USER3> Security issues, and often not the right way to do things, but not sure of massive performance issues with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> lol, a site about high performance is down. The irony.

Thanks, but I think I'll stick with everything I've been taught.

<comment><USER12> The hosting site is just an intermediary. The link is to a presentation by the chief architect of Plaxo (15M users says he probably knows what he's talking about), and it's just hosted on SlideShare.

<comment><USER4> Could have been 15,000,001.

I'm no more patient that I would expect any of my clients to be. Funny, they never care WHY something isn't working right.</comment></comment></comment>


Detecting Technological Advancement in Alien Civilizations - <AUTHOR> http://www.trending.us/2009/01/28/detecting-technological-advancement-in-alien-civilizations/

<comment><USER2> A little OT, but if The Singularity could result in our extinction, should we just stop right now?</comment>


The Future of the Past: Modernizing the New York Times Archive - <AUTHOR> http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/the-future-of-the-past-modernizing-the-new-york-times-archive/ <comment><USER2> I think this is an obvious thing for NYT to do and it seems like this is one of the things they can leverage to get more subscriptions, since they obviously put it behind a paywall. I think it would be really interesting if they did something with the digitization of it all, like having another subscription where they offered reprints of different years, presumably only one at a time due to logistical problems.

It would also be really interesting to be able to see the different discussions in one publication about a topic and see how it may have evolved over the years.

These are the things that I think are going to be key to NYT and other publications moving forward, which seems more like story telling with archives, which is part of their resources compared to new publications and outlets.

<comment><USER3> Everything up to 1985 (I think?) is available to subscribers:

[http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser](http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser)

There is even OCR done on the articles so you can do search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We've done XML conversion projects for around 5,000 magazine titles. It's not an easy process to get high fidelity and preserve formatting.</comment>


TensorFlow Demo in 5 Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FmcHiLCwTU <comment><USER2> That "lol so randum XD" crap works in some situations, of which this isn't.</comment>


A Comparison of Assertion Libraries - <AUTHOR> https://blog.frankel.ch/comparison-assertion-libraries/ <comment><USER2> I have a possibly unpopular opinion that assertion libraries that depend on throwing exceptions are bad API design for unit testing. Mainly because most test functions end up with multiple assertions in them and exceptions abort the test function early.

Many times understanding what causes a unit test failure is easier to debug if you can see the rest of the unit tests all at once.

I much prefer testing frameworks that use simple true/false tests and not exceptions like Go's unit testing library or Perl's TAP library.

<comment><USER3> In my experience test failures occur vastly less frequently than the rate at which tests are written, and when they do fail, it's usually due to a refactoring where lots of tests fail with only a tiny handful of failure modes.

If test setup is involved, adding multiple assertions is much cheaper (both in code and test suite execution time) than having a test per assertion. If assertion failures don't fail fast, later assertion failures are frequently just noise. For example, often the size of a list or map is asserted on, and then the entries checked; if the size fails, there may be spurious null reference or index out of bounds failures.

And due to far fewer failure modes than broken tests, it's often the case that once one test has been fixed, a similar fix needs to be applied to most of the other tests that failed. In a dynamically typed language, this is usually due to a refactoring that changed the API in some way; a method renamed, parameters added or removed, that kind of thing.

(I am increasingly convinced of my long-held opinion that unit tests are mostly useful at the leaves of the call graph, and the pinch points in data flow (which are usually fairly integration flavoured), and not very valuable everywhere else. Integration tests that seldom need to be rewritten after a major refactoring are worth their weight in gold, though. Major bonus points of they can be run quickly.)

<comment><USER2> That is usually true, and it's a lot easier to find all of the failures first if you can see all of them at once instead of fixing one rerunning the test suite fixing another, and continuing the cycle until they all pass.</comment></comment></comment>


Poll: 10 Widespread Beliefs--True or False? - <AUTHOR> http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/living-well-usn/2009/10/13/poll-10-widespread-beliefs--true-or-false.html

<comment><USER2> What? Only survey results, nothing on what the answers probably are?

Seems this is just advertisement

<comment><AUTHOR> The related news link

[http://www.usnews.com/articles/health/living-well- usn/2009/1...](http://www.usnews.com/articles/health/living-well- usn/2009/10/13/5-common-pop-psych-myths.html)

from the magazine editors answers many of those questions, and provides information about a source that will answer all of them.</comment></comment>


If I were running Twitter. - <AUTHOR> http://orangethirty.blogspot.com/2012/08/if-i-were-running-twitter.html

<comment><USER2> Good for a laugh. The terrible advice starts early, though. If you start hiring developers without a good screening process a large percent of them will be developers who can't find a job anywhere else, often for good reasons. Classic Joel Spolsky.

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's do a quick fill in the blank quizz here.

If you start hiring _______ without a good screening process a large number of them will be _______ who can't find a job anywhere else, often for good reasons.

        a. developers
        b. managers
        c. plumbers
        d. mechanics

I didn't say I would keep them all, did I? :)

<comment><USER3> Firing people is fucking expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It amuses me that only the very last item on the list is about _making_ money, rather than spending it. Yes, if I had a billion billion dollars and a fantasy pony castle then I would also have a team of super hackers that would make my every twitter wish come true.

Other than that: yes, that would be an awesome way to run a company. But it seems that the bigger the companies get, the more they shy away from that structure (obvious exception: Valve).

<comment><AUTHOR> It is satire with a twist (tweet?) of truth behind it. My point is that I would focus on exploiting the user base in order to find ways to be profitable. That takes lots of hackers, and less middle managers. It would be an awesome way to run a company, and I wish someone would give me the chance to even work in one like that.

You rlast sentence is true. Bigger companies seem to mostly focus on themselves. Guess its a side-effect of bureucracy, dilber-style management, and MBAs.

<comment><USER5> Throwing more developers at a problem doesn't always help things. Sometimes, it can actually makes things much worse. One very talented middle-manager can often lead to more productivity than adding 20 inexperienced developers to the mix.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month>

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I agree. I don't have an idea of how to properly run such enterprise, but had fun playing pretend. Though I'm serious when I say that I'd love to work with or for a company that would focus on software/hardware R&D. More so if someone would be kind enough to give me some funding to try and make such thing work. I don't aim to be rich, I just want to build stuff. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So the author would turn it into a nerd wet dream?

