Obama Administration Set to Take Executive Action on Gun Control - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/article/obama-administration-set-to-take-executive-action-on-gun-control?utm_source=vicefbus <comment><USER2> "Earlier this month, Congress remained deadlocked on the issue, with Republican Senators shooting down a proposal from Senate Democrats to stop suspected terrorists on no-fly lists from buying guns and also a measure to tighten background checks."

This statement is utterly false. The only Senate Democrats action that remotely resembles that claim was SA 2910, which was written solely to overwrite the ObamaCare repeal elements of the parent bill, H.R.3762. Because it was a bogus attempt to kill the ObamaCare repeal with language that was completely unrelated to the U.S. Code addressed by the bill, it was ruled Out of Order.

Senate Democrats have made NO attempt to introduce any such standalone legislation with the claimed effect. (For that matter, SA 2910, the Feinstein scam, doesn't even mention the Terror Watchlist.)

</comment><comment><USER3> If there is one place in the American government where "checks and balances" have become a farce, it is in the sheer amount of things the executive branch can get away with by EO. I will be very interested to see what, if any, effect they can have on actual gun control with an Executive Order, and just how fast the Judicial Branch strikes this down.

It is far easier for us to vilify guns and maintain the status quo versus recognize and fix what is actually causing all of this violence: the quickly widening cultural polarity between Americans. An actually united populace and culture does not often shoot itself to death. There's too much money to be made by making people pick sides instead of join on a common one, and until that changes, I don't think America will ever solve its violence problem.</comment>


Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? - <AUTHOR> http://larrysanger.org/2011/06/is-there-a-new-geek-anti-intellectualism/ <comment><USER2> I always find it somewhat ironic that these discussion about anti- intellectualism always seem to lack any knowledge of how old this very discussion is. Plato's Phaedrus spends plenty of time discussing the effects of new technology (writing) on current intellectual practice (memory), and yet I rarely see it even touched on when people write on the topic, so much for those old books. More important: the real anti-intellectualism to look out for is the 'trial of Socrates' kind, not disregarding one form of transmitting knowledge because of your own intellectual curiosity. Certain classes of 'geeks' feeling they have found a better model of knowledge transmission, even if they are wrong, than the academic model is not anti-intellectualism.

<comment><USER3> Beautiful comment. There might be some parallels between the entrepreneurial culture of the Valley (drop out of school to go conquer the universe, etc.) and the warrior culture of Sparta and Athens. The spirited youth that Socrates seduced were bent on fame and fortune on the battlefield, and had little time for long-haired hippie freak philosophers.

<comment><USER4> I don't think Athens was known for its "warrior culture".

<comment><USER5> From antique on and indeed today. Any civilization worth mentioning in history had a warrior culture. Indeed a man that was not a trained warrior was deemed unfit to perform any kind of public service.

Some cultures being known as more war like, in my opinion only signals their relative cultural poverty on other areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I resent and disagree with the distinction that is being drawn up here.

The notion of disruption is not inherently anti-intellectual. The notion that whatever society or structure under discussion has reached a local maximum, and must be torn down somewhat to be built back up is not to say that a society is worthless, or wrong at it's fundament, but rather that sometimes, change is not possible from within.

It is the opposite of conservatism (with the little "c").

Additionally in the world of the internet, where a thousand flowers bloom, and theories and movements are spawned and die every day, i put relatively little stock in each of the common wisdoms that spring up for their 15 minutes of fame, and then fade into the abyss. Fads like the notion of experts being unnecessary are ridiculous, and largely have no legs. And even to the extent that they do reflect some deep seated feeling, i would more likely attribute them to an antipathy to credentialism, rather than the notion that expertise is worthless.

And if you want to put a political spin on this, posts like these are exactly the sort of false equivalences which make moral argumentation impossible. Sure geekdom has its share of charlatans and know-nothings pretending to be masters of insight, but this is different from demands of faith and fanaticism, and that if you disagree with orthodoxy, not only are you _wrong_ but that you are _forever damned_ , and in some cases, shunned by your friends and family.

I've listened to David Barton (The "Historian", and yes, the scare quotes should indicate to you that he's not an actual historian.) make the claim that the Bible lays out specific prescriptions on tax policy, and that if you vote for a party that raises taxes, you are not on the right side with God.

These are not the same caliber of argument, and i am extremely frustrated to hear them equated.

<comment><USER7> >The notion of disruption is not inherently anti-intellectual. The notion that whatever society or structure under discussion has reached a local maximum, and must be torn down somewhat to be built back up is not to say that a society is worthless, or wrong at it's fundament, but rather that sometimes, change is not possible from within.

I'm not really sure what you mean here. Tearing down what--books? Schools of thought?

<comment><USER6> Sure, i mean all of these things are about the process which produces stuff. So i mean the institution of the book. For example, that the majority of academic publishing be measured in books (some fields definitely do this). Or that the "great" works of literature are inaccessible to the vast majority of the public and that there are more worthwhile things that could be done with one's time than reading "War and Peace".

That is not to say that reading "War and Peace" is wrong, or that it has no value, but that we should reassess whether reading "War and Peace" is somehow a metric of serious thought. This is the same sort of bullshit that people doing pop culture research have had to deal with for _years_. Whether it's research into comic art (and yes there are research libraries for cartoons – i spent 3 years working in one), contemporary art, or journalists using twitter, their existence is not (inherently) a zero-sum game with the old order. It is a threat to _orthodoxy_ , but it is not a threat to academic inquiry or knowledge.

It'd be like claiming that Martin Luther was a great threat to religion and faith, because he sparked the reformation.

<comment><USER8> I don't think reading "War and Peace" is in itself a metric of serious thought so much as it is a test of literacy and of attention span.

<comment><USER9> Or sheer bloody mindedness. If you read "War and Peace" to improve your mind, more power to you. If you read it because you think it will make you better that someone else, you're just engaging in more social signaling.

<comment><USER8> I don't think people ever do that. Not with _War and Peace_ , anyhows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> An odd thing about Larry Sanger in this regard is that he is actually a pretty good positive (in some ways) example of what he claims to decry! Here is what his bio on that page says:

 _I call myself an "Internet Knowledge Organizer." I started Wikipedia.org, Citizendium.org, and WatchKnow.org, among others. Now I am lucky enough to be able to work full-time on creating free materials for early education, which I am using with my two little boys and sharing with you._

Now, that all sounds pretty interesting. But does it sound like traditional academia? What are his formal credentials in Internet Knowledge Organization? What are his formal credentials in early childhood education? What does he publish in peer-reviewed journals in those areas? It sounds almost as if, despite no formal training in sociology, new media, online communities, pedagogy, etc. (all of which _do_ have established academic fields, which he could've studied if he wished), he just brazenly went out there and started some projects. As far as I can tell, he didn't even _read_ what had been written about those areas. That's cool, but why is he then all negative on the idea in general? If we wanted to apply some strict standard of expertise, Larry Sanger should be publishing in philosophy journals (an area he has formal training in), and staying out of online communities, education, and other areas in which he lacks academic expertise.

In any case, I'm a computer science academic, and in _our_ field I don't see it as a new sentiment: the idea that you can be a brilliant garage hacker with no degree is decades old. I don't think it's overall that negative a relationship, either. It's not necessarily idyllic, but plenty of non- academics are interested in the work of academic research (algorithms, PLs, operating systems, AI). Even in industry, researchy stuff, like what comes out of Google Research and MSR, gets a lot of interest. It might help that some respect is given in the opposite direction as well-- plenty of academics' heroes include non-degree-holding garage hackers.

<comment><USER11> "An odd thing about Larry Sanger in this regard is that he is actually a pretty good positive (in some ways) example of what he claims to decry!"

His premise isn't that making knowledge more accessible is bad. It is that the growing attitude that is comprised of (among other things) "If it's on wikipedia, I don't actually need to know it"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Geeks I know value skill and creativity over knowledge. Getting things done instead of getting stuck in pointless intellectual and political considerations. There is a growing contempt for the old academic intelligentsia more concerned with 'clan politics' than actual knowledge creation. The system looks like it is meritocratic, but whoever dwells there long enough knows how far this is from meritocracy.

What seems to be the consensus is that academia has not brought in any revolutionary innovation for decades. Whenever practical innovation came, it came from characters as far from the 'standard intellectual stereotype' as could possibly be. As a result there is a haughty "keep debating while we get the job done" attitude, which may be mistaken for anti-intellectualism. In reality it is not that geeks dislike experts and intellectuals - it is that they've met too many would-be-experts who failed their most trivial relevancy tests, so the term 'expert' raises a BullshitIncomingException almost immediately in any geek's mind.

<comment><USER13> Do you know how crazy that sounds, typed in a medium invented by a theoretical physicist? Of course I am referring to Tim Berners-Lee.

What counts as "innovation" these days is what, LOLcats?

<comment><USER12> I think you missed my point. It is not against theoretical science. It is against scientific politics that seem to dominate academia.

Regarding Tim Berners Lee, he is imho all but an 'average theoretical physicist' - which further proves my point.

<comment><USER14> Being against "politics" in anything always seems to be shorthand for being against having one's world view challenged. This old meme gets trotted out by corpratists all the time: "X process has become so politicised, if only it were more efficient". It's becoming quite tiring and doesn't actually help advance anyone's argument forward - which I guess is the point.

