Cloud Accounting + CRM Software Beta Invitation - <AUTHOR> http://www.servora.com/beta/

<comment><AUTHOR> Servora is at the final stages of beta testing their second generation product, which includes only accounting and CRM (with collaboration tools coming soon) - geared towards small businesses. There are only a limited number of invitations left so sign up while there is still a chance and take your company a step forward.</comment>


Bitcoin trademark filed at USPTO  - <AUTHOR> http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=26527.0

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://i.imgur.com/HALV8.png></comment>


The Internet I Knew (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://flowerhack.dreamwidth.org/3230.html <comment><USER2> I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans.

The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web _anti-social_. I distinctly recall when my group of friends had stopped calling around each week to figure out what we were going to do on the weekend. I was calling people to find out what they were up to... and I got that condescending call to action, _just get on Facebook_.

So I did. I tried it for about a year or two. And it didn't make the web any better or more social for me. It would recommend events to attend and I'd go... but people would just be in their cliques not talking to anyone outside of their groups. Even learning about upcoming concerts and events required a Facebook account. People stopped calling and hanging out. It was all very passive: like, like, comment, meme, har, har.

So I closed down my Facebook account and haven't used it since 2009 or so. The "social web" has only become more anti-social.

Most of these web services made quite a lot of interesting innovations and such but I can't help but wonder what the web would've been like if we'd stayed true to its roots and improved the protocols and infrastructure instead of centralizing everything behind walled gardens.

<comment><USER3> It's absolutely hearbreaking to see the independence, critical thinking and self-determination that Western society has been building up since the Enlightenment, weakening under the forces of big data and targeted advertising.

Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and advertising should not corrode conversation.

Viva la revolucion!

www.hellolyra.com/introduction

<comment><USER4> > advertising should not corrode conversation.

You really followed this with a link to your website?

<comment><USER5> You really can't see the difference between the kind of advertising this guy is complaining about and a link to a personal website / manifesto complaining about advertising? Really?

<comment><USER6> lol that's not a personal website...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> OT: I don't get social networks.

Till today, I don't see any value in real name social networks like Facebook. They should present content I want but they don't, they show upvoted content from my connections which is wrong from a consumer and entertainment perspective.

My friends like or share mostly content of people because those people are kind of high-profile in their circles. Not because they post good content. The typical example, we all know, is some boring dude working at a VC that just raised a new fund who hourly posts really crappy content on FB and gets hundreds of likes every single time. Now, guess why. This happens _all the time_ , everyday, every minute, just go to your FB feed right now and check how many of those high-status animals post again and again some random content which is liked and shared by too many likers.

So, the status of my connections determine which (lousy) content I have to see? No thanks and this is why I prefer interest-driven platforms such as HN.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, you missed out on the brief time in history when they did exactly what you were asking for.

MySpace had no likes and no algorithm to filter your activity. Neither did Facebook for several years, nor did LiveJournal (and all the other social blogging platforms), or even Instagram at first.

<comment><USER7> > they did exactly what you were asking for

No, MySpace and Facebook didn't what I was asking for because they didn't have any feed then.

With MySpace and Facebook in its early days, I could just stalk profiles and both didn't serve me any content based on my interest. On MySpace I could browse through some music genres but this is not my understanding of an interest-driven site.

<comment> yoz-y Twitter has had a feed from the beginning and served you content you wanted, as long as you subscribed to the right people. It still does, as long as you only follow a few people.

<comment><USER7> The grandparent post was about FB and MySpace, not Twitter.

However, Twitter is a different beast. They got better over time because Twitter evolved from a friends network to kind of a interest-driven network. At the beginning people were following friends and then you had the same dissatisfying outcome like with FB (nobody wants to unfollow a crap-posting friend and muting wasn't available then). But nowadays you rather follow people on Twitter based on interest or because you share the same industry, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> call me nostalgic, but i refuse to let go of that internet. There are plenty of alternatives that dont get a multi billion dollar TV ad blitz, and theyre worth checking out

[https://freenode.net](https://freenode.net) for a classic IRC experience, free of charge. [https://mastodon.social/about](https://mastodon.social/about) for a distributed open source twitter-like experience [https://diasporafoundation.org/](https://diasporafoundation.org/) for an alternative to facebook that respects your privacy.

<comment><USER10> I maintain to this day a personal IRC network. Many of us have been "together" for over a decade. In fact I just tried to advocate self-hosted communities at CCC. So I'm also stuck in the past and refuse to let the internet go. But I have two points I'd like to mention.

1) Forums are dead for almost all but the biggest communities that surround a product of some kind. Social forums are simply dead.

2) As an IRC-user mentioned at the CCC. Facebook is the new telephone number. It's significantly easier to ask for a Facebook friend request than a phone number and that edge will keep Facebook relevant even if we saw a rise in self-hosted or segmented interest driven communities.

<comment><USER11> Spam is the reason Facebook is currently the easiest way to get in touch with someone. Otherwise you could just put your email address in a publicly searchable database. It seems like we need a service that provides the verification and permission based communication model of Facebook but without the public feeds, virtue signaling, and political garbage.

<comment><USER12> Spam drove people to Facebook even in the early days. When Facebook first came out, spam filtering was far less effective than it is today. Also, for whatever reason, people trusted Facebook and would post private things there that they wouldn't post on pseudonymous forums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hear, hear! My friend group in high school had its own Proboards forum and we spent so much of our free time on there. (And we weren't the only ones, either.) I'd say the split was 60-40 male/female. We talked about everything—political topics, gaming, arts and crafts, literature—and I owe much of my development as a kid to those conversations. It makes me sad that those kinds of half-online, half-offline communities don't seem to be around much anymore. It felt like we owned our own little plot of online land, tended to it, inhabited it. It was nothing like renting some page space on Facebook or standing on a Twitter soapbox.

After reading the delightful chapter on Community Memory in "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", I've been thinking of ways to get back to this local, more intimate style of online conversation. It seems that with the centralized nature of the web, an abundance of resources leads to the formation of a limited few communication hubs to which everyone gravitates. How easy would it be to create some sort of mesh network hub or beacon that would only let people in a local area connect to each other and create their own decentralized forums or databases? Thinking back on my high school forum experiences, the success of things like Nextdoor, local community events such as UC Bekeley's Anoncon, and even things like Geocaching, I think this could be an incredible paradigm shift for those who are tired of the overwhelming numbers and impersonality of today's "social" web.

It's only the spark of an idea, but few things excite me more than the social possibilities of a publicly-accessible network firmly and intrinsically rooted in a particular physical area!

</comment><comment><USER14> I think a more fair view of the term social media should be as a marketing term? When these tech giants were growing they needed a name to refer to them as a whole, but that name reflected what they _wanted_ those services to be viewed as, not the _effects_ they came to have. We see this everywhere in how labelling of things appeal to some of our inner desires -- in this case the need of social interactions -- and not necessarily accurately describing their effects.

I think the main reason these services exist at all is not to create social mediums but to tap into the flows of human communication for profit. And, since their version of communication is, in the true social aspect, an incredibly crippling one compared to the rich, immersive experience of more old ways of interacting -- no wonder we can be left with a deeply dissatisfying feeling when use social media services.

</comment><comment><USER15> And 10 years earlier we had irc and usenet.

But be under no illusions - I ran a Star Trek site in the late 90s that had adverts on, every month or so I'd get a cheque trough the post. In dollars. My bank were somewhat confused about how to cash foreign currency cheques into a child account.

<comment><USER16> I ran a forum with a decent amount of users as a kid some 15 years ago. We had no ads but once a year when the bills came through we'd have a donation drive to cover the hosting fees and sometimes upgrade our (paid) forum software. Was always weird when people sent letters with cash from all over the DACH area to me ;)

<comment><USER17> I had a similar experience with my BBS. We did UUCP with some rather remote nodes and I had 11 incoming lines (the maximum BellSouth would install in a residence) so the bills were not trivial. Each month I'd post the prior month's bill total and small checks and envelopes of cash would show up in my post office box soon after. It never made a wild profit, but there were only a couple of months where we couldn't cover the bills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of the biggest differences in my mind between the Internet described in the article and the social networks of today (at least for me) is the forums and IRC channels I frequented were filled with people who genuinely enjoyed talking to one another and even cared for one another. I still have friends 15 years later that I've never met and so many great memories. I can't say the same for FB or Twitter.

And the "heart of a sysadmin" statement hit so close to home.

<comment><USER19> In 2005, I used to be in a Battlefield 2 online community with game servers, SMF Forums, and ventrilo for VOIP. I used to play pretty regularly, but when not playing we would all talk and learn from each other. There were maybe 30 people at most from age 15 to 50 years old.

The way we sustained the servers was everyone pitching in to pay maybe $5 to $15 per month.

Moderation and Adminstratuon was volunteer based and people who donated had priority.

We eventually became some of the most popular BF2 servers and it made for interesting social interaction when the admins had to come together to make a decision if someone was cheating or just really good.

I'm sure communities like that still exist but I haven't played many online games since then. Those were the days :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The difference is who owns and pays for what. Running a centralized application for more than a few people on donations and goodwill is a challenge.

