"It just works" isn't good enough - <AUTHOR> http://mayankgureja.com/resume/#PersonalStatement

<comment><USER2> I think the problem is that this is really hard to do. All-in-one devices more often than not don't do anything well, because they are trying to do everything.

This is one of the reasons Windows 8 is so confusing. It's your good old windows experience. No wait, it's a brand new tablet interface. You can install Metro apps... but you can also install existing apps...as long as they never interact. It's meant to be used with a touchscreen....but also with your keyboard and mouse. It does everything, but nothing well.

I'm not saying you couldn't have a phone that doubles as a laptop, that doubles as a desktop, that doubles as a video game device. But I think it's really hard to make it coherent.

<comment><USER3> I agree, what I've proposed is the absolute best of my vision for things to come.

But when I propose this, I think of all the hard challenges that have already been conquered in making cohesive, all-in-one devices. A few years ago, a computer, GPS and phone were 3 very distinct things. But someone figured out how to make them work together, so much so that today, smartphones outnumber feature phones in the US and other places. Laptops, tablets, gaming consoles etc. have all seen a similar accumulation of purpose.

Nothing good comes easy. Gotta dream big, or go home! :-)

Thank you very much for your comment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know what we're really talking about here, but I had a conversation earlier today why I will be getting another iPhone instead of an android- because I already know how to use it, it does everything I want, my entire day is filled with not knowing enough and constantly learning or figuring out something, and it just works.

I have enough to learn/figure out, if you show me something that "just works", well, I must already be using it.

<comment><USER3> If it works, it works. But can it be better?

What I'm saying is that something doing what it's supposed to isn't the end of the story. Can it do better? Can it also do something else, which is close to its capabilities but just not realized yet?

An endless pursuit of betterment. That's what we're really talking about.

<comment><USER5> No, by adding features you add complexity and therefore compromise reliability.

So what we are REALLY talking about is how you want to "endlessly pursue" my devices and "better" them _until none of them work anymore_.

<comment><USER3> Compare cars from even a decade ago to what we have now. Far more features in safety, comfort, economy. Are they less reliable? Maybe/maybe not. See this (sources cited on Page 3): [http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the- hood/diagnosing-car-...](http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the- hood/diagnosing-car-problems/mechanical/cars-less-problematic.htm)

Car manufacturers could've easily stopped innovating and bettering the automobile eons ago, thinking it works and does what it's supposed to so what's the point. (Sure they did it for profit and not purely for the sake of innovation, but who doesn't?) But they didn't, which is why we have the Tesla Model S and Honda FCX and much more today to marvel at.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Developer-friendly Twitter alternative App.net hits 100K registered users - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/05/17/developer-friendly-twitter-alternative-app-net-hits-100000-registered-users-9-months-after-launch/

<comment><USER2> There was a good post recently how what attention App.net has received has been focused on Alpha instead of the platform and how much of a marketing fail that was <https://medium.com/future-tech-future-market/81dd36429f47>

</comment><comment><USER3> It is interesting, just a couple of days ago i asked this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715431>

</comment><comment><USER4> App.net is just like twitter at the beginning: I don't understand what it's for.

<comment><USER5> Here is my answer.

App.net has positioned itself as "anti" - capturing the developers who were turned away from other social networks. That's OK as a starting point, but it doesn't account for growth to 100k users. So who are those users?

And I think the answer is: they're users that would have done business directly with the outcast developers and their products, rather than App.net. App.net is a new kind of middleman.

There are types of social networking services that would be suitable for subscription fees, and ordinarily each of those devs would have the option of building out their own infrastructure, or trying to cram their idea into the second-class citizenship of a Facebook or Twitter, with all the risks that entails. But hooking themselves to App.net gives them a mix of the two options - more freedom, less bootstrapping.

So there's a massive positive feedback loop associated with getting developers on App.net - the same kind of feedback loop that made Microsoft in its best years so developer-centric.

The downside is that everyone's going to be heavily locked in. The endgame for this ecosystem isn't likely to be pretty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> App.net is just a cool name.

</comment><comment><USER7> And this is exactly why the mods here change titles. Original headline of this submission was "Developer-friendly Twitter killer..."

<comment><AUTHOR> And this is why submitters complain about title changing by mods. I was keeping the spirit of the original headline, mod removed "in 9 months" in favor of "alternative". I think mentioning it was done in 9 months is important.

<comment><USER8> 100k users after 9 months doesn't usually warrant a headline, and barely tickles twitter's user base.

<comment><USER9> 100K in a month, that would be newsworthy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The User Experience of Lootboxes - <AUTHOR> https://blog.prototypr.io/the-user-experience-of-lootboxes-fcfe92206a6b <comment><USER3> I am morally opposed to exposing children to faux-gambling to make Blizzard or Valve an extra buck -- or get them to spend an extra 20 minutes in game. The argument that loot boxes are "only cosmetic" is also a terrible argument. The game experience involves customizing your character. Cosmetic items are _by definition_ part of the game and, therefore, enhance gameplay. Many lawsuits were lost a few years ago where dozens of skin selling/trading/gambling sites had to be shut down. At least I'm happy governments all over the world took a stand.

But unfortunately, this trend won't stop until consumers also take a stand and vote with their wallets. I was excited for Battlefront and the new Shadow of War games but decided not to buy (or pirate) either. On the other hand, maybe litigation is the only way to change these exploitative grey-area practices.

<comment><USER4> The issue is unlike previous anti-consumer practices (like day-1 DLC), no more does one customer = one wallet vote. Sure, 50 of us could not buy the game, but that one whale who spends $3000 has just outvoted us with his wallet.

<comment><USER5> At least it prepares kids for how the real world works...

<comment><USER6> ...at a time at which they're unprepared for making financial decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of things I don't like about loot boxes is that it doesn't involve shooting avatars. I didn't buy CoD WWII so that I could take sixty seconds to load The Headquarters, wander around, push the lever, wait for the drop animation, wait for the opening animation. Only to get a box full of shit I already have (I've just quit opening them now). I want to shoot shit, not stand around doing paperwork.

So in summary, if this is the direction games are going, I guess I'll start looking at more board games, and get better on that mandolin. Because this is _not_ how I care to spend even a minimal amount of my gaming time.

<comment><USER8> Ironically, you like the game less, the more it gets close to true military life experience :).

That said, I sympathize. Things tangential to the core gameplay should be... tangential. The problem is that these days, the idea of what constitutes "gameplay" differs is different for the studios than it is for the players.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's ironic. Games are not there to be accurate simulacra of life; that's what life is for. People usually play games to _escape_ from the tedium of realism. If I wanted to spend more of my time grinding, I'd work longer hours.

<comment><USER10> which is why i find the genre of Simulation so interesting. of which Flight Sims seem to be most well known, most typical example of. In the old Falcon 4, there was a large manual that one required just to operate the radar screens. and folks would learn them . Perhaps it provided some feeling of mastery over a complex task - and knowing it derived from something from reality/nature meant that task was in some way grounded in "truth".