<comment><USER15> "Politics" seems to be an excuse for giving up these days. I think baby boomer parenting techniques have left a generation with very little resolve in the face of adversity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think Sanger has conflated multiple streams of argument here.

The first is marxist and postmodernist critiques of the classics. "Dead White Men" and all that jazz.

The second is the demoticism (not the democratisation) of the internet.

These are unrelated, in my view. The PoMx/PoMo criticism is more political, in my view, than what it purports to critique. The change in demoticism is itself not a fundamental change but a rhyming riff on what has happened in the past.

Today the classics have never been more accessible. But just as when Penguin Classics was introduced, most people want penny dreadfuls, potboilers, comic books and a generous helping of porn.

</comment><comment><USER17> There are a lot of good reasons to read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", but one thing I got out of it that I think is applicable to this discussion relates to our concept of "the classics". In fields of knowledge where they is progress the classics are often respected, but seldom read. Nobody learning about physics reads the original Newton[1] because there are better ways to phrase the same insights that are easier for students to digest. So we have fields that make progress like the sciences where students read modern textbooks, and fields that don't the original works of their discipline.

The classics have their place as art and as sources of prestige, but if you're looking to learn things there are usually better places to look.

Not that I disagree with everything Mr. Sanger said, but the truth is a complicated beast.

[1] Some people studying _the history of science_ read the originals, but thats different.

<comment><USER15> Newton is not a classical author. "Classics" basically refers to philosophy, theology, literature and history from 600BC to 600AD. Humanities in Greece and Rome.

<comment><USER18> Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren include him in the canon in _How To Read a Book_. That seems to be as authoritative a list as any.

<http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html>

<comment><USER9> Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren were, by the way, strong supporters of the reader conversing, even arguing, with the author. I don't the Sanger is on the same page with them, and I don't believe they would agree with his essay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm reading Anna Karenina right now. It's enjoyable. I think many people would get something out of it if they read it. But most people never did. The majority has never been "well-read". And so, if we can make the majority well- equipped with information (by destroying impenetrable silos and distributing their grain), who cares if that doesn't have any other effect? The person who is well-informed will not necessarily be the same person who has received an excellent liberal arts education any more, but at least ze'll be well- informed.

Edit: clarity. I never intended to say anything about the classics' _value_ , only their past and future _popularity_.

(in hindsight, the former could easily have been an interpretation of the post)

<comment><USER20> I can read a wikipedia article on Libertarianism, or I can read "Stranger in a Strange Land". I can read about the dangers of absolute power and lack of free will, or I can read "1984".

The lessons learned from classics are constantly quoted, and it's beneficial for people to read and learn.

<comment><USER19> I absolutely agree that reading some classics would be valuable for anyone, but I think it would be hard to learn anything concrete from a lot of what is considered "art".

My argument was that we aren't destroying the silos because we hate the information, we're destroying them because we hate the silos. And if that's beneficial, who cares if most people, who wouldn't have otherwise read Russian literature or listened to Mozart, still don't?

<comment><USER21> Who cares if other people, who most likely wouldn't have read the manual for their computer, still don't?

I mean, Google is obviously supplanting the manual for a lot of things, but the point is much the same. If people read the fucking manual, they'll have a lot fewer problems. And a lot of the classics are pretty damn good manuals for life.

<comment><USER22> I'd venture that someone could spend a lifetime attempting to read/listen to the 'classics' and still not fully accomplish that goal. So does this mean that we should all dwell in the past and eschew the future? Or that we should eschew the past and focus on the future?

<comment><USER23> The future is often the past repeating itself, but most aren't aware of this.

<comment><USER9> That one is trotted out a little too often. I much prefer Twain's "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

It's important to know of the past, but many who use this argument are simply afraid of the present, and are attempting to denigrate new ideas and discoveries.

<comment><USER23> I said often, not always. Also, it tends to be an amalgam of different pasts. Like right now what the US is doing in the Middle East looks a whole lot like Athens during the Peloponnesian War, and what we're doing financially looks like what Japan did.

So, I do think it is an accurate phrase, but misunderstood.

<comment><USER22> You're not going to find out about 'what Japan did' by reading 'the classics' though. The past is encompassed in more than just classic literature.

<comment><USER23> Quite true, but classics focus on distilling principles. If the authors' thinking was valid then, there isn't any reason it shouldn't be valid now, as I've been arguing that at least parts of the past repeat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think this essay's definition of _anti-intellectualism_ is incoherent -- must I disrespect knowledge itself, disrespect all education beyond grade school, disrespect _War and Peace_ , or merely disrespect Nicholas Carr, in order to be labeled an _anti-intellectual_? -- so it's hard to make a definitive response.

But here's a partial response, focused strictly on the phenomenon of college education:

It would be easier to embrace academia if the inflation-adjusted cost of going to school were stable or decreasing, rather than growing at 6.8% per year between 1987 and 2009:

[http://seekingalpha.com/article/144835-college-tuition- expla...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/144835-college-tuition-explaining- the-increases)

With a few exceptions -- gods bless MIT Open Courseware and the Khan Academy -- the academy does not scale, nor does it even try very hard. The Internet gets more inclusive every year. The academy does not. As economies grow around the world and the web gets built out, we add more and more people to our public discourse, and the percentage of those people who've gone to Harvard just gets smaller and smaller.

It would be easier to embrace academia if a young academic had more than a snowball's chance in hell of finding an academic job. Nostalgic baby boomers can look back at a time when new colleges were going up at a great rate and they were all hiring staff. Not so much anymore. I know _lots and lots_ of people who would love to do laboratory research, for example... in a world where it didn't involve an enormous pay cut, enormous career risk, incredible devotion, high stress, difficult politics, and potentially the sacrifice of one's family life.

It would be easier to embrace academia if academic research, much of which is paid for with public funds, was published in open journals that all taxpayers could read for free, instead of in expensive private journals that only other academics can access for "free" via their university libraries.

And a lot more people would be touting the virtues of college degrees if the unemployment rate for college graduates weren't at its highest point since 1970:

[http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2010-12-06-...](http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2010-12-06-collegegrads06_ST_N.htm)

It may not be entirely the intellectuals' fault that college education costs more than before and can take longer than ever to pay off [1], but you can't expect people not to complain about it.

\---

[1] AFAIK college education _does_ pay off, handsomely, even now. Although if tuition keeps growing and wages do not, shouldn't we feel free to wonder, out loud, how much longer this can remain true? Isn't that what a numerate intellectual might wonder?

<comment><USER25> > It would be easier to embrace academia if academic research, much of which > is paid for with public funds, was published in open journals that all > taxpayers could read for free, instead of in expensive private journals that > only other academics can access for "free" via their university libraries.

In principle I agree with this point, in practice it is moot. Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire. No, they can't read the articles without leaving their office, but, yes, they can get all of the research articles and other scholarly publications _for free_. Libraries exist for a reason, they still provide the service they advertise. This is a false criticism of the flawed and broken publishing system.

> I think this essay's definition of anti-intellectualism is incoherent -- > must I disrespect knowledge itself, disrespect all education beyond grade > school, disrespect War and Peace, or merely disrespect Nicholas Carr, in > order to be labeled an anti-intellectual? -- so it's hard to make a > definitive response.

As in a discussion on religion it depends entirely on how you scope the word "intellectual." It could and does mean a variety of things. I believe the author of the original article was leaving it open to many meanings. This is not good writing. He should have said what he meant, instead of the feeling of what he meant.

> in a world where it didn't involve an enormous pay cut, enormous career > risk, incredible devotion, high stress, difficult politics, and potentially > the sacrifice of one's family life.

Those are all fair statements on the cost of pursuing a life in academic research. However, only the pay cut really differentiates academia from any other competitive field. People engage in academia because they love it not because they get rich.

> As economies grow around the world and the web gets built out, we add more > and more people to our public discourse

Interesting factoid, the amount of academic publishing has pretty much only gone up in last century. So even discounting the Internet public discourse (and I do believe academic publications are public) has been growing.

<comment><USER24> Let's not get into estimating the actual percentage of humanity that lives within, say, thirty minutes of a publicly accessible library with a _Nature_ subscription. (I do, but I pay big-city rent for a reason.) Instead, let's talk about modern information technology.

Have you ever visited tvtropes.org? Don't go if you don't have the rest of the day to waste. It is _seriously_ addictive, mostly because it's a sterling example of hypertext in action, maybe even better than Wikipedia. Every article is linked to the others. Every citation has a link. You want to check a reference, you click. You want to surf a chain of references _N_ generations back, you click _N_ times. You can't _not_ follow the links on tvtropes.org, unless you simply hate all pop culture.

It is the height of irony that HTTP was originally invented to link up academic publications, because when last I surfed academic journals, six years or so ago, it didn't work that way. You would click a journal article, maybe click through a couple of crappy login screens, maybe navigate up and down some menus on some journal's CMS, and finally find the article after a bunch of surfing. It would have footnotes. The footnotes were almost never links. Instead you had to manually type their key information into your local library's website in some other window, and then hope that your local library had the journal, then surf through some more screens and up and down some more delightful CMS cruft before you found the article.

Smart folks would download PDFs of everything as they went and then file them in some personal database like Endnote. But they still wouldn't be cross- linked. You had to spend time organizing them, or use the search a lot.