This is why I am a huge fan of distributed and federated networks. The idea of you and your buddies being able to split a dream host subscription, but instead of being locked into your own forum hangout, you can interact with a whole global network of fellow self posters and VPS renters. We are in the early days of high-quality federated interaction for non-nerds, but we will get there.

<comment><USER3> An open conversation service needs to be open to all, not just people with tech skills; we need to prevent large numbers of people feeling locked out of discourse, or left behind.

Also, many of the distributed/federated services we've looked at have rapidly devolved into niche communities often centred around sexual content. These two reasons lead us to think that a centralised service is more open and approachable.

<comment> slipstream- With regards to mastodon, there's at least one hosting service specifically for it already ([https://masto.host](https://masto.host)), and people who don't know that much about the Linux command line/etc have set up their own instances using it.

<comment><USER3> I know it's hard to see it this way when one is into tech, but many of my non- tech friends (artists, philosophers, retail...) would balk at this.

We believe using a communication tool needs to be as easy as entering a URL and logging in - friendly, familiar, no new terminology.

<comment><USER20> Sorry, but that doesn't fly in a technocracy. Oh well, just bow before the Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple overlords

<comment><USER3> We bow only to the Hypnotoad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Facebook killed most of the old social communities. The big ones where very lucrative basically swimming in cash, they where only replaced by a bigger fish. The non profit forums and IRC channels are still alive. What worries me though is that so many people use smartphones instead of work-station computers. With a smartphone you are mostly a consumer/by-stander. While on a work-station you are actively taking part by both producing and consuming. There are a lot of really high quality content produced by professionals for profit. But _the best_ content and Internet culture is still made by "ordinary" people for the love of sharing. I hope the good content is not buried by monetized content. There should be more "Hacker News" and less Google and Facebook ads.

<comment><USER22> And you've just described how Instagram and Snapchat took off. You don't need a work-station to post the content. All you need is a camera and a couple of seconds of your life and you're contributing _something_.

Sure, that content might be crappy photo of your breakfast or a short video of you puking rainbow, but it's a content that regular people submitted with little or no effort simply because they had a phone with a camera that they spend most of their time on the Internet on, not a laptop or a desktop.

<comment><USER21> Uploading photos is not that impressive. You've been able to do that on a PC from the 90's. While it has been interesting to see the 90's repeat itself on the phones, the smartphone's hardware have already surpassed, and there's really no excuse to have such a limited io-interface. The problem is the big players are just fine with their users being just consumers. One step in the right direction is the note (pen/stylus input) devices that give much better precision then using your thumbs, which makes it possible to take advantage of all that screen resolution. What we'll see next is an extra fold-able screen that will give more screen real estate. And general purpose hardware buttons on the sides and back, that apps can use for special functionality. And better voice processing using camera plus mic, so you can talk to the phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> en-us You don't _have_ to use corporate sites like Facebook and Pinterest. Check out scuttlebutt.nz for a serverless alternative, or Mastodon for one where anybody can host a server. Or just stick to forums and IRC.

<comment><USER23> No, you don't _have_ to. But if everyone you know does, then you have to make a choice. I've had the same "just get on Facebook" experience as the article's author, and it isn't just about "what are we doing this weekend?" It's about human social behavior changing to fit the model implemented by Facebook, because Facebook tries so hard, and so successfully, to be sticky, that eventually everyone is on Facebook. If you're not, then once that's happened, you're no longer part of "everyone", because Facebook's design very successfully seeks to maximize the degree to which people prefer it as an exclusive medium of social interaction, because that's the same as maximizing its revenue stream. The people who run Facebook, and who build it, have by now gotten very, very good at doing exactly that. And their userbase is such that, whatever adverse effects their model of revenue maximization by social behavior monopolization may have, it is by now having them on about one-third of the entire human species. If we include all the other behemoths which use similar models, the fraction of humanity affected grows markedly - half? More?

Yeah, I know, it sounds absurd and dystopian and like something you'd hear from an ideologue of the RMS stripe. Well, I have my differences with RMS, and we've had them out in public before now. And I'd have regarded the things I'm saying as dismissively as anyone might, if I'd heard someone saying them a few years ago. But that would've been a few years ago. Times change.

It was around the time I missed the second wedding, followed by the second chance encounter with one of the parties thereto, and the second heartfelt apology, and the second "but you should really get on Facebook", that I started to really think something was up other than that everyone had just quietly and comprehensively dropped me, over the space of a few months, because I was just that unpleasant a person to have around. Sure, that was my default assumption. But it would seem unlikely in that case for the apologies to be so heartfelt, or indeed to occur at all; they needn't have, no more than the entire conversations in which they occurred, if those who made them hadn't chosen to engage when they saw me out and about. They could've quietly walked the other way. Instead they hailed me and started conversations, in order to apologize for having unintentionally snubbed me, and to warn me I'd better get on Facebook if I didn't want more of the same.

So I had to think something else was up, something outside my own constant suspicion that I exist in the world purely on sufferance and should not be too surprised when that sufferance ceases - and I started looking around for what it might be. What I found was other people who'd had the same kinds of experiences that led me to start looking in the first place. People like the author of this article, who'd also watched their social circles disintegrate around them, and be reconstituted in a form which did no longer include them, in order to make a lot of money for a dozen or so thousand people mostly in California.

Now I've got no problem with people making a lot of money. This is America, after all. And I don't think anyone who works for Facebook is evil, at least not in any higher proportion than the population at large; you get a few bastards in every hundred, sure, but there's no reason to imagine Facebook uniquely concentrates them somehow. But none of that changes the fact that, in the cause of building something that makes those people a lot of money, they have produced a machine for the deliberate mass modification of human social behavior, the like of which history has never yet seen.

I don't know. I feel like there's nothing unreasonable in thinking such a situation has implications a bit beyond "well you don't _have_ to use it". Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I really am the problem here, and Facebook is just a bugaboo. Maybe that's true for everyone else with a story like mine, too. But what if it isn't? Wouldn't that seem a little dystopian to you, there being a website in a position to mediate your friendships? It seems a little dystopian to _me_.

<comment> en-us I understand where you're coming from, but ultimately it is your decision to stay on Facebook. If you ever want to try something different then try Scuttlebutt. All of your data there is stored in your own blockchain, and then you exchange these blockchains with others. There is no central server or identification authority.

The UI is very much in an alpha state but the SSB protocol is solid, so the blockchain itself will outlive any particular UI version. It might actually be able to scale without having a central authority run it, which gives a glimpse of a future without Facebook.

<comment><USER23> Every time I talk about this, people assume I'm on Facebook. Why is it that, every time I talk about this, people assume I'm on Facebook? I talked about this and you assumed I'm on Facebook, so you should be able to explain at least one reason why, every time I talk about this, people assume I'm on Facebook.

<comment><USER24> Because everyone is. I quit Facebook for a year or two, trying to get people to email or WhatsApp or whatever. didn't work. So I lived with people closer to me reaching out to my SO through Facebook, or sending messages in another way. I eventually made an account again because there were instances where an alternative solution was too much of a pita. So I now check every other week, respond to messages when I have time, and ignore the rest. I think I've posted one thing in the past year.

Still trying to get people to contact me through WhatsApp or signal, which works really well for the NL (>95% have wa), but not so much for international friends. I mostly don't get the drive, the need to post mundane things on there. I just can't get myself to believe anyone will care that I took a picture of me eating lunch, or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Those "social networks" were small, and never made front-page news (or any > news at all), and were more concerned with keeping to themselves than > recruiting new members.

And I'm supposed to be convinced that those small forums weren't anti-social in their own important ways?

<comment><USER23> Such as? It wasn't that you never brought new people in. It was that you weren't operating under a perverse incentive to bring in as many new people as you could.

<comment><USER25> Such as being subject to the whims of random administrator/moderators and whatever random set of principles they wished to apply to their users.

The most striking example I can remember was with _Rick and Morty_ creator/writer Dan Harmon using mod powers to edit a forum user's posts to publicly humiliate the user until he/she left the forum. This was a forum for the monthly short-film festival Channel101-- a forum that is no longer alive, but it appears someone kept some of Dan's insults from that thread[1].

But that pales in comparison to more technically-oriented forums and mailing lists where insidious forms of passive-aggression flourished. These include:

* making the new user feel stupid for failing to comprehend the poor documentation or poorly considered forum guidelines

* making the new user feel stupid for asking a question and failing to read a relevant footnote from a message posted three years ago with an unrelated message topic

* endlessly blathering on about top-posting, asking-about-asking, proper quoting, on-topic vs off-topic, reading-the-stickies, formats for uploading images/attachments, instead of making the software better so that humans don't have to deal with that bs. (The same way git makes it so that humans don't have to bicker about who gets repository permissions)

* telling a user they will be ignored, then mentioning in a meta-discussion about the forum who is ignoring whom

* other users rationalizing the behavior of trolls because those trolls were veteran members

* general lack of mentors to help new users (if the purpose of the forum was to be a sort of community)

There are of course exceptions. But I still remember the feeling of just crossing my fingers in the hopes that my query about a technical topic wouldn't trigger Socratic bombs from a forum's resident jerk.