In something newer like the DCS series each aircraft has rows of knobs - <USER2> _represent reality_ as closely as possible. Of course you can expand Simulation to all sorts of domains. e.g. for tanks Steel Beasts is almost a game in the proper sense, but quite simulation influenced (actual militaries use it to train tank teams).

Finally, why restrict yourself to avation/military... you could truly attempt simulate any experience. essentially, you would de-gamify it.

i think the core values of simulation are free-form structure, customization, exploration, experimentation.

Are engaging with these sims "fun"? I dont' know, but folks sure seem to spend a lot of time "playing" them. They must be getting something out of it.

I'm interested how far you could take this, how far you could expand into something engaging that not along the well-trodden path of flight/military/car stuff.

<comment><USER11> People who own planes generally report it being fun to fly; it is just also extremely expensive to do often and there is a massive element of risk if you don't know what you are doing or your luck with the weather runs out for you and your small plane that you are flying with your limited skills. I don't be know many people who report "going into the military was extremely fun and I would do it constantly if I just had access to enough sufficiently-evil enemies to kill".

<comment><USER10> > I don't be know many people who report "going into the military was > extremely fun and I would do it constantly if I just had access to enough > sufficiently-evil enemies to kill".

That statement to me shows you even have difficulty conceptualizing what a non-gamified model even look like! (.e.g "sufficiently-evil enemies to kill").

Simulation has much more elements of tedium (no "pacing"), just like real life.

Or the learning curve is not constructed just so to be the perfect on-ramp, just like real life. The learning curve is simply what nature/environment demands.

e.g. "Enemies" are not "sufficiently evil", or even presented to you at proper game-enjoyment level times/pacing.

It is why simulations are not really "games", they are not "fun" (but the can be, but that isn't the "point"), but my point was that something draws people to them, and they engage with them. It's interesting to think about why.

<comment><USER11> I brought that up to isolate the moral ambiguity of war, not to imply something about gamification. The reason I did that was because, without that comment, I think you would have to be a sick and twisted person to consider shooting at and killing other people to be "fun", even if it were thrilling and challenging and engaging and whatever else you find "fun".

Flight simulators do not have the same moral quandary, so we don't have to worry about it there: we can ask the question "is flying fun"... and you seem to have ignored my premise which is that the answer is apparently "yes": people who own planes report that flying is fun.

However, most people can't fly, as it requires you to have a ton of disposable income to own the plane and contract the hanger and pay for the fuel. The people I know who own planes hardly ever get to fly them, and when you do get to fly you are often almost "forced to" in order to keep your training up to date.

Regardless, it is worth noting that you have now slipped into the territory of having defined a simulation as something inherently not fun, so we should ask if a flight simulator even qualifies for your circular definition, and it turns out it doesn't :/.

So, the reason why a true combat simulator (with the caveat that the enemy is "sufficiently evil") would be "not fun" is that most of combat is "hurry up and wait", maintaining your equipment, and doing training exercises. What makes a first person shooter fun is that you get to do only the parts that are thrilling, challenging, and engaging: even your gun is maintained by other people.

A flight simulator is thereby not really a simulator, as if it were 99% of your time would be spent making money to buy fuel. You would only get to fly a couple times a month at most, and your plane would even be in the shop a lot. You would be managing your flight certification credits more than your air traffic control, and you would have a pretty limited set of destinations.

In Flight Simulator, you can fly any plane, from anywhere to anywhere, the plane always works (unless you _ask_ for it to not work), you get to decide how bad (aka, "exciting") the weather is, and the fuel is effectively free. You get to spend all of your time doing the parts that are thrilling, challenging, and engaging.

The closest you can get to this experience in the real world is flying commercially, whether for a large airline (in which case you do get to fly large aircraft--which is both interesting and boring--but mostly in good weather on someone else's schedule) or you start your own small business flying people around (in which case we would expect a bunch of sales and accounting hours).

<comment><USER9> One quibble: You don't have to own a plane to fly. You can rent small prop planes at an airport.

<comment><USER12> Getting your License requires a significant money and time investment. The kind of investment that a significant amount of people cannot make. Meanwhile FSX is under 20 dollars and runs on a laptop from 2007, which a nice joystick costing about 30 dollars. It even lets you turn down the simulation-ness, if you just want to play around instead of follow checklists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Extra Credits did a good video on AAA game pricing recently ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhWGQCzAtl8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhWGQCzAtl8)) that talks about why developers are going down the lootbox and microtransaction roads.

Their argument is basically that AAA games are just way too cheap. The price has been at $60 for a long time, and even though the market has expanded since then, it's still not enough to cover the development costs, which have skyrocketed. Finding other revenue streams has become a necessity. The alternative would be $80 or $100 AAA games.

<comment><USER14> _The alternative would be $80 or $100 AAA games._

Or lowering production costs. Less reliance on expensive licenses and must-be- bigger-than-the-last-one sequels and more original content instead would be a good starting point.

<comment><USER15> Relying on more original content would actually be more expensive if they were trying to maintain the same quality. Having to develop a new IP and new story from scratch, plus new assets and models, plus the major chance that it might not actually succeed... it's a risk-averse model. Everyone knows that CoD will sell, or Madden, or GTA. It's guaranteed money, even if it's a relatively small profit. Small profit is better than maybe zero maybe negative.

<comment><USER14> CoD, Madden and GTA are big enough to make a profit at $60 though. We're not talking about those titles really. We're talking about the games that try to compete with them, and don't sell enough $60 copies to be worthwhile. Those are the games that need to reduce their production costs, or just not get made, rather than introducing things like loot boxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In Magic, booster packs are actually useful for drafting. Adults in the MtG community constantly stress that you shouldn't buy booster packs for yourself --they're made for draft play.

In pretty much all video games that have them, you can't draft with loot boxes, or it wouldn't make any sense. I played Destiny 2 recently and had a good amount of fun, but much of the game felt so artificial and designed around a boardroom-brainstormed economic strategy. It seems this has just resulted in chaos in the fan community. I strongly recommend Monster Hunter World instead. Loot-based, grindy action game, without loot boxes.

<comment><USER8> Could you explain what "draft play" means?

Also: I hereby regret that I didn't make contact with adult CCG communities when I was ~10-13 and into Magic and other games; with my cousin, we've spent plenty of our pocket money buying booster packs...

<comment><USER17> Ah, by draft we are referring to a mode of play in modern CCGs: one where players gather around a table, passing packs around and picking cards from them for the purpose of making a deck _on the spot_ , and then playing with that deck in the subsequent tournament.

With drafting, having a randomized pack actually serves a purpose other than gambling, in that the unknown nature of the contents of the pack means that the people sitting at the table picking cards for their deck don't know what will be coming and what others have picked (which makes the act of this drafting itself an interesting skill and entertaining experience separate from merely "opening a pack hoping for a good card")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hate to think how many talented designers and engineers are building systems to convince their marks to spend more money than they intended to spend. Or maybe can afford.

<comment><USER19> This is basically the concept of Dark UI Patterns. Great video on some examples here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KVyFio8gw4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KVyFio8gw4)

I find the Ryan Air example particularly interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I cant say that i want to support this direction videogames are going in. We get less content and still need to pay full price and then theres the pressure to buy all the dlc and microtransactions. At least before lootboxes you could buy exactly what you wanted, now you need to grind 100h and just hope you get the correct one.

