Twitter now lets anyone request a verified account - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/19/12227490/twitter-opening-verified-account-user-form <comment><USER2> I wonder if this means they will stop using the removal of verification as way of punishing controversial users.[0]

[0] [https://twitter.com/nero](https://twitter.com/nero)

<comment><USER3> For those out of the loop, 4chan started posting mocked Tweets from Leslie Jones saying all sorts of racist and homophobic things.

Someone sent them to @nero, and he retweeted a few of them. This caused a lot conservatives and gay people on Twitter to get angry at Leslie Jones.

Twitter then banned @nero for the fourth time this year.

What's funny is that Leslie has actually posted racist things before and hasn't been banned for it. [http://i.imgur.com/EawuVV2.png](http://i.imgur.com/EawuVV2.png)

<comment><USER4> Why would she be banned for posting "racist things"? That's not against Twitter's content policy:

> _Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against or directly attack or > threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, > sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, > disability, or disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose > is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories._

[https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311](https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311)

<comment><USER5> Did you miss:

> directly attack other people on the basis of race

?

<comment><USER6> That's not the same as "posting racist things". None of the example tweets directly attacked an individual on the basis of race.

<comment><USER7> Are you saying that "black people are lazy and barely people" isn't racist, for example? It doesn't directly attack an individual on the basis of race.

Saying "white people smh" is as racist as "black people smh" is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am assuming twitter would start suppressing non-verifed accounts in replies/searches ect.

Wouldn't this make arab spring style twitter revolutions impossible. How do you criticize your govt in countries where you could go to jail for what you say online. Just wondering if this has something to do with their notorious saudi investor.

<comment><USER9> Yeah; $10 says there's a preference coming "Only show notifications from verified accounts" or "Only allow verified accounts to follow" etc etc.

<comment><USER10> Notification filters are already a feature of verified accounts.

[http://sproutsocial.com/insights/verified-accounts-using- twi...](http://sproutsocial.com/insights/verified-accounts-using-twitter- features/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This could eventually factor into Twitter's monetization strategy.

Namely, now people can self-assert to be 'important'; relevant quote here:

> "We want to make it even easier for people to find creators and influencers > on Twitter so it makes sense for us to let people apply for verification"

These creators and influencers are the drivers of most of the user engagement to Twitter. By changing this process to be requestable instead of the Hollywood Principle ('don't call us, we'll call you'), they can gauge the level of interest that people will have in a premium level of service -- which, as of right now, is free, but selective.

<comment><USER12> It also creates an incentive for people to use their real information and fill in all those additional fields that people love ignoring (date of birth, phone number). Advertisers will be quite pleased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know this is horrible, but one of my goals was to get that checkmark next to my name one day.

<comment><USER14> Now it's easier than ever, and just as meaningful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Twitter desperately needs this. There are far too many garbage (spam/bot) accounts on their service. I think this will help people filter out such noise a lot easier - looking forward to it!

<comment><USER16> I don't think it is really an issue for Twitter unless real user leave "en masse" due to spam.

It helps inflating the number of users without even twitter putting a hand in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously." \--Thomas Sowell

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised Twitter didn't try to monetize this feature. I'm sure there are a lot of people that would pay to have that "verified" icon.

<comment><USER19> I've have happily paid $5; anything to help Twitter monetize without having to rely solely on ad revenue...

<comment><USER20> Agreed. I'd happily pay, say, $2 a month for Twitter if it made them stop packing on more bullshit features and ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Clueless Twitter again - sell verification for $99.95 for the first year and $9.95/year thereafter.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think this is too little, too late...or at the very least too late. I'm heading towards more and more decentralized means of posting and communicating...you know, where I can control my own fate at least a tad more. Good luck to twitter, but this is _so yesterday_. ;-)

<comment><USER23> Are there decentralized social media platforms? What do you mean by decentralized? Posting on individual websites with different accounts?

<comment><USER24> Yeah, there are decentralized social networks.

A few that I know of:

[https://diasporafoundation.org/](https://diasporafoundation.org/)

[https://gnu.io/social/](https://gnu.io/social/)

[http://friendica.com/](http://friendica.com/)

[https://movim.eu/](https://movim.eu/)

<comment><USER25> Let me add to the question: Any such network that is actually used by more than very niche peer groups, that wouldn't be just as well served by IRC, Slack or Matrix or Discord?

<comment><USER11> You list two open chat protocols and two proprietary services based around rich media chat. Despite bells and whistles, these are all fundamentally about chat and presence.

A contemporary social network implies a profile, an asymmetric social graph between users, personal status history, an aggregate friend feed, and a content management system where users can upload and share media.

Rich media chat apps can approximate some of these usecases but they aren't the same thing.

<comment><USER25> With respect, I disagree; IRC with a bouncer and a bot would serve those functions handily. The other chat platforms also have mechanisms for groups, sharing files and metadata, and creating social "graphs" via the use of channels. I submit that they're no worse than the options listed.

What makes Twitter better than the niche social graph/network tools presented?

People are actually using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It sounds like they are basically going for a Real Name policy? I wonder how that will go, as problems with that have been well documented on other platforms.

</comment><comment><USER27> Lesson: don't be a twitter share cropper.

</comment><comment><USER28> _cough_ HackerNews _cough_ hellbans with no warning _cough_.

<comment><USER29> Your account isn't banned. Except in cases of spammers and serial trolls we nearly always tell people publicly that we've banned them.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127190) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> verification futures plummeting in asian session

</comment><comment><USER31> Leslie just banned me on Twitter lol</comment>


Tell HN: SSL error on HN- not accessible on Firefox - <AUTHOR>

while accessing HN firefox reporting certificates valid only for  ssl2000.cloudflare.com, cloudflare.com, *.cloudflare.com. Chrome allow to add exception. <comment><USER2> This seems to happen with CloudFlare pretty regularly. Has it resolved itself?

I'll follow up with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes its resolved now..

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)</comment>


How to grow as a tester - <AUTHOR> http://altom.training/how-to-grow-as-a-tester/?ref=y <comment><USER2> Appears to be there to harvest emails primarily...</comment>


Update: R.I.P. Schiaparelli: Crash site spotted for European Mars lander - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/update-rip-schiaparelli-crash-site-spotted-european-mars-lander <comment><USER2> > It's space-it doesn't collaborate.

The Martian made it all seem so easy.</comment>


AT&T's 3G MicroCell to patch iPhone dead zones - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/02/06/atts_3g_microcell_to_patch_iphone_dead_zones.html <comment><USER2> I love how they mention data. It uses your Wi-Fi to give the iPhone 3g data. Or the iPhone user could just hop on the Wi-Fi for 10x the speed.

</comment><comment> tsetse-fly This has nothing to do with the iPhone.</comment>


When to propose a relationship to your Anonymous Visitor - <AUTHOR> http://www.cucumbertown.com/craft/when-to-propose-a-relationship-to-your-anonymous-visitor/ <comment><USER2> Looking at all the hate toward sing-up overlays one can wonder why websites still do this. The answer is simple, an unfortunately very sad.

Users value content. That's what they visit the webpage for. However, businesses like this (i.e. the ones inventing ideas like sign-up overlays) _do not care_ about the content. They might say they do, but that is a lie. Website content is only a means to an end - extracting money from users. It's a bait for the fish.

This fundamental mismatch of values is - I think - the main reason why people still can't get why websites implement annoying sign-up pop-ups and stuff. Such companies don't really want to provide value to their users, they only pretend they want, to the extent that maximizes profit.

I'm fine with people earning money and charging for their work. But I believe that this relationship should be up-front. Running heavy maths to figure out the optimal amount of pretending-we-care to maximize profits is not only annoying, but dishonest.

I wish there was a way to reward businesses that actually focus on benefit to their customers, while punishing the ones who only pretend. Right now the only thing I can do, whenever I see annoying sign-up box or other signs of someone doing "clever things" to extract money from me, is to say "fuck you, I'm not coming back".

As for the usability part, [0] summed it up perfectly:

"(...) you have no fucking idea what a website is. All you have ever seen are shitty skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a fucking message."

[0] - [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

<comment><USER3> They obviously want signups at all costs, but I can't see where they monetize these signups that makes it worth degrading the user experience. Signup numbers for VC investment, then eventual advertising?

<comment><USER4> That, plus sign-up is usually the top of a funnel to ask you for money later on.

So they want to have as many signup as possible, and they also want as many conversion from free users to pay users or whatever. The reasoning is that if they double the number of signup, they'll double everything down the line (forgetting that the "quality" of signups matters and making a user create a phony account just to access one page one time is useless).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anecdotal data of course but If I'm still reading and something pops up over the content I either switch to iReader view (If it's good content) or close the tab faster than I can read the first sentence.

If I've not even had the chance to read anything when it pops up chances are anything on your domain is never being clicked again. If I came in via Google I click the little "Block <domain>" link on the way back for good measure

<comment><USER6> It's all fair though, because most content online has as much attention put into writing it as you are willing to put into accessing it. Your attitude is no different from an online "writer's": if it doesn't fall into their lap ready to be reposted with 1 single click, fuck it.