Stack Overflow proves there's a way to at least a way to discover and _read_ relevant responses without that pain. I have no idea what the antidote to Facebook/Google is. But pining for single-point-of-failure, buggy backends serving up poor UIs with content that cannot easily bubble up to a wider audience isn't going to help.

And forget the anti-social part-- you can't even technically achieve the spirit of such forums today because sock puppets and Sybil have become so sophisticated. Unless we confine ourselves to topics so ineffectual that nobody on the internet would ever decide to hate us.

[1] [http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes](http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes)

<comment><USER23> Okay first of all I've seen _Rick and Morty_ and there is no way in the world I'd spend one _millisecond_ I didn't have to around the people who create that show. If I ran a bar in a Western and Dan Justiharmoroiland walked in, I'd go for the shotgun. The show is occasionally funny and _constantly evidence that the minds behind it are deadly toxic to everyone in their blast radius_. Like Bill Hicks with a sack of crystal meth and a great big hard-on. So I'm not sure how much Dan Harmon being Dan Harmon counts as an example, is what I'm saying. That guy's going to ruin whoever he's around just by being who he is.

But this all misses the point. What we're talking about here isn't "content" bubbling up to "audiences". It's people keeping in touch with one another, and making themselves places to hang out on the Internet and arrange to hang out off it. I mean, yeah, some people are going to be assholes. That's not really a problem for technology to solve. "Don't hang out with assholes" is maybe not that hard? But this isn't, like, Buffy or X-Files forums we're talking about here. It's "hey, let's put up a thing so we can talk to each other". If anyone can just sign up to join whatever you're thinking of, then whatever you're thinking of isn't really what we're talking about here, because what we're talking about here is more than anything like long-running group chats _avant la lettre_ , using whatever technology happens to be available. _Using_ technology, shaping it to fit one's purpose, and not the other way around. That's the distinction toward which we're struggling here, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We had ad-free social networking in 1994, and 1984.

Usenet, IRC, BBSes, MUDs… heck, remember The Well?

The Internet has always had ways for people to get together and socialize. Ello invented nothing.

<comment><USER27> BBSes sometimes had full screen ANSI art interstitial ads, too, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This description of the old days is actually a fairly accurate description of HN now.

<comment><USER29> On old forums (at least the ones I was part of) the community was usually small, and you knew most users and what they thought.

Instead on hn most of the comments I see are from people I don't think I ever read from before.

Also, here we don't officially have PMs or an official IRC channel, both of which were major parts of the communities I remember (most of the stuff actually happened on IRC, not on the forums).

<comment><USER12> Even the visual design of HN (grey usernames in a smaller font) minimizes identity in favor of the content.

Also, for whatever reason, convention seems to favor all-lowercase names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> OP mentions Paul Ford's tilde club [1], [2]. I really must get around to putting up one of these locally soon - if only to learn about running a Web server in the wild.

How would one go about that now?

[1] [https://medihttp://tilde.club/um.com/message/tilde-club-i- ha...](https://medihttp://tilde.club/um.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple- drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf)

[2] [http://tilde.club/](http://tilde.club/) [infinite waiting list... suspect dead]

<comment><USER31> > How would one go about that now?

If you know your way about Linux and the commandline, it's not that hard. There's plenty of good tutorials out there for (almost) anything you would want to do. Renting a small VPS is not particularly expensive either.

I did it this year and can only recommend it - I learnt a ton in the process :-)

<comment><USER30> That's a plan, thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > we had ad-free social networking in 2004.

We had ad-free online communities in 1994... you just used telnet instead of a browser. We had BBSes in 1984. She is totally correct that online gathering spaces of various kinds are not new. The labels change, the tech changes, the scale changes... and that is why the ads came in. Because at some point we jumped from individuals making small systems into businesses making money via large systems.

</comment><comment><USER33> my faith is that there will be a revival for this internet just like vinyl. I I dream it will be very based on physical location. Kind of a mix of mastodon with localwiki.

<comment><USER23> Optimizing for faddishness? Vinyl's been over for years.

<comment><USER22> And yet, they just keep selling more and more of them, a year after year.

[https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/03/record- sales-v...](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/03/record-sales-vinyl- hits-25-year-high-and-outstrips-streaming)

[https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/01/vinyl-sales- rose-26-i...](https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/01/vinyl-sales- rose-26-in-2016-see-the-25-top-selling-releases/)

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanpassman/2017/01/12/vinyl-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanpassman/2017/01/12/vinyl- is-officially-booming-the-new-billion-dollar-music-business/#81905e54054b)

[https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/04/vinyl-records- sa...](https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/04/vinyl-records-sales-2017/)

[https://thevinylfactory.com/news/vinyl- sales-q3-2017/](https://thevinylfactory.com/news/vinyl-sales-q3-2017/)

<comment><USER23> Didn't say that selling vinyl was over. Every fad gets commercialized some time after it's peaked. In a year or two, no one will remember.

<comment><USER22> That "in a year or two" seems to be happening since 2007 for the Vinyl industry: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Our team (mostly cognitive scientists and engineers) is nostalgic about the past of online communication and concerned about its future. Our platform, Lyra, provides support for effective conversations rather than social networking and advertising. You can read our history of online convesation - and more about our approach - here: www.hellolyra.com/introduction

<comment><USER34> But why does all the free and open stuff look so bad. I mean seriously, Lyra is in dire need for someone with a UX/UI background to join their team.

<comment><USER3> As a nonprofit, we operate on grants and revenue alone, not investment.

We'd love to hear some specific feedback on what you think could be improved about our UI :)

We also think we're not doing too badly compared to Reddit and Hacker News!

<comment><USER35> Not the parent, but I have two specific suggestions about the on boarding process.

One, please add a directory (feed?) of public conversations that can be viewed without logging in. I want to see how the platform is used by other people and whether that fits me - but if you ask me to create an account first, I'm going to bounce.

Two, here on HN you say the team is mostly cog sci and engg people, which sounds awesome and piques my curiosity about why you made this. But the web site itself doesn't mention that, or anything about the people behind it. Please add an 'about the team' page so that I can understand more about the people who are inviting me to use their platform.

Hope this helps!

<comment><USER3> Thanks, we will add a page about the team.

We have been thinking carefully about whether to include a public conversation feed. Public communications are not Lyra's central use case, and as most conversations are private at the moment, such a feed would be quite sparse.

As a nonprofit which is not funded by advertising, it is not our main goal to support viewers without an account. There is no charge to sign up.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't there a Who is Hiring post for the month? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm hiring and was wondering same question- I usually am able to post before 11 AM EST?

</comment><comment><USER3> It's posted 11 AM EST/EDT

<comment><USER4> And it's already May 2nd. So it's 1 day late?

<comment><USER5> It's posted on the first weekday of the month so more people will see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nobody is hiring. Move along.</comment>


Are we breaking Google? - <AUTHOR> http://tychoish.com/rhizome/are-we-breaking-google/

<comment><USER2> The author assumes that people who write Wikipedia articles do their research after they've decided to write an article, instead of having things to say and then going to make articles or edits.

Also, blogs rarely come about by searching Google for things and then writing them, so most of those links aren't from Google, either.

In fact, the only time that Google is used is when we know part of something, but not enough of it to consider ourselves fluent in the subject. In other words, when we don't know enough to write an article.</comment>


IQ and the concentration of wealth - <AUTHOR> http://greyenlightenment.com/hbd-investing-part-2-iq-concentration-of-wealth/ <comment><USER2> While reading the site introduction, my bullshit detector went off the scale. Avoid.</comment>


Better Code. IDE plugins to help dev teams discuss, review, and understand code - <AUTHOR> https://www.codestream.com/ <comment><USER2> Looks interesting. If someone uses you, can they export the side comments in a usable way? Can they import them from another product? If they stop paying you, what happens to the comments?</comment>


Privacy-preserving sentence semantic similarity - <AUTHOR> http://blog.christianperone.com/2018/01/privacy-preserving-infersent/?k=2 <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be a way to translate arbitrary text into a universal "voice", so you could post online without your writing style giving you away.

<comment><USER3> Does anyone know if such tools exist?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting! Any relation to Private Set Intersection?

[https://crypto.stackexchange.com/tags/private-set- intersecti...](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/tags/private-set- intersection/info)

For example: an airline trying to determine if a passenger is on the no-fly list, without having the no-fly list, and without the authorities knowing which passenger the airline is inquiring about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ! You can also have PSI with OT-based protocol, actually, I think that the OT-based protocol is one of the fastest for PSI. ENCRYPTO has a very nice library for it: [https://github.com/encryptogroup/PSI](https://github.com/encryptogroup/PSI) if you are interested, paper here: [https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/930](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/930).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two-party computation is really amazing. If anybody here is interested in a more "do-it-yourself" approach to garbled circuits, I described an open- source, Python-in/Garbled-Verilog-out toolchain on my GitHub.

The example shows that you can play a game or Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock over the 'net and know if you have won without telling the opponent your move. (And without a trusted 3rd party, of course)

[https://github.com/lou1306/gssi/tree/master/2pc](https://github.com/lou1306/gssi/tree/master/2pc)</comment>


Happy 10th birthday to us - <AUTHOR> http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to-us-celebrating.html <comment><USER2> I always feel strange being nostalgic about a website. Like I don't feel weird being nostalgic about a classic episode of The Simpsons or a rock concert, but for YouTube or Newgrounds or now Reddit, I do.