I assume that this workflow has improved at least a bit since then. Maybe Endnote or its competitor is smarter, maybe journals have finally started publishing hyperlinks. Maybe it has even improved to the point that academic literature is half as easy to surf as, say, tvtropes.org. In which case I take back much of what I said, and we can go back to estimating how many people can actually be expected to access the blessed terminal where all of this can happen. But I bet it hasn't improved that much. I bet it's still impossible to construct a hyperlink from _Nature_ directly to _Science_ , mostly because they've got different and incompatible DRM.

Mind you, things are heaven compared to when _I_ was in grad school, when following references from a paper meant going into the stacks, laboriously collecting one heavy paper volume per footnote, physically hauling them back to a photocopier, and copying the articles two pages at a time. Oh, the hours I spent. Life is much better now. But, you know, young people don't know or care about how hard _I_ had it. All they can see is that it's fifty times easier to research the plot of any episode of _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ than it is to follow a chain of citations from a Nobel-winning publication back two generations, and that a popular article about a videogame from 1980 can link to its sources but a popular article about a publication from last Wednesday's _Nature_ can only link to a paywall.

Science is always going to be a hard sell compared to the rest of our culture, so why do we make it even harder?

<comment><USER25> > Maybe it has even improved to the point that academic literature is half as > easy to surf as, say, tvtropes.org.

It is. try google scholar, pub med, or academic.research.microsoft.com for starters and Mendeley for building a personal "library" (note Mendeley isn't perfect but it is a lot better than not using a paper manager.) Things aren't great but they are better.

> I bet it's still impossible to construct a hyperlink from Nature directly to > Science, mostly because they've got different and incompatible DRM.

I have no idea I don't read Nature or Science. The Computer Science literature I read is all easily searchable these days.

> Mind you, things are heaven compared to when I was in grad school, when > following references from a paper meant going into the stacks, laboriously > collecting one heavy paper volume per footnote, physically hauling them back > to a photocopier, and copying the articles two pages at a time.

I still do this (but for Religious Studies research in my spare time) and don't really mind it, although I try to avoid photocopying when possible as it is a pain.

> All they can see is that it's fifty times easier to research the plot of any > episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion than it is to follow a chain of citations > from a Nobel-winning publication back two generations, and that a popular > article about a videogame from 1980 can link to its sources but a popular > article about a publication from last Wednesday's Nature can only link to a > paywall.

I am usually against the idea of progress, but in this instance I do believe this will not be the case forever. Already we are starting to see changes in the publishing industry. Search tools are improving, archiving tool are improving, library collection tools are improving. Yes it is slow, but the problems they are solving a much harder than the problem of _generating_ new content. New content can be put the days leading format (papyrus, scrolls, codex, books, pamphlets/newspaper/magazine, websites/blogs/wikis) at zero extra cost. Old content however costs a lot to update. Libraries and academic journals have a lot of content that existed before the web, before the pdf, and before the wiki. It takes sometime of the format transition but if the past is any guide the old formats eventually become historical curiosities rather than knowledge repositories.

<comment><USER24> Oh, I'm not surprised to find the _CS_ literature leading the way to our hyperlinked future. CS folks are the first to know the score when it comes to online publishing.

Unfortunately, I was never a CS guy, I was a cancer researcher. And if you can't read the _Nature_ journals you're not going to keep up with medical or genetic research -- everyone in the field openly lusts after _Nature_ publications; _Nature_ gets first crack at every manuscript -- and _Nature_ sits firmly behind a paywall.

Let's try your helpful suggestions on the legendary paper, _Viable offspring derived from fetal and mammalian cells_ , a.k.a. "the Dolly-the-sheep paper", _Nature_ 385, 810-813 (27 February 1997). Surely I can write a blog post in which I link directly to the methods section of this famous work, which contains the first-ever working recipe for cloning an entire mammal? I mean, this is from 1997. We even had the web in 1997. Don't try to tell me that this has to be painstakingly transcribed from some faded papyrus.

Pubmed has the abstract, of course -- they have abstracts for everything:

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9039911>

And Microsoft provides lots of cute metadata about this paper, but no actual contents:

[http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Publication/4066302/v...](http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Publication/4066302/viable- offspring-derived-from-fetal-and-adult-mammalian-cells)

...so if I want to talk about the methods section, it looks like I'll have to tell my blog readers to click through to, e.g., the Nature Publishing Group and pay _thirty-two dollars_ for the privilege [1]:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v385/n6619/pdf/385810a0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v385/n6619/pdf/385810a0.pdf)

Or will I? Google Scholar to the rescue:

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Viable+offspring+derived...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Viable+offspring+derived+from+fetal+and+adult+mammalian+cells&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C22&as_sdtp=on)

The first link is to a reprint of most of the article, in a book. And they've managed to include every page. Today, anyway. For me, this time. (Other pages of the book are "not included" in the preview, so maybe others won't be so lucky?)

Oops, except the figures and tables aren't there. Sure hope there wasn't any data in those figures and tables.

So I'm saved, sort of, thanks to Google's big scanning budget and even bigger legal budget, provided I want to cite the words of Wilmut _et al_ , and not their data. Or their slightly-more-obscure references, or any of their many citations -- for those, I will have to repeat this dance, and hope I still get lucky.

I know I've got a bit of an _idee fixe_ here, but I cannot get over how _utterly lame_ this is. My god, it is lame. Much of the best work of modern civilization, the pinnacle of hundreds of years of scientific advance, work which our society invests billions of dollars in, is hidden inside this pitifully obsolete rent-seeking system while we use state-of-the-art infotech to exchange pop-music lyrics and annotate famous games of _Magic: The Gathering_.

\---

[1] No, that is _not_ thirty-two dollars per year, or even per month. That's _one paper_. You're probably better off springing for a subscription ($199) although that only gets you _Nature_ : all the other journals in the _Nature_ family, like _Nature Medicine_ , are extra, and of course every other journal is also extra.

<comment><USER26> And even in CS you are mostly out of luck if it has been published by any of the usual anti-progress rackets like the ACM or IEEE or the other usual suspects (Springer , Elsevier and their ilk). Sometimes authors are allowed to publish a copy on their homepages, and sometimes they even do, but you still have to find it. Just yesterday I tried to find a description and current assesment of an algorithm from the late 60ies (arc labeling for shortest paths with turn penalties), and most references I found were north of $35 for twelve pages.

<comment><USER27> I completely agree about Springer and Elsevier, but the ACM and IEEE both offer "Digital Library" subscriptions that give you complete access to the entire archives of all of their publications for a couple of hundred bucks a year (including their membership fee.) That's a small price to pay for the quantity and quality of material available, at least in my opinion-- and I'd be ecstatic if Elsevier or Springer offered a similar option. (I've probably paid more than that to Springer this year alone just to get a half-dozen individual articles.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How does the author equate: "Recently, Sir Ken Robinson has got a lot of attention by speaking out–inspiringly to some, outrageously to others–saying that K-12 education needs a sea change away from "boring" academics and toward collaborative methods that foster "creativity." "

To: "Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known"?

I recently attended a paid training course run by the authors of some well known toolkit. They are, without discussion, the experts on their own software.

Nobody in the course got to 'hello world' before 2PM, the instructors constantly bickered between each other what tools the students should be using, and further discussion was limited to 'check our kitchen sink app for more demo code'. Everyone on the course

This is because having knowledge of a topic, and being able to teach others, are separate skills. Both are required, however academics - people who spend their live in academia and are used to learning things for the purpose of learning, whereas most others are goal oriented - tend to lack the latter skill, despite their expertise in the former.

This is not anti intellectualism. This is about requiring teachers to have the ability to teach.

<comment><USER28> (pardon the missing fragment above)

"Everyone on the course...." later revealed they were either glad they didn't pay for it themselves or regretted that they did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think at its core this issue is all about ease and speed vs. the classical idea of gaining knowledge through a long, pondering struggle of the mind, equally involving pouring over ponderous texts and memorizing facts.

As far as the lightning speed of modern information technology, I must admit to be alarmed at that- I feel that my attention span has become so deteriorated in recent years that I find it very difficult to complete reading books. I haven't even finished reading this article (though I shall do so later). Certainly shortened attention spans + greater access to information -> absorption and retention of only a shallow subset of knowledge would be a great danger.

Frankly, I'd like to see lifehacker-type articles that propose ideas to rebuild attention spans and teach memory techniques. Sort of blunting the anti-intellectual effects of prolonged exposure to the internet. I'd like to think that proper guidance, discipline, and training is the cure to anti- intellectualism. Perhaps that is something that Confucius would have approved of.

<comment><USER29> Years ago I read about a study with college students. They had one group read a book each night until they no longer wanted to read. The other group was told to do the same, but then to make themselves read just one more page. The latter group reported that they read more and more each night, and found their attention span increased significantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What's the line between anti-intellectualism and being able to recognise an argument from authority fallacy? Sanger does not seem to be able to draw it.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've learned more reading Dostoevsky than I ever have writing code. One is practical knowledge that might lead to a paycheck, the other is depth of knowledge that (for me) leads to a fulfilling and well-rounded life. The value is not mutually exclusive.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's more that geeks oppose old institutions having a monopoly on knowledge than that they oppose any sort of knowledge at all. Maybe there's some resistance to the rigid, hierarchical structure of "intellectualism" as well.

<comment><USER33> The idea that institutions have a monopoly on knowledge is starting to become preposterous. The closest thing to a monopoly is a few journals, but their days are numbered. The monopoly doesn't exist. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from buying any textbook and learning what they want to learn, from buying all the tools they need and teaching themselves. At the end of the day, you _can_ learn anything anyone else learned going to college. If you are upset because you can't get a job because you don't have a degree to prove what you know, then that's something you need to take up with the companies that are doing the hiring.