Seriously, I cannot fathom what content online is worth reading, but for which the 5 seconds you are cost to click an x is not worth investing. The level of entitlement you show here is bewildering. It is like you are fighting tooth and nail for junk content that is not worth anyone's time to any extent whatsoever. What a reader.

I, too, am annoyed by having to click an X. At the same time, it makes me smile: the content underneath is actually worth something, and took work on someone's part, to the extent that it's being monetized while remaining accessible for me. It's not going to be some two-sentence blogspam.

<comment><USER2> > _Seriously, I cannot fathom what content online is worth reading, but for > which the 5 seconds you save by clicking an x is not worth investing._

It's not about content, it's about the company actively showing that they don't really care about providing any value, but only about monetizing you.

<comment><USER7> This. I wrote this piece [1] on Medium, previously submitted here [2] about this exact issue. I also made Tab Closed; Didn't Read [3].

[1] [https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/a30bbe8b54a5](https://medium.com/i-m- h-o/a30bbe8b54a5)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819358)

[3] [http://tabcloseddidntread.com](http://tabcloseddidntread.com)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the links. Bookmarked TC;DR immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "When to propose a relationship to your Anonymous Visitor"

How about Never. Let the user decide if they want to have a relationship with you. Getting less conversions with a boring "sign up" form ? The solution is not an overlay. Solution is to make your product better or relevant for _that_ user. If you can show the relevance or benefit, user will sign up _on their own_. If the user did not sign up, it is either because they are not the right target OR you suck at explaining how your product can give them what they _want /need_

And not to be a jerk but instead of spending all that time "analyzing" the numbers with overlay, why not make your product better by talking to customers if you can.

<comment><USER9> Examples:

I started reading reddit the first day it showed up on paulgraham.com. I never made an account. (I stopped visiting reddit years ago. not worth using brain cells on that stuff anymore.)

I started reading HN the first day it showed up on reddit. I made an account as fast as my fingers could type out credentials.

People will do what they want. Twitter went from 100% open to hiding everything except timelines behind login blocks (you can't view followers/following without logging in). Facebook went from 80% open to 99% blocked. expert sexchange went from 90% closed to 100% irrelevant.

 _why not make your product better by talking to customers if you can._

Because the CEOs view website visitors as cattle who must be pounded into shape. Haven't there been some studies showing most people, when presented with a "Enter your email address to continue" modal, just fill out the form and click okay?

It's all about propping up your asshole vanity metrics. You aren't going to get any actual permission marketing cohesion out of blanket view-and-bounce visitors whose email you "stole."

<comment><USER8> "Haven't there been some studies showing most people, when presented with a "Enter your email address to continue" modal, just fill out the form and click okay?"

Perhaps. I do it too if I really want the content BUT like many of us, my email address is "firstname.lastname@example.com". Heck, if they make me enter my first/last name (some even do that), then my first name = wont, last name = tellu. So the point is, most of those are garbage bogus data anyway. Why bother collecting ? Now if the study shows that the % of garbage data entered is much lower than correct, then we are on to something

<comment><USER2> Relevant xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/1303/](http://xkcd.com/1303/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you show me an overlay like that, I hate you.

<comment><USER11> The post is all about how to reduce that same feeling. Convert hate to love, if possible. ;)

<comment><USER12> The sentiment from me is that _any_ registration pop-up converts good feelings (good feelings that might have turned into love organically) into _repulsive hate_ faster than I can close the tab or window.

The way to win me over is purely with content. I read HN for _years_ without getting an account. Guess what, I came back day after day because of the content. Eventually I wanted to participate more actively, so I intentionally and with absolutely _no_ prompting, registered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Population bias? It sounds like you currently have a sizeable population of anonymous users that evidently have found value in the site because they keep coming back. They are easy to convert now, but may have written the site off had you shown them the overlay on their first visit. Once you exhaust that population, you may get fwer conversions than before and fewer people using the site. How are you distinguishing the anonymous users that leave in disgust and vow never to come back? Are you sure you want to alienate such users up- front? I strongly prefer StackExchange's approach to Quora's.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why not show the overlay when the user performs an action rather than after a delay? For example, displaying it when the user scrolls to the bottom of the page content. Or half way through but display it in a way that doesn't interrupt reading (as a fly-out from the right hand side perhaps)?

The optimal time to display something like that is when the user is engaged, interested and open to receiving more content from the site - not "after an arbitrary period of time".

<comment><USER11> That is a good point. We tried that but were not convinced about whether we are able to capture's user intention only via scroll tracking since our pages have images and users tend to quickly scroll through to get a "feel" of the content.

The post details how to show overlay at a more effective time. Intent is to use time spent on page as a proxy for user engagement since scroller tracking was not so effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think you have a fundamental bug in your model of the funnel. The wide end of the funnel is the people who hear about the site and arrive there no matter what the means. Those who sign up are the ones advancing to the next stage (your clip art only has one stage, which may reflect your misunderstanding). So putting up an immediate sign up doesn't cut the number of people who come in through the top (as the article says) instead it just makes the first stage of your funnel shorter.

Now the aim of each funnel stages is to discard as many unqualified buyers as possible as soon as possible to avoid wasting your (and their) time. But how soon is "possible"? You have to qualify them (give them some content in your case, and see if they engage) to see if you are a good match. If you push the sign up right up front yes, more people may advance to the next stage, but you have no idea as to the quality of the leads (%false positive and %false negative).

Consider the rediculous extrema: you could assign everyone a user id when they first arrive (basically: a cookie!) which would give you a 100% conversion rate. Or you could disallow any sign up at all: a 0% conversion rate. It's easy to see that these boundary cases are useless.

But how do you know that your new approach isn't equally as useless? All that mathematics is exciting but doesn't address the two core questions: _how many of these sign ups became revenue generators_ and _how much revenue was abandoned to people who wouldn 't sign up?_.

TL;DR: You've analysed how quickly you get out of the driveway without looking at how that relates to getting to your destination (say, if you're even turning in the right direction).

</comment><comment><USER16> If there's no obvious "dismiss" button, I found you can sometimes right-click, select "Inspect Element" and when you think you've found the DIV, select the "Delete Node" option. (Firefox)

Requires some HTML knowledge to pull off, alas.

<comment><USER17> The point is to show the banner/overlay precisely at the point when the system detects you like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Too bad all the fancy math can't account for people who don't share or upvote the content because their reading was rudely interrupted.

<comment><USER2> They don't care. They are optimizing for maximum signups, presumably because signups = growth = VC money.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but conversion rate is only a part of that. If nobody shares your article, it doesn't matter how good your conversion rate is. Optimizing conversion rates while ignoring the viral coefficient is like the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight because that's where the light is best.

<comment><USER2> Well, I guess the "viral coefficient" is something inherently unpredictable, so it's probably hard to include it in calculations.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but that's my point. Using only what's easy to include in calculations biases the outcome to what improves (easily measurable) conversion rate and not what improves the (difficult to measure) viral coefficient. This would be fine if the viral coefficient were independent of the variables they are adjusting to improve conversion, but I'm saying that they're not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That gif advertisement in the corner is really annoying. It's even blocking some of the text on my screen.

</comment><comment><USER20> Please devote all this mathematical brilliance to measuring the folks like me who NEVER RETURN TO YOUR SITE because proposing a relationship on my first anonymous visit means you're creepy and I will never invite you back into my life. I suspect that's more difficult to measure.

</comment><comment><USER21> So, was the overlay more effective at conversions than no overlay at all?

I think this is a great article about how to measure overlay timing effectiveness, but didn't convince me that overlays work at all in general.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the overlay became more effective. Saw 4-5x increase in sign up rate in some cohorts. It certainly gave a much higher sign-up rate than without any overlay. In fact, just trying a dismissable overhead banner was also not working as great as an overlay.

<comment><USER21> Ahh that's interesting. Was the overlay un-dismissible?

<comment><USER11> It was dismissible. The whole idea was not to take an approach where the content is locked down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My proposal? Get rid of the signup form altogether. Make it so they can give you money and take what they want in return.</comment>


Thoughts on Privacy: The right way forward - <AUTHOR> http://kashif.io/thoughts-on-privacy

<comment><USER2> Many of these discussions happened in the 1970s as people first became aware that large databases (then often called "databanks") were being built to store lots of personal information, and that information from one database could be combined with information from another via a database join. That raised the specter that information originally collected for one purpose could come to be used for a very different purpose.

An important result of those discussions at the time was the Fair Information Practices

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_Fair_Information_Practice#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_Fair_Information_Practice#History_and_development)

which came out of two U.S. government studies on privacy during the 1970s.

These principles include things that are quite similar to what this article proposes, including notice (of what's being collected), choice (about whether it should be collected), and access (to know what others know about you).