Im happy i bought my overwatch key on g2a, those people buying keys in bulk and then doing chargeback can have the money rather than Blizzard.

edit: To expand upon, most of these costs are invented the game makers. In games like CS source you didnt need to buy any skins, you could make your own and replace the in-game models to see them client side and if you wanted everyone to see it you could have the server you ran the game on use it. But now no one lets you host your own server and prevents you from mixtering with the game files, so now you need to pay for simple recolors that you could have made yourself before or get through the community.

And another reason not to buy games anymore is that you really dont own them. When steam finally dies one day your 'license' expires and all your games are gone, not like it mattered anyway since more and more games require verification from servers owned by the developer/publisher either to play online or to verify your copy (doors in Diablo 3 are server side iirc). These servers then close down to force you to buy the latest game in the series. Or nobody bothers to keep them online when the company gets purchased or closed. And rarely to never at all do they let anyone set up third party servers because why would they. /rant

<comment><USER21> Have you played Overwatch?

Overwatch is ONLY cosmetics in lootboxes, has high drop-rate in normal play. They give them out like candy. They literally gave you more at Christmas.

It's rubbish suggesting you have to grind, you earn lootboxes for virtually EVERYTHING because you are constantly earning XP for playing almost every game, QP or ranked or arcade.

There's a reasonable in-game currency, no external trading, and is frankly an example of loot boxes done right.

Your attitude is "I'd rather defraud the devs, even though the game I have is the opposite of Pay-to-Win."

I don't get it.

<comment><USER10> > defraud the devs

I seriously don't understand game culture these days. The rhetoric seems to hint at things I don't understand.

I herald from the relatively pastoral times of doom, mortal kombat, x-com, worms.

Reading discussions between gamers and about games these these days feels like a postmodernist imbroglio involving Derrida and lacan.

<comment><USER22> Those games are all classics, but they would all be considered small indie games by todays standards. I guess the answer is check out popular (or especially not so popular!) indie titles if you're nostalgic for those days rather than be enraged by heavily marketed AAA titles.

<comment><USER10> I'm not talking about indie vs AAA. (games from then also required significant effort - the same effort now simply get you better games.)

I'm talking about what divisiveness exists in the industry as a whole, today, compared to what divisiveness exists in the industry as a whole then.

<comment><USER22> Ah, divisiveness in the industry as a whole now vs then is probably due to the ubiquity of the web (specifically social media) and having a much larger audience with videogames as a stronger part of their core identity. The PC gaming market in the early and mid 90s was growing rapidly, but still pretty niche. There are also far more developers and a larger diversity in developers and players. Often with indie developers (and occasionally in AAA) the divisiveness is animosity toward developers for not making games that cater to the majority audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> EA/Dice in Battlefield moved from a perfectly healthy grind-to-improve mechanic where you got improvements and unlocks by grind and achievement that actually felt worth doing (BF3 and BF4). I even had zero issues with the possibility of buying these perks for money.

Then they release their latest iteration and they completely ruin it. Some extremely complex mechanic of crates giving crap that seems to be cosmetic only? I mean who is feeling rewarded in any way by having a purple gun if it works the same?

<comment><USER24> Can we just not have grind? I liked multiplayer back when there was no progression, you just came back because it was actually fun.

I already have a job, that's not what I've ever wanted out of video games.

<comment><USER23> In "simple" FPS I agree (e.g quake style shooters etc). But in BF where there is tanks and planes and a hundred modes I like the incentive it gives me to vary my playing with unlocks for "fly a plane for an hour" etc. After a hundred hours or so you have most stuff and there isn't much progression for many hundred hours after that.

I agree it shouldn't be useless grind, it should be rewards for varying it up. Such as just trying something, or getting 5 kills with a gun. When you go out of your comfort zone, you are initially shit (naturally), so without the lure of an unlock "if I can just not suck for enough time to shoot down 3 planes" you stick with where you would have just gone back to the comfort zone otherwise.

Not something you need hundreds of hours of _repetitive_ play to do. So perhaps "grind" is the wrong term for this type of progression. Getting to the _end_ if the progression might be a grind if you want to do it deliberately. But I enjoyed the progressions of BF3 and 4 and I probably would have had less fun without it. I did the first 1000h because the first 100h had those rewards that compensated for me sucking as a player.

<comment><USER24> I don't know, I just get sick of the feeling that every game needs progression systems. Constant popups telling me I've accomplished something and here's your reward make me feel like all my accomplishments are meaningless and just exist to beef up an arbitrary number on a server somewhere. I really like FPSes, but I don't remember the last time I had fun playing a new one because the skinnerbox mentality takes so much away from the design.

I don't mind modern mechanics that don't have to do with telling me how great I am. Ironsights are great and even going back to Left 4 Dead 2 from 2009 felt like going decades backwards in design. Cover systems range from okay to really good. (Red Orchestra 2 being my favorite on that front) Regenerating health is... okay well I don't like regenerating health much because it encourages corridor based level design rather than the classic exploration you'd get from Doom or Jedi Knight 2 or whatever.

And I'm especially upset that the single "element" pulled in when a game has "RPG elements" is the leveling system. That's not what makes an RPG an RPG, that's just the system that best fits tabletop games.

I miss when I could hop into a game, and apart from skill, everyone is on the same level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have two points I'd like to make.

First, I disagree with those who have been saying that piracy or purchasing keys from the grey market are solutions: those are just making the problem _worse_ , not better. These gambling-like mechanics are coming from companies looking for a way to remain economically viable when their base prices stay the same even as the cost of development goes up, and stealing the product is just going to make this already bad situation much worse.

That being said, I am also firmly against the loot box model. While many genres of games use behavioral conditioning as a means to the end of making the game entertaining, the conditioning inherent in loot boxes represents a much tighter loop: one where the primary act of deriving enjoyment comes not from the experience of the game, but rather comes exclusively from that conditioning itself. When you look at it that way, the only difference between a loot box and gambling is that gambling has the additional harmful effect of being a "closed loop": that is to say, the solution to gambling may appear to a user to be "gamble more to make up your losses." But to me, that doesn't excuse loot boxes; it merely makes gambling a particularly egregious cousin within the genre of variable ratio scheduling-based "entertainment".

When I look at loot boxes, I see something that is (at least, in the general case) well-intentioned: the designers feel a need to find a way in this difficult market to retain viability, as mentioned recently by Extra Credits. They're in a hard spot, and a very personal one: indeed, their jobs and the jobs of their co-workers are on the line. Designers may also look at the entertainment caused by the reinforcement of conditioning and see that as providing value in itself: the act of "scoring big" on a random roll is indeed thrilling to people, and it is easy to believe that providing that to people provides them "value". But is it thrilling for the right reasons? Is that really value? Are we optimizing for the wrong measurement? My feeling is that this potentially well-intentioned pivot to loot boxes has and is derived from models of behavioral conditioning that feel harmful to end users even if they came from well-intentioned reasoning.