How can there be a monopoly when there are hundreds to thousands of individual institutions competing for each other? Of course, college isn't free or unencumbered by some silly rules, but neither is buying an iPhone.

<comment><USER34> Institutions are merely _hubs_ of knowledge, a natural enough occurrence. Maybe information does want to be free, but free birds of a feather flock together.

I personally feel the image that they are or are trying to cultivate a monopoly is a misguided perception based on jealousy, resentment, etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> While I am of mixed opinion on the article, the one part that really stands out for me is his insistence of the necessity of long, difficult texts. I am one of the people that seldom reads a book these days. It's not that I find it too challenging, or too long. I certainly read fast enough, and my background is sufficiently wide. However, I do find it far too repetitive and rife with personal opinion that does not aid my quest for more knowledge.

Why would I read a book about a programming language when there is a set of APIs, tutorials, and articles that can convey the information in 1/10th the time? Why should I read a dozen chapters about the history leading to a new mathematical concept when I can just quickly read the research paper about that specific concept? Why do I have to read a hundred asides about what the author does on his days off, how he loves his wife and his dog, of what sort of stupid questions his students asked of him? I'm just here for information, and unfortunately books are rarely the most ideal way of getting it.

Not to say that all books are bad, and should be deprecated as a medium. I have, and will always find good books enjoyable. However, to insist that they are an irreplaceable feature of the quest for knowledge is ignoring the reality of how the quest for knowledge has changed. In the end it's not about long, difficult texts; just difficult texts will often suffice.

</comment><comment><USER36> As others have generally pointed out, 'intellectualism' isn't the problem. Instead, it's a particular brand of intellectualism that economically benefits from maintaining its established system. These intellectuals have little incentive to change their established position from which they profit. and they profit a lot. Generally, the traditional intellectual world can't keep up with the pace of the rest of the culture. We consumers and participants of intellectualism want cheaper, faster, more variety and niche. The current intellectual establishment benefits from the opposite.

Intellectualism is alive and well on the Internet. In fact this blog post and reaction to it is evidence. It's just that the traditional expert model doesn't scale into real economies. Many forces continue to work against it. As with other capital, intellectual capital will flow, like liquid, through the least resistant path. If one seeks influence and participation over intellectual topics, why would they spend many years going through the motions of attaining credibility and standing, when they can establish their presence much quicker along other routes?

All of the objects and roles referenced in the article (e.g. books, experts, etc.) have continued value, and they won't disappear, they will just be augmented by technology.

</comment><comment><USER37> Recently there seems to be an increasing hate towards academia in particular, usually ranting about how it is too theoretical and how it doesn't prepare you for the "real world".

Funny enough, this seems to come more often from people who either never went through college, or failed at it for whatever reason. Which can be fine, for people who are dedicated enough to actually learn on the job, instead of just acquiring habits and repeating them over and over.

What isn't fine is this praise for superficial knowledge. What irks me the most is people praising their ignorance of what academic knowledge really offers, and how it can change some of your solutions (many times unknowingly) in the "real world".

Practice does not replace fundamental knowledge. Practice only teaches you the solutions for the problems you encounter, not the solutions to the problems other people have encounterer over time, and the underlying reasons for the solutions you are using.

It this particular case there isn't so much "anti-intellectualism", but a justification for ignorance.

</comment><comment><USER38> This article is shallow trollbait. For example, this list summing up the beliefs of the anti-intellectual geek:

> _1\. Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known. > Knowledge is now democratically determined, as it should be._

Who said that, and where? "Experts" are not excluded from Wikipedia or, in fact, any other online community. In a way, Quora, StackOverflow and friends recognize the value of the expert. The only difference is that now you don't have to pay thousands of dollars and travel to another country to ask these experts questions. You don't even have to attend university! It's about _inclusion_ , not _exclusion_. Is the OP bitter about the fact that any teenager with a web browser can now learn how to write a radix sort whereas he had to go to university to learn it? Or is he bitter about the fact that said teenager has already learned a good chunk of important CompSci material even before graduating from high school and thus feels that a formal CS degree might be overkill? Sure, you can't learn philosophy at home, and you sure as hell can't build a particle accelerator at home, but anything that does not require special infrastructure that only a university can provide is up for grabs. Think maths, compsci, even design.

> _2\. Books are an outmoded medium because they involve a single person > speaking from authority. In the future, information will be developed and > propagated collaboratively, something like what we already do with the > combination of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Wikipedia, and various other > websites._

Once again, I don't know where he's getting this from. Does he know about the Kindle? Or iBooks? People still buy books when they need in-depth knowledge. The only time I look at Wikipedia instead of a book is when I'm doing initial research on a topic or when I feel I only need surface knowledge of the topic at hand. Sometimes I will buy a book because it was cited on Wikipedia. Does the OP know about the books people publish online? _Real World Haskell_ , _Dive Into Python_ , _The Architecture of Open Source Applications_ , _Clever Algorithms_ to mention a few CS-related books. Then there are a bunch of books on analog and digital electronics, math and statistics, all published on the web. A book does not have to be in the form of printed pages to convey knowledge. And remember: the people writing these books are still "experts", they still speak from "authority", they still have an "individual voice". Social media merely aggregates the work of individuals.

> _3\. The classics, being books, are also outmoded. They are outmoded because > they are often long and hard to read, so those of us raised around the > distractions of technology can't be bothered to follow them; and besides, > they concern foreign worlds, dominated by dead white guys with totally > antiquated ideas and attitudes. In short, they are boring and irrelevant._

What "classics" are we talking about here? Are we talking about philosophical texts? If yes, I don't think any geek questions the value of the work of Socrates. OTOH, the value of fiction is debatable. I personally love reading classics because I want to learn about people from another era. Some people prefer to read contemporary authors, and I don't think they're any worse off. David Foster Wallace has as much to say as Tolstoy.

 _4\. The digitization of information means that we don't have to memorize nearly as much. We can upload our memories to our devices and to Internet communities. We can answer most general questions with a quick search._

This is an age-old debate. What is more important: understanding _why_ the Roman empire fell or knowing _when_ it fell? Besides, if something is worth memorizing, you almost always end up memorizing it involuntarily. For example, many developers know regex syntax by heart. Same goes for human language: after looking up the same thing 20 times, you end up remembering it. The argument geeks are making is: why remember inconsequential data when you can be analyzing it instead?

> _5\. The paragon of success is a popular website or well-used software, and > for that, you just have to be a bright, creative geek. You don't have to go > to college, which is overpriced and so reserved to the elite anyway._

So going to college is the paragon of success? I'm sorry, but building and running a business is a far more difficult task than getting through college. IMO, of course. I do not judge people by the degrees they have. My opinions might be a bit jaded, though; college in India produces graduates who are pretty much unemployable.

Looks like the OP met a crackpot on IRC and painted every geek with the same broad brush.

<comment><USER39> He did mention that his manifesto is meant to be provocative.

1) The difference is that the experts' opinions are not being amplified anymore,as there is no reliable "authority index" on the web yet. Should we trust wikipedia to build, say, LHC?

2) People actually read less books [http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071...](http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain) . I guess he's referring to works of fiction and philosophy that require long linear reading, not reference material.

3) Classics are called "classics" because they convey fundamental ideas that shape our society. I would argue, though, that the problem is that "classics", as in "seminal books" are not being written anymore. Btw, Socrates never wrote anything.

4) True, i dont see what's bad about foregoing memorization of facts that are not relevant to one's pursuit.

5) Getting through college is just the start for academics. Making a profound discovery is the goal and it's much more difficult than making a moderately successful business. [My theory is that the role of luck is much bigger in entrepreneurship than in academia]

<comment><USER40> I question number 5. Don't most PhD students succeed in making a peer reviewed thesis? The same cannot be said for businesses.

<comment><USER39> A PhD thesis with little other impact would be the equivalent of a business that barely breaks even. My point is that the luck/work ratio of , say, the 10 greatest websites is much higher than the equivalent of , say, the laws of quantum mechanics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The problem seems to be with the explosion of knowledge around us. Very often, beyond basic principles, what we are being taught in school is failing us in real life by being too general, too generic, and too broad to solve the problems we face. Given this, and given the lengths to which one must dig by oneself to solve a problem, a self reflecting geek tends to look back and see that his education has not been of much help. This is more so among information technology professionals and maybe among some in fundamental research.

This doesn't make education unnecessary, just that there needs to be a way of making it more relevant to people, problems and choices.

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't think this article has much, or at least enough, to offer to stimulate a high quality debate on the subject. It conflates anti-intellectualism with skepticism about academia and authority, these are very different things though.

</comment><comment><USER43> The ongoing attacks on academia have little to do with geek culture in particular. Academia is under attack primarily for cynical political purposes. Specifically, because the political right wing sees institutions of higher learning as bastions of left wing political ideology and because the employees of these institutions are largely unionized. What is happening is fundamentally a political battle dressed up in the guise of "concern" about tuition costs and the value of a college education.

</comment><comment><USER44> New? No. Just the latest fad of rationalizations.