The Fair Information Practices formed the basis for European data protection legislation, which has now been implemented in some form everywhere in Europe as a result of the EU Data Protection Directive and other legal instruments. (Of course the Europeans reformulated it and did not directly enact the original U.S. Fair Information Practices into law.) An interesting consequence of that is that most Europeans, at least in theory, have quite extensive rights against information collection that violates these rules (at least by the private sector).

Many Europeans have been able to exercise these rights in practice to challenge data collection and retention by private companies, to see what the companies know about them, or to demand that companies delete information about them. Some of those examples have been mentioned here on Hacker News; the one that I found the most interesting was when Malte Spitz got his cell phone location records from Deutsche Telekom by exercising his right of access under German data protection law.

[http://zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data- protection-m...](http://zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protection- malte-spitz)

Anyway, I think these rights are quite similar to what this article is proposing, so I wanted to point out that there is a long history of similar proposals, and that the idea that technology was taking away people's practical right to control over data about them is something that's been a concern for some decades.

By the way, the United States never enacted a comprehensive data protection law, despite being where the Fair Information Practices were first cooked up. They were never given the force of law in a general way, as they were in Europe; here in the U.S. companies can, in general, collect and use data in ways that would be considered "unfair" elsewhere. The main consideration in the U.S. is that the companies can't lie in their privacy policies, but there are few substantive restrictions on the private use and disclosure of data, outside of particular regulated sectors (like credit cards with FCRA, health care with HIPPA, and education with FERPA). There is extremely strong industry opposition to a generally-applicable data protection law here.

Some sore points about data protection where it did get implemented into law:

① European data protection law is leading to some weird and counterintuitive results, recently including the Google v. AEPD/González case where Google was ordered to remove links to old disparaging (but accurate) information about individuals when users search for their names, based on the idea that Google was "processing" personal data about those individuals in an inappropriate way.

② Data protection often has major loopholes for government collection of information. (Government agencies, including police and spy agencies, very often _are_ subject to privacy and data protection laws, but the application of those laws often means just that those agencies are supposed to deliberate about whether they think what they are doing is OK; if so, they can carry on.)

③ As this article and this discussion seem to suggest, notice and consent have become more difficult where companies expect to use large amounts of personal data routinely. The amount of consenting that users would be asked to do and the frequency with which they are asked to do it could become quite annoying and also decrease the likelihood that users will take the time to understand what they are being asked to consent to. (We can see this to some extent with the cookie notices on European web sites, asking users to consent to being tracked by cookies. Contrary to the mainstream view of web developers, I think cookie tracking is a serious privacy risk that users should still worry about in 2014 and that addressing this risk is pretty important. But we can see that the warnings haven't necessarily made most users better-informed or more cautious about cookie tracking, and many users are probably kind of annoyed that every site they use is warning them about cookies.)

As a result of the last point, I heard a Microsoft executive in a speech say that he thought notice and consent were now _obsolete_ and ought to be rethought. (This statement isn't super-shocking to Americans, who might not even have heard about Fair Information Practices in the first place, but it could have been something of a scandal if he had said it in Europe.)

The executive gave the example of the number of different entities that are receiving user information when a user interacts with a major web site, and the number of different privacy policies that would be applicable to these interactions. He suggested that few users would even read the policy of the site that they're trying to visit, let alone the policies of third parties (that might receive user data as a result of embeds or as a result of business partnerships).

I thought that preventing and discouraging some of those data flows was actually a _goal_ of privacy protection. In fact, a lot of privacy software, including software recently developed by my colleagues, is actively trying to stop them, based on the idea that users don't know about them and that they aren't in the user's interest.

[https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

</comment><comment><USER3> What if they don't care? Not because it's "designed" or "rigged" but because privacy is not something they value?

Humans lived in small groups, then villages pretty much until yesterday, easily for most of our species' history (99%+ of ~200k years). People knew everything about each other. And then gossiped to make sure nothing went unnoticed.

Contrary to the article, we probably still reveal less than we used to. People would bathe in semi-public places. That's not common outside of vacation spots any more.

Yes, advertisers bank on our nature. Gossip blogs bank on it. But they didn't make us that way.

OK, so the nature of information collection changed but we don't feel it. Some people can rationally appreciate it but not casual Internet users. And most nightmare scenarios are still hypothetical.

 _Imagine being subject of public hate because you expressed a unpopular view when you were young._

Many people, even here, are fine with that. On Twitter it's practically a part of regular programming.

<comment><USER4> I think it's a flaw to bring in village life in pre-modern time in the context of the meaning of privacy. For one, in that context what information one shares is apparent and the impact of the information is more readily understood. This is not the case when large volumes of data are shared with unknowable powerful parties, used in unmonitored ways with effects that one cannot predict or control.

Secondly, we do not live in a small community, we have an incredibly interconnected world. Democracy does not function well when people lose the capacity to moderate access of information about ourselves, our thoughts and communications to some degree, when other parties may use that information against the individual. It stunts individual expression and that is pretty fundamental to living a modern society.

It's incredibly naive to undervalue the need and importance of privacy. Nightmare scenarios are not hypothetical to a lot of people, they are acting out right now, each and every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe Windows Vista tried to do exactly that: annoy user with security related screens all the time. This didn't go well because people were just clicking "yes" without reading and in the same time everyone was absolutely frustrated with these crappy alerts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, good point, That would be traumatising to handle, all i am saying is, its a debate we need to have, and this cannot be left in the dark corners of modern web. This is just a proposal which imho covers all the bases, what we choose to do with it may change according to local geographical conditions and mindsets.

<comment><USER5> There is no need to have debate - the current internet infrastructure does not allow privacy. Even Tor and over tools don't let you to stay under the radar. And it is not really clear if there are any better ways. At least I haven't seen any research or proposals that would provide users with better privacy online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Imagine being subject of public hate because you expressed a unpopular view when you were young."

Rather than being able/forced to hide all of my unpopular opinions, I would prefer to live in a society that didn't hate me for having different ideas.

Privacy is important, but often the need is rooted in disfunction elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, i second that to the letter, only if we lived in that perfect society.

<comment><USER6> Things do get better. Being gay used to be a major crime (and thus had to be hidden). Now gay marriage is becoming legal in much of the western world. I'm optimistic that we can continue building a more open and tolerant society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Privacy is simply not sustainable.

Imagine all the lost opportunities, all the worry, all the steps some people take to conceal the truth. It can't go forever, and it will become increasingly more expensive to keep the privacy you had in the past, simply because technology makes transparency cheap and ubiquitous.

Designing a society that relies on the secrecy of certain information is a recipe for disaster. Passwords, credit cards, etc. It won't be long before we simply can't keep any of these secrets, and we will have to switch to a better identification system.

I've had enough to worry about what people might think if they encounter the truth. I don't want to lie anymore. I don't want to keep and remember secrets anymore. I don't want to watch each of my steps and hide behind 7 proxies when I surf the web.

We're due for a paradigm change toward transparency, and the earlier the better. Privacy and secrecy only leads to deception and inefficiencies.

</comment><comment><USER8> But how can it be done every translation? Lots if time the service wants to keep info about you to be used later. So if you say "no" 99 times but "yes" once ... they have you.

<comment><AUTHOR> just to reiterate, i am saying to change the mindset we handle the privacy, They can have you in a hundred different ways without you noticing. all i am saying is we (as users) make them care enough to be on our side and not collect info without telling us in the best ux possible.</comment></comment>


ƒu.js - The Functional DOM traversing library. - <AUTHOR> http://tsenart.github.com/fu.js <comment><USER2> Why would you use this over normal querySelector{All}? Also, why do you define a window.typeOf global? It completely defeats the purpose of using a clousure.

You also seem to be checking `typeof value.length == 'number' && typeof value.splice != 'undefined' && !value.propertyIsEnumerable('length')` to determine if something is an Array. First of all, the recommended practice is to check Object.prototype.toString.call(value) === "[object Array]", but since you're going to rely on latest browsers supporting querySelector{All}, you might as well use Array.isArray.

I'm sorry for being so harsh, but this is the most worthless library I have ever seen. You're adding an extremely thin and pointless layer of abstraction to querySelectorAll and polluting the global namespace with _four_ globals, three of which are completely identitcal, and two of which take too much effort to type. Not to mention your use of _worst_ practices (such as using eval(), only loose comparisons, wrapping all of your code in try..catch statements instead of just not doing things that will throw errors, etc.) and your prototypical pollution in Array, Document, and Element. For example, you define Array.prototype.flatten for _internal_ use. You shouldn't pollute global prototypes for something that you can do privately.

<comment><USER3> I think you bring up valid points, but you should work on delivery. Your post is very offensive to read, even from someone who has no stake in this library whatsoever - even though I think you're right.

You've also got a lot of typos.

So, try to be helpful and encouraging instead of damning and dismissive? I'd appreciate that, and be more open to what you're saying.

<comment><USER4> His delivery is exactly what anybody is bound to get on the internet, and there's seriously nothing wrong with it. If you have an issue with brutal criticism like that, you should re-evaluate even spending time on this site.