I've used reddit for like 7 years. Gleamed helpful info from it. Even won a contest off that site (still got that postcard of all the admin's autographs). Yet my continuing theme with that site was their social experiments. Some of them were one time events, like the Reddit Jet Blue Travels or naming a whale Mr. Splashy Pants or the Rally For Sanity (okay, we technically tagged along for that event, but I was the ones drawn to that pilgrimage). Most of them were short lived, like Soapier or The redditor zine. However, there were successful experiments like IAMA (we finally got the President in the end after making joke IAMA requests), Secret Santa, and shit, we even got Snoop Dogg as an honorary mod of /r/trees.

That was the thing with reddit, it was this general forum that various people showed up on who wanted to try new things or learn something new. Sometimes they took it too far and sometimes they had real life effects. Whatever redditors tried, it was something that broke the regular order of things. Hidden away in the subreddits, I can still see these attempts at trying something new. Try Paleo, donate a pizza, ask a scientist or historian for detailed answers, try not to jack off, meetup with like-minded people, try to be more productive with GTD, try to have this obscure politician win an election, or watch these obscure movies on netflix.

Now the site has gotten so big, so many stuff has been done on there, I'm likely just skimming the surface here.

Anyways, Jedberg, Raldi, if you're still on this thread, thanks for your early contributions to that site. It has brought me fond memories and even a few friends...who I can assure you are not the steretypical reddit weirdos. For reals!

<comment><USER3> I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about _The Simpsons_ : It used to be good.

Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it.

To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/programming remains fairly lively, but it's still a weak substitute for what it could be given proper community oversight.

<comment><USER4> Frankly, I don't feel like Reddit's quality has changed altogether too much since even before Digg v4 killed Digg.

There was definitely a period where the average quality of a comment seemed higher. But those times also coincided with the rise of novelty accounts, power user personalities, often with foul sounding names and awful subreddits. Drama over subreddit bannings is nothing new, either.

Honestly, I'm enjoying the website more today now than I was a few years ago.

Which, I suppose, is the same thing the people say about The Simpsons.

<comment><USER5> > There was definitely a period where the average quality of a comment seemed > higher. But those times also coincided with the rise of novelty accounts, > power user personalities, often with foul sounding names and awful > subreddits. Drama over subreddit bannings is nothing new, either.

Personally I'm pretty happy there's less of the narwhalbacon joke stuff that used to be rampant in the comments years ago. I think the noise:signal ratio is about the same as I can ever remember it being, but at least I can now stand the noise.

To this day I still don't tell people I visit reddit because I don't want to be associated with or labeled as a "redditor" despite the fact that I find the site to be a valuable source of content. There's a strong faction of the core user base that I just can't relate to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most people don't know this, but it was PG who gave Alexis and Steve the idea to make something like reddit, and also gave them the tagline "the front page of the internet".[0]

PG had vetoed their initial idea to create a food-delivery app and then called them back and asked them to come up with something new.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZ8f3Bx6Po](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZ8f3Bx6Po)

<comment><USER7> Food delivery app idea looking pretty OK about now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Happy Birthday Reddit!

I also really enjoyed this post from Alexis re: their journey [1]--particularly this excerpt:

"I talk about this a lot in my book, but it was PG who invited us to apply to the first ever round of Y Combinator and ultimately Jessica Livingston who banged on the table to accept us into the program after PG and the other partners rejected us.

I often think about what would have happened if she hadn't demanded that we be part of the program. There'd be no reddit, that's for sure."

This doesn't get repeated quite often enough as it should, but jl is probably one of the kindest, most intelligent, and most perceptive partners at YC, and probably in the entire venture capital industry.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/alexis.ohanian/posts/10102187402893...](https://www.facebook.com/alexis.ohanian/posts/10102187402893876)

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's a GitHub repository released by Reddit of all the relevant Reddit metrics (uniques, page views, submissions etc.), by month: [https://github.com/drunken-economist/reddit-10-year- data](https://github.com/drunken-economist/reddit-10-year-data)

<comment><USER10> From this data, you can see that reddit is stil highly dependent on the US market. The international part must be the other English speaking countries I suppose. There is still some huge work to do to have a better international coverage. (and also a good potential for further growth).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> all that matters in reddit history to me is the turning point when Digg botched their v4 design execution and caused a huge exodus to Reddit, who was struggling at the time. Changed everything

<comment><USER12> > Reddit, who was struggling at the time.

This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.

<comment><USER13> That's actually really surprising. I was part of the Digg exodus and I'd barely _heard_ about Reddit at the time of the v4 debacle, while Digg was a pretty big brand in tech circles. Was it just better marketing while Reddit actually had a larger-but-quieter userbase at the time?

<comment><USER12> Digg spent _a lot_ of money on marketing, while reddit spent none, so yeah, that was a big part of it. They had a lot of articles written about them because they had a fabulous marketing and PR team. One we were a bit envious of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've asked this repeatedly at reddit and have still yet to ever receive an answer and I think it goes to the core of many of the concerns the reddit community has over the new direction.

Why is /r/TwoXChromosomes the only default subreddit to allow political advocacy?

Not a single default would have accepted kn0thing's first post in todays reddit.

Reddit as a political soapbox died around the time of Occupy Wall Street. It's as neutered as Facebook now.

<comment><USER15> Most political subreddits don't garner upvotes on the basis of "I'm glad I was shown this" but rather, "YOU need to read this".

And so you get a front page full of angry crap nobody wants to read but everyone thinks everyone else needs to see.

It doesn't make for a pleasant user experience.

<comment><USER16> Just because you (and the rest of the staff) don't want to read it doesn't mean the community doesn't.

Parent comment is very much right, Reddit got disappointingly neutered.

<comment><USER14> Not only that, they should recognize that yes one use pattern of reddit was to get the word out of things you think other people ought to here. This attracts users that have something to say; and that attracts users who want something to read/hear etc...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc)

This too can drive growth. If the community gets the impression that they don't drive the content then reddit loses all the magic.

The truth is, the users haven't driven the content of the front-page since the fall of /r/reddit.com following Occupy Wall Street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Makes me sad that Admins did not mention Aaron Swartz[0]

\- [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz)

<comment><USER14> Same here, and the community noticed as well:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3auk69/happy_10th_bir...](https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3auk69/happy_10th_birthday_to_us_celebrating_the_best_of/csg7g1t)

[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is Reddit still run to be profitable? It always seems like it fits more with a wikipedia type model of donations etc.

<comment><USER19> I'm more interested in how imgur survives since they serve up far more bandwidth that reddit does and their own advertising and community efforts are pretty young relatively, not to mention hotlinks bypass that entirely.

<comment><USER20> Imgur uses the free/extremely cheap CDN Cloudflare. Same with 4chan. The vast majority of Imgur's content gets served at the CDN layer so Imgur doesn't have to pay for that bandwidth.

moot (of 4chan) said a while back that Cloudflare is one of the main reasons 4chan is still around these days.

<comment><USER21> CloudFlare told me that using them to host images/media isn't allowed. That they do the CDN bits for websites, but not to do excessive non-webpage stuff. Their ToS says something like that.

Maybe that changes for a few K a month?

<comment><USER20> CDNs don't host the files, your servers do. They cache copies of the files across their CDN network and serve the files from their cache until the cache expires, then they go and get the file from you again to rebuild their cache.

As a practical example, you might have an image on your webserver. When it goes viral on reddit, the request for the image hits the CDN first, not your servers (that's why they call it reverse proxying), they see that they don't have a cached version of the file, or their cached version has expired, so the CDN sends a request to your server, copies the file, and then proceeds to serve that file from their cache for the next million user requests or until the cache is set to expire (usually 24 or so hours, more than long enough for the traffic hitting your image url to die down).

Basically, the CDN made it so your actual servers (and thus your host bandwidth bill) served one request. Not 1 million requests.

Now typically you will foot the bandwidth bill for the CDN as well, but Cloudflare has a tiered pricing structure that is well below the rest of the competition. See moot (owner of 4chan) talk about cost savings here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324)

<comment><USER21> Yes I say "host" as a shorthand for "cache so I don't have to serve much".

Just saying that when I contacted them, they were clear that we shouldn't use them for images or media, and their general ToS agrees.

Their enterprise pricing starts cheap so if they throw in "unlimited bandwidth for everything" then it'd be quite a good deal.

<comment><USER20> There must have been some misunderstanding/miscommunication, if not then Cloudflare has pivoted their business significantly from what my understanding of it was (granted I haven't researched them in over a year).

Media is the primary purpose for CDNs. The performance boost comes from a global network caching the media files so when requests are made for the resources, the end user downloads the media from the nearest CDN node instead of your server that is potentially on the other side of the world. It doesn't matter quite so much to have non-media (such as the page html) served locally because the size of an html page is generally significantly smaller than the media embedded in the page.