Twitter doesn't make money because the idea isn't amenable to making money. It's that simple. There is this weird theory that if you get a bajillion people to use some website, it's worth a lot of money. No, it's really not.

It's like trying to monetize a park. Sure, you _can_ do that, but when you look around you'll realize you have built a carnival. That is the future of Facebook, of Twitter. They are going to turn into carnivals. Not because of bad management, but because they are corporations, and either they will decide to make money, or they will go away.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would, indeed, turn it into a nerds wet dream. What is wrong with that? Their current strategy seems to be focused on alienating the very people who helped the grow. Twitter doesn't make any money because it is focusing on finding a way to make money with messages that are no longer than 140 messages. A big userbase does equal value, though I agree it does not mean it is worth a bajillion. Maybe two billion like instagram.

Monetize a park? Well, you can rent out some designated areas for birthday parties during the day. Then put a big movie projector during the night and sell over priced pop corn. You can do paintball matches during the weekends. Maybe build a small lagoon where people can row some wodden boats while reading poetry. You might even go as far as putting some small vending machines that sell bird food, so the kids can feed the pretty birds. No need to build a carnival when you focus on finding alternate business models. Though to build the lagoon, paintball course, outdoor movie theater, you need engineers... :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you go about hiring interns? - <AUTHOR>

I've been searching for an internship for several months, and am finding it incredibly difficult to get any response, even though I believe that I'm easily qualified for many of them. For anyone who has hired interns recently, how do you go about it? What do you look for when finding inters? What are your expectations for interns? <comment><USER2> I had a co-op position while at school, and I found the opportunity through the school's co-op/internship office. They had system like Monster where you could post your resume to positions, except they were only looking for interns from my school.

A friend of mine just got hired as an intern at my work. We needed someone and I knew he was looking. Everything worked out on both sides and he accepted.

Expectations for interns, at least in my experience:

1) You're going to get trained. There's a 99% chance you don't know what we want you to know

2) You're going to learn quickly, because otherwise you're gone in 3 months and that was worthless

3) You're going to be given a project (or piece thereof) that realistically can be finished or mostly finished by the time you leave.

So what I'm looking for in an intern (I did screening of applicants at my last job to replace myself as a co-op) is a willingness to learn, reasonably smart, and good time management. The latter 2 you can approximately screen for in GPA, or GPA + outside activities. If you're excited in whatever we do that will give you a big leg up, or if you've done something approximately similar to what that is.

My last job would also only seriously look for applicants in spring, though we did interviews year round. In summer we'd start hitting other companies' rejects that couldn't get a job for that summer. Fall was hit or miss, depending on if they wanted to start in spring or summer. Summer was more promising because it meant that the students thought ahead and were already looking for jobs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just hired someone for an internship position -- wholly based on personal networking.

That is, I knew her from active participation in a baseball fan forum (<http://www.azsnakepit.com>). She was cheerful, courteous, kind, etc. That is, she unconsciously demonstrated everything any sane businessperson would be looking for.

After Liz had a baby, she asked me for advice about how to find a part-time work-at-home job where she could learn a new skill (and avoid going stir-crazy from talking only to the baby). And I said, "Hey, _I_ need someone!" I'm now paying her a lot more money than she imagined, she's doing a great job, and the work is getting _done_.

Therefore, I recommend that you begin rooting for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Only good things can come of this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some what of the same boat myself. Personal networking presumably isn't working for you. Try internmatch, hireArt and coderwall.You might even reach out to locaI companies and ask for an internship if they aren't offering one. Wish it was easier.

</comment><comment><USER5> What sort of internship are you looking for? I interned for Google and Hitachi while at university and might be able to answer some questions.

</comment><comment><USER6> A lot of Universities have intern job fairs, or databases you can add your resume to that gets sent to companies looking to hire interns.</comment>


How the City of London invented offshore banking - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/the-real-goldfinger-the-london-banker-who-broke-the-world <comment><USER2> I'm skeptical offshore banking started with the brits in the 1940s. Wikipedia has banking starting around 2000 BC in Assyria and later ancient Greece. They also had islands with shores and I'm sure someone figured they might avoid hassle from the local rulers by taking their money to another island.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article covers all that.

Warburg missed the freedom, and excitement, of the German markets in the 20s and 30s. So created an instrument, Eurobonds, in the 1960s to escape the carefully constructed international limitations of Bretton Woods. Add further desire to be outside the system from the US not being a neutral arbiter of the postwar international currency. That led to the inspiration for Eurobonds: the Eurodollar market.

Thus course was set on the race to the bottom. The US came off the Gold Standard, Bretton Woods was deconstructed and most national regulations that responded to the depression and war were repealed along the way.

That Warburg managed to get away with something so artificially constructed to evade laws is, to say the least, disappointing.

<comment><USER3> >That Warburg managed to get away with something so artificially constructed to evade laws is, to say the least, disappointing.

Why should a person in London be bound by laws in the US? Warburg did nothing illegal.

I'm all for the rule of law in general, but it's unreasonable to try to use laws to distort fundamental economic reality, while also actually acting in such a way to undermine the economic system those laws were supposed to create. That's what the US was doing. They were trying to cheat the markets for political purposes.

<comment><AUTHOR> The UK was an enthusiastic participant to Bretton Woods and the Bank of England was not yet an independent body.

I would have assumed that UK laws and regulations were updated similarly to facilitate Bretton Woods, not just the US. In fact I was under the impression they had been resulting in the dullness of City banking, and the unprecedented period of stable growth etc, postwar through to the 60s.

Even had they not BoE should have been able, or been required, to step in and regulate it out of existence - or at least out of the UK.

> trying to cheat the markets for political purposes

Fundamentally disagree here. Markets need strong regulation for purposes that need not be political at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that they try to pin the failure of the Bretton Woods system on some shadowy backroom figures instead of 1) the US inflating the dollar well past the amount of gold backing it, 2) governments cashing in their dollars for gold @ $35/oz and making a profit by selling it on the international market for its true market value and 3) the French calling for a return to a true gold standard...because who doesn't like to blame the French?