This is, quite simply, the most _useless_ and badly written 'library' I've seen in some time. I applaud the author for pushing his work out there, but this is the part where you take criticism and run with it, _fix it_. Listen to Sephr, he's spot on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are alot of bad practices being used in this code. It gives the impression that you've (ab)used JavaScript for a long time, but haven't actually bothered to read the 101 introduction to the language.

E.g.:

        try {
           eval('el.' + argv[1]);
           return el;
        } catch(e) {
           return null
        };

Why in the world would you do this? JavaScript has property access via bracket syntax for a reason:

        return el[argv[1]] || null;

Give this a read: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en/a_re- introduction_to_javasc...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/a_re- introduction_to_javascript)

<comment><AUTHOR> I do that to be able to do: ƒ('ul li:nth-child(2n)', 'style.background = "black"').

<comment><USER6> A better way to do that would be to split() it first on '=' then, split() the left side on '.' and iterate the results. You don't want to evaluate just anything anyone puts in that second argument.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well... Actually I do.

<comment><USER6> If you want to eval anything anyone passes you with no consideration for what it could be, then I have to agree with OP that you must not be aware of the pitfalls of using eval.

Consider that the "black" portion of that argument actually comes from user input and that you were passed instead:

black"); alert('This framework is awesome!

Try eval'ing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> tsenart, you submitted the same thing two days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2146944>

At the very least you could link to the previous discussion, no?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh well I am sorry. I linked the other way though. Thanks for noting.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Disclosure: I think I got misunderstood. This is not a serious library meant for multi-browser support or a general purpose library like jQuery (which I use daily). It's a toy project born out of interest, will to learn and the simple fact that in another project I have, Sight(<https://github.com/tsenart/sight>), I didn't use any external libraries (except Underscore.js). That's how I really started to learn Javascript. I missed the ability to directly iterate through the results of document.querySelectorAll() so I just had fun playing with a solution and ƒu.js came out. I'm not praising it as the best library in the world. And it can even have no advantages over the others. It's just my toy project with which I learned a lot (and even more with brutal criticism) and published for the others to see. Not selling anything here. (The headline of the page is mere satyre)

</comment><comment><USER8> Am I missing something here or do I really have to type the weird curly-F every time I want to call this? Having charmap open in my taskbar is not my idea of being productive. Plus, from my cursory glance this looks pretty similar, if not almost identical, to jQuery...

<comment><AUTHOR> It is nothing like jQuery. It's a small utility library for easing your life when dealing with raw javascript. You can use ƒ or fu.

<comment><USER6> It's a lot like jQuery's $ selector mechanism and fluent API. Here's some of your examples compared to their jQ equivalents:

\---

ƒ('selector1').ƒ('selector2').ƒ('selector3');

 _vs._

$('selector1 selector2 selector3');

\---

ƒ('body').style.background = '#f4f6f8';

 _vs._

$('body')[0].style.background = '#f4f6f8';

\---

for (var i=0; i < 50; i++) { ƒ('ul').appendChild(ƒ().createElement('li')); }

 _vs._

$.each($('ul'), function(index, ul) { for(var i=0; i < 50; i++) { ul.appendChild(document.createElement('li')); } });

\---

I'm not even a jQuery user but I don't see a lot of difference in your approach versus jQuery's here. I already only use lightweight libraries like jQuery or Ext.Core for situations which call for only minor Javascript (read: not an RIA).

In what situations do you imagine your framework is more useful?

<comment><USER9> In the author's defence, the Fu.JS syntax is _much_ nicer than the jQuery syntax, so I can see why someone would want to build this.

<comment><USER10> > In the author's defence, the Fu.JS syntax is much nicer than the jQuery > syntax

How? No, seriously, how is

        ƒ('body').style.background = '#f4f6f8';

_much nicer_ than

        $('body').css('background', '#f4f6f8');

?

        fu().body.fu('ul').appendChild(ƒ().createElement('li'));

than

        $('body ul').append($('<li>'));

?

        document.body.ƒ('ul li:last-child').innerText = "I'M THE NEW GUY!";

than

        $(document.body).find('ul li:last-child').text("I'M THE OLD GUY!");

?

        for (var i=0; i < 50; i++) {
            ƒ('ul').appendChild(ƒ().createElement('li'));
        }

than

        for (var i=0; i<50; ++i) {
            $('ul').append($('<li>'));
        }

?

        ƒ('ul li:nth-child(2n)', 'style.background = "black"')

than

        $('ul li:nth-child(2n)').css('background', 'black')

    ?

<comment><USER11> Some quickie improvements to the jQuery examples:

        $('body ul').append($('<li>'));

can become:

        $('body ul').append('<li>');

and:

        $(document.body).find('ul li:last-child').text("I'M THE OLD GUY!");

can become:

        $("body").find('ul li:last-child').text("I'M THE OLD GUY!");

(We optimize for body explicitly in our selector code.) Although that last example selector is rather weird, it's equivalent to:

        $("body ul li:last-child")

or even just:

        $("ul li:last-child")

(When is a ul ever going to be outside of a body element?)

<comment><USER2>
        document.body.ƒ('ul li:last-child').innerText = "I'M THE NEW GUY!";

That code won't work in standards-compliant browsers. You should either use .textContent = "..." or .appendChild(document.createTextNode("...")) or .firstChild.wholeText = "..." if there's already a text node child.

The real issue though is that unlike jQuery, ƒu.js won't work in popular versions of IE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Umm how the hell am I suppose to type "ƒ" every time? I know I can "map" it to some other character, but that kinda defeats the purpose, no? Other than that it looks nifty, but since I'm already using jQuery in all of my projects I don't think I have much use for it.

<comment><USER13> It's a Mac thing. Alt-f prints ƒ on Mac. On any other OS it's a pain in the ass. Granted, you can use fu but I think it would have been wiser to promote the usage of fu instead of ƒ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone who writes a js library gets props in my book, even if I'll never use it :) It's a great way to learn about javascript.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like one-file less-than-100-LOC type libs.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not really meant for general purpose. Just for projects where you want raw javascript performance and need a little help for traversing and manipulation of DOM elements as arrays. Like my Chrome extension: Sight: <https://github.com/tsenart/sight>.

<comment><USER16> Why would I use this over Sizzle in those cases? <http://sizzlejs.com/>

e.g. Sizzle('div:first')

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am a happy person.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And it is oh-so-ninja. It's 3Kb size. And 1.6Kb compressed with Closure. All in 87 LOCs. Beautiful recursion rocks.

<comment><USER17> Ninjas are stealthy. Carelessly adding four globals and modifying prototypes is not stealthy.

<comment><USER18> Additionally, ninjas never self-promote without adding a disclaimer. Moreover, ninjas despise calling developers "ninjas."</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What similarities might the crypto market have with the dot com bubble? - <AUTHOR> I was too young to remember the dot com bubble when it happened.
All I know is that a friend's dad almost lost their house when Cisco's price collapsed.
But I have been following the crypto markets very closely over the past few years.
We saw a very strange move about a week ago where almost every single coin across the board increased substantially in it's USD valuation.
And I have no idea what to make of it. Surely every single coin across the board did not increase in value overnight.
Are there any similarities at all between the dot com bubble and the crypto bubble that you can see? <comment><USER2> I'll give you similarities of the Bitcoin with a Ponzi scheme:

From wikipedia: "A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒn.zi/; also a Ponzi game)[1] is a fraudulent investment operation where the operator generates returns for older investors through revenue paid by new investors, rather than from legitimate business activities or profit of financial trading."

Bitcoin's only real value is that of the chance of being adopted as currency. For it to become a currency people have to start buying bitcoins, as it is the only realistic way to get hold of them. So the only way to make value for the current holders(older invenstors) is more people buying into it(revenue paid by new investors).

<comment><USER3> Someone always makes a statement like this in every thread about bitcoin, without any evidence or reasoning to back it up. The benefits and unique aspects of cryptocurrencies have been enumerated ad infinitum, and to continue to claim that it's all a scam at this point is analogous to claiming the internet was just a scam in 1999, after it was obvious to many people that it was not. This labeling is only evidence of abject ignorance.

<comment><USER2> What do you mean without any reasoning? I gave a very precise argument on why and how I think they are similar. Why don't you try to debunk my argument instead of a generic reply?

<comment><USER3> Cryptocurrency has many positive values that are not replicated by any other financial instrument when taken together as a whole:

* No middle man

* Nearly instant transfer at low cost

* Non-geographically bound

* Non-governmentally bound

* Potentially untraceable depending on how you use it

* Incorruptible

* Uncensorable

* No central point of failure

* Transparent and open (as in source and freedom)

* Programmable and automatable

* It is the first system to solve the byzantine generals problem.

My point though is that anyone who has been paying at least even slight attention would know that there is a purpose and value to the design of and usage of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and to claim otherwise is an embarrassing display of ignorance.