I would like to see the industry move away from this model; I know that right now a higher initial price tag is a hard pill to swallow, but at various times in the industry the price has been higher (adjusted for inflation), and the market accepted it. I think for example about the SNES era, where SNES games defaulted even back then to $80 for a new AAA game (adjusted for inflation, that'd be ~$140 today): the initial price was steep, but the market held and the people found value in it. There is also something to be said about profitability being obtained by being able to reach our much wider target audience - profit by volume, which is something that loot boxes take advantage of but that other models could take advantage of as well.

This is by no means an easy problem to solve, and I don't know where the industry will end up. The kinds of pressures mentioned recently by Extra Credits are very real, and loot boxes present a very obvious way to circumvent that issue. But I hope that an alternative model can be found; one that derives itself less from gambling and behavioral conditioning and more toward providing an obvious, easily calculable cost-to-benefit.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yep. And this is why I play emulated and pirated games. These older games don't use loot boxes, DLC, or the myriad of other tricks and traps to sink more money after the initial purchase.

I'll also play more current games where I actually __buy __the game outright, although that 's changed from computer to board games. I know what I'm getting with a board game. None of that stupid lootbox crap, or the Diablo3 method of forcing people to buy crap on eBay to play "single player game".

The game companies have forced me to migrate to local games. And Emulation serves its purpose very well. It assumes the same hardware, and just works. Yeah, it's breaking copyright, but well - I'd get screwed in buying legit. So well, whatever. Arr.</comment>


EUV Lithography Revisited - <AUTHOR> https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-does-the-laser-technology-in-euv-lithography-work <comment><AUTHOR> I didn't really appreciate the difficulty of modern semi-conductor fab until I read this.</comment>


The Erlang Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://yarivsblog.com/articles/2008/02/08/the-erlang-challenge/

<comment><USER2> I must say that I am taken aback by the title you used to link to my article. I did _not_ mean it as a snide response to the Arc challenge. I thought the Arc challenge was pretty cool, and I replied to it with an Erlang implementation -- you can see it here <http://arclanguage.org/item?id=722>. If it come across as snide, then I didn't communicate it as I had intended. The reason I said it's in the "spirit" of the Arc challenge is that the Arc challenge highlights what Arc is good at, and the Erlang challenge highlights what Erlang is good at.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. I thought you were making a sly joke too.

I guess this just proves people read their biases into whatever they encounter. Like many, I thought the Arc challenge amounted to a test of how much a language was like Arc (guess what, Arc wins). So I assumed your post had to be satire.

And -- maybe the requirement of spawning a million threads doesn't seem like a cruel joke to you, but it is to anyone who has to work in a language other than Erlang.

<comment><USER2> Apparently, I should have been more sensitive to the way people would interpret this challenge and picked my words differently.

A few other languages, including Scala and Stackless Python, have lightweight concurrency capabilities. AFAIK those languages do allow you to spawn millions of processes (or actors), but they don't handle garbage collection, scheduling, IO, distributed programming and native code interfacing as well as Erlang does.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if there's anything different you should have done.

If you discuss two different computer languages in any piece of writing on the internet, a large majority of the readers will assume you are advocating one over the other. I've seen this so many times already.

I'm just sad that I fell into the same trap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm guessing that very few people here on news.yc are qualified to compose the Cobol Challenge: the problem for which Cobol is uniquely qualified to provide the elegant solution.

Of course, the budget and the legacy code will have to be a very explicit part of that problem.

Meanwhile, this Erlang Challenge only tends to emphasize my impression -- which is just a stereotype, really -- that Erlang is _certainly not_ the hundred-year language: it's a special-purpose language that is brilliant at a narrow class of problem. I'm convinced that, if I have some process that I want to spread across half a million processor cores, I should ask my company's Erlang guru to work on it (because, come on, if you can afford half a million processor cores you can afford at least one Erlang guru). What I'm not yet convinced of is that a world with N programmers who work in general- purpose languages needs more than (0.005)N Erlang gurus.

The challenge of the Erlang advocate is not to convince me, over and over, that Erlang wins its class; the challenge is to convince me that Erlang's class of problem is so important to my life that I should study Erlang rather than vascular surgery, or television repair, or other obscure technical skills that I don't know that much about.

<comment><USER2> Just because Erlang is very good at solving a certain class of problems, doesn't mean it's inferior at solving general computing problems.

The Erlang challenge highlights what Erlang is good at, but it's not meant to convince you that Erlang is good at everything. I've never claimed that this challenge proves you should use Erlang to solve any problem that comes your way.

<comment><USER4> Well, okay, it sounds like I have therefore interpreted the Erlang Challenge correctly: it highlights what Erlang is good at. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with ass-kicking special-purpose programming languages, and I look forward to the day when I will actually spend ten minutes learning Erlang and be able to start _discussing_ it instead of just marveling at it from afar.

The thing is, the Arc Challenges (I presume there will be others...) _are_ explicitly intended to convince us that Arc is an awesome language for solving general computing problems. (Of course, they're also tools for designing Arc: If Arc proves unconvincingly awesome at any point, the plan is to twiddle its design knobs until the awesomeness returns. We will see how it goes.)

When you adopted the Arc Challenge's title and style, it left me wondering if you were aiming at the same goal. If you were, I wanted to invite you to shoot again, because you kinda missed. However, it seems that "convincing me that Erlang is good at everything" was never your goal at all, so I'm sorry to have interpreted it that way. (My interpretation may have been unduly influenced by the original title of the submission...)

<comment><USER2> I guess that you and I had different interpretations of the Arc challenge. I thought it was intended to demonstrate how easy it is to implement multi-page flows in Arc by binding closures to links and forms. I didn't think it was intended to convince people that Arc is a good general purpose language because its scope was so narrow (if the challenge were to build a search engine or an image editing tool, it would have been a different story).

By the way, although I didn't expect people to extrapolate from the Erlang challenge that Erlang is a good general purpose too, I do think that it is, at least for building backends for a wide range of applications. I wrote a followup on my blog to the Erlang challenge where I listed some of them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/science/oldest-modern-human-skull-in-eurasia-story.html <comment><USER2> Can someone link to a kind of summary of the current best understanding of human evolution and dispersal? It's really fascinating to me.

Until recently, I had naively understood "Out of Africa" to mean that _homo sapiens_ evolved in Africa from some sort of ape like thing and then went out and conquered the world. But the idea that _homo sapiens_ is just one of many kinds of human species, and that other ones like Neanderthals and Denosivans left Africa earlier (or evolved from _homo erectus_ who left earlier still...?) is really mind blowing. It's weird to me to think of multiple human species living at the same time.

<comment><USER3> The general consensus up until now is, roughly:

Homo Erectus: 1 million B.C. to about 500,000 B.C.

Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens split off from common ancestor: 500,000 B.C.

Homo Sapiens dominate Africa until about 70,000 B.C. when they spread into Europe, Middle East, and Asia.

Neanderthals dominate Europe, Middle East, and Asia, until 70,000 B.C. when Homo Sapiens return out of Africa.

There are a few other variations of humans in the 300KYA to 70KYA period, including: Denisovans (found in Siberia and other places), the "hobbits" found in Indonesia.