From the small amount of research I've done on the Cloudflare service just now, it doesn't seem very transparent how exactly it works. I've found information on 4chan and imgur using them to serve billions of CDN requests, but others saying don't rely on their CDN. So who knows, maybe it's on a case by case basis.

<comment><USER21> [https://www.cloudflare.com/terms](https://www.cloudflare.com/terms) Section 10:

...Additionally, the purpose of CloudFlare's Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Actual link [http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to- us-...](http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to-us- celebrating.html)

<comment><USER23> Thanks. URL should be updated for this post to avoid blogspam.

<comment><USER24> Right why link to the TC article instead of the blog post? I don't understand it.

<comment><USER9> Because someone linked to the blog post previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766565)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Blogspam?

<comment><USER26> Probably - duplicate from actual reddit article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766565)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If every single vote on reddit (both up or down) over ten years were to equal Uber's ~$40bn market cap, each of ~19bn votes would have to be worth over $2.

<comment><USER28> If my fingers were to equal Google's $375B market cap, each of my finger is worth $37.5B.</comment></comment>


Cloud Foundry: Design and Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Cloud-Foundry-Design-and-Architecture <comment><USER2> If you have your browser set to require a click before running flash, you can't easily view this presentation. Every time a slide changes, you have to click to start flash again.</comment>


Carrier Wave in Wired Data Networks - <AUTHOR> https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/129422/carrier-wave-in-wired-data-networks <comment><AUTHOR> Question: Could today's SDR (Software Defined Radio) -- be used to implement all/part of yesterday's wired Ethernet, like 1990's 802.3i 10BASE-T: 10 Mbit/s (1.25 MB/s) over twisted pair, or if not that, then something earlier, like 1983's 10BASE5: 10 Mbit/s (1.25 MB/s) over thick coax?

(Reference: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.3))

I'm talking about connecting the SDR RF output -- directly to the twisted pair or thick coax.

Yes, you'd need to additionally understand how Ethernet encodes data over the underlying signal, but could SDR be used to implement the underlying signal?

Why or why not would this work?

If it would, then what are some additional things to be aware of?</comment>


A Map to Calculus - <AUTHOR> http://mathman.biz/html/map.html <comment><USER2> I will book mark it for now, but I hoped there was a comment section I can come back to ? Kinda can't go over it right now or next few days, due to plans.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am planning to get a printout for my daughter.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome!

...but the image is so small given that it packs a ton of information. ):

Mapped HREFs onto a PNG image that's only 872 x 640 pixels?

How about an SVG file?</comment>


Show HN: My in-network Node app for controlling my kids' nightlights - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ecaron/smart-nightlight-manager <comment><USER2> Very cool.

I do something similar with LIFX bulbs. ([https://github.com/adamjacobmuller/lifx/](https://github.com/adamjacobmuller/lifx/))

I specifically have them configured to follow a f.lux-like curve for brightness and color temperature.

The only major thing I want to add is some kind of local control/override for the brightness. The curves work great 99% of the time but sometimes you do want BRIGHT even at 11pm. The dash buttons are a cool idea, but I don't like the look of them in a wall. Haven't found a great solution for that yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed about the Dash button. I've moved one of the rooms away from that to a doorbell attached to a Pi Zero. I also picked up a Voice Kit ([https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/voice/](https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/voice/)) for $10 at Microcenter, and I'm playing with what that could offer.

If you the room is near a server you have in the house (like a Pi running Pihole), then Bluetooth buttons (like Puck.js) unlock a lot of potential for you too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone interested in this sort of thing for their kids, I've found most hue lights to be too bright and I wanted a way more flexible scheduling ability. So I made my own and now sell them.

[https://www.keenglow.com](https://www.keenglow.com)

It does require any cloud besides ntp and just uses a local web interface. You can define relative events, like 15 minutes before bed is tv time, 5 minutes before is snack time, bed time is 8. If one night the kids are extra cranky and need sleep, simply adjust bed time and the others adjust too.

I've used em for years with my kids!

<comment><AUTHOR> Well done! This is very impressive!!! You're 100% right that the Hue lights don't get nearly dim enough.

I'm sorry I didn't see your product sooner. More parents should know about your this - I'll make sure to spread the word whenever possible (:

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My kids get to control their nightlights all by themselves. I trust them to do this responsibly, if they're clever enough to do it so I don't notice then I'll let them get away with it. I don't feel the need to snoop on/control my children digitally.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it depends on the age. This started several years ago to give my 4 year old an "ok to wake" light, which helps considerably with sleep training.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I made something very similar, but the device I'm controlling is an RGB LED attached to the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi zero.

[https://github.com/mekane/Node-API-for-Raspberry-Pi- GPIO](https://github.com/mekane/Node-API-for-Raspberry-Pi-GPIO)

I made some bash scripts that call the API to do certain things (like light up green when it's time to get up for school) and I set cron tasks to call these at certain times.

The Node service also serves a very simple web page that can be used to control the light color and brightness.

</comment><comment><USER6> The Hue bridge is capable of this type of scheduling without any other devices. Philips simply hasn't included any useful level of flexibility in their app, so the use of All4Hue or other low-level apps is required.

</comment><comment><USER7> The light turning to blue at 7am to indicate that sleep time is over is a nice touch.

Working in collectivities with young children, we'd have a sheet of paper with a sun/moon on each side, and every morning at 7 one of us would go in every room and turn the piece of paper around to let them know they could get out of bed and come to the common areas if they were awake.

</comment><comment><USER8> I had this kind of project in mind when I built my rpiapi project. [https://github.com/victorqribeiro/rpiapi](https://github.com/victorqribeiro/rpiapi)

I'm going to work on it a little bit more.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you want to drop the price of equipment you can go down a level and use 433Mhz. Athough wifi chips have gotten cheaper lately and hopefully the smart home iot gadgets will keep dropping in prise.

<comment><USER10> Sonoff switches and plugs already cost less than $5, and they're all flashable with extremely good open source firmware. It's a great time to be a home automation hobbyist.

<comment><USER9> Does these Sanoff devices have an API that you can access via LAN, or do you need to re-flash them if you don't want to use them via "the cloud" ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I so out of touch for thinking that I wouldn't want devices with internet connectivity running at all times in my home, especially in children's bedrooms?

<comment><USER12> [https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-recommends-that-you- keep-y...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-recommends-that-you-keep-your- iot-devices-on-a-separate-network/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I"m sure this was created for personal interest / development reasons but I thought I should mention that Home Assistant ([https://www.home- assistant.io/](https://www.home-assistant.io/)) will do all of this out of the box.

<comment><USER14> And Node-RED for more advanced automations [https://nodered.org/](https://nodered.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Please use a language like C, D, C++, or Python. They are much more lightweight. It takes hundreds of lines of javascript to be executed to do a single "console.log."

<comment><USER16> Please let people write their hobby projects in whatever language and stack they want.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Scicademy – A student science research database/journal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jeshaitan/Scicademy <comment><USER2> While high school and undergraduates don't often have access to the high-cost infrastructure needed for hard science or biological science, there are vast amounts of data available that enterprising individuals can crunch for next to nothing, which can be picked up by other institutions as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like any data service, it will be as good as its data - without a big concerted effort to gather data it will soon die. You need to reach out to science fairs, big and small, as well as Science Research programs and convince them to post their work here. Also in lieu of citations awards earned would help distinguish the more decent ones. Downloads may also be a good metric to measure interest

</comment><comment><USER4> arXiv junior I guess?

It's cute. I would probably never read anything there. I wouldn't trust my own projects and stats from high school and I actually do this for a living now, so why would I trust some random's? looks good on applications though, like debate club or something, announces your acceptance of the norms of the scientific society you wish to join.</comment>


How founding a company compares to graduate school - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00219-w <comment><USER2> It does not.

A Ph.D. goal is trying the go to the boundary of knowledge in a very specific area (which takes around 4 years), and then extend by 1 inch(by publishing). The main currency is status.

A startup goal is to create customers. The more boring the better, and the faster the better. The main currency is money.

<comment><USER3> Can you define what boring here is? How does a boring startup be successful if it is boring? Genuine question.

<comment><USER2> It's hard for me to find a startup that is NOT boring

(When did you hear about a startup that does a meaningful R&D?)

The easiest one are B2C:

1) Amazon - selling books.

2) Air B&B - renting rooms.

3) Uber - renting cars (advanced taxi).

4) Facebook - a database (My SQL) for Social Network.

But even "hard" tech startup:

1) Google - research done at Stanford.

2) Databricks - research done at Berkley.

3) Microsoft - No research at all, founders drop from college, Selling interpreters.

5) AWS - Research done at Cornell. Selling VM

6) VMWare - research done at Stanford.

Only today, we see startups (e.g. Cruise) that are trying to tackle autonomous driving, which is still an R&D problem, and see where they are.

As for being successful.

There are two risks in a startup - execution risk and market risk.

With boring, you take out execution risk.

For market risk, the main thing is timing (I.e. most of the market risk is outside your control).

You must be in the right market, at exactly the right time.

Hence you must start the project 2 years in advance and hope that the market will become "hot" when you finish.

<comment><USER4> In fact doing meaningful research is an anti-pattern if you want to get hyperscale growth.

R&D startups have proven that the only thing in their future is an acquisition (using Cruise as your example).