<comment><USER4> Wasn't the whole "no middle man" thing mostly about avoiding the 3% Credit Card Processing fees found elsewhere? Bitcoin is now more expensive to verify than most credit card processors[0].

"Nearly instant transfer at low cost" it is no longer instant or low cost. Confirmation times[1] have now skyrocketed and as I showed above as have costs. This is why Valve's Steam no longer accepts it.

"No central point of failure" like Mt. Gox[2]? And the recent currency split[3]?

[0] [https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin- transactionfees...](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin- transactionfees.html)

[1] [https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation- time](https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox)

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

<comment><USER3> It is nearly instant when compared to most money transfer services or gold, and low cost is relative, and depends on the coin and time of transfer. Bitcoin cash, which you link to, is both fast and cheap to transfer.

Mt. Gox is not Bitcoin. It was an exchange. It has nothing to do with whether Bitcoin has a central point of failure or not.

<comment><USER5> Nearly instant?:) Compared to what? I got money transfer between banks, by wire, from the US to the end of the world in less than a day. You can't get 3 confirmations on a BTC transaction in 24 hours!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The clearest similarity, I'd say, is that so many people don't understand what they're buying, so they go by a vague story and a price trend and guessing the mass psychology of other investors. That can't end well.

I think in both cases there was tremendous real potential, but it's hard to pick out in the moment, even with a technical background -- there's more to winning than technology.

<comment><USER7> I know a few people who signed up for coinbase and bought Litecoin because it was the cheapest per arbitrary unit, without doing any reading on what differentiates it from Bitcoin or Ethereum. I've also seen similar attitudes towards more fringe coins.

I'm not old enough to remember the dotcom bubble but I wonder if things like pets.com benefitted from people conflating its potential to that of ebay or amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMHO, most of the recent purchases of Bitcoin are mostly because of FOMO. That's the only explanation I can gather for something that increases in value so rapidly without any underlying change in the fundamentals. Quite a similar phenomenon happened during the dot com bubble too. Because of FOMO, people blindly invested in stocks that proved to be worthless later.

So the only similarity I see is irrational investment fueled by FOMO.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is the worst forum of all to ask a question like this. HN is full of people who think they are smarter than everyone else, and a vocal group here has been saying "bitcoin is a scam" since bitcoin was $1 and missed out on the rise. So now they are actively rooting for it and all cryptos to fail, and ignore the benefits of the blockchain. Additionally a lot of YC-type people benefit by the current VC system and funding via ICO's or similar mechanisms is anethema to what they have constructed.

I know many wealthy cryptos and they don't have time for the noise here. Bitcoin could fall to $1000 and they are still rich, they don't care about bubble talk.

<comment><USER10> This is an exceptionally facile analysis.

YC-type people don't benefit from the VC system; YC is a subversion of the VC system, an effort to organize promise founders against the interests of VCs. _Ceteris paribus_ , every YC founder would rather raise 5MM in an ICO than to raise them in capped notes or (even worse) directly from a VC.

If ICOs actually mainstream, YC itself gets _more_ valuable, not less, as they control essentially the only noteworthy credentialing system for startups. Not to mention, they'll be the locus of all the selling-picks-to-prospectors activity that will follow.

Meanwhile: "congratulations" if you made money by buying and "hodling" back when 1 BTC was $1. People made money on Pets.com, too. So did the banksters who made money reselling bogus AAA MBS's. Nobody doubts that you can win large sums of money gambling on the actions of the greater fool.

But: it looks to me like most of the concerns raised by Bitcoin critics have played out as expected. Decentralized? No. Bitcoin is controlled by a small, self-interested group of big-time players. Currency? No. Bitcoin is a speculative asset. Seamless way to transfer funds? What are transaction fees for Bitcoin now? Here's approximately the trajectory of Bitcoin: in 2012, you could buy a pizza with it in 1-2 cities. In 2017, you can't.

And, as predicted, tens of other organizations have come up with their own competing cryptocurrencies. Many of them are objectively more sound than Bitcoin. But we're all meant to pretend that somehow, 1 BTC is worth $15,000 because it really is worth that, and not because Bitcoin is a distributed pump-and-dump scam.

<comment><USER11> >And, as predicted, tens of other organizations have come up with their own competing cryptocurrencies. Many of them are objectively more sound than Bitcoin. But we're all meant to pretend that somehow, 1 BTC is worth $15,000 because it really is worth that, and not because Bitcoin is a distributed pump-and-dump scam.

I am by no means an economics or marketing expert, but I think it's worth considering Bitcoin's "brand" impact and its history. Humans are irrational and do a lot of questionable things even with ample evidence of better alternatives to our choices.

Tuur Demeester makes a comparison in this podcast ([https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/episodes/bitcoin- masterm...](https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/episodes/bitcoin-mastermind- charlie-lee-tuur-demeester/)) to Bitcoin/altcoins vs Coca-Cola and its competitors, starting around 1:05:20. He says that Coke had countless competitors trying to overthrow it as the #1 cola brand, but it stuck around as a result of familiarity and being of quality (my takeaway, not his exact words). He goes on to say that if Bitcoin survives with the same core developers trying to make it better and better, the brand attacks become less and less of a threat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The similarity is GREED.

People invest in a bubble, despite knowing it is a bubble, because they want to make money. And they are willing to take the risk to do so. Why not, when you can invest a small amount of your net worth and make 2-10x returns in a matter of months? The only problem is nobody knows when the bubble will burst.

Bitcoin like Boo.com, Pets.com, WebVan, etc. were first movers, had good branding and promised disruptive models. These all have value, but were overvalued because the main motivation was to make money. Just like how the main reason to buy Bitcoin now is to make money.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have lived through the dotcom and there are massive parallels. Throughout the 90s everybody was talking about why they would need the Internet when they have tv and newspapers. Then from '98 to 2000 hyper and hysteria kicked in. Ridiculous funding happened and businesses really started doing irrational things because they thought they'd have their lunch eaten. Everybody new the dotcom bubble was going to pop and it did over the course of 6-12 months.

Calling bitcoin a scam or ponzi scheme is really not fair, it dismisses the underlying utility of blockchain. Look at the tech of Ripple, their performance characteristics are aiming at the VISA and AMEX of this world. Bitcoin is turning into the reserve currency of crypto-coins, there are lots of alternatives which better serve day to day transactions.

The real point I am trying to make is that right now it feels like we're in HTML 2.0 days and bitcoin is Netscape Navigator. New finance companies are going to spring up over the next few years, in about 5 years they'll start eating into traditional banks. Those banks and institutions will start panic buying. Nobody will know who the next Google/Facebook of the finance industry will be and thats the risk right now.

Regarding the price change, you have to be careful. It's not a fiat coin backed by a government, so it's value is purely based on what the guy next to you will pay for one coin. On that basis bitcoin is very risky because it's value to you is $16,000 but your car mechanic thinks it's worth $0.

</comment><comment><USER14> Full disclosure I work for a firm that's helping launch the next generation of crypto/fiat brokers that will be popping up through out the world the next couple months. My dad is a chip engineer and has personally worked with kurzweil on some of his early ventures. One of his xmas bonus was a kurzweil keyboard that I was forced to learn how to play when I was a child. I remember hearing first hand from my dad and his friends about what was happening. Later on in my undergrad biz school I still had some text books that was written around the boom. Everything was about the new "information highway" and how the "long-tail" will finally be serviced. People were giddy and it being the end of 2017, it is safe to say they were all right to be giddy. I buy a majority of my stuff through apps, able to maintain friendships across the globe and taught myself everything my dad tried to teach me about linux, when I was a child, now online while at work.

Being able to freely create a currency that has the necessary legitimacy to actually work while still being able to cleaning integrate with a larger organization is a powerful weapon against getting screwed by globalism and these massive multi-national corporations. Where I call home is a former mill town that got fucked. Having a solid local currency that all the local businesses will recognize will make home much stronger. For this to reach it's potential though, there needs to be massive investment and social change - just like tinder needed fb, websites, emails and fast internet connections to reach a point of maturity, these new digital currencies need a full ecosystem.

I don't buy or sell any of these currencies even though it would be ridiculously easy for me to do stuff that would be terribly illegal with stocks. It's because I think there will be a spectacular crash in the short run but in the long run the next FANGS will related to the blockchain and crypto technologies.

So hate at your expense.

</comment><comment><USER15> In the dot-com bubble, people invested in companies that had websites, but for some reason, they thought they were investing in domain names ending in ".com".

In the crypto bubble, people are investing in Bitcoin, Ether, etc., but they think they're investing in cryptography.

</sarcasm>

</comment><comment><USER16> I think stories like the one about Long Island Tea adding blockchain to the name and seeing their stocks soaring. More examples here:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/technology/bitcoin- blockc...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/technology/bitcoin-blockchain- stock-market.html)

During the dot com bubble everyone was doing something similar.

</comment><comment><USER17> I know for now that crypto currencies are really only worth something as long as they are used as "currencies". I don't believe bitcoin is currently being used as currency to buy/sell stuff, rather it's used increasingly as an investment, which I don't believe any currency should be especially when it's this unstable.