It's possible and likely that around 100KYA, there were several species of humans cohabiting the earth, including modern humans (H. sapiens), Neanderthals, Denisovans, a few remaining H. Erectus, the hobbits, and some mixtures of the above.

Each discovery sheds new light and sometimes, as with this possible modern human skull, shatters old theories about the timeline.

It's fascinating to think that at one time in the not-too-distant past, there were multiple species of humans in existence, of which only one survived, though most non-African humans today carry 2-4% Neanderthal genes, so in a sense, some traits of the Neanderthals survived. We are the Neanderthals.

It's time we stopped using the term "Neanderthal" as an insult. They were possibly as smart as modern humans, had larger brains, had tools, ritual burial, weapons technologies, and art work. Their anatomical structure indicates that likely they had language. It's possible that they were gentler than H. Sapiens which would explain how they got gobbled up and made extinct, despite their vast strength (Neanderthals bone structure and muscle attachments indicate that they were many times stronger than modern humans.)

<comment><USER4> > _Homo Erectus: 1 million B.C. to about 500,000 B.C._

Can you imagine the period of sheer.. _uneventfulness?_

It's an indescribable unease for me, imagining a planet where nothing _really_ happens, just animals doing their thing... Even worse if you're a semi-sapient species, with _just enough_ awareness to know that things could be better, but not seeing any improvement in your entire life..

I mean, imagine _us_ staying basically the same for the next 50 years, with nothing really changing in human society, let alone a 100 years, let alone a 1000...

> _there were multiple species of humans in existence, of which only one > survived_

If there were other sentient species on this planet co-existing with us, we probably killed them all.

<comment><USER5> If someone traveled from 1200 AD to 1700 AD their lives would not be much different. The biggest change would be the New World.

If someone traveled from 1919 to 2019 their mind would be blown.

<comment><USER3> and imagine traveling from 2019 to 2119. It will probably be almost unrecognizable to us.

My daughter was born in 2004; she _might_ live to 2119. Almost certainly, barring accidents, will live to see the 22nd Century. I only hope that she'll like it. There are so many dystopian predictions -- nanotech killers, evil AI, war.... I just pray that the world she and future generations inherit will be worth living in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To have a feel of long period of time, I always use one metric: my grand father. He's lived 93 years, so almost 100. 2000 years ago was then 20 grandad away. Not so long ago after all. 200K ago is 2000 grandad away. Quite some time but nothing astronomical yet.

<comment><USER7> You can also think in terms of generations. If everyone has a kid at 20 then you can draw 100 stick figures in a line to go 2000 years back. Not so long when you look at it.

<comment><USER8> So this person 200k years ago was roughly 10000 generations ago. That's long in human terms and very short in the history of the earth.

<comment><USER9> The entire history of mammals is already quite small when you compare it to the history of earth. Protohumans/humans history is a drop in the ocean.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth#/media/File...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth#/media/File%3AGeologic_Clock_with_events_and_periods.svg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does it strike anyone else as odd that the two skulls found practically "nose- to-nose" are 40,000 years apart in age? How do two humanoid skulls coincidentally end up right next to each other with 40,000 years gap between them?

<comment><USER11> Sea mines placed miles apart during the second world war sometimes end up settling right next to each other, several miles away. Sometimes tens of miles away. Sometimes next to a leftover mine from the first world war that arrived the same way.

The environment in which they exist subjects them to varying pressures and forces, making them move. When do they stop moving? When they reach a point at which those pressures and forces cease. That point is the same for all items that get swept there. Wait long enough, and if another one is part of the same system of forces that directs towards the same null point, it'll turn up. Happens with sea mines over the course of a few decades. Could it happen with skulls over tens of thousands of years? Sure could. Happens with lots of objects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _When it comes to figuring out how old something is, archaeologists are > interested in one element in particular: uranium._

I though fossils were dated with Carbon-14. Did that change?

<comment><USER13> C14 dating loses precision dramatically past a certain age (~50k years, IIRC), because of the nature of half-lives. Since this is in the 200k range, C14 wouldn't be the go-to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's scary what humankind set to achieve in next 210k.

<comment><USER15> Extinction?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, there's basically a zero percent chance of surviving that long intact.

If we do survive it will be by changing and adapting to the point of not being human any more.

<comment><USER17> I wonder if humans/hominids from 210,000 years ago had similar speculations?

<comment><USER18> I doubt they had the ability to speculate about the future of their (or any) species.

<comment><USER16> They weren't stupid, they just had very limited knowledge and experience to draw on, and very limited tools.

Most importantly they didn't have the ability to directly edit their own genes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > When bone is buried in the ground, it can absorb U-238 from the environment.

How? Is there traceable amount of Uranium-238 in every handful of dirt around the world?

<comment><USER20> I don't remember specifics from college, but yes, I think there is uranium pretty much everywhere. Oceans, rocks, dirt, maybe not airborne, but everywhere else.

<comment><USER8> There is actually enough in the oceans that people have proposed concentrating it for commercial extraction. Probably not viable, but surprising to think about.

<comment><USER21> Same goes for all sorts of elements, like Gold.

<comment><USER16> Or mining platinum from the shoulder lane: [https://hackaday.com/2016/06/06/mining-platinum-from-the- roa...](https://hackaday.com/2016/06/06/mining-platinum-from-the-road/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [http://archive.is/8qW4B](http://archive.is/8qW4B)

</comment><comment><USER23> ...if the DNA testing proves out. Which hasn't been done yet?

</comment><comment><USER24> Also discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20410982](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20410982)

<comment><USER25> Thanks. We'll merge that thread into this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Take the dates with a grain of salt.

Nobody ever got a grant or a paper published for revising towards a younger date. No discovery in that.

<comment><USER27> > Nobody ever got a grant or a paper published for revising towards a younger > date.

Really? Is there a published paper with evidence supporting this claim?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice try, Satan. First dinosaur bones are planted to trick us, and now this?!

<comment><USER25> Please don't do this here.</comment></comment>


Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories - <AUTHOR> https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99744324870271197 <comment><USER2> Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell you about Ghost: [https://ghost.org](https://ghost.org)

I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript, charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...).

1\. Ghost is open source, developed by a foundation in the open. They make their revenue open, their issue tracker, their code, everything.

2\. Ghost is self-hostable, as well as hosted on a paid plan. The paid plan is a little pricy ([https://ghost.org/pricing/](https://ghost.org/pricing/)) but I recommend it if this is for a company blog.

3\. Ghost is beautiful out of the box. Here is the default theme: [https://blog.ghost.org](https://blog.ghost.org) \-- Here is a slightly customized theme: [https://articles.hsreplay.net](https://articles.hsreplay.net)

4\. Ghost has an excellent featureset. It's powered by Markdown and has a wonderful markdown editor in its admin/authorship interface. It also supports authors, editors, contributors, drafts, publishing schedules, tags, etc.

Seriously, try it out. I'm not affiliated, just a huge fan. I want to see more people use and support these fantastic open source tools, rather than complain about Medium like there's no alternative.

<comment><USER3> As many others indicated, static sites are much better unless you need dynamic features. Static sites make deployments much easier, doesn't depend on any OS/runtime, doesn't lock you in to a particular database. You just write markdown and with little to no modification, the same thing could just work on Hugo, or Jekyll.