</comment><comment><USER45> _So there is no mistake, let me describe the bottom of this slippery slope more forthrightly. You are opposed to knowledge as such. You contemptuously dismiss experts who have it; you claim that books are outmoded, including classics, which contain the most significant knowledge generated by humankind thus far; you want to memorize as little as possible, and you want to upload what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible; you don't want schools to make students memorize anything; and you discourage most people from going to college._

I think this is the core of the article.

Firstly, geeks are not opposed to knowledge, as such. There's knowledge, and the ability to apply it, and geeks value both. We don't all value both equally, there's a bit of diversity here, but "put up or shut up" is seen as a valid call. You can't just claim to know better.

 _You contemptuously dismiss experts who have it_

We dismis experts who flash their "expert card". We are deeply suspicious of experts of the esoteric, unless they can show they are also proficient in the familiar.

 _you claim that books are outmoded, including classics, which contain the most significant knowledge generated by humankind thus far_

Here is where we start deeply mistrusting experts of the esoteric. Notice how the author refuses to actually specify _which_ old books are important? Criticize Plato and he will say he is talking about Gothe. Or Victor Hugo. Or Sun Zi. Or Spinoza.

 _you want to memorize as little as possible, and you want to upload what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible_

I advocate memorizing as much as possible. Cognitive psychology has a lot of evidence that low level knowledge is the foundation of higher order skills. A lot of modern educationalists dismiss this, but they don't have any evidence; just credentials of esoteric expertise.

 _you want to upload what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible; you don't want schools to make students memorize anything; and you discourage most people from going to college_

Accessible knowledge is a good thing - would the author have opposed the Gutenberg press? Probably.

As I've stated, I do want students to memorize as much as possible. If there are any geeks who think differently, they should read "Why Students Don't like School" - which presents a fair amount of cognitive psychology in a very easy format.

Finally, we get to the real point. Because of our virolent anti- intellectualism, we discourage students from attending university. Bullshit. We discourage some students for going to university for three reasons: Firstly, we don't think it's necessarily the best way to educate themselves, mostly because class sizes are so big you might as well just watch a better lecturer on youtube. Second, it's not necessarily worth it, from an economic point of view. Finally, universities need a bit of competition.

</comment><comment><USER46> Is there a new jock anti-athleticism?

<comment><USER47> I understand that you're trying to say that jocks are to athleticism as geeks are to intellectualism. Your tone indicates that you believe that jocks cannot be anti-athletics. By your initial analogy, geeks cannot be anti-intellectual.

However, I disagree with at least the analogy. The word "geek", in this context, refers to a computer programmer, not an intellectual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> These kinds of discussions remind me of the people who said 20 years ago that calculators were going to make everyone math-illiterate.

<comment><USER49> I just flashed back to one of many times in the last few years that the person behind the cash register couldn't handle basic making change without the machine telling him how to count.

But then, if we're seriously talking about "the classics", then "everyone" is already classic-illiterate, aren't they? I mean, I took two semesters of Great Books and done a good bit of further reading on my own. I'd be willing to bet that puts me in the top 1% of the population. But I'm still fairly classic- illiterate by the standards of 100 years ago...

<comment><USER50> Huh? I'm trying to get my head around today being less 'classically literate' than in the early 1900s. For example, in the United States, 10% of the populate was flat-out illiterate. Only 50% of people were enrolled in primary education (reaching a middle-school level education). [1] Secondary schools (High School) just started around the 1890s. Enrollment in schools that are now mandatory was 10%. [3]

Since 1942, inflation-adjusted cost per pupil increased by 700%. [2] Some of that is surely inefficiency but most is because we spend more on education. This means better teachers and better materials.

And this is in a country with one of the largest GDP in 1900. You can pretty safely assume we've had far less drastic changes in our own education system compared to the rest of the world.

I'm sure Thomas Jefferson could destroy you in Classics knowledge. However, he was one of ten his age that had the means and passion enough to spend much of his life reading them.

But, this all adds up. This leads to people reading War and Peace, Jane Eyre and Great Gatsby before they leave mandatory secondary school. And while not every country is at this level, technology and humanism has given people a much better chance in life to explore these types of works all over the world.

[1] <http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp> [2] <http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-025.html> [3] <http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-20.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I think the internet is, for those who can take it in, very humbling. The anti-intellectuals are the people who react badly to this overwhelming sense of one's own smallness.

In 1900, colleges decided what it was important for an upper-middle-class person to know. One set of writers and texts was in the canon; the rest were not. Sometimes the selection was based on quality but it was often political as well. It wasn't actually possible to have "all knowledge" but one could get all the "important" knowledge in a few years of study. Any thinking person in 2011 realizes that this is no longer true (if it ever was). There's a million times more genuinely valuable knowledge out there than anyone can take in in a human life. Also, the authorities once trusted to decide what was important have been disrobed by technology; the increased power of technology has allowed us to discern that they aren't much smarter than the rest of us.

Anyway, the result is that a lot of people get really insecure and overwhelmed when they realize how much they know nothing about, and there's a tendency among some people, as a defense mechanism, simply to declare large sectors of knowledge useless, unimportant, or outmoded.

It's not just the less intelligent who have this attitude either. I've heard an esteemed computer scientist (someone with a name, but I'll withhold it here) argue that the only useful literature is science fiction because everything else is "just the seven deadly sins, over and over again".

<comment><USER9> It isn't that the elites are about as smart as the rest of us, it's that they were usually found to have their own agenda, regardless of the ideals they espoused. Just another case of someone telling you "it's for your own good", when really it was for theirs. "Intellectuals" are the ones who are reacting badly, when their "authority" is challenged.

It's not anti-intellectual to require someone back up their statements from authority, it's science.

<comment><USER51> That's not anti-intellectual. That's just being discerning about what information you take in. Everyone needs to do that, especially with regard to, e.g., news media.

Anti-intellectualism is when people start making ridiculous statements like "classical literature is boring and irrelevant" and "college is a waste of time" (rather than merely overpriced).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Should people read a classic book because it is important or because it is a good book?

I firmly reject the notion that a book should be read _because_ it is "classic". But any book that's good should be read for it's intrinsic quality as exemplary writing.

To that end, Ethan Frome can get fucked, Moby Dick is gonna (minus the incredibly inaccurate whale biology chapters) will be around forever.

<comment><USER53> «A classic is a book that everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read.»

Guess which «geek anti-intellectual» said that. Mark Twain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Taking the author's point of view, one can spot 2 underlying assumptions about the world in today's digerati:

1) The more information we consume, the more likely we are to come up with a useful theory, tool etc. Our brain is designed to process and recombine stimuli and come up with innovative things, so the more combinations we do, the more likely we are to succeed. This is sort of like a darwinian theory of science and technology. There also an anti-specialization trend among geeks.

2) People have an equal opportunity to create new and significant knowledge.

While (1) is debatable, (2) seems to be outright wrong. Some of our greatest scientists, from Newton to Einstein were "lucky" in coming up with great Ideas more than once in their lives. They also had a narrow field of focus, and it's doubtful they could keep up with Twitter today.

</comment><comment><USER54> I think the best examples of geek anti intellectualism are the groupthink cultures of reddit and 4chan.

</comment><comment><USER55> They're called Derp-sters.

</comment><comment><USER56> All this article does is bash other peoples' opinions without providing and basis of its own. Why are the classics still worth reading? Why is practical knowledge not good enough? If I was supposed to be convinced by this, I wasn't. I still feel that reading "The Classics" is outdated. I see no real problem with them being considered "tl;dr". It doesn't seem unreasonable to me either to say that memorization is antiquated, I think that's true, though it certainly isn't done for all together and I do think you need to memorize things at first to learn them on some topics. I also am currently in university and feel like a lot of theory I've learned has been helpful and a lot of it has not. Frankly, the jury is still out for me on this topic and this article sure didn't put me on this guy's side of the fence.

</comment><comment><USER57> In response to his accusations, I DO think that most classics probably ought not to be read. But that DOESN'T mean I'm anti-intellectual - rather, it means I believe that iteration is everything and we just need to upgrade our old firmware. Classics are, by and large, inefficient mediums of information. The fact that they are still around today is really just a function of the fact that they were still around yesterday. And what if every nugget of knowledge and insight that is contained in a classic could be transmitted in a much smaller package? We'd have trouble remembering and applying it all, sure, but not if they were a part of our collective consciousness - as many ideals found in the classics already are. Believe it or not, you already know most of what Kant, or Twain, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare has to tell you. They were all human, just like us, and we are more than capable of thinking what they thought without reviewing what they said first.

<comment><USER58> I properly know all that Shakespeare has to say to me, but the importance of him is how he says it, how he makes English come alive and sing.

I have never read anybody who has mastered the English language so completely has he has.</comment></comment>


Ben Folds Chatroulette Piano Ode to Merton - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfamTmY5REw <comment><USER3> I think I prefer this on Reddit where I first saw it. This is only vaguely topical here.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I think there has been a mass exodus from reddit in the last few weeks. The quality of content there has gone down, and the quality of content here has slid as well as reddit's users bring their brand of news to the site.

<comment><USER5> Note that the poster "MikeCapone" has been a HN user for over 750 days - <USER2> counterexample to your thesis.

<comment><USER6> Not necessarily. It's possible that he's always been submitting such articles, but only now are there people upvoting them.