My understanding of the main argument put forth in the article is that capital controls are the answer to global inequality?

<comment><USER5> Yeah. Netting it down to the essence, the proposed explanation for the collapse of Bretton Woods seemed to be "USD inflation". Which is sure, plausible enough, I suppose.

Unfortunately they then threw up their hands, ignored everything we know about inflation in general or that inflationary period in specific, and come up with some weird story about how 70s stagflation was actually caused by South American dictators stashing money in Swiss bank accounts and then lending the money to the Italian government to build motorways.

A+ for imagination, but yeah, actually, the US just printed a ton of money. It's not a huge mystery!

> My understanding of the main argument put forth in the article is that > capital controls are the answer to global inequality?

And yes, that was the other big weakness. Their argument for capital controls seems to mostly be "inequality was better when we had capital controls, so clearly capital controls caused lower inequality". There's no real attempt to outline a mechanism for this. There's an implication that capital controls allowed higher marginal taxes which in turn financed higher spending, but if you actually look at government spending, this is clearly nonsense. The UK has been spending between 35% and 45% of GDP on government since the 1950s, with no correlation between the start or end of Bretton Woods. Extremely high marginal tax rates may lead to good song lyrics, but they don't necessarily collect a lot of actual money.

<comment><USER6> Obviously, if there is higher tax rate on higher incomes this will reduce inequality even if the net amount of taxes collected stays the same.

<comment><USER5> That's a lot less obvious than you'd think, in large part because people have so much scope to react to changes in tax rates by restructuring their income, sheltering it, etc.

The impact of taxation on inequality is empirically much lower than the impact of spending. You can see this, eg, by looking at the Nordic countries, which have relatively flat taxes skewed towards regressive taxes like a VAT, but low inequality, while countries like the US have very progressive income tax structures but high inequality. The difference, at a very high level, is that Denmark spends money on the poor, and the US spends it on the upper middle class. :)

You can see this clearly looking at the first graph here: [https://lanekenworthy.net/2008/02/10/taxes-and-inequality- le...](https://lanekenworthy.net/2008/02/10/taxes-and-inequality-lessons-from- abroad/)

Inequality is reduced via _spending_ , not _taxes_ ; taxes are primarily useful as a revenue source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My theory is that The City was the primary force behind Brexit. They are by far the largest and most influential entity and one of the only few that are going to be better off after Brexit.

Even more, staying in the EU would actually jeopardize their special tax- heaven status as EU was moving toward more banking regulation. Note: EU rules or laws, once accepted by local parliaments, have the status of international law, which is above the local laws. Since The City has special exempt status in British legal system, accepting the EU banking regulation could potentially do away with their special "tax-heaven" status. So leaving the EU was actually a matter of survival for them.

<comment><USER8> who/what is the "The City"?

<comment><USER9> It variously means London, The City of London (which is a district inside London with an unusual political status), or the host of financial and trading services industries which in the UK are largely based in the City of London.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't mean greater London. It means the second and third things on your list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Welcome to capitalism & competitive forces 101.

Of course the hot money moves to the place offering optimal conditions. Just like if you have a very portable app you'll host it on whatever cloud provider is cheapest & best.</comment>


Ask HN: Best way to store web traffic logs? - <AUTHOR>

I am in the process of setting up a new website, and was hoping to get some advice on how others store web traffic log data.
At the moment I am thinking of just using Google Analytics and Mixpanel.
I have no intention of saving apache access log files - so Im looking for a web based service. I was considering rolling out a custom db table just to log hits, but it just feels wrong.
What are you using? If you are storing data in a db, what is the db (i.e. mongo, postgres, cassandra)? <comment><USER2> How you store your logs depends on your server configuration. Analytic services like Google Analytics or Mixpanel will work for any type of config as they're initiated by the client. They both also have a nice UI so can see live user's, plot them on maps, etc.

If you want lower level detail such as data for each user's IP address you'll need something on the server side. I haven't used Mixpanel but Google Analytics doesn't give you raw IP addresses. Also, if a user has it blocked (ex: by Ghostery) then you don't see them in Google Analytics. To get around this we also log all requests server side.

The two options I know are either do it yourself (that's what we did, more below) or use something like Piwik ([http://piwik.org/](http://piwik.org/)). The latter is kind of like your own Google Analytics that you run on your own infrastructure.

For our public cloud app ([https://cloud.jackdb.com/](https://cloud.jackdb.com/)) we run all the infrastructure so we aggregate the server access logs from each nginx instance and push them to an S3 bucket. It's pretty straightforward and _really_ cheap (S3 costs peanuts and log data gzips well). Besides audit events (which do get logged to a database and can be queried) any funky research is done by good ol' awk/grep/sed.

Our public website ([http://www.jackdb.com](http://www.jackdb.com)) is hosted on S3 so we don't even control the actual server. Instead we've got logging enabled on the S3 bucket sent to another S3 bucket[1]. S3 creates files there with 1-3 hour lag of all requests with full details (IP, useragent, etc). Only pain is that S3 creates _a lot_ of files so we've got a cron job that runs regularly to combine them into daily files, gzip them, and put them in a different S3 bucket. Again ad hoc research is done via unix commands on either the latest log files or the archived files (we keep a local copy in addition to the ones in S3).

Regardless of how you get your logs onto S3. If you want to make the storage costs 10x cheaper in the long run (again this will only matter once you actually have a significant amount of data) then you push it from S3 to Glacier. Even better you can setup S3 to auto expire data to Glacier after X days[2]. Just remember that you can't access them directly from Glacier. It's just for "cold-storage".

[1]: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ServerLogs.ht...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ServerLogs.html)

[2]: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/object- lifecy...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/object-lifecycle- mgmt.html#intro-lifecycle-rules)

<comment><AUTHOR> This sounds reallly interesting, but it feels very painful for reporting. Trying to run reports on this type of data for a dashboard seems out of the question.