<comment><USER2> I use Jekyll; I used Hugo and Pelican in the past. They solve a very specific use case. But if you want to allow guest posting on your blog, a static site will not do. You need something that has drafts, that has a proper editor, that has a UI you can add and invite people to. Ghost solves that.

<comment><USER4> You need a headless CMS like Contentful[0]. They have a free developer tier which is great for static sites, especially when you pair it with the super awesome React based static site generator GatsbyJS[1].

[0]: [https://www.contentful.com/](https://www.contentful.com/) [1]: [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby- starters/](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-starters/)

<comment><USER5> would go with Ghost or Hosted Jekyll, `Contentful` is not a good solution for individual/small/medium teams.

<comment><USER6> I was an early user of Contentful. Before I introduced it, we had non-techies editing YAML or Markdown files and committing them to Git and deploying them using Jenkins (yeah that went about as well as you'd expect).

After countless hours supporting this system I decided to move over a couple of the content pages to Contentful (here's one example: [https://issuu.com/m/success/madsounds](https://issuu.com/m/success/madsounds)). I didn't need to support anyone after making that move. As techies we tend to think things like Git are easy, but it's not (that's part of the reason we get paid the big bucks(

Also eventually basically all the company's CMS needs were moved over to Contentful. From my experience it scaled well for both small and medium-sized teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A blanket statement like 'Medium is bad' does not have enough nuance. Medium is for profit centralized service. You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience. It is for you to decide if this tradeoff is profitable.

For me, having Medium as the sole repository of my content does not seem like the right tradeoff. Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. Having complete control over the content is far more valuable than the audience that Medium brings. Mirroring posts to Medium can still allow me to reach that audience.

<comment><USER8> Why do you even need a CDN? GitHub will host static sites for free and updating is a git push. S3 will as well for pennies a month unless your site is huge.

<comment><USER9> I don't believe you can use HTTPS with a custom domain (a domain that doesn't end in github.io or amazonaws.com), with GitHub pages or S3.

Two free choices I'm aware of, for hosting at a URL that both future-proofs your choice of hosting provider and provides end-to-end encryption to site visitors, are the free CloudFlare plan in front of GitHub or S3 (or any other static hosting service), and the free hosting plan on Netlify.

<comment><USER10> You can, we use S3 at my company to host a site used by pathologists to sign out reports. How we did that... I'd have to ask my coworker, but we have https and a custom domain.

<comment><USER11> Aws cert manager (acm) now does this for any domain you can verify

<comment><USER9> It looks[1] like you can use Cert Manager with CloudFront[2], but not directly with S3.

CloudFront is very cheap[3], but it is not free. (For that matter, S3 itself is cheap but not free.) It's therefore a solution to "I'm employed in a developed nation and don't want to notice that I'm paying for hosting", but not to "I have literally no money to spare for hosting because a year is less than coffee" or "I want my content to stay up without my having to remember to keep a valid credit card on file somewhere".

[1] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm- service...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm- services.html)

[2] CloudFront ≠ CloudFlare. Nobody in this thread has been confused about this, but it tends to trip people up.

[3] I ran tech ops for a company whose site was, on launch day, around the 55th-most-popular site on the internet. I think our CloudFront bill was $300 for that day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Always publish on your own platform then syndicate it across all the relevant social media providers to get exposure.

It's a huge pain, especially now that most platforms are closed and don't provide automation (APIs, RSS), but it's really the most flexible solution.

It also makes syndicating to new providers a lot less painful since you'll have some standard raw form (e.g. Markdown) which you can create a manual or automated pipeline for.

Considering Liberapay is using Mastodon, I expected them to already know what they're getting themselves into. Especially with Medium's thickening walls.

<comment><USER13> Standard reminder that Markdown, while pleasant to author in, is perhaps one of the least standard formats ever (every implementation does things their own way; see Babelmark 2) and not a great archive format, largely as a result. (Markdown files don't have version or flavor information embedded)

I hear org-mode is a good alternative. In the mean time, consider storing a permanent .html version upon publication of markdown

<comment><USER14> Commonmark is a wonderful and well defined markdown standard (ie the one GitHub uses)

<comment><USER15> Cited in the spirit of good humor, but not irrelevant: [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

<comment><USER16> Serious question - how is it not irrelevant? Should it be posted any time people discuss the pros and cons of various standards?

<comment><USER13> To be fair, this is exactly what happened, since CommonMark did not cause all Markdown users and implementors to converge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't even understand why someone who has a hosting would want to write on medium when they can host their own blog, especially when in the case of liberapay and mastodon they say they are fighting for freedom but choose to wirte their posts in a closed, centralized service which also has user-hostile behavior.

<comment><USER18> I rarely click medium.com links, or any of their associated domains, hackernoon.com, etc.

The website _sucks_. It's crippled without JS, and squirmy and laggy when JS is enabled. Either way, it's very heavy on the network pipe.

Medium is in business of driving traffic, which means the content is likely to be mediocre.

It's content that is looking for an audience, as my comment's sibling states. Which means that it is probably not that compelling, otherwise the audience would find _it_.

It's written by someone who can't be bothered to set up their own website without all of these mis-features, nor understands the importance of doing so.

And for all of these reasons, the opinion of someone who publishes on Medium is worth a lot less to me.

The same goes for businessinsider.com, wsj.com, patch.com, nymag.com and all those other shitty sites that make me regret visiting them the moment I arrive. There can't be anything relevant enough on there that I can't live without. Just a big waste of my time and network resources.

I've blacklisted them in my hosts file, and haven't looked back.

<comment><USER19> > It's crippled without JS

It's an SPA. What did you expect? That's the new M.O., unless you're a 90's relic like myself, in which case I appreciate your point but times change.

<comment><USER20> There are some use cases for which SPAs are a huge leap forward, greatly improving the user experience. A lot of modern web applications don't and shouldn't behave like a collection of pages, after all.

A blog is not one of these use cases; it is exactly a collection of pages.

<comment> et-al Not to mention, as a SPA, Medium is a total failure.

Trying to read a string of comments on Medium results in a bunch of unnecessary clicks and page reloads. I guess it's upping their click count..

<comment><USER21> I have thought it was intentional, to reduce the number of comments and motivate the writers to write their own real big posts instead.

The way I see it, medium doesn't want to be a forum, but to have people write the full articles. Even those who respond.

<comment> et-al I can see that. But it's tiresome as a reader.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reading further down the thread, it seems they were suspended for violation of Medium's policy on cryptocurrencies... despite the fact that they have never written about cryptocurrencies.

<comment><USER23> Medium has a policy on cryptocurrency? Given the amount of problematic thought pieces submitted to HN from it (and the no-so-subtle advertisements for the author's own crypto), you wouldn't know it.

<comment><USER22> Here's the post where they quote the message Medium sent them: [https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99744414079487371](https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99744414079487371)

And here's the policy page it links to: [https://help.medium.com/hc/en- us/articles/360000646167](https://help.medium.com/hc/en- us/articles/360000646167)

<comment><USER23> Ah, that policy page was added _a week ago_ (the update date is visible on the mobile site). Even if that policy was violated, it's a jerk move to _ban_ for infractions prior to that date.