<comment><USER7> He hasn't, as you can readily see by checking his submissions. He does seem to have a bit of a bias toward green energy, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the original Chatroulette piano improv video by Metron, see:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32vpgNiAH60>

<comment><USER8> When I first saw the Ben Folds video, I thought it confirmed my belief that Merton is Ben Folds, but after thinking about the title "An Ode to Merton", I'm confused. Are Merton and Ben Folds different people, or the same?

<comment><USER9> They are different people.

<comment><USER10> Can anyone point to proof that they are in fact different people? I know Merton _claims_ to not be Ben Folds, but the voice, style, and facial structure are _extremely similar_.

<http://www.broadwayworld.com/columnpic/ben-folds1.jpg> [http://technabob.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2010/03/piano-c...](http://technabob.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2010/03/piano-chat-improv-merton-chat-roulette.jpg)

<comment><USER11> It's hard for me to provide _proof_ but I've been a Ben Folds (Five) fan for 14 years and been to almost as many gigs, and I didn't believe Merton was Ben Folds for a second. His playing style isn't similar (as far as pop rock pianists go) and his voice is _quite_ different (Folds' North Carolina accent usually comes out when doing impromptu stuff - less so with studio recordings). Merton also looks somewhat younger (Folds hasn't aged too well in the last cpl years IMHO).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I admit to not knowing who Ben Folds was until a few years ago when I stumbled onto an entertaining site called improveverywhere.com which did a prank imitating him, which of course somehow drew the attention of the real Ben Folds, and the prank was scaled up to include him... <http://improveverywhere.com/2006/11/19/ben-folds-fake/>

</comment><comment><USER13> His old band, Ben Folds Five, also were an early adopter of cybercasting some of their concerts back 'round the turn of the millennium or so. I can see why Bam's where he is in this video-I would probably crap myself as well if this is what I was greeted with while using Chatroulette...

<comment><USER14> Over on Reddit it was pointed out that "Bam" was probably a masturbator who was too chicken to do it in front of 2000 people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think I prefer the Youtube dumbed down (ie no cocks!) edit of Chatroulette.

</comment><comment><USER16> This makes me appreciate how awesome Ben Folds is.

<comment><USER17> I've seen Folds live about 10 times over the past decade. He's always had crazy improv skills. It's great to see him getting coverage and recognition of this beyond his rabid but small fan-base...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This guy is absolutely genius. The fact that he can think that quickly in front of a crowd shows a lot of skill. No doubt he will become an internet superstar.

<comment><USER19> He's amazing at improv stuff - another example where he just wanders into a studio and creates something out of nothing:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KI78874qbU>

<comment><USER11> He did even better than that. Before his last studio album was released, he went into a studio and recorded an _entire_ fake album in 24 hours then leaked it to the net.

Funny thing is, a few of the "fake" tracks are better than the real ones that ended up on the album, such as this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTKRckEmKZQ#t=0m22s> (a user created music video for the fake "Dr Yang" - the real version kinda sucks)

Another prime example was "For Those of Y'all Who Wear Fanny Packs" from the Naked Baby Photos album. It's a totally impromptu 6/7 minute "song" performed totally on the spot by him and his band. No prepared lyrics, music, or anything - they just riff off each other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is only one reason I would log into chat roulette - and that would be to 'chat' with Ben Folds.

</comment><comment><USER20> That was excellent!

</comment><comment><USER3> I think I prefer this on Reddit where I first saw it. This is only vaguely topical here.

<comment><USER21> It's interesting how two identical comments are at the top and the bottom at the same time.

<comment><USER22> People downvote duplicate posts all the time to express displeasure (and hopefully to get the author to delete the duplicate).

It's not more significant than that.

<comment><USER23> When I notice a duplicate of an otherwise-reasonable comment, I almost always upvote one copy and downvote the other, not to express displeasure or provoke deletion but to help make there be one canonical one to reply to.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: JavaScript unit testing in under 30 lines - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/freedmand/e9457a1ddfd2f2c56ebbf7a186e43216 <comment><USER2> This is quite interesting. Would be nice to have error exit code as well, which is important for a CI workflow.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea. It'd be as simple as adding the following before line 19:

      process.on('exit', () => (process.exitCode = 1));

I didn't want to assume that people are executing the code in-browser or terminal for the purpose of this Gist, but feel free to fork for your needs.</comment></comment>


Citus 6.2: Concurrent index creation and complex queries for multi-tenant dbs - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/06/07/announcing-citus62-multi-tenant-database/ <comment><USER2> This is a pretty impressive set of new features and fixes (i.e. things that worked in Postgres, but not with CitusDB).

In particular, the added ability to run `CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY` [1] for distributed tables is an important addition. I've run a pretty big Postgres database before, and this feature is absolutely _critical_ for bringing new indexes online for large tables without affecting users or other operations (without it, `CREATE INDEX` needs a lock that blocks other modifications in the table).

Its reverse, `DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY` is a relatively newer addition to Postgres and also pretty key. While running on pre-9.2 (when it was added), we had to stop dropping indexes from large tables because the operation would block long enough that we'd start timing out user requests while it was running.

[1] [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql- createind...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql- createindex.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how they'll compete with Cockroach down the road. Looks like both projects are doing great work around ACID in multi-tenant environments.

<comment><USER4> I'm really inclined to say that Citus is better suited for the vast majority of companies, since You Are Not Google [1]. For example, forcing everyone to synchronously replicate using Raft all the time seems like overkill, and incurs a huge latency cost.

Furthermore, I think Citus has a head start on being a mature project, since it builds upon the back of the already-mature Postgres for things like query planning.

[1] [https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not- google-84912cf44afb](https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not- google-84912cf44afb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is _key_ : SERIAL on distribution column: we now use serial types exactly as in Postgres

Bravo!

</comment><comment><USER6> Just a quick comment on this:

> Good software never stops evolving

I think I would translate this as: "our software is so large in scope, it must never stop evolving if it is to remain good enough."

Small software, with a single, focused goal, can evolve to a steady state which is still good.

Often we need to build things whose scope is too large for that, and must constantly churn. That's ok. But ideally you are finding parts of your work which can be sent in the opposite direction: towards God; or the oneness of all things.

If none of your work ever seems to find a path towards simplicity and oneness, it's possible you are pathologically mixing concerns, which, if true, is probably slowing you down.

<comment><USER7> That's kinda vague philosophizing about an actual project. It seems pretentious and not constructive.

Do you have a concrete criticism of Citus? Do you believe a database system can become your definition of "God", or are large database systems simply not necessary and could be replaced by a few tiny God-like pieces? If so, why do large database systems exist at all?

<comment><USER6> I have no criticism of Citus at all. Seems like a great project.

I don't think systems of large scope can necessarily be replaced by small scope ones. Just that the large project is probably suffering if smaller, more stable parts aren't sloughing off of it as part of your device process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Citus people are putting SQL back into NoSQL! :) Awesome.

<comment><USER8> SQL has actually been back in NoSQL for a few years now.

Spark SQL, Presto, Vora for example allow you to write ANSI SQL and query NoSQL stores such as Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB etc.

And if you are are after SQL-Like well then you have Phoenix, Hive, CQL etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do you guys have pricing anywhere on the site?

<comment><USER10> Not them, but here is the link for their cloud offering [https://www.citusdata.com/pricing](https://www.citusdata.com/pricing)

For other enterprise solution would require you to contact them first.

<comment><USER9> hmm 200K/month for 20 HA nodes with 20TB and 4TB RAM. A bit pricy and 20TB is kindah low for max disk. A single PG instance on a hefty box can do 20TB.

<comment><USER10> It comes with more than just the database. The package includes, but not limited to:

      1. All enterprise features.
      2. All nodes being managed by Citus themselves. All the upgrades or rebalancing will be done by them.

Another option which should be cheaper is paying for the Enterprise license and manage it on your own hardware with your own setup.

Finally, you could also spin up the community version, which is free but lack important enterprise features such as rebalancing the shards when you add more nodes to the setup.

<comment><USER9> Thank you for all the info the use case we are running a setup with dedicated PG RDS instance for each client some of them are pushing the RDS limits of 6TB potentially looking to move to multi tenant setup as managing 100+ instances is not fun. The read load is fairly light it's rare that more than a few people are running queries against an instance. Would it be possible to consolidate using Citus (are there any advantages as far as ease of management etc?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Offtopic, but the mention of elegant lightsabers reminds me of a scene from one of my favourite TV series, StarGate SG-1:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjlCVW_ouL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjlCVW_ouL8)

Money quote at 02:25:

        [O'Neill demonstrating a staff weapon]
        This is a weapon of terror. It's made to... intimidate the enemy.
        THIS...
        [O'Neill shows a P-90]
        ... is a weapon of _war_. It's made to _kill_ your enemy.

I.e. effective beats elegant :).</comment>


Project Include Is yet Another Reason to Short Sell Tech Stocks - <AUTHOR> http://theblondbeast.com/social-criticism/a-criticism-of-project-include-and-their-7-point-agenda/ <comment><USER2> This was incoherent.</comment>


March Temperatures in Alaska: 20 Degrees Hotter Than Usual - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/09/climate/alaska-abnormally-hot-march.html <comment><USER3> I live in southeast Alaska, and anyone who's been in Alaska for a while starts to know people from around the state. We don't always talk about climate change as a global phenomenon, but people are always talking about the specific changes they're seeing and experiencing.