I understand adhoc research is done via command line, but if you wanted to have a dashboard which shows stats, how would you handle that? I assume you would have to import into a db of some sort to run queries regularly?

<comment><USER2> > This sounds reallly interesting, but it feels very painful for reporting. > Trying to run reports on this type of data for a dashboard seems out of the > question.

Yes we've saved it mainly to look at it later. It's the lowest level of detail so I figure we can mine it later. To do anything useful with it it would have to be processed though I don't think it's _that_ much.

> I understand adhoc research is done via command line, but if you wanted to > have a dashboard which shows stats, how would you handle that?

We don't use those files for reporting. We have user stat reports (activity, actions, etc) generated and look at the numbers themselves but nothing I'd consider "pretty". All of those are generated from the audit trail data so it's already in a database. The ad-hoc reporting from the command line is if I want to trace something specific in detail. I've usually filtered it down to small enough set that grep/awk is more than enough and it only takes a couple seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you have the cash and analytics aren't a real distinct business advantage just go Mixpanel.

If you decide to do it yourself this is what I've done: Create a small web service that you can call to log data from the UI. Start with one server and if it starts to go over 60-80% usage consistently create a second.

The server should log every call to the service in a large flat file (csv is easiest). The file should be named by date and time down to the minute. As you scale up servers you just have a process pull down each file and aggregate them server side. Or just throw them into S3 and use Hive/EMR to report on the data.

It's a middle-class man's Mixpanel. I served tens of millions of logging events a day with this solution. At the time the cost was somewhere around $1,500 a month I believe. I was running 6 servers on Ruby/Sinatra though and never tried to optimize much.

EDIT: typo

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess the part Im really keen to setup is the S3 + Hive/EMR part. But it sounds like it will be a bit too expensive to have up-to-date stats, and better to just do batch processing to run reports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are planning to run at any sort of scale I advise staying away from logging into a database. Tying throughput to i/o like that could really hurt.

</comment><comment><USER5> just use Google Analytics. It's a free and extremely powerful reporting. Trying to roll your own solution is a total waste of time.

The only thing you should be doing with your logs are archiving them in case of a security breach so your can try to pin point how the attach happened.

Don't waste the space on your lan either for the log archives. Get an S3 account, zip them up and store on S3.</comment>


Michael Bloomberg launches $160M initiative to ban flavored e-cigarettes - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/michael-bloomberg-160-million-initiative-vaping-youth-f9da04ab-bd8a-4115-955f-08ad2f485506.html <comment><USER2> I understand that we don't want our kids vaping or smoking, but banning flavored juices is the wrong way to go about it. All it's going to accomplish is deregulation of the flavored juice market. People will buy unflavored juices and add their own (possibly dangerous)flavoring agents at home.

Also, it is in Big Tobacco's best interest to make vaping as difficult as possible. Think about it, all these cities with vape bans haven't banned cigarettes yet, right? Make it extremely difficult to vape and people will resort to smoking.

On a more philosophical note, are we really OK with the government reaching this far into our personal lives?

The issue isn't really about the juices themselves though, is it? It's more about the advertising allegedly targeting young kids. I think regulating the advertisement of these products is probably the most sane course of action here.

<comment><USER3> _Also, it is in Big Tobacco 's best interest to make vaping as difficult as possible_

Not true. Big Tobacco owns (partially or outright) most of the big players in the vaping industry. Vuse is owned by Reynolds, Vype is owned by BAT, and Altria has a massive stake in Juul.

It's in Big Tobacco's interest to ensure vaping is easy and viewed as an alternative to cigarettes. It's also in their interest to keep the product in snazzy packaging with candy flavors that appeal to younger consumers.

<comment><USER4> > with candy flavors that appeal to younger consumers.

Because no adults enjoy candy, or flavors? That's exclusive to "younger consumers" only? The vast majority of people who vape are adults. They also enjoy flavored e-juice. Maybe we should put stuff in alcohol that makes it so disgusting no one wants to drink it as well by that logic. Ban flavored alcohol and mixers... too many kids getting drunk off peach schnapps because it tastes good. Ban Coke in bars so people can't add it to their rum. It doesn't matter if the overwhelming number of people consuming it are (legal) adults...because there are some kids abusing it (which is already illegal).

<comment><USER5> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28318902](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28318902)

From this study:

> Current flavored (including menthol) tobacco product use was highest in > youth (80%, aged 12-17 years); and young adult tobacco users (73%, aged > 18-24 years); and lowest in older adult tobacco users aged ≥65 years (29%). > Flavor was a primary reason for using a given tobacco product, particularly > among youth. Eighty-one percent of youth and 86% of young adult ever tobacco > users reported that their first product was flavored versus 54% of adults > aged ≥25 years. In multivariable models, reporting that one's first tobacco > product was flavored was associated with a 13% higher prevalence of current > tobacco use among youth ever tobacco users and a 32% higher prevalence of > current tobacco use among adult ever users.

<comment> nv-vn How is flavor the #1 reason for use? I don't get how they determined that.

<comment><USER6> I'm betting the question was something akin to "Why do you prefer vaping over smoking traditional cigarettes?" or "Do you prefer flavored smoking products over unflavored?"

While the argument does have some minor merits, I'm personally against removing flavors from smoking products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Adults hate candy, ice cream, fruit, etc. Those are for children. I only vape liver and spinach flavored juice because I'm an adult and I hate sweet things.

So when is Bloomberg going to divest from fossil fuels? Need to consider the harm that does to our future's children.

<comment><USER8> Don't forget onions. As an adult I also don't like things that are enjoyable.

<comment><USER9> He's a moral crusader

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When can people finally stop to interfere in other peoples lives? If Bloomberg doesn't want to vape flavors: fine, but give me the liberty to do so... Seriously, if I look back at my youth, I wonder how we all survived -.-

<comment><USER11> Bloomberg just loves to use his money to try to enforce his beliefs on other people.

<comment><USER12> The mere fact that Bloomberg is wealthy proves that he knows best and we should bend to his will. After all, someday when you sell your startup to SoftBank, don't you want to use your money to improve society and get your way?