<comment><USER24> Probably a pre-emptive move triggered by FOSTA and that other one that starts with S who's name I forgot.

<comment><USER22> I don't think FOSTA/SESTA have anything to do with cryptocurrencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I never understood why people who can use self-hosted wordpress and domain names would decide to give up control and put content on Medium. The stories featured on the front page seem a bit of an ideological bubble (I doubt any conservative bloggers would get any traction there.)

And the whole "log in to your email to log on" is IMO horrible design. I put Gmail in a separate browser to mitigate cookie tracking, having to log on to email then copy the login link to my main browser is much more annoying than using a password manager like every other site.

<comment><USER26> That is a bit like saying "I never understood why people who can self-host video put it on YouTube". Most times your content will never reach a significant audience (if this is your goal), platforms like Medium/YouTube/Flickr/500px make discovery easier.

<comment><USER27> You're going from a simple CMS to video hosting is like saying why ride a bicycle when you can build a lamborghini from scratch. Sure some people have the bank roll to try and launch a youtube, very few, but everyone can afford to spin up a wordpress or some other sort of CMS on a one click host.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I never liked medium, their comment UX is weird and annoying, the whole thing is just faceless, brandless and feels generic.

Mabye I'm old, but I find shared hosting with one click deployment of wordpress a better choice, but heck, most of the blogs I end up reading nowdays are tech blogs written by bright people who for some reason will not

1\. deploy an existing blog engine to a shared host

2\. host a blog on a vps

3\. write a rudimentary blog engine

4\. write a static generator (how much time could that be? a day?)

Yep, searching may be tricky, especially with rendered sites, but it's doable and I literally never used the search function on medium... but whatever. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.

If you really want to publish something and you're a lazy bum, just throw up a github repo, or a gist, it's still 100% more flexible than medium.

<comment><USER29> wordpress offers free hosting for unlimited traffic. You don't need to set up anything.

The smallest blog takes a long time to setup. I understand developers who don't want to run web services at work only to come home and run other web services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Static site generator + static site hosting + JavaScript based comment system like disqus is a great combo. You can generate in a container off markdown using something like Hugo and host on S3. I've got free tier werker pulling my repo, building it, then deploying it to CloudFiles. All I do is commit the markdown changes to github.

<comment><USER31> If you are concerned about the privacy of your readers, using Disqus probably isn't such a good idea:

[https://replyable.com/2017/03/disqus-is-your-data-worth- trad...](https://replyable.com/2017/03/disqus-is-your-data-worth-trading-for- convenience/)

<comment><USER32> Two alternatives are:

[https://github.com/posativ/isso](https://github.com/posativ/isso)

and Discourse on a subdomain ($5/month for a Digital Ocean server).

<comment><USER33> Another alternative is Talkyard (I'm developing it):

[https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments](https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments) — there's serverless hosting (with privacy. No ads, no tracking), + it's open source like Isso.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Looks like their account has been reinstated now: [https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99745922397657868](https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99745922397657868)

</comment><comment><USER13> I expected the other side of this link to be a thinkpiece that maybe having one company host and track all of our blog reading activity isn't smart in a post-Cambridge Analytica world (or even a post-Snowden world, but whatever).

It's actually saying that maybe giving a company control over your own blog isn't always so smart. True.

For these reasons it seems dumb to me that Mastodon itself (not the author of this post on mastodon) blogs on Medium. Like a global warming activist jetting around a lot, it just shows one not putting their money where their mouth is.

</comment><comment><USER35> Am I the last TypePad user? I never see it mentioned anywhere, including this entire comment thread. Based on my blog traffic in recent years, it would appear that, like De Niro rants in "The Deer Hunter" — "I'm the only one here."

<comment><USER36> I still use TypePad. I actually like it much more than Medium, much better typography imho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The Mastodon website works great without JS, unlike Twitter. Nice!

</comment><comment><USER38> It's getting harder and harder for me to muster any sympathy for these "Company X suspended my account and now I can't do Y" sob stories. As long as it's not your server, running software you control, you are taking the risk that whoever is providing that service will go out of business, capriciously close your account, censor you, ban you, etc., whether or not you're paying for it. Moreover, if your business actually relies on this service and you haven't accounted for this risk or prepared a mitigation plan? WTF!

How many examples of this happening do we need before we start acknowledging and taking the risk seriously, rather than crying about it after it happens? The sooner self-hosting comes back into fashion, the better.

<comment><USER39> What happens when your DDoS-protection reverse proxy deems your words wrongthink and drops you, allowing anyone with $50 to flood your server? What happens when your registrar drops your account and steals your domain name so that you can't transfer it elsewhere? What happens when you get BGP blackholed? And what happens when all the modern-day puritans on Twitter approve of these actions?

What happens when the oh-so-responsible Twitter crowd decides that the above actions are mandatory under some CS "code of ethics" they made up? What happens if they can back up their words with an industry blacklist?

You're screwed.

We have a massive society-wide problem with censorship and moving to small- scale private infrastructure won't help.

<comment><USER40> You can always start to host on a Tor onion service, though that is admittedly the last straw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Theory:

1) Medium has SESTA/FOSTA concerns.

2) Medium constructs a broad, but also shallow/naive, search for warning terms.

3) Since darkweb pornographers accept cryptocurrencies, all crypto-related terms are included in the search.

4) One of those terms is "decentralized," which is also a property of Mastodon.

5) Mastodon gets auto-banned.

<comment><USER42> It's liberapay that they've banned, not mastodon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I never understood why people trust their data, identity and brand to others to have ultimate power over. Whether it's facebook.com/yourbrand or twitter.com/blah or medium.com/pleasedonthurtme

I realize that these days people may want something more than Wordpress, they want some social networking layer. So I did something about it. I opened a company and 7 years we worked on an open source platform to once and for all solve this stupid situation. Take a look and I'd be curious to get your feedback:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

<comment><USER44> > I never understood why people trust their data, identity and brand to others > to have ultimate power over.

> > [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

No further comment

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I have no idea why businesses think that it's a good idea to let third-party sites control their primary website pages. I have written at length here about this issue >> [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/basecamp-moved-blog-medium- yo...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/basecamp-moved-blog-medium-you-probably- shouldnt-adarsh-thampy/)

The point is, everyone is moving to medium because they have great UX plus they already have an in0built audience. But what happens when they have to start making money? We all know what happened to Facebook pages.

</comment><comment><USER46> Any official word from Medium? I want to know what their excuse will be.

</comment><comment><USER47> Matthew Butterick made this argument years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9063177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9063177)

</comment><comment><USER48> Can someone provide any context? What were they writing about?

<comment><USER49> Mentioned elsewhere in these comments but they got deleted for violating a no- cryptocurrency that medium added a week ago.

also they never wrote about cryptocurrencies, they're a free alternative to things like patreon, and only accept payment directly through the bank (i've used them once)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Host your own. I trust medium like I trust Facebook - they're a walled garden and the walls are getting higher.