Southeast Alaska is a temperate rainforest. When I moved here in 2002, I spent my first years relishing the short periods of clear skies we had. I'd plan longer hikes for those days, and squeeze in a few of those hikes each year when the weather cleared. I liked going hard outdoors when it was clear, and then enjoying some inside time when it was gray and gloomy. It was a perfect place for a programmer, because you play hard for a while when it's nice and then spend longer periods working indoors while it rains. I like the rain too, but it was nice to plan some bigger hikes for dry spells.

Now I make myself do indoor work when it's nice out, because we have regular month-long dry spells. It's not just me; many people talk about how they've adjusted their lifestyle away from a focus on rain. We all still talk as if the rain keeps us inside, but it's less of an impact every year. Around the state it's the same story, local changes have a wide range of direct impacts on the everyday lives of residents here. Three miners in Nome got stranded on an ice floe because the ice broke up in March for the first time in at least 120 years. [0]

If you're curious to hear about Alaska weather on a regular basis, Brian Brettschneider is an Alaskan climatologist who regularly provides informative commentary on long-term patterns and recent changes. [1]

[0] - [http://www.nomenugget.com/news/nome-gold-miners-rescued- drif...](http://www.nomenugget.com/news/nome-gold-miners-rescued-drifting-sea- ice)

[1] - [https://twitter.com/Climatologist49](https://twitter.com/Climatologist49)

<comment><USER4> I live in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Tons of locals talk about how they used to drive onto the River in Whitehorse for the annual Rendezvous festival in February - park cars on there, put up tents, have a huge party ON the river for a week.

It hasn't frozen over solid even once in 10+ years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have good information for how rare this actually is? To me - <USER2> someone who believes in global warming but believes the media does a disservice exaggerating its effects - this seems like a misleading article.

How many times during a 365 day period does the temperature read 20 degrees above (or below) the average? How many times does this happen per day, per weekly average, per month?

As someone who grew up in New England it doesn't seem like it would be that rare. There were weeks in July where it was over 95 when the historical average was probably 75 and weeks in February when the average was 10 even if the historical average was 32. What is the standard deviation for temperature in certain areas and how rare is it to see 20 degrees variation if you are looking at multiple windows of time that vary in length?

Sure, global warming did not cause it to be 20 degrees higher than usual? If anything it would be +3 degrees global warming +17 degrees random variation? Why run with 20 in the title if there is no way that global warming would be responsible for the random variation.

<comment><USER6> I think we need to stop saying "As someone who believes in Global Warming". It is as ridiculous as saying "As someone who believes in theory of gravitation".

It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table.

Same thing with debates about whether earth is flat or earth is 6000 years old. The fact that these debates take place gives undue credibility to the non-scientific opposition and elevates to the same stage as the scientific views.

<comment><USER7> > _It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to > believe in. The belief part is off the table._

This is a pretty odd take. Believing _anything_ is optional. You may believe that the evidence is incontrovertible, but even that is an optional belief. The person you're responding to is just signaling that the questions are not based on climate change skepticism. In 100 years that signal may no longer be valuable, but today it probably is.

<comment><USER6> That's my point. Believing in anything is optional - except for hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally to a "believable" level _relative_ to the other side which is presenting anecdotal evidence.

Everything can be wrong. Even theory of gravitation. That's besides the point.

<comment><USER7> > _Believing in anything is optional - except..._

Except nothing.

> _hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally_

Science isn't in the business of proving things. Science develops explanatory models that account for known evidence. Saying that science proves anything is super wrong and leads to all kinds of problems.

<comment><USER6> Fair, you are absolutely correct. Science is in building models about how nature works. Mathematics is in the business of proving, I guess. I think we are engaging in unproductive pedantry while going away from my original point.

I want to emphasize my point again - we have 2 arguments. Argument A and argument B. A is presenting scientific evidence, in your corrected terms - presenting a model of climate change. Argument B is anecdotal evidence. The fact that they are both argued on the same stage gives the audience (who may not know anything about A or B) a false assurance that both A and B are arguable and therefore, they are on the stage. It is fine for casual conversations, I am speaking about large debates that we still fucking have about whether Earth is flat. It is equivalent of "Trolling" and should not be entertained.

<comment><USER8> Many times the consensus has provided scientific evidence (e.g. geocentric model) and has still been wrong. For some reason, I feel that something similar is going on with the climate debate. Mix money, politics and some aspects of religion and one just might arrive to the place where we are in today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Carbon pricing, carbon pricing, carbon pricing.

It's the one thing virtually all economists agree on as the most efficient way to catalyze large-scale change (although we'll still need regulation and sequestration as well).

Politically, the most realistic way to get this done without a huge public backlash is via a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend. There's a bill before congress right now [0]. Canada implemented a variation on this at a federal level recently.

One of the most active groups supporting this kind of legislation is Citizens' Climate Lobby – if you care about this issue, please consider joining.

[0] Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act: [https://teddeutch.house.gov/uploadedfiles/deutch_014_xml_116...](https://teddeutch.house.gov/uploadedfiles/deutch_014_xml_116th.pdf)

<comment><USER10> If China subscribed to such a system and agreed to operate on a level playing field, then I might give more credence to it. However they aren't, and they won't. No amount of sequestration in the United States or Canada will have a meaningful impact on world pollution unless the world's largest polluter is held accountable. Anything less than that is counter-productive, putting us economically at a disadvantage to a country, and a communist regime, that would like nothing more than to chip away at US hegemony in the world.

<comment><USER9> China already has the largest carbon trading market in the world [0]. Perhaps it's not aggressive enough, but they're significantly more ambitious than the US, and their population isn't nearly as wealthy to begin with, so it'll hurt them more. Either way, we can chose to invest now, or pay the price for this silly game of chicken later.

Besides – how do you suggest we get China and India to cut emissions without doing the same, if not more, at home? Perhaps Border Adjustments [1] can alleviate some of your fears; they would protect domestic industry. All of this has already been worked out to stupendous levels of detail by legal scholars and Nobel-prize winning economists [2] – your armchair criticism just shows that you're decades behind the policy wonks. Leave it to them.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_national_carbon_tradin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_national_carbon_trading_scheme)

[1] [https://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/border- adjustments/](https://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/border-adjustments/)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/business/economic- science...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/business/economic-science- nobel-prize.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know of the implications of a year-round ice-free artic? Is the artic salvageable at this point? It seems evident that soon the artic will have a short period of being ice-free, kickstarting an inexorable process with yet longer periods of being ice-free.

It is safe to assume at this point climate change is like an asteroid on a trajectory of near term collision with Earth. I'd rather be wrong and alive then right and extinct on this one. But thats me.

</comment><comment><USER12> Those news are great, but do people actually change their lifestyle? do governments change too? The solution is to stop being over-consumerists, limit births of course, and to have more permacultures to bring back more life, better recycling, plant trees...

We are spending so much energy and resources analysing a black-hole (which is fantastic for Science, but our ship is sinking), entertainment sports... Every individual can and should change. Personally I did, I'm living with a really low environmental fingerprint compared to the average here in Western Europe, I eat mostly region-scale local vegetables, fruits, rice.., ride a bike, and buy the strict necessary

</comment><comment><USER13> my general read at this point is that the ipcc numbers have been dead on, the "pause" was ocean warming, and now the pause is over, so things are gonna escalate quickly. like popcorn in a microwave (over the next few decades).

</comment><comment><USER14> PSA: It's only 11° Celsius

<comment><USER15> only? 11°C is huge!

<comment><USER16> But if your default temperature unit is C, then 20C seems like a heck of a lot more than 11C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm all for reading science data, but an article like this makes me wonder about Buffalo, NY. Or Chicago, or Minneapolis. Why pick Alaska to report on?

<comment><USER18> Alaska, along with the rest of the far north, is seeing both the largest shifts as well as the most obvious shifts. Waving my hands a bit, a twenty degree difference in Arizona means it's hotter; a twenty degree difference in Alaska means melting permafrost, retreating glaciers, and widespread brood failures for migratory bird populations.

<comment><USER19> A 20° increase in Arizona (picking Yuma where my father grew up) would mean much worse. The record high is 124° from 1995[1], at 144° and 5-10 minutes of exposure we'd see death[2].

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma,_Arizona#Climate](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma,_Arizona#Climate) [2] [https://www.livescience.com/34128-limits-human- survival.html](https://www.livescience.com/34128-limits-human-survival.html)

<comment><USER20> we talking about averages here, not maximums

<comment><USER19> Unclear to me why average temps would move up and at the same time the variance in the range of temps would shrink? If the average goes up 20° why should we expect the potential maximum temperature to go up less than 20°?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: rofo.ca, a geo/social network visualization of the Rob Ford saga - <AUTHOR> http://rofo.ca

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on this project in my spare time over the past few months. SIGCHI is coming to Toronto this weekend, so I was inspired to post on HN and hopefully receive some feedback.</comment>


The Fastest BigInt in the West - <AUTHOR> http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2014/10/20/the-fastest-bigint-in-the-west/

<comment><USER2> >>"Unlike the Benchmarks Game, we aren't requiring all the test programs for the same language to be identical. This is a controversial rule..."<<

Benchmarks Game programs for the same language are not required to be identical. Wilfred Hughes has been asked to correct that misstatement.

>>"It's also not clear how representative the test programs are of typical performance of that language."<<

Without sampling programs "in the wild" how could anyone possibly claim that other programs were "representative"?