<comment><USER18> I think there's some belief that the current issues Bitcoin has in transaction rate/cost can be addressed in a software update.

<comment><USER19> These issues have already been fixed by other crypto currencies like Bitcoin Cash.

The core development team behind Bitcoin doesn't seem to be interested in fixing these problems for the time being.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> * The people don't understand it. Check

* Everybody just wants a piece of it no matter what. Check

* Companies that have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies are trying to associate themselves with it. Check

</comment><comment><USER21> both involve irrational exuberance?</comment>


Biggest telescope starts observations - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/12/biggest-telescope-starts-obser.html

<comment><USER2> This is extremely cool, but I question the wisdom of naming it after a fictional terrorist organization from James Bond.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECTRE>

<comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_%28disambiguation%29></comment></comment>


Entrepreneurs Who Believe That Business Shouldn't Be Boring - <AUTHOR> http://www.nichegeek.com/10_entrepreneur_who_belive_that_business_shouldnt_be_boring

<comment><AUTHOR> Oddly enough, I found the exact same article submitted under the title "10 Online Businesses That Prove You Can Make Money Out Of Anything" to a different site. [http://madconomist.com/10-online-businesses-that-prove- you-c...](http://madconomist.com/10-online-businesses-that-prove-you-can-make- money-out-of-anything)</comment>


How IT Workers get conned out of an honest wage through secrecy - <AUTHOR> http://thetarah.com/2014/03/19/how-it-workers-get-conned-out-of-an-honest-wage-through-secrecy/

<comment><USER2> Plus, transparency isn't the complete solution. Just knowing exactly what you're being paid doesn't mean it's always a fair wage.</comment>


Why I Don't Think Craig Wright is Satoshi - <AUTHOR> https://danielmiessler.com/blog/why-i-dont-think-craig-wright-is-satoshi/ <comment><USER2> Hal Finney. Hal was a quiet, unassuming fellow who you had to get to know before you discovered he was incredibly smart.

Hal could never attend class, flip through a textbook on an unfamiliar subject, and then ace the final exam at Caltech. What would take me a solid 3 months of work.

The Satoshi thing is just the kind of prank Hal would have done.

<comment><USER3> I always wondered if the style of writing and coding could lead to the identification of the real author.

Or was he also clever enough to change his way of writing to even hide that?

<comment><USER4> It can, it's called stylometry. There was a talk at CCC i remember. I think it was this one: [https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6173_-_en_- _saal_g_-_201412291...](https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6173_-_en_- _saal_g_-_201412291715_-_source_code_and_cross-domain_authorship_attribution_- _aylin_-_greenie_-_rebekah_overdorf)

Iirc someone asked during Q&A if they tried to identify Satoshi Nakamoto like this and they said they think they know who it is but don't want to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > And I think he's definitely brilliant enough to do the work.

It's part of the scam. Bamboozle the target with technobabble. Target lacks the skills to independently verify the claim or even recognize the vocabulary is just plain wrong.

The technical lack of understanding has been documented repeatedly and in depth. Still, people insist in heaping misplaced praise on this huckster's intellect.

[https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-how-many- wrongs-m...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-how-many-wrongs-make- wright)

Not only does Wright's temperament not match Satoshi's, but Satoshi actually knew what he was talking about.

<comment><USER6> "Bamboozle the target with technobabble. Target lacks the skills to independently verify the claim or even recognize the vocabulary is just plain wrong."

Ah yes, an adage of my old Staff Sergeant (who probably borrowed it himself) "if you can't convince them with brilliance, confuse them with bullshit".

<comment><USER7> The canonical wording of that phrase seems to be "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." according to [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/W._C._Fields](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/W._C._Fields)

<comment><USER8> A related quote is- "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

s/software design/piece of public technical writing/ and you have a pretty good match for Wright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To me, the damning evidence is that Craig Wright tried to trick people into thinking he signed something with Satoshi's key when it turned out it was merely clever digital sleight of hand. Losing the key is possible, but employing a trick like that is a big warning sign that you're fake.

</comment><comment><USER10> > he's definitely brilliant enough to do the work

That was not the impression I got from him.

He did a cheap trick (on his own computer!) that would make a novice think he is Satoshi (he called a variable and then misspelt it deliberately to deceive the observer). Maybe I just don't like the word brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER11> Satoshi wrote the bitcoin whitepaper, a nine-page document:

[https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

can't you test Wright's claim by just saying "walk us through how you wrote this paper. the thought process, how it came to fruition. what was on your mind. you included a number of references, where did you get these? just, the whole process, etc."

presumably wright would hem and haw and not say anything.

\--

EDIT: I'm puzzled by the downvotes. I've been accused of not writing something myself, and it's easy to defend by just showing my work, drafts, etc. anyone who's ever written anything can speak really easily, maybe after a quick glance to look at it again. talking about the creative process is a pretty solid defense of authorship in my opinion.

<comment><USER12> If you think a false Satoshi would hem and haw and not say anything, you don't know how con artists work. Some people have the skill of lying fluently. If Wright isn't Satoshi, then clearly he is one of those people. Therefore this test would not distinguish anything.

<comment><USER13> The lack of humming and hawwing isn't nearly as convincing as the lack of demonstrable knowledge that should be expected of the real Satoshi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, of course. Can we stop giving him attention, please?

<comment><USER15> I have to agree. The media and everyone is taking his bait and giving him undue attention. Nobody thinks Craig is Satoshi. Nobody!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why do we think Satoshi is a singular person?

My pet theory is "Satoshi" was multiple people.

IIRC there was even speculation about one programmer who sadly passed away shortly after Bitcoin's launch.

If someone(s) used some variation of Shamir's Secret Sharing to lock up the credentials the death of one could have made them inaccessible.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing)

</comment><comment><USER17> I thought everything pointed to Paul Le Roux being Satoshi?

<comment><USER18> I'd bet $1 in Nick Szabo.

<comment><USER19> My money has always been on Hal Finney. Timing of his death and Satoshi's silence seems too coincidental, to say nothing of the fact that the first p2p transfer was between Hal and Satoshi, and Hal's credentials. Also can't ignore that the person who was falsely portrayed to be Satoshi due to his name (Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto) lived 2 blocks from Hal.

<comment><USER20> The work was probably done by Finney and Szabo together. As Satoshi is a fictional entity it could represent either or both of them. Though I think the writing under the name Satoshi was probably mostly Szabo.

<comment><USER17> That was my thinking at first as well. When I heard the name and that it was a pseudonym I thought of two things:

* a shadowy genius from a Dan Brown novel (like Ensei Tankado from _Digital Fortress_ )

* Nicolas Bourbaki (who _was_ a group of people)

But Le Roux is as smart as a group of mathematicians, and is much more the sort of person who would come up with ultralibertarian solutions like Bitcoin (being, you know, a criminal mastermind and all).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Setting aside the footnote about his private key, I find the logic annoying even if the conclusion is correct, because it's purely begging the question, IMO.

It reminds me of the argument that the moon landings were faked because the astronauts would have been killed by the Van Allen radiation belts. The only real answer to that is, well, they tried it and they weren't. But that doesn't resolve anything for doubters.

</comment><comment><USER22> Maybe it's just me, but who cares who Satoshi is? Knowing wouldn't change anything.

<comment><USER23> Well, for one reason, if Satoshi is alive; he can easily crash the entire bitcoin market if his wallets start selling currency.

If he's dead, (which is the case if he's Finney), then that is a not a risk.

If he is alive, then the likelyhood of him cashing out at some point is pretty high. He may be only be waiting for the moment when there is enough liquidity in the market for him to dump it all at once - and we're probably not quite there yet, he's said to have just under 1M BTC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am wondering if we can find his c/c++ code from 2008/2009 and compare with bitcoin early releases - that would clarify a few doubts...

<comment><USER24> Ah ok, looks like there is no code that he wrote, that is pretty much enough to know :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://www.stopcraigwright.com/screenshots](https://www.stopcraigwright.com/screenshots)

"Tonight I am downloading Java Security courses" \- haha, that's epic...

</comment><comment><USER25> I think I am quite sure who Satoshi is. Paul Le Roux.

</comment><comment><USER26> Correct, Wright is not Satoshi.

Because Satoshi is a project, not a person.</comment>


The Philosophy of Digital Art - <AUTHOR> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/digital-art/

<comment><USER2> The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a wonderful resource and a rare bird: It's a refereed work by > 1500 professional philosophers, and it's free. When I want to read in-depth about a topic in mathematics or logic, for example, (and if there is an SEP article on it) there are few authoritative alternatives on the web.

The articles are written by subject specialists in a field which focuses on the subtleties and complexities of reasoning, and they aren't writing for the evening news, so their articles do take some time and investment from the reader.

Consider supprorting them: [http://plato.stanford.edu/support/](http://plato.stanford.edu/support/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Move along. No discernible point made here, philosophical or otherwise.