<comment><USER5> Biotech or fusion energy startups generally require a serious R&D investment whereas a social media webapp does not. MySpace isn't a good model to use for the next Fairchild Semiconductor.

<comment><USER4> I don't even place the former two in the same category of startup as software startups.

Again, if we define startup as "Growing company in search of a business model" then fusion energy falls completely outside of that.

You don't get "hyperscale" growth with science (biotech) or infrastructure projects (fusion energy). I'm unaware of any biotech startups that have grown to hyperscale. Genentech is the only giant biotech company I'm aware of and it was started 40 years ago and acquired before any kind of hyperscaling like you see with software startups.

<comment><USER6> I think the outcome for Packard & Hewlett would have been much different if they had not put so much effort into meaningful R & D.

Once you get that much going on, nobody can launch it all anyway. If you could, Thos Edison's lab or Bell Labs would have probably scaled most hyperly themselves.

As a technology marketer, I think you should have much more technology that you are not selling compared to what you are promising to deliver.

Even better if you can just keep the technology coming to delight customers more so as you go along.

Sometimes a highly scaled startup seems to define itself as an unsolved problem where there is exponential uptake begging for a solution. If someone can figure it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://web.archive.org/web/20200127190513/https://www.natur...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200127190513/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00219-w)

</comment><comment><USER8> Rating - nothing to see here. This is a W.E.I.R.D. article... Western, (highly) Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.

So, you have a PhD from an Ivy school -- what next?! of course this applies to .. who?

The most immediate response to the essay topic is .. the biggest difference between Academic life and starting a business is that in the latter, you potentially engage with about six or eight billion humans that do NOT have a PhD from an Ivy school.. and who knows, maybe the living world, dirt, floods, sales, and/or servitude.. the way a substantial portion of the rest of the world is..

This is a fine subject and is applicable to some readers, but the "insider" writing point of view, without self-examination.. leaves little to admire here for anyone not in the seat described. Is this elaborate bragging on the part of the individual author? even less to admire then..

<comment><USER9> I feel like your criticisms might make sense if it was a random nytimes article but this is in the career advices column of the academic journal nature.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Using GDPR to request post-interview feedback - <AUTHOR> Most of the employers do not offer feedback after a candidate is rejected, mainly due to "legal concerns". However, most of them are using recruiting tools to manage the process, including notes on interviews, thus, issuing a GDPR-backed data portability request should get you those notes. Did anybody try this? Did it get you the results you were looking for? <comment><USER2> I don't think notes about you is your personal data. Of course your name and surname is, but interviewer opinion about your experience and behavior is his. If you request information about you they will tell which recruitment tool they used but that's it.

</comment><comment><USER3> [stupid comment]

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, quoting friom the GDPR, art. 4

"'personal data' means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;"

I guess interview notes would fall into this category as well. it's related to a identifiable `data subject` and related to his traits. e.g. "John Smith is bad at math and he hates pencils"

<comment><USER2> No. Under the GDPR they will tell you that they stored your name and surname (as in sentence "John Smith is bad at math and he hates pencils"). They will not send you the sentence they will just inform you that they used your name in it. If you ask them to remove your personal data then they are obligated to remove your name from that sentence but that's it, the sentence can stay because it doesn't says who hates pencils, it's just says that there is a person that is bad at math and hates pencils. It's like me saying "A white, old guy who was US president sent me a letter", it describes quite a bit but it doesn't identify anybody even thought it narrows the list quite a bit.</comment></comment></comment>


Embed AI into Projects with Nvidia's Jetson Nano - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/quickly-embed-ai-into-your-projects-with-nvidias-jetson-nano <comment><USER2> Does anyone know where I can find good benchmarks? Especially how the CPU compares (I don't expect to be GPU-bound).

A projects page would be neat as well, to see if anyone has done anything similar to what I want to do (simple processing on 3-4 video streams -- will IO keep up?).

<comment><USER3> I've spent the last couple of years working on an edge multicamera system (drones). Even at a fairly low resolution, eg a 2MP RGB cam and a VGA thermal, you run into problems. Depends somewhat on how much cash you have to spend on the project!

From experience, IO and encode speed are by far the biggest problem in these systems. You can do reasonably fast inference using a hardware accelerator on any platform - Google Coral is very efficient, as is the Intel NCS. For many ML applications, inference latency will dominate your framerate (ie it doesn't matter if you run it off a Pi, as long as you use USB3). But again, there your bottleneck is how fast you can feed the accelerator.

Until recently, with more platforms offering USB3, actually saving data was a challenge. USB2 just isn't fast enough for high bandwidth multi-camera video and you quickly hit the write buffer on cheap USB storage. Forget SD cards unless you have low level access. Nowadays you can at least use an external USB3 SSD or even M.2 on some of these boards. In the past I resorted to tricks like buffering frames into RAM and then dumping to the card in one go to avoid doing random writes.

Very few other platforms in this price range can offer encode specs like the Jetson. The Pi can do one h264 stream which is representative. The RK3399 can also do one stream at 1080p/30 - though I've never managed to make it work better than 15. A reasonable solution, actually, is to buy a Pi for each camera and hardware synchronize them (or not, if it's not important).

Then camera support, if you go CSI then usually this stuff is pipelined into the ISP. If it's a UVC camera or whatever then usually you're going to be using Gstreamer. If the board claims to support N streams, that should all be done over CSI totally on the GPU without any significant CPU load. I'm not sure if that's what you're after, since you ask for CPU benches, but none of these platforms can cope with even a couple of HD streams on CPU only. You need hardware encoding.

Processing is not saving though. You may be able to process video using CPU only, but if you want to do something with it later, you'll need to encode and transmit or store it.

The downside is there aren't that many CSI cameras available off the shelf and they can be pricey, for no real reason other than economy of scale.

<comment><USER2> I don't have a lot of cash for this project. I also don't want a lot of size or watts. I am streaming educational materials live. Since it's a livestream, I don't need to capture or store anything, and output resolution doesn't need to be better than 720p.

I have around 5 streams coming in, but I'm only using 2-3 of them at a time (so the rest can be disabled, but it's nice if I don't get USB errors when switching things around). These are 720 through 4k resolution, MJPEG (YUVY overwhelms USB). Right now, I'm using an Intel NUC, which works adequately, but can't do anything else reliably at the same time. If I open up an application, I get glitches. I'd like something cheap and small to offload processing to.

All I really /need/ to do is crop, downsize and things like picture-in- picture. On the other hand, I do some fancier processing as a nice-to-have (greenscreen, as well as some fancy nineties-level machine vision -- edge detection and the like). Right now, this is OBS, but I could move this to Python+OpenCV pretty easily (and probably ought to; I'm bumping into OBS limitations).

<comment><USER3> Does the NUC support hardware acceleration? Otherwise you could just use a Pi 4 for this and run all your cameras through gstreamer, which supports the ops you want - I think you can even do PiP. One thing I don't know though, are you going to have to decode the streams, overlay and then encode again?

You could also look at getting a Jetson Nano which is a bit beefier, and you can offload some of this stuff onto CUDA.

Easy to try the opencv route, but you need to be a bit careful on ARM (make sure you compile yourself with all the optimisation flags on).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know how this compares to the megaAI chip which seems to be for a similar use? [https://www.crowdsupply.com/luxonis/megaai](https://www.crowdsupply.com/luxonis/megaai)

<comment><USER5> [https://medium.com/@aallan/benchmarking-edge-computing- ce3f1...](https://medium.com/@aallan/benchmarking-edge-computing-ce3f13942245) has benchmarks comparing a previous version of the Intel Myriad accelerator with Jetson Nano and Coral accelerator.

TL;DR: The Myriad accelerator was about twice to four times as slow as Jetson or Coral.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Need a shopping or part list plus a github ... given "not counting the time I spent waiting for various supporting bits and pieces to arrive in the mail while isolated from my usual workbench at the Spectrum office!"

<comment><USER7> This was mainly stuff like the pan/tilt head, the power supply, and some headers and 40-pin sockets

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this from early last year?

The Jetson Xavier NX is the one released this year.

<comment><USER9> That is true. The Nano is $99, where the Xavier is $399. That changes the game for some use cases. I suspect the Xavier still won't see as much press because of that, though it doesn't change much of the core message -- GPU based compute at the edge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Too bad the storage is sdcard.. Would've been more robust if it's some ssd, with block-device emulation for easy transfers.

<comment><USER11> The Nano baseboard has an nvme slot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> link returns status code 418 for me</comment>


I'm a pathetic loser who can't stop procrastinating - <AUTHOR> https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/im-a-pathetic-loser-who-cant-stop-procrastinating.html <comment><USER2> I was this person with Asian parents. Didn't help. (Not their fault though). I eventually ended up dropping out of university too.

Took me five years of backpacking and wandering the world to figure out how I could even start figuring out this whole thing out, and I still am.

I also want to say, seeing a therapist may not always help, and I don't think a therapist could have helped me and for a lot of people I've spoken to with a similar condition who actually did see a therapist it doesn't seem that seeing a therapist helped them either.