<comment><USER13> This is satire, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can sort of get it, we could've been the first generation of majority non- smokers, but instead companies got kids to start vaping clouds of bubblegum, and of course kids didnt have a chance of avoiding that crap and now we have an entire subculture of vaping.

There'll be a lot of pushback, but I really do think this is the right direction.

<comment><USER7> Where is the parent's responsibility in this? As a childless adult, why do I lose out because they want a nanny state? I love my candy flavored vape juice and I, as an adult, accept whatever issues come with it. The same with alcohol, smoking cigarettes, etc.

<comment><USER14> So, from my perspective, everyone except a few high level corporate people would be better off if we never got people addicted to smoking tobacco.

Obviously we can't change the past, but we came very very close to doing the next best thing: make it culturally unacceptable to smoke.

We lose out on all that all over again, except replace tobacco with candy vape juice. I guess again the genie's out of the bottle and it's too late for another few generations, but it's such a shame to me.

Addressing the point of parent's responsibility: there's no chance parenting beat an subculture of cool, let's not pretend that's possible.

<comment><USER15> >So, from my perspective, everyone except a few high level corporate people would be better off if we never got people addicted to smoking tobacco.

The tobacco trade was hugely influential to the development of the early US colonies. If there was no demand for tobacco, the early colonist would've most likely starved as the soil was not particularly suited for food crops, but they could at least trade tobacco for food.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> According to HL Mencken

"Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

It seems that Puritanism is still alive and well in America.

<comment><USER17> It's difficult to get rid of something when your country was partially founded by it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "But what about the children?" never ends well. I'm a damn adult and I vape because the alternative is worse. I'm certainly not going to vape unflavored e-liquids, so people like me will be forced to buy the flavors separately. Vaping has seriously been a life saver for me. I and my surroundings no longer stink, my lung function is back to normal, and my oral health has improved. When will society learn that prohibition is never the solution? The solution to this is, like all societal problems, is to improve access to education, wealth and social circles. People that are educated, don't worry about bills, and have large social circles generally don't abuse drugs.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is the same guy that thinks an adult cannot make their own decision on the size of soda to drink: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2013/03/11/th...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2013/03/11/the-new-york-city-soda-ban-explained/?noredirect=on)

</comment><comment><USER20> There was a really solid thread on Vaping generally that also had some relevant insights the other day here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20915520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20915520)

There is a strong argument for vaping as a harm reduction tool, I wonder if that holds up (or is made stronger) if there are no flavors

<comment><USER21> Surely it's the nicotine that people are addicted to, not the flavor. That's just my assumption though, I've never gotten myself addicted to any of that shit; one taste of a cigarette was all I needed to know.

<comment><USER22> part of why people have such success switching to vapes is that most people actually find vaping to be a more enjoyable experience than smoking (after a transition period). your clothes don't stink, you can breathe noticeably better, etc. imo, the pleasant flavors are a major part of this. I've bummed a couple cigarettes since I switched to vaping and I can't even finish one anymore; they taste gross now.

<comment><USER23> The other, much bigger part, is addiction. Otherwise, why aren't nicotine-free vape mixes front and center? Manufacturers are pushing higher and higher amounts of nicotine to keep people hooked after the fonzie factor wears off.

<comment><USER7> Online retailers have been moving towards lower percentages for years. I started with a massive 30% (around 4 years ago) when I switched and I'm down to 1.5% because I believe there are some good benefits, similar to caffeine.

<comment><USER23> That's great to hear, honestly. Brands like Juul have (had?) very high concentrations.

<comment><USER7> I believe the % concentrations are apples and oranges when comparing a PG/VG based juice to nicotine salts. I thought the same when I saw how high the nic was, but I believe the actual % of nicotine absorbed is about the same for lower % PG/VG and seemingly high % nic salts

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like a great way to start an unregulated flavored vape black market

</comment><comment><USER25> I would like to see more laws making the use by kids illegal. Around here at least you don't see kids walking around with bottles of alcohol because the police would stop and dump it out. Then question where they got it. I think the same should be done with vaping, aggressive targeting of kids caught vaping with punishments reaching to their parents possibly. If I let my kid go to school drunk repeatedly(or ever really) I would expect to have child services here. Why should we allow vaping any differently? Now I hear about 12 year olds vaping. That has to end.

</comment><comment><USER26> Has anyone proposed making e-cigarette devices prescription only? Seems like if the manufacturers are really saying "we only want addicted smokers to use our device" that requiring a prescription from a doctor to oversee you through some addiction recovery program would make sense as far as regulating its use goes.

<comment><USER23> Manufacturers were marketing their devices as smoking-cessation devices until they realized there was a huge recreational market potentional.

These devices should have required doctor consultation but instead we have manufacturers selling bubblegum and candy flavored vape cartridges to totally legal adults of age ( _wink-wink nudge-nudge_ ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Bloomberg likes the spotlight. Is this a way to keep the light on for the white house bid?

<comment><USER28> He's announced he's not running though.

<comment><USER27> I think polling national was lower than expected. Now we see him attach his name to the latest issue. Maybe he is hoping for a vp invite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Oh great, so instead of buying flavors from stores people will buy them on the street and make them at home using dubious online tutorials.

<comment><USER30> People have been making their own vape liquids at home for at least the last five years, probably closer to the last decade.

It isn't difficult, a guide to making vape liquid is basically a lesson in measuring liquid volume and a handful of links to flavoring merchants. I don't see how that could be dubious...

<comment><USER22> making your own vape liquid necessitates handling nicotine in dangerously high concentrations (ie, a lethal dose just from spilling it on your arm). I think it's fine for informed enthusiasts to do this at their own risk, but it would be extremely irresponsible to push the median vaper towards blending their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Bloomberg can ban ecig juice if we can ban him from eating fried chicken and Cheez—its:

"The New York Times reports that even as the mayor implements one city-wide dietary restriction after another, he continues to indulge. He loves burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches, hot dogs, fried chicken, and Cheez-its. He puts so much salt on his bagels "that it's like a pretzel," and so much salt on popcorn "that it burns others' lips."