<comment><USER4> Since at least Book X of Plato's Republic no one has come up with a better definition of Art than "derivative mimetic representations" of ideal forms. But, is "digital art" any different?

How will "interactivity", "virtuality", "ephemerality", "networks", "presence", "artificiality" and "trans-humanism" alter the traditional notion of a single author of a work attempting to achieve immortality? And does it truly matter? Or are we just prejudiced by the fact we have not yet seen digital Picasso's or Dali's?

Perhaps the pace of technology has outstripped the ability of artists to be the vanguard? Maybe we should begin looking to the neuroscientists to find a diagnosis for the symptoms we call Art?

<comment><USER5> We've seen amazing digital art already, but that doesn't make the submitted article any good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Any definition of digital art that doesn't include the demoscene (and related) or the ascii/ansi scene is not one that matters.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can I use this to promote the Artpacks.org ANSI & ASCII Art Archive?

[http://artpacks.org](http://artpacks.org)</comment>


An Introduction to Causal Inference - <AUTHOR> https://fabiandablander.com/r/Causal-Inference.html <comment><AUTHOR> This was a thorough yet concise overview of the Structural Causal Models framework that has been gaining in popularity recently.</comment>


U.S. Warms Up Its Own Old Spy Stories to Bash Putative Chinese Espionage - <AUTHOR> https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/02/us-warms-up-old-spy-story-to-warn-of-foreign-espionage.html <comment> java-man This is the _real_ story.</comment>


Senate Passes Music Modernization Act - valiant-comma https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/18/17876660/senate-passes-music-modernization-act <comment><AUTHOR> Wow.

      Mitch Glazier, the president of the Recording Industry
      Association of America (RIAA), said in a statement: "As
      legendary band the Grateful Dead once said in an iconic pre
      1972 song, 'what a long strange trip it's been.' It's been
      an epic odyssey, and we're thrilled to almost be at our
      destination.

That took some real chutzpah to quote the Grateful Dead, a band who's success was predicated on bootleg recordings, and one of who's band members founded the EFF, which adamantly opposes extending additional copyrights to pre-1972 material. Given the open and contentious debate surrounding music copyrights, I doubt it was a coincidence.</comment>


Salesforce encouraged employees to buy and expense Benioff's book to boost sales - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-marc-benioff-trailblazer-employees-expense-2020-1 <comment><USER2> I've nearly finished reading this and I have to say that it's one of the most out-of-touch business books I've ever read. Benioff sells Salesforce as an modern, socially responsible and generous organisation. He's not wrong, Salesforce is admirable in many ways but it's not as unique and different as it's sold as. The book sets Salesforce up as a pioneer in being a socially responsible but highly profitable business; in doing so, it's self-promotion draws attention to the fact that it's actually not all that radical or different to many other modern enterprise companies.

Benioff has lost perspective. He was once the pioneer of a new way of doing business and challenging the status-quo. What he's failed to see is that Salesforce has become the lumbering giant it once set out to slay.

One hilarious anecdote in a chapter on "innovation" describes how Benioff realises that the company must adopt AI technology to stay competitive. He gathers a group of engineers to work out how to "infuse AI into every product in our portfolio" because they "didn't want to be late to the revolution". I have a lot of respect for Benioff and his company which was once a massive trailblazer of the industry. I'm not sure it's quite got the edge to still claim that title.</comment>


Easter Island heads have bodies - <AUTHOR> http://seeker401.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/easter-island-heads-have-bodies/

<comment><USER2> Of course they have bodies! How is this news to anyone? A good part of these statues are well above ground _including_ their bodies, and we've known the sunken ones have bodies below the ground for several decades already.

They've been excavating these statues for quite a while already.

Here, go read the Wikipedia article on Moai, it's way more interesting than this article (which is just a copy of the first few paragraphs of <http://www.eisp.org/3879/> with the commentary "wild stuff" added):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai>

Now excuse me while I go submit an article about the Great Pyramids having five sides. Yes mind=blown, I know.

<comment><USER3> I think the fact that they're referred to as Easter Island _heads_ , rather than statues might have had something to do with it :)

More seriously, the iconic pictures of the heads are from Rano Raraku (IIRC), and that is just heads and a bit of neck sticking out of the ground, isn't it?

<comment><USER4> According to Google Image Seach :) more than a half has body, and some have a hat [http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=en&q=moai&gs_sm=e...](http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=en&q=moai&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=9765l10312l0l10656l4l4l0l0l0l0l391l719l3-2l2l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&biw=1024&bih=625&wrapid=tlif131998176684310&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi)

(IIRC, all most of them had had a hut, but in most of them the hat had fallen an been lost.)

<comment><USER5> Well IIRC most moai were placed at the shore or on the cliffs, and the hats were generally rounded. So giant wheel + hill + ocean is definitely going to end with the majority of the hats being lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whenever I see an easter island head, I can't help but draw parallels between our global civilization and theirs.

The eastern islanders consisted of around a dozen tribes, each competing for resources with others. It's thought that all of these statues were put up in a race by chieftains, competing with one another to put up the biggest, most refined and the best statue.

I wouldn't be surprised if they competed in their standards of life too. ("I eat X for breakfast, lunch and dinner!") I certainly wouldn't be surprised by the fact that they might have had political factions, special interests and a life rife with complicated political maneuvering. (it was certainly in the short term interests of statue makers to be against conservation and egg chieftains on)

After all we're the same species and they were just like us.

However what they failed to realize was the inescapable fact that they were living on a small piece of land in the middle of a vast ocean. Their seemingly inexhaustible resources were pitiful by any standards.

As time wore on and their population boomed, a point came when all of these factors came together. Their squandering of resources combined with their unsustainable way of life for a large population faced off with their limited resources, and the result was ugly. Their entire civilization collapsed.

Most of the population was lost to famine. Their civilization descended to cannibalism to survive. This degraded civilization became the perfect breeding ground for disease and even more people died. This cycle went on and on until their entire civilization was wiped out and the entire population nearly eradicated.

I shudder to think what it must have been like to live in this world. It must have been a nightmare.

Today like the eastern islanders with their statues, we keep on building taller and taller structures, better and more lethal weapons, and crazier systems. We compete with one another for status symbols at personal, regional and national levels.

Today we are just as isolated on this tiny blue ball, with a finite amount of resources, a booming population, combined with special interests and huge egos.

Like the eastern islanders we have nowhere to go...

<comment><USER7> Ok, nice prose of your, but the tiny blue ball thing is bullshit. Any plane on window seat will show you that the Earth is enormous and empty for most it's parts, even in China.

Don't think I advocate more cars and buildings. It's just that the tiny crowded ball argument is wrong, and dangerous, as it can be used to build a nasty antihumanism.

<comment><USER6> >>> nice prose of your <<<

Thank you, but my prose is far from being nice. You should see my boss with a red pen around my prose. :-)

>>>but the tiny blue ball thing is bullshit<<<

Carl Sagan has another take on the matter. :-)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M>

>>>Any plane on window seat will show you that the Earth is enormous and empty for most it's parts, even in China.

Don't think I advocate more cars and buildings. It's just that the tiny crowded ball argument is wrong, and dangerous, as it can be used to build a nasty antihumanism.<<<

I would argue that treating our resources as essentially endless because of the sheer size as compared to the individual fails to take into account that there are now 7 Billion people on this earth. Each and every one of them deserves a better life, they deserve to be able to have a luxurious bath, flush toilets with water, wash hands with water, eat processed foods which take a lot of water to make, wash their cars with water, drink pure water and at the end of the day consume around 315 litres of it. Of course, today not everyone lives like that except for wealthy countries (the statistic is based upon the US) but I think everyone wants a standard of life like that. If somehow, tomorrow 7 billion people started consuming water like that then we would drink up 2 205 000 000 000 litres of fresh water in a day, but the total possible water supply we can access (and this includes the glaciers) is only 3.5 × 10^19 litres...

That's quite an easy way to run out of water.

Now if you do the same with energy, with waste, with consumption and so on what you have is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. The way we live today just can't last. I think that you can solve this problem using technology, but its roots lie deep in our societies.

What's frightening over here is that there is no way out for us. Unlike our ancestors we simply can't burn and move on. The earth is where we have to make our stand. I really think that it's important for people to start taking the gravity of the situation seriously. We need solutions, and we need them fast. Our time is running out.

I think that there is no greater form of humanism than realizing that all of these people need to be saved from such an horrible end and devoting your entire life to creating a better future.

<comment><USER7> I see a demographic problem if and only if Americans continue spreading their unhealthy way of life.

<comment><USER8> It's not about Americans spreading their unhealthy way of life. It's about non-Americans claiming that life (more or less) as their own.