This whole reflex that "as soon as something is wrong go see a therapist" has somehow gotten ingrained into our heads as a society. Maybe it works for a lot of people and so that's why it's there, but we should make alternatives known as well

Because what then, what if therapy fails..?

I'd be curious to learn about the history of "mental illness" (I'm talking in the centuries before Freud etc). I say that because when I travel to less developed societies, I notice a disproportionately less amount of people who face the symptoms the person in this article faces (I'm guessing some combination of anxiety and depression).

What about other things, spend time in nature, get away from technology and your phone, how about natural medicines (with the obligatory: consult with a doctor first), do a vipassana retreat.

Also the obligatory, if there is something fundamentally malfunctioning in your brain chemistry where allopathic treatment modalities would help, then by all means medicate. But I don't think this is always the case here.</comment>


Ask HN: career advice for mom? Has spent years using Fortran - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
My mom has doing freelance computer consulting for 10-20+ years, mainly with something called GL4, which she says is similar to Fortran. It's really specific and for very niche clients.
Long story short, her client list is starting to dry up. I recommended that she learn something more modern, as there seems to be a huge demand for experienced programmers.
Any suggestions on what language(s) to learn? Keep in mind that she isn't going to run off to SF and join a startup, and that remote or semi-remote work is much preferred.
Not really looking for a huge career change here, more like... spend 6 months learning X (which is easy for a person familiar with Fortran) and get a decent position with reasonable hours / freelance work.
Thanks a ton, it is much appreciated. <comment><USER2> How's her COBOL? I probably get 2-3 recruiter requests a month for long-term consulting gigs. Most aren't remote positions but often do pay enough to make it worthwhile if you can uproot your life for 3-6 months.

Alternatively, have her ask her current clients what their requirements are. Much easier to continue consulting with them than to find new business with a fresh language.

If she's doing 'Fortran', I would think Python may be close enough to pick up easily. She could branch into C which I believe is the typical replacement language for most Fortran installations.</comment>


How to Transfer a Software Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.dcaulfield.com/transfer-a-software-project-lessons-learned/ <comment><USER2> This is relevant to the current situation at my workplace. The "not taking on too much" thing is hard to avoid in normal circumstances, now with less staff due to COVID it's more challenging</comment>


Is Encryption Being Stigmatised? - tefo-mohapi http://www.iafrikan.com/2016/04/01/is-encryption-being-stigmatised/ <comment><AUTHOR> I think a more poignant question would be "Is privacy being stigmatized?". The answer has unfortunately always been yes.

<comment> tefo-mohapi True.</comment></comment>


Overworking can harm your start-up - <AUTHOR> http://www.nithyadayal.com/blog/2011/07/11/over-working-can-harm-your-start-up/

<comment><USER2> I'm sure we all know by now that there is a certain number of hours you can work per week before efficiency goes downhill. Even if you don't feel it, it's happening.

Sadly, this post doesn't use any real data, but instead uses an anecdote about playing a video game too long.

Also 'too much' by definition is damaging. If it wasn't 'too much' then it wouldn't be bad. By definition.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's tough to use real data because it is subjective. All I am saying is one should at-least give oneself a chance to find out what that threshold is. The books that I recommended in that post helps in that. Also, the Pivotal tracker suggestion works for me. Probably it will work for others too. But, do people that mindlessly work even know it is necessary?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup - <AUTHOR> Nowadays, people post almost everything happening in and around their life on various social-media platforms. So, I am working on an AI assistant which will return more personalized results by searching for user queries in user's, user's friends', local and global social-media posts.
For example if you want to know whether your friend would be going to that party or not, you can ask this assistant and it will search for his/her social-media posts and will return with relevant results (after taking user's permission) or if you just felt an earthquake you can ask this assistant and it will search for relevant posts in your friends' as well as local social-media posts.
Please let me know your feedback and further suggestions like should I develop a standalone app or should I integrate this with services like Alexa and Google home? <comment><USER2> Link to demo?

<comment><AUTHOR> no demo available yet... sorry!</comment></comment>


Why is Backblaze tracking me? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/why-is-backblaze-tracking-me/ <comment><USER2> Firstly, not violating GDPR. Because, it is exactly the same as you visiting a website that has no tracking.

If browser info and IP are personally identifiable, then every website should throw up a GDPR pop-up.

If you use Sendgrid, the do this automatically I think. Every image embed, every link you click on an email is redirected through a sendgrid domain first.</comment>


MongoDB 1.7.5 Released with single server durability - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/thread/4b94744f1f709048 <comment><USER2> I think making this an opt in feature is poor strategy. This should be opt out for the people who know what they are doing.

<comment><USER3> Durability is a new feature, and should be treated as such. While it is currently not the default, that may change in a later release.

<comment><USER4> Durability is the new web scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's worth noting that this is not a "stable" release. MongoDB releases with an odd minor version number (1.3, 1.5, 1.7) are unstable development releases, and should be treated as such. 1.8 will be the first official "stable" release with single-server durability.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is great news, thank you!

Until 1.7.5, the advice seems to have been that ANY single server is vulnerable, always use replication sets to prevent losing data.

While I appreciate that point, and we do use ReplSets for every DB, in the real world problems happen.

        A circuit might explode in a DC, causing all the machines to go down. (Happened to me at ThePlanet)
        Our Secondary machine might go down, and while fixing it, the primary might fail. (Happened two weeks ago on dev machines)
        Our devs might run a test database on their Macbooks; While this isn't mission critical to stay up, potentially losing records means they need to restart all tests after an event, rather than resuming.

There's a million other places that this will be helpful. Yes, we should always spread things out as much as possible.. But I still use redundant power, RAID arrays, a journaled filesystem and in ideal times a ACID DB.

Here's hoping 1.8.0 will be out soon! ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> I've always thought the MongoDB database was really good, but has poor drivers for node.js. I've been using node-mongodb-native, and it has basically no documentation. If you want to use a relatively new feature, you have to figure out how to convert from the MongoDB command line syntax in the MongoDB docs, to some syntax that the driver understands (which may sometimes be impossible). If you have poor drivers, even an awesome database won't make up for it.

<comment><USER8> It also requires way more nesting than it should, in my opinion. It would be nice to have a synchronous connect method so that I don't have to wrap my entire app in a connect callback.

And I don't see why 'collection' should take a callback either, unless you're in strict mode and querying mongo to see if it exists.

Some people have written higher level APIs on top of node-mongodb-native, two that I have seen are mongoose and mongous. I'm still evaluating them to see what their performance characteristics look like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Forgive my ignorance, but I had no idea what single server durability was. So I had to look it up. I couldn't find any direct definitions, but from what I read it sounds like it does this:

Single server durability is a disk buffered list of pending writes so if the server reboots while in operation it can just resume where it left off. In larger deployments this risk is handled by having multiple servers running concurrently.

Does this sound right?

<comment><USER10> Take a look at the documentation for Journaling: <http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Journaling>

This covers what MongoDB is doing for durability.

<comment><USER9> Thanks that is exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone did write benchmarks with durability enabled?

<comment><USER12> This is a situation where the physical disk configuration may make a real difference. If the journal and the data files are on the same disk, a write- heavy load will be continually seeking between them. If they're on different disks, there's a lot less seeking, and that may reduce the performance penalty quite a bit (at the cost of extra hardware).

And of course, if you're on SSDs, this is all a non-issue, but that also still comes at a premium.</comment></comment>


Why are software developers confused by Kafka and immutable logs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/why-are-software-developers-confused-by-kafka-and-immutable-logs <comment><USER2> An immutable event log is not without its complexities. For example, versioning of events (I recommend reading Versioning in an Event Sourced System [1]).

I would also add that you can take this approach without using Kafka, especially if your system is small. Even a RDBMS table can be used as your single-source-of-truth immutable event log.

[1] [https://leanpub.com/esversioning/read](https://leanpub.com/esversioning/read)</comment>


California island offers $130,000 for new lighthouse keepers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/san-francisco-lighthouse-job/index.html <comment><USER2> Run some sea cables for high speed internet and I would consider it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would retrofit in a laser</comment>


FCC commissioners disagree over whether Internet access is a "necessity" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/07/fcc-commissioners-disagree-over-whether-internet-access-is-a-necessity/

<comment><USER2> Of course internet access isn't a "necessity". Air, appropriate temperature, food, shelter, those are "necessities". But just like a driver's license, internet access is one of those things we can make a "privilege" legally, and a necessity practically, and then make the privilege into a control mechanism. Just say it, you blithering idiots.</comment>


How Face(.com) Recognition Could Fit Into Facebook Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/28/face-com-may-give-facebook-a-mobile-klik-but-ceo-tells-us-nothing-new-to-announce/

<comment><USER2> It would be a right fit and this is the future.

<comment><USER3> I agree, if only because Facebook is primarily a giant photo album.</comment></comment>


Tech Swagger - A Photo Essay on Geek Confidence - <AUTHOR> http://techswagger.info/

<comment><USER2> You sir, is a genius.</comment>


How U.S. Torture Left Legacy of Damaged Minds - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/world/cia-torture-guantanamo-bay.html <comment><USER2> And it isn't just the first-line victims who've been damaged -- it's all of us.