Why am I not surprised?

<comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure Bloomberg won't end up in the hospital unable to pay for his own heart surgery that the taxpayers will then have to cover. The average smoker who gets cancer? Not so sure, and I don't really want to pay for them

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Finally joining the ranks of Gates + Musk in using his fat stacks to better society

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd like to ban being such a goddamn busybody. I don't have $160 mils to throw around though, should I start a GoFundMe?</comment>


Uncovering the truth about the British empire and the Mau Mau uprising - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/18/uncovering-truth-british-empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet <comment><USER3> I'll never forget a discussion with a very intelligent professional American (in the software business) who refused to believe that America could possibly be engaged in torture. She just refused to believe that a country as 'great' as the US could commit torture. (this was a few years ago under GWB when Guantanamo was all over the UK papers but presumably still being suppressed in the US media).

The more stories like this are told and remove any shadow of a doubt about the foundations that western imperial states are built on the better.

Occasionally British politicians talk about "British Values" or "Making Great Britain Great Again" without any hit of acknowledgement of what 'British values' really entailed in reality.

<comment><USER4> There was no suppression of the Guantanamo abuses in the US media. It was widely reported.

I also wonder if you misremember. It's plausible that the person you described refused to believe that the abuses were _systemic_. It is implausible that a "very intelligent professional" would legitimately deny the abuses entirely. They were widely reported and well documented.

Edit: Actually, you could have just been dealing with someone who actively chooses ignore this stuff. That is a sad possibility. It was still widely reported, though.

<comment><USER3> I was shocked because she fell into the demographic that I would expect to know.

Anyway, one thing that isn't in doubt is that it was only one data point. It's good to have some balancing opinions!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The sad truth is that empires require massive amounts of violence to maintain. There is no other way. Just look at Sumer, Assyria, Persia, Rome, China, Ottoman, France, Britain, and Germany. Also, make no mistake, the United States is also a defacto empire.

Unfortunately, the alternatives to empires is isolation and infighting between smaller powers. For an example of this, take a look at the middle east. The middle east is most peaceful when it is part of an empire - be it the Ottoman, the British, Mongol, or Arab empires. Another example, is Europe. Europe was pretty peaceful when it was partitioned between the Soviet empire and the US Empire (also known as NATO).

Also, empires can provide major benefits through economies of scale. Take a look at Europe before and after the fall of the Roman Empire. Looking back historically, the Roman Empire was probably a net positive for human development throughout the Mediterranean World. The various Chinese empires were also probably net positives for their citizens.

Thus, it is not proper to judge the British empire over violence (given that an empire requires violence). The judgement should be over whether the British empire was a net positive or a net negative overall for the people involved.

<comment> throwaway-hn123 > The judgement should be over whether the British empire was a net positive > or a net negative overall for the people involved.

That's easy, it was a net negative for the Indians.

<comment><USER6> That's not an easy statement to make at all. The Indian kingdoms were perpetually at war, and there's no reason to think things would have changed without the British. Beyond that, the Brits left India with a common language and pretty good set of governance institutions.

<comment> throwaway-hn123 Actually, it's a really easy statement to make. The British were directly responsible for millions of deaths in India.

<comment><USER6> "Millions"? How is that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes one of the great quirks of European history is that the British Empire is not held in the same esteem as the Nazi empire. The British Empire was bizarrely racist and killed tens of millions of people worldwide. Maybe even more than that if you include the promotion of slavery as a business on global scale. England is so lovable now though.

<comment><USER8> Except it was the British Empire that persecuted slavery and brought to an end the slave trade far in advance of other nations.

What people forget is that the norms of the past are not the same as the norms of today. At one time, slavery was normal across vast swathes of the planet. That it isn't today, is in part due to a moral revolution that took place in Britain and resulted in a policy change by the British empire - despite its own commercial interests - to abolish slavery and the trade in slaves, even while nearly all other countries in the world at the time were totally fine with it.

<comment><USER9> Once the economic advantages were outweighed by the political disadvantages.

"while nearly all other countries in the world at the time were totally fine with it". I guess this depends on how you define "country", but lets take it to mean the majority of a population. I'll give you that countries benefiting from the slave trade were clearly fine with it. I sincerely doubt the populations being enslaved were though. (their opinions count right?)

<comment><USER8> That's the very thing I am talking about. Britain was the first country in which it was a massive political liability to support slavery, and the first country in which the opinions of ordinary people mobilising and campaigning against slavery actually mattered and made a difference.

You can cast this in cynical terms as self interest, but you can do that with any action by any state in history - Britain is hardly unique there.

<comment><USER9> I don't think its being particularly cynical to say if the industries supported by slavery had not been supplanted somewhat (reducing their political power) then slavery would have continued apace. Politicians have proven adept at taking advantage of popular movements when suitable.

Its basic economics. Had the ruling elite deemed it necessary I'm sure Punch could have been commissioned to print all manner of xenophobic cartoons about subhuman slaves and their barbarism in order to justify the practice further.

This isn't to diminish the efforts of the anti-slavery movement or the individuals involved.

*Edit: Also, yes, this is not unique to any country at all. I'm sure there are a myriad of examples of slavery within any of the countries that Britain colonised throughout history.

<comment><USER10> very dark yet very accurate

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whilst Kenya was an undoubted low point of the British overseas territories, it's chilling to think they were markedly better behaved than the French and especially Belgian colonies in Africa.

Quite how any of these were able to rationalise such behaviour, and so comparatively recently, whilst claiming to be civilised beats me.

<comment><USER12> Blood and repression is the norm for empires, from Sumeria down through. The new thing is being ashamed of it.

<comment><USER11> Well the first phase of the British Empire was much more about the trade than repression and saw abolition of suttee and slavery. Early treaties attempted to preserve native rights. Intermarriage was relatively common, as was some immigration into the UK.

The later "benevolent empire" phase, broadly around the time of the Opium wars, saw the repression, misrule and attempt to civilise these places. That saw more separation. This was the phase that saw concerted efforts to add infrastructure, schools, hospitals and such.