<comment><USER7> Well, you know, I live in Chine since 8 years and, in some ways, there is a profound influence of the "American way of life", mostly through the channel of Holywood movies. The matter could be worse: Chinese have the weight on their side, they can't change so fast as to lose their identity, but still, they have an idea of what should be an happy life that is formatted by these f __* movies (really hate then, sorry). For instance, they think everyone should ought to live in an appartement in a tower, own a car, drink canned soda, eat industrial food cooked in microwave, have only one overprotected child, work in suits, go shopping each Saturday, watch baseball on a gigantic TV on Sundays, etc.

They can't believe it when I tell them I am living in a cheap courtyard house, rides a bike to work, never drinks soda, eat home cooked food, never watches TV, know nothing about baseball, climbs mountains on the week-end. In fact, it is the way their parent and grand-parents lives (eg. my neighbors) and the younger generation don't want that, they want the "American way", the supposed "comfort". Maybe a personal taste, but I think Chinese way is better, for me, my family and even for the little big blue ball floating in the universe.

Don't get me wrong: I know US citizen do not live like described, and I tell my friends and colleagues as much as I can. But the problematic part is, again, those f __* Hollywood movies that have too much worldwide influence. (I therefore welcome any other influence, Mangas, Bollywood, Hong-Kong kungfu, anything _else_ is better.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This blew my mind. I don't know why, I find it incredibly eye-opening that the first thought that one might think of on seeing a head in the dirt (that there's the rest of it underneath) has just simply never occurred to generations of people because we were "told" by someone that they're just heads.

How powerful words can be in casting an illusion, in defeating creativity, and hiding the truth!

<comment><USER10> A Google Images search for "Easter Island" reveals many heads with above- ground bodies, and a few heads buried up to their noses. That some of the bodies are buried up to the neck should come as no surprise to anyone.

<comment><USER5> What I wonder is, were these buried statues left like that by the islanders. I mean to get the hat on the statue, the statue has to both be stable and you have to access the head.

So was the easy method of doing this burying the statue? If so how fast did the islanders die off that they couldn't dig out the statues back to their intended state.

What's scary is what these peoples last days must have been like if they abandoned so many of these before completion.

<comment><USER11> I seriously doubt the easiest way to get the hat on is by digging a massive hole, burying the statue, using the ground around it as a ramp, maneuvering the head into position and then somehow either raising the statue in position or digging out the ground around the hole so that it no longer looks like a hole. I think it's more likely the statues were laid flat, their hats attached and then raised with ropes and blocks of wood and a lot of man power.

Who knows why they were buried, perhaps their religions and customs changed over time and they buried certain heads as a mark of denigration or respect.

<comment><USER10> My bet would be natural silting and settlement. Easter Island was deforested at some point in its history. New groundwater patterns and a few hundred years could easily sink a few stone statues up to their eyebrows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is one of the most amazing discoveries I have seen recently. The sheer weight of that stone is absolutely insane. I'm still a little stunned this was just discovered.

I would love to know what the people who made this were thinking. To create a work of art that detailed and massive just to bury 75% of it seems very odd. I'm sure there was a good reason to do it (in their minds at least), I'd love to know what that was.

<comment> Anti-Ratfish Making stuff and burying it is very common in archeology according to my (limited) knowledge. Chucking stuff as offerings into springs, holes etc as offerings. Burin it with dead people (anyone under that stone is now 2 dimensional). But I do agree that this seems odd - half burying...

<comment><USER13> Guess it could be a case of bad foundation, causing it to slowly sink into the ground over many years. Judging the type of ground of the excavation site at the photo, it seems to contain a rather high amount of clay, which is a terrible foundation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Like everybody, I've heard of the heads at Easter Island since childhood and yet I never had a clue of where on Earth Easter Island migh be.

So here's a Google Maps link for geography-impaired folks like me: [http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Easter+Island,+Isla+de+Pascua,...](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Easter+Island,+Isla+de+Pascua,+Chile&hl=en&ll=-12.897489,-65.742187&spn=114.078688,227.988281&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=55.543096,113.994141&vpsrc=6&hnear=Easter+Island&t=m&z=3)

Answer: between Chile and Australia, closer to Chile.

</comment><comment><USER15> That is phenomenal. Raises the question: did whoever built them bury them, or were they buried by natural forces?

<comment><USER16> I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps originally they weren't buried. Are they designed in such as way as they could have stood upright by themselves?

I would guess that the people doing this work would be able to determine the dirt they were digging into was newer or older than the rock itself.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps they couldn't turn these massive pieces of rock upright without the aid of gravity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone else wondering why it took so long to look below the surface?

<comment><USER19> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahu_Tongariki.jpg>

The article has an image of excavated ones that have short bodies. Seems like this one was unusually tall.

<comment><USER20> Relevant quote from that WP link:

"Though moai are whole-body statues, they are commonly referred to as "Easter Island heads". This is partly because of the disproportionate size of most moai heads and partly because, from the invention of photography until the 1950s, the only moai standing on the island were the statues on the slopes of Rano Raraku, many of which are buried to their shoulders. Some of the "heads" at Rano Raraku have been excavated and their bodies seen, and observed to have markings that had been protected from erosion by their burial."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> ancient aliens!

<comment><USER22> Read the book "Behold!! The Protong!" and you'll get an even more intriguing explanation. These statues are a WARNING TO THE FUTURE that the great CATACLYSM, which comes in cycles, will HAPPEN AGAIN.

Below the ground-line (which represents the flood survivors emerging from the murk) these statues are holding the "Bi" - an iconic feature representative of the grand CATACLYSM where the balance of water is tipped, and which you can find in almost all ancient artwork, regardless of the culture that creates it - an ocean-covering flood which occurs when the land masses move in reaction to Solar activity.

Easter Island is a WARNING set up by an ancient civilization to protect us from ignorance.

Let us never learn the extent to which SZUKALSKI was RIGHT!

<comment><USER23> Setting aside the outlandish CONJECTURE which is the CONTENT of your post, the arbitrary SHOUTING does not aid your CREDIBILITY.

<comment><USER22> I would have thought quoting SZUKALSKI alone would have set that off, but okay .. not that I'm a huge fan of Zermatism (a subject I would have thought at least a few hackernews visitors might be familiar with) but the ideas of SZUKALSKI are intriguing from the perspective of being able to look outside the box. There is scientific analytical thought, and then there is artistic motive desire, and if you apply both to the same subject you often get surprising results.

In my opinion, the idea of Protong-as-a-warning has quite a bit of validity, if only intelligent minds weren't so easily dissuaded from looking outside their own little boxes now and then ...

<comment><USER20> "if you apply both to the same subject"

Where's the scientific thought?

If the world was covered with an ocean any time soon (call it the last million years so we can include every human culture) then there would be obvious physical traces, and salt-intolerant species, including plants, would have died.

<comment><USER22> The oceans move, was his point. I would investigate the science, but the science-fiction of a language called Protong is far more intriguing and worthwhile a pursuit. While I will always respect the mainstream desire to discern the truth, a fiction about Easter Island may be just as valid.

<comment><USER20> Whenever I see "may" I have to remember that it's essentially meaningless, and your text is equally valid changing it to "may not", as in "a fiction about Easter Island may not be just as valid."

First you say "apply both to the same subject" and now you say that's fiction may be "just as valid."

Szukalski's fiction is 30 volumes of text. You pick out that "the oceans move"? (By which you mean "cover the Earth", not continental drift or tides.) What about that human culture comes from a people on Easter Island, after Noah's flood? How is that fiction at all valid? Races derive from crossbreeding of species, again, after the flood? How is that at all valid?

If it's hard to pick the valid fiction from the invalid, then what's the point? Isn't it like looking up the date by randomly picking a day from this year's calendar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone else have flashbacks of super mario brothers on gameboy when they see the statues?

</comment><comment><USER25> This still a tech news aggregator? This is something that should be on reddit, not hacker news...?

<comment><USER24> Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT...

tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.

<comment><USER2> > Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting > is OT...

Art, okay. But how is this paradigm shifting?

We already knew they have bodies below surface for at least a couple of decades. And a good deal of the statues are well above ground with their bodies. They're just called "Easter Island Heads" because their heads are often disproportionally large to their bodies. PARADIGM SHIFT!

If that's a paradigm shift to you, here, have some more! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions>

Though, I do notice that "Easter Island Heads are in fact not merely heads" is not among them. Maybe I should edit that, given the popularity of this story among what are supposed to be a community of knowledgeable and intelligent people :)

Finally, you say it's a story about "discovery". The posted article doesn't really mention anything about a discovery. The _original_ article kind of does: <http://www.eisp.org/3879/> Has the same pictures, nearly the same text, maybe it's a bit TL;DR for this crowd given that you even had to summarize your one-sentence post:

> tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.

In which case, congratulations to anybody who read this far.

<comment><USER24> Wow! I just finished reading though the list of common misconceptions. If you were aware of all of those misconceptions am extremely impressed. That list covers an enormous body of knowledge. To be honest I would not have imagined that anyone would know all of those details, congratulations.

Did you really know all of those?

<comment><USER2> I don't know, it's a while back that I read the article.

I should check again, I suppose (or hope) the ones I don't know about, at least I know I don't know about? :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>