Through either silent complicity -- or simply feeling too weak and impotent to resist. As Vaclav Havel said in his famous New Year's address to the nation, in early 1990:

 _But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. ... We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co- creators._

<comment><USER3> You speak as if the damage is past-tense. It's still being done! The U.S. may have ended the policy of openly torturing people, but they're still proudly assassinating people in foreign countries with drones. This is a practice that's really going to bite the U.S. in the ass one day. Sooner or later, some other nation or terrorist group is going to start killing people they don't like on U.S. soil with drones, and the U.S. will have no moral high ground from which to complain!

<comment><USER4> > The U.S. may have ended the policy of openly torturing people, but they're > still proudly assassinating people in foreign countries with drones.

That's a bit different. Arguably, that's taking place in a state of war. Also, what makes you think our complaining actually requires moral high ground? Complaints are made from a high ground made of power, not morality.

<comment><USER3> Drone strikes are taking place in countries like Pakistan and Yemen, where there is no official war with the U.S.. Their success rate is terrible[1]. They miss their intended target most of the time[2]. Thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children, have been killed[3].

I'm not sure what you meant by saying complaints are made from a high ground of power. Plenty of powerless people in Yemen and Pakistan have complained are are complaining. Perhaps you meant that complaints are actually _listened_ to and addressed when made from a position of power? This is true. However, sometimes complaints can be made from a position of weakness and be listened to when made from a moral high ground and massively supported by the public. e.g. Gandhi's passive resistance movement.

My entire point is that, when other actors are able to strike targets on U.S. soil with drones, power is the only thing that the U.S. will have to stop them, and it might not be adequate. Drones are going to be very difficult to control in a few years. The U.S. has opened a Pandora's box by using them in such fashion. Heck, the U.S. government has behaved so outrageously over the last decade that U.S. citizens are likely to blame their own government when drone strikes happen on U.S. soil!

[1][http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/15/90-of- people...](http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/15/90-of-people- killed-by-us-drone-strikes-in-afghani/)

[2][http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the- obam...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-obama- administrations-drone-strike-dissembling/473541/)

[3][https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/dron...](https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/drones- graphs/)

<comment><USER5> > Heck, the U.S. government has behaved so outrageously over the last decade > that U.S. citizens are likely to blame their own government when drone > strikes happen on U.S. soil!

Nah. We respect Hanlon's Dodge. Our government is a tool of the shadow government. It's a dirty mark on Americans just like the Jihad is a dirty mark on Muslims. Balkanize all the things!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Americans have long debated the legacy of post-Sept. 11 interrogation > methods,

It is depressing to live in a supposed civilized society where torture is a valid topic of debate.

Often I don't, but here I agree with Slavoj Zizek:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0)

He starts talking about Zero Dark Thirty movie, and then talks about how torture debate is normalized, and how there is something disturbing about that. He posits torture should be a topic like rape: nobody will take anyone seriously if they want to debate the benefits of rape. That person is automatically excluded from the conversation as a disgusting idiot.

But here we are discussing and debating the benefits of torture. The hope is one day, torture will be the same, anyone who wants to even discuss its benefits is automatically a candidate for the looney bin.

<comment><USER7> Not to mention that experts in the field of interrogation have openly stated that the 'ticking time bomb' situation simply never exists, and that's the one that's _always_ used to defend torture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The saddest part is that by torturing few the US triggered the torture of many many more. Egypt, Turkey, Venezuela and almost everybody else: why hold back when the US do it? When the good ones do it? Torture is mainstream, morally acceptable and maybe even efficient - why else would the western democracies do it? By torturing their foes the US damaged the whole world for decades, maybe centuries to come.

<comment><USER9> As even a casual review of history will reveal, torture is something that humans are prone to doing. It has always happened and probably always will. Other than giving up the moral high ground, I doubt what the US does or doesn't do in this regard has much impact on what despotic regimes do.

<comment><USER8> It's not black or white, many regimes (imagine Turkey) are more democratic than despotic and the question is not whether torture is the official government policy but rather whether a local policeman in remote village thinks it is an appropriate thing to do when investigating a mobile phone theft. 99% of torture happens in countries where it is officially illegal [my guess].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am absolutely shocked by this 'They knew that the methods inflicted on terrorism suspects would be painful, shocking and far beyond what the country had ever accepted. But none of it, they concluded, would cause long lasting psychological harm.'

How could one reasonably think that torture such as leaving someone suffocating at the bottom of a well would not leave lasting effects?

<comment><USER2> It's one of the signature features of the totalitarian apparatus -- cognitive dissonance.

It's what enabled, for example, members of the _Einsatzgruppen_ to believe that it was OK to shoot young children at the front of the ravines and pits, because they'd be "better off" without their mothers to raise them. Not exactly congruent to what the CIA's operatives have been doing. But still, there's that mechanism of the brain saying, "This isn't _really_ hurting them, so it's OK if I participate in it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I suppose someone has to do the follow-on work, years later, reporting the actual consequences as they played out. Yet two things about this particular piece infuriate me: 1) Most of us probably could've foreseen, and did foresee, that there would be human consequences to this shitty evil program. Even those who didn't have a particularly vivid mental picture of that, could still tell it was a shitty evil program. So to have it reported as news now is like, "Wow, no shit?" 2) The ones doing the reporting in this case were complicit in supporting the Bush administration in these very efforts back then, so they're now deploring that in which they participated. When you do that, it is generally accompanied by an APOLOGY. Also see my very similar comment from 3 weeks ago on the Washington Post suddenly betraying Snowden: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527065)

</comment><comment><USER12> great, now the mouthpiece of the state department is finally coming out against torture, long after they cheerled for the entry into the war which provided a stage for such torture. bravo.

the fact of the matter is that we're long overdue for prosecution of americans who supported, knew of, trained, or tortured others. obama cut them a free pass, which makes him complicit.

heavyhanded sentences against the perpetrators (highest leadership included) will do much to rehabilitate america's ruined reputation.

my prediction: moral cowardice among our government and citizens will continue because the effort of cleansing evil isn't understood to be worth the purity afterward.

</comment><comment><USER13> What scares me is how this program has so normalized torture. It's now talked of too casually in entertainment media (Archer). Waterboarding is even depicted in network pg-13 programing (Braindead. CBS). And don't get me started on how many series (recent Star Wars) depict torture not only as acceptable but effective. Star Wars is a good example as it has run for decades and we can see the evolving US attitude towards its use and depiction. I'm a little shocked that Disney hasn't dialed it down, but I guess it's what the kids want to see.

This is something that damages people. It should not be taken lightly. The normalization of waterboarding by US SERE schools, where this all started, has produced countless PTSC cases in soldiers who never even saw a battlefield. Despite the reality of its use, torture should have no place in any training regime. You don't shoot a trainees so that they are "better prepared" for being shot. This is not something that can ever be done harmlessly.

</comment><comment><USER14> I originally thought that this article would be about the U.S. agents/tormenters and how it damages _their_ mind. That torture would damage the mind of the _tortured_ seemed too obvious.

To digress, the idea that an American citizen could be ordered to act in deplorable manner is in itself deplorable. One would think that the most powerful, idealistic, and fortunate nation on earth wouldn't have to put its citizens in this situation and instead would take every opportunity be a global moral leader.

<comment><USER15> I thought the same. The claim in the first paragraph that experts "knew" torture would not cause long-lasting psychological harm is so absurd on the face of it, I lost interest in the article pretty fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> And yet, if one were to suggest on here _not_ electing one of the main architects of this nightmare as POTUS, the cognitive dissonance would kick right back in...

</comment><comment><USER17> U.S. Torture is the experience of living in a garbage dietary regime while exposed to a garbage stimuli regime and being stuffed full of garbage aesthetic and moral judgments that rationalize that the reason for your distress is your lack of ability to thrive in garbage.

These people need to stop wasting our godamn time.

</comment><comment><USER18> First off, I'll freely admin I only made it through about one page. I have two main thoughts on this subject.

1\. I grew up with Catholicism. It isn't my moral system but it is a reference point. In the catholic moral equation there are two poles: God, and the devil. God is good, the devil is evil. What does the devil do? Torture. Torture is the lower bound of the moral equation, it is the worst thing you can do.

2\. "We", I use the term _we_ very loosely here, we support a system which tortures -- we pay taxes, accept the authority, defend the shores, etc, of an organization that tortures, and voluntarily associates with torturers.

Given this, I've had a huge change in my political thinking over the last 5-10 years. We are bad guys. Maybe not _the_ bad guys, but we _are_ bad guys. It is wrong to assume reasonable people will support us. It is wrong to assume that reasonable people are our friends. It is wrong to assume that if people are educated, familiarized, empowered, etc. that they will support our continued existence. This has made me much more politically conservative in a lot of ways.

<comment><USER7> Don't fall into the trap of polarised good guys vs bad guys. It doesn't describe humans, and it is the kind of thinking that leads to accepting torture ("it's okay to do bad things to bad people").

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Disgusting.</comment>


Map of current wildfires in Siberia (CO concentration) - <AUTHOR> https://www.windy.com/-CO-concentration-cosc?cosc,56.849,120.410,3 <comment><USER2> looks like china is also pretty much on fire or is that pollution? :'D</comment>