<comment><USER13> The first phase of the British empire was roughly from the time of Queen Elizabeth to the start of the Seven Years War in 1754 (or up to 1688 if you want to use the Glorious Revolution as a division point). This is precisely the period when the British were among the world's most active and enthusiastic slavetraders. The abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire was obviously a bright point in its history, but it's worth pointing out that this happened _two hundred years_ into the British Empire's lifespan, not at the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Appreciate the great work!

British did a lot of nasty killings in India as well, for instance the Jalianwala Bagh: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre)

<comment><USER15> Here you can see imperial life in action

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhKYg641K3c&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhKYg641K3c&feature=youtu.be&t=565)

Surreal imagery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think a better example of the evilness of the British Empire is the Irish experience in the 19th century. You lose the "excuse" of racism and are left with religious sectarianism and sheer greed for the policy.

The British put inhumane and genocidal policies in place, starving millions in a land of plenty.

<comment><USER8> The initial British response was to buy £100,000 of corn meal from the US to import to Ireland to combat the famine.

This doesn't seem like an action of a government intent on genocide.

It seems more to me that British policy in Ireland during the famine is marked by an extreme ideological commitment to laissez faire economics (ie, letting land owners export food from Ireland in large quantities to make money, letting ports export food etc) and no little incompetence and prejudice against imagined "workshy" irish layabouts.

But I wouldn't say there was a deliberate policy of genocide as such.

As far as I know, the potato blight was not started by British settlers gifting infected towels to the natives.

<comment><USER9> No, it seems like the action of a government attempting to appear concerned when quite clearly humanitarian issues were a tertiary concern.

If a genocide occurs as a result of a commitment to a political or economic ideology, does intention really matter?

<comment><USER8> I think it matters, because the very definition of genocide involves deliberate intent and policy to achieve the goal of wiping out a people.

<comment><USER9> Fair point. We need a better word to describe mass murder by coincidence.

I would note however, that the goal of wiping out a people (in this case it could be argued that "a people" could just as easily refer to "poor people" as "Irish people") was at least a bonus as far as Westminster was concerned.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.sh...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.shtml)

"The Irish viceroy actually proposed in this fashion to sweep the western province of Connacht clean of as many as 400,000 pauper smallholders too poor to emigrate on their own. But the majority of Whig cabinet ministers saw little need to spend public money accelerating a process that was already going on 'privately' at a great rate."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Shouldn't we as humans bury the longer past and move on and look at the present-day scenario? I know many will say - "What about justice to our ancestors?". Justice is done to them when their children(descendants) do not suffer similar injustice and/or live a better life. How many parents want their kids to live in a war-waging world?

I understand what she did was very hard work. But what's the point? People who raise these issues now probably and unintentionally end up generating hatred amongst individuals who might otherwise be perfectly fine with each other. Then there are people who get emotionally touched, take an absolute stand and create an uprising. The people (experts) who raised the issue first get sidelined. The govt tries to control the situation and gets labelled as oppressive. Politicians and media take control now. It goes on and then starts a racial and a religious divide and all the wars in the world. The true purpose is lost and what exists past those wars is just pieces of hazy truth mixed with spiced up vigilantism.

The British did very bad and evil things in the past. But why not talk about evil things performed now by another powerful and smart country that uses methods incomprehendible to most people.

<comment><USER13> I have no issue with the anti-war aspects of what you wrote. But as an historian, I feel like I ought to write a defense of remembering past injustices. I think there are several grounds for doing so:

\- I can't speak for Caroline Elkins, but I think that many historians, including myself, believe that every human life that was ever lived has some value and deserves to be remembered, as far as that's possible. As living human being we naturally have a tendency to privilege our present moment and the lives of the humans who happen to be alive alongside us, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it's humbling to realize that there are tens of billions of lives that have faded from memory, but which were every bit as vivid and profound to the people who experienced them as your own life is to you. So I think one core benefit of history is simply in preserving the memories and the experiences of all sentient beings. (This is going to get very interesting in the decades to come when we get better at digitally preserving people's personalities and memories, but that's for another discussion).

\- There are a surprising number of people in the mainstream of political and cultural discussion who truly seem to believe that the British Empire should be uncritically celebrated. Niall Ferguson being probably the most famous example. This kind of work forces us to confront the fact that the good intentions of some British imperialists were counterbalanced by atrocities and acts of unthinking violence. Caroline Elkins' work is important in the same way that George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" is - it documents cruelties, not to settle scores, but to help us avoid repeating them.

\- Arguably, more violence and hatred could be incited by _failing_ to remember horrible past events. In other words, if a people have a sense that they've been wronged within living memory, and that as those memories fade, the injustice done to them will be forgotten, this could generate even more distrust and hatred then an acknowledgement and apology. This is a debatable point, but one that makes sense to me from the standpoint of my own life - <USER2> tend to get angriest at unacknowledged wrongs.

<comment><USER18> As a counterpoint I think remembrance of past injustices is one of the key obstacles holding back the former Yugoslavia. People there tend to be _aware_ of history (or at least their own version of it) going back to 1389 in a way that most Americans can't grasp. And although they might be right in some moral sense, so what? This just encourages a victim mentality and won't get them anywhere in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is a great Radiolab episode on this very subject, also touches on the vault of top secret historical documents from the British Empire. [http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau-mau/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau- mau/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I appreciate that she took a stand for what she believes in. I hope that someone of her calibur will also express how the carribean has so few natives or tribes being pocketed in little corners of many american countries. But I appreciate any effort to understand and reach for justice

</comment><comment><USER21> It is interesting how everyone wants to portray themselves as a victim. "I was persecuted for pursuing this very popular agenda, please ignore all the overwhelming support I got and pretend I am a victim". The idea that the British empire was an empire of evil and hatred has been the only acceptable view for decades, and is the standard story taught starting at least 3 decades back. You were not persecuted for supporting the majority view.</comment>


Star Trek cited by Texas Supreme Court - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/10/star-trek-cited-by-texas-supreme-court/

<comment><USER2> So, in case anyone is interested in what the actual ruling was about: A couple sued the company which purchased the husband's former employer for asbestos related mesothelioma. The Texas legislature enacted a law which retroactively indemnified companies from being sued in such cases, most interestingly is that this couple's suit was the only one which was affected.