See [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/jsmeter/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/jsmeter/)

<comment><USER2> As-for the reference to Alex Gaynor's blog post, see:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Julia/comments/2jr0xo/the_fastest_bi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Julia/comments/2jr0xo/the_fastest_bigint_in_the_west/clhkooj)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Wilfred, please correct your statement that the benchmarks game requires "all the test programs for the same language to be identical".

It isn't true. It wasn't true 4 years ago.

For sure, my preference was to show PyPy programs that also _worked_ with CPython -- that made clear that optimizing for PyPy could make performance worse with CPython and _vice versa_.</comment>


Starting Salaries For Most IT Pros Will Climb In 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=K1DEPVMM0AZ50QSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=206900011

<comment><USER2> Six figure starting salaries?

Maybe I'm confused about what an "application developer" or "application architect" is, or what exactly they mean by "starting," but I just don't see many new CS grads making that kind of money. Last I heard, starting salaries with a CS degree were somewhere around 50-60k. Did I miss the memo?</comment>


Ask HN: Good ways to record an audiobook for my nephew? - <AUTHOR> My nephew's birthday is coming up. I plan to record for him The Phantom Tollbooth, a book I loved around then.
I'd love tips from HNers who have recorded audio or audiobooks on the best way to go about it. I'm on Linux, and to listen he could borrow iPad, iPhone, or Android phone from his parents. (I'm glad to buy some physical device as well if that's helpful.) But please mention other platforms if you have experience, so that this thread is good for others with the same interest.
The things that I know to wonder about: performance tips, ease of editing, thoughts on audio quality, best way to record it so that they can easily listen one chapter at a time, and options for including illustrations (if I want to take it that far).
But I'm especially curious about the things that I didn't think to ask, things that I will wish I had considered before recording many hours of audio.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I recorded one with the help of a friend ( [http://www.audible.com/pd/Comedy/First-World- Problems-101-Re...](http://www.audible.com/pd/Comedy/First-World- Problems-101-Reasons-Why-the-Terrorists-Hate-Us-Audiobook/B00ATEEF76/) )

Here's a blog post I wrote about the process and what I learned: [http://bennesvig.com/record-audiobook/](http://bennesvig.com/record- audiobook/)

Amazing list of resources and videos: [http://www.acx.com/help/video-lessons- resources/200672590](http://www.acx.com/help/video-lessons- resources/200672590)

Also check out ACX's blog: [http://blog.acx.com/](http://blog.acx.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I can only speak to audio quality, which is usually the result of a very good microphone. There are probably blog posts from well-known podcasters or video game streamers who might send you in the right direction for hardware.</comment>


Why are India's top judges doubting each others' sanity? - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-39778698 <comment><AUTHOR> India's judiciary, while vital and beneficial, is also extremely entrenched, at times quite unpredictable and bizarre.

In fact if you go by the definition of deep state, Indian judiciary might be cited as a good example of it. Except it's not a secret conspiracy, but a well known clusterfuck.

As for this one judge, it's likely that he is mentally unstable. It's also equally likely that there is some truth to what he is accusing the other judges of. Both those propositions need not be mutually exclusive.

</comment><comment><USER2> Boggles my mind this is even allowed to happen, its one thing if he is a whistle blower judge with evidence for his claims, totally another if he has a history of unsubstantiated allegations against other judges. They better find him guilty of contempt of court throw the book at him.

<comment><USER3> He already took precautions against someone throwing the book at him: [http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/calcutta-hc- judge-c...](http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/calcutta-hc-judge-cs- karnan-says-sc-warrant-against-him-unconstitutional-motivated/story- UonAYbnGmcgsscoJ9J8m2M.html)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you prevent data leaks? - <AUTHOR> this is something that i've been pondering for awhile.
at pretty much every job i've been at, we've had Linux Servers that we ssh into.
these linux servers have customer data on them, builds, code, business critical shit.
if i were a malicious individual, i could easily just rm -rf important files, scp important customer data out to my home computer. or use dropbox to sync some critical business data into the cloud... or casually peruse customer data and take advantage of it. and there would be no evidence that i did anything at all.
obviously, it's not possible to handle this from the networking side. SSH is encrypted, and any network level scans would just see a bunch of bits flowing between the server and me.
is there some solution to prevent this kind of linux data leak from happening? is it normal in companies for anyone to be able to just log on to servers, do whatever they want, without any kind of auditing or recording or tracking whatsoever?
i'm curious, with data leaks like the ashley madison one... did they ever find the perpetrator? does anyone even care about securing data....?
what does your company do to prevent data leaks? <comment><USER2> There isn't a totally bullet/fool-proof way, but it boils down to aggressively locking down computing functions to match closely the job functions expected to be performed by every employee. This requires a thorough understanding of said job functions. For example, why do engineers need to ssh to production machines? If the answer is "to tail logs", then a facility needs to be created that allows the tailing of logs and nothing else. This can be done either by locking down authorized_keys, using restricted shells, or introducing centralized logging (logstash, kibana, ...).

Access to outside SSH is a big no-no. Access to outside file sharing (DropBox et al) is a liability unless explicitly required for performing job functions.

I've worked with a brilliant security mind (no irony here) who wanted to go as far as provide employees with remote desktop environments only, which were to run in a fully controlled environment. This removes attack vectors such as USB drives, computer theft, and so on. The proposal never flew, but the idea has merit and is thought-provoking in its own right.

<comment><AUTHOR> what do you think about recording every SSH session?

You bring up remote desktop environments... its actually a good point... similar to what VM's on AWS are.

If the access point (SSH) is locked down and recorded, doesn't that pretty much remove any possibility of employees leaking stuff?

knowing that they are being recorded is a pretty big deterrent to leaking data right?

<comment><USER2> I've personally come to assume that everything I do on an electronic device is being recorded all the time, so the mere presence of surveillance isn't in itself a deterrent. Most reasonable people will IMHO realize that no one's going to read through the interminable logs of SSH sessions, 99.999% of which will likely turn out to be most mundane and boring. Apart from that, storing and securing these logs will in itself become a liability. Imagine all the sensitive information that might get caught in those logs, only to be leaked itself in a titanic stroke of irony!

Relying on surveillance is folly; simply lock down access and remove privileges that aren't necessary. This is something you do once and never have to think about again, unless some event warrants a review. Thankfully such reviews can be triggered by normal business activity: new project, new employee, new team, new vendor product, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah. what if one of those privileged accounts gets compromised or an admin goes rogue...

i think theres still a use for surveillance. just my opinion.

then again. im paranoid. i want the fort knox of data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Automate everything... you should never need to SSH into a server.

<comment><AUTHOR> that can't always be true. for instance, some of my friends are doing data science.

they are constantly SSH'd running jobs on the data, using different tools to understand their data.

i think SSH will always exist going forward, and we won't be able to automate everything.

any other thoughts on how to prevent data leaks?</comment></comment>


Netflix Lowers Data Usage By 2/3 For Members In Canada - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netflix.com/2011/03/netflix-lowers-data-usage-by-23-for.html

<comment><USER2> I'm a netflix user who's had a bandwidth cap for a while, so I only watch movies in SD not HD and you while you can notice the difference in quality it's worth it for the amount of attention I pay.

But I have a hard time believing "will use 2/3 less data on average, with minimal impact to video quality" that's a pretty major advancement in video encoding.

</comment><comment><USER3> Kudos to them for adapting to the situation and providing options for their customers.</comment>


You Are Most Likely Misusing Docker - <AUTHOR> http://www.mpscholten.de/docker/2016/01/27/you-are-most-likely-misusing-docker.html <comment><USER2> clickbait, title should be "come and look at Nix, an idea of mine to solve software packaging problem"

<comment><AUTHOR> Docker shows that people are looking for solutions to the software packaging problem. Docker is part of the argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/) (couldn't resist :P )</comment>


The case against Docker - <AUTHOR> https://www.andreas-jung.com/contents/the-case-against-docker

<comment><USER2> I don't care for the tone of this article, but there are a lot of valid points here.

The natted networking is problemmatic, the file system is slow (particularly with many image layers), and to get good performance, you have to give up all of the isolation abilities.

To get good network performance, you have to use net=host; to get good disk performance, you have to mount and write to host volumes. To increase visibility, you have to use host pids.

I have a lot of hope that Docker will get more performance to go with the awesome isolation. It's a useful tool in the proper circumstances, but it requires a lot of forethought and information to use well.

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of the (performance) problems are probably caused by the device mapper backend being used on CentOS... I have no performance issues at all running in production on Ubuntu 14.04 using aufs.

> The slowness of Docker is a big pain. Build and deployment procedures are > not predictable.

I have the absolute opposite experience. My build & deployment has become very predictable, and I build pretty much all the images I use myself.

> Data belongs onto the filesystem but not into a container that can neither > be cloneed in an easy way nor incrementally backed up in a reasonable way. > Containers are for software, not for data.

Volumes are for data. And sure they can be backed up or cloned, just launch a container that only backs up mounted volumes with --volumes-from whatever stuff you want to back up. Containers should be stateless, and yes, volumes need more attention.

This whole thing smells like "I tried this tool and I don't fully understand it so I'll write a rant blog about it". Containers force you to think differently about software deployment. I started using Docker very early-on and I have never regretted putting it in production since the 0.6x days.</comment>


The Value of Information (how can News be Monetized?) - <AUTHOR> http://informationarchitects.jp/the-value-of-information/ <comment><AUTHOR> There is some kind of "second part" to this article, published today: <http://informationarchitects.jp/pronto/></comment>