The widow (the husband having passed) challenged this ruling as unconstitutional with regards to the Texas constitution. The judgement handed down sides with her, though I don't think that a judgement has yet been made in the original case.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's baloney. The police power flows from the individual's right to defend his own rights and to cooperate with others to do so.

When the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, the few can volunteer to help out or the many can offer something to compensate the few for helping out.

But the many don't have the right to sacrifice the few whenever they decide it will hurt the few less than it will hurt the many. If anything, the law is all about opposing mob rule.

Its interesting to note that in the following movie Kirk explains that he went back to find Spock because the needs of the few sometimes outweigh the needs of the many.

All this really means is that an individual or a group can decide to help others when the value of the saved is clearly worth more to themselves than even a personal loss or even risk to one's own life.

<comment><USER4> I guess this is all in the constitution as majority rule with minority rights. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few except when the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. :p

<comment><USER3> i think the constitution is more about protecting the rights of all individuals. There's no weighing to be done there because the rights of one individual do not conflict with the rights of others. Rights don't require anyone to be sacrificed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."_

I always found the reverse, from Star Trek III, more thought-provoking: _The needs of the few, or the one, outweigh the needs of the many._

While our government is ostensibly decided by the majority, our system also recognizes and guards the fundamental rights of the minority.

<comment><USER6> Only to a point, but there is no right that a large enough majority cannot take from the minority legally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For details on the actual case:

[http://www.setexasrecord.com/news/230714-texas-supreme- court...](http://www.setexasrecord.com/news/230714-texas-supreme-court-crown- cork-asbestos-suit-protection-unconstitutional)

Quick sum-up: "Law passed to retroactively protect one company from asbestos lawsuits deemed bullshit"

Yes indeed, my state's court system can occasionally get something right, and _very_ occasionally a Team Red judge like Willet will make cogent arguments and decisions actually based on concepts of limited government.

</comment><comment><USER8> _The following news almost makes up for how often I hide my head in shame of the decisions of the Texas courts._

Sigh. Does everything have to have a political overtone?

If your point is that the judge used Star Trek in order to decide issues of law, you are mistaken. If your point is that it is silly for the judge, in his opinion, to refer to popular literature and metaphors, you are also mistaken.

In fact, looks to me from the above quote that the whole article is just an excuse to use what is a neat example of Trek continuing to have an effect on the mythos of our age as a stick to beat on Texans, probably because most of them don't see eye-to-eye with the author.

Perhaps that wasn't diplomatic enough for the author. But, to quote a famous fictional engineer: "Ah, diplomacy; I adore diplomacy...Diplomacy? The best diplomat I know of is a fully charged phaser bank!""

Sorry. I just don't like folks using Trek to take swipes at political affiliation. There are some very good people in Texas of all stripes. This could have been a much better trivia article if the author could have left out his little jabs. (And yes, I am assuming sarcasm in the above quote)

<comment><USER9> Does being shamed by Texas courts really have a political overtone? I interpreted that as a reference to the Eastern District of Texas Federal Court, the preferred venue of patent trolls due to the notoriously complainant-friendly judges there.

Shame over that mess should know no political boundaries.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. When a town's economy is significantly dependent on how reliably biased its courts are, such that hotels and other businesses are sustained by visiting lawyers, that's a clear sign that the courts are messed up beyond any political excuse. Trial by jury isn't due process in that town, because an unbiased jury can't be assembled from its citizens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad I'm not the only one that quotes Star Trek all the time. I can tell my wife and friends that even Judges uses Star Trek to prove points.

Live long and prosper. That should be a ethos for startups.

Also, maybe someday people won't laugh at me when I tell them Star Trek invented the future.

\--Trekker/ie</comment>


The 17 highest-paying companies in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.de/highest-paying-companies-silicon-valley-2016-8/ <comment><USER2> In all of those showcase photos spanning all of those companies, is there a _single_ person over the age of 35?</comment>


Foursquare's Dennis Crowley Can't Stop Believing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/dennis-crowley-takes-another-stab-at-explaining-foursquare-a04894b7874b?sectionName=recommended <comment><USER2> Previously discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433580)

</comment><comment><USER3> Having read this I'm substantially more convinced that Dennis Crowley knows what he's doing. The only bit Foursquare has really messed up was the split into two apps, but it's not something that they can't fix. Swarm being an app that feeds data into the main Foursquare app is a hard setup to make work (users might use one or the other, and not both), but Facebook has made it work with Messenger and the main Facebook app.

Foursquare has a _lot_ of data. As a bonus, they've also realised that the company is very likely viable just living off other people wanting that data. If they can use that data well, I wouldn't be surprised if Foursquare turns into a serious competitor for Yelp (or even TripAdvisor, etc). If anyone wanted to try and usurp Yelp, it'll be Foursquare, not Facebook or Google or Apple.

<comment> grey-area Google, with their map products used on phones, websites and via their web search, is in a far better position to supplant yelp/trip advisor etc, because they have much more data than someone like foursquare; they have visits, searches, route requests worldwide and also the POI data which they are encouraging people to use and enter for them.

<comment><USER3> Foursquare has a substantial amount of 3 of those 4 data sources - and with Swarm, the potential to continuously improve those data sources quicker than Google has been able to.

Route requests probably aren't that interesting to someone trying to supplant Yelp - if you were trying to supplant TripAdvisor you might want travel bookings, but that's a case of connecting to the users email account (with their permission) and grabbing the lovely JSON encoded tickets and booking details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When a founder can't explain what his own company does, it's a bad sign.

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems success has gone to their heads. Jerking your users around is a very bad idea. Building an expectation that your app does one thing and then pulling the rug out destroys trust when trust is the most valuable asset you have. These guys seem to think they are so awesome that they can do this and get away with it. Their conviction that Foursquare must build the app that only they can envison or it will never get built is nonsense. Someone else will come along and build it. They might not build precisely the same thing, but play fast and free with the trust of your userbase and someone will eat your lunch.</comment>