</comment><comment><USER51> I wish the creator of dadgum started a no-frills blog hosting business, a Medium competitor that loads in milliseconds due to text being the medium.

</comment><comment><USER52> What do people use medium for? To duplicate their blog posts? Can you put any content on it? Even controversial topics?

</comment><comment><USER53> We use Jekyll and it's just awesome.

<comment><USER54> It was funny to me seeing so many people recommend less robust, less tested static site generators than Jekyll.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> If you like the medium editing you and want it for your own site, have a look at quill.p3k.io

</comment><comment><USER32> I wish people would stop using Medium, especially for programming blogs. The UI is terrible (footer bar, animated pop-ups, monoculture design, paywalls), and I don't like landing on Medium sites. Publishing on the Web is supposed to be decentralized.

If you're going to write a tech blog use a static site generator like Metalsmith, Hugo, Hexo, Middleman, Jekyll, or Pelican, and deploy it for free on Netlify.com.

<comment><USER56> If someone is writing a programming blog AND using a static site generator like Hugo, etc., that also builds up the author's credibility as a programmer in my view. But that's just me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Serves you right for handing control over your content to another party. So, now that the account has been reinstated I figure you must be busy executing your migration plan? Or will you leave it like it was until the next time it suddenly disappears like this?

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm partial to using netlify and Publii for my blog.

</comment><comment><USER8> Medium is a magazine with unpaid writers.

<comment><USER59> That's not true. I made about $200 from a Medium article published last month to their membership program. It's not an amazing amount of money, but better than I expected for a single post.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that's a living wage for a writer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Is there anywhere you can blog under a pseudonym?

</comment><comment><USER61> This is why I use Publii [https://getpublii.com](https://getpublii.com)

It's open source, free static CMS with GUI and free themes.

You can easily sync your website with Netlify, GitHub Pages, Google Cloud, S3 or SFTP.

<comment><USER62> Set up publii for a non-technical client, it looked like everything the client needed, but a few stumbling blocks

1) Themes are too limited, there are <10 and the path to customization is not simple. This is a chicken and egg problem, if publii grows, more themes come into the marketplace, but only having a few themes limits growth.

2) Even though it has a pretty good GUI, it is still confusing for non- technical people, and I struggled a lot with it too, mostly because there aren't tooltips next to fields to explain them (e.g. what is the difference between a "title" and a "label" for a link?)

I'll have to unfortunately move to something else for my client, and revisit publii at a later time.

<comment><USER61> Great feedback, I will send it to the authors. Publii is is still in beta so your comments will be helpful.

PS: In fact, there are 10 themes at this moment but show me the same quality, free themes that come with other static generators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Is there any sign of an explanation as to why Liberapay was banned?

</comment><comment><USER64> No one even considers that Medium might be right and we might be better off without Liberapay aka Gratipay aka Gittip. May I remind you of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844457)

</comment><comment><USER65> Happy Medium user here for several years. Even have been paid >$5 USD for work hosted there. Yes, I have skin in the game, and yes I'm positioning myself as a semi-advocate.

Today's better lesson: LibraPay is too cheap to fork over money for effective legit marketing, so they're going the GoldiBlox route and trying to pick a fight to make themselves look good and get press. I mean they can totally respond to this post with a list of how much they've spent in hard currency to market their brand versus the traffic they've gotten from throwing mud at Medium...

<comment><USER66> $5 USD?? Is that a typo?

<comment><USER44> More than you get paid for HN posts I guess</comment></comment></comment>


The Internet Is Enabling a New Kind of Poorly Paid Hell - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> "Euvoluntary exchange" is one of the most important ideas of our time. I think an understanding of euvoluntary exchange motivates one to focus on the root cause of a worker having poor alternatives, and not the perceived injustice of a particular opportunity available to this worker.

"The confusion that arises in judging exchanges that are not euvoluntary is understandable, but unfortunate. The observer, seeing the degree of inequality, or desperation of one of the parties to a potential exchange, is actually perceiving a disparity in levels of welfare of the respective BATNAs, or "Best Alternatives to a Negotiated Exchange." This disparity is a consequence of differences that come before exchange is contemplated, and are not caused by the exchange." \- Mike Munger

[http://people.duke.edu/~munger/euvol.pdf](http://people.duke.edu/~munger/euvol.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> No one is putting a gun to these people's heads and making them do these tasks. I believe both sides are to blame. The employer for asking the job to be done for basically nothing and the fool who agrees to it.

<comment><USER4> >No one is putting a gun to these people's heads and making them do these tasks

Well actually your taxes subsidy major tech companies like Intel and Google, if you do not work and eat you will die, if you work and refuse to pay subsidies through taxes to major tech companies, the IRS will show up at your door, if you do not answer them, you will get a gun pointed at your head.

<comment><USER3> Your argument is a total non-sequitur. No one said they shouldn't work, but they shouldn't work for an unjust wage at completely extortionate wages that are highly unjust. It's essentially labor theft.</comment></comment></comment>


An Open Letter To Mark Zuckerberg: "Don't Do A Mugabe To Facebook" - <AUTHOR> http://oonwoye.com/blog/2010/05/18/facebook-letter/ <comment><USER2> I am not sure selling privacy is such a great idea. People tend to see privacy as more of a right then a privilege and facebook's actions of late has been viewed as a violation of these rights. To ask users to pay to keep their content private would probably make matters worse and send facebook on a similar path to the one mugabe took zimbabwe on.

I think the premium services model is an interesting one however. This could provide an additional revenue source for facebook but I think it raises an interesting question. Are the users of facebook more valuable to the company as customers or as products. Or in other words, is there more money to be made in advertising than in premium services?

With all the brain power and talent of the people at facebook it's likely that these ideas and more have already been considered and in the initiatives that the company has taken recently shows which model they prefer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree it will be risky to change privacy now, but inconsistency is really bad. That should chose a way and stick to it.

I doubt that the revenue per user is up to $10/year. That will be $4bn every year. So even if they get only 10 million paying, it will be a better return per user.

<comment><USER2> Theres no doubt that it would be a profitable venture but Facebook is concerned about more than just profit and at the moment. I get the impression that revenue is not their primary concern or least they aren't focused on maximizing revenue at the moment. Instead they're tweaking their product and growing the userbase to try to position themselves to maximize revenues later and become a force in the business world to compete with the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft etc.</comment></comment></comment>


What if the greatest athlete alive decided to actually get serious? - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/features/usain-bolt-bio-0410 <comment><USER2> It's an interesting article, but this type of piece bugs me. It means to suggest that Bolt is not that hard a worker. Now, to the reader, that means grabbing a bag of Fritos and heading directly to YouTube. To Bolt, I'd be willing to bet, it means something like training for five hours a day instead if eight.

I always admire high achievers who cop to having worked damn hard to get where they are. The article means to suggest otherwise, but I can't imagine Usain Bolt is anything even vaguely resembling lazy.

<comment><USER3> > _I always admire high achievers who cop to having worked damn hard to get > where they are. The article means to suggest otherwise, but I can't imagine > Usain Bolt is anything even vaguely resembling lazy._

Sometimes the truth isn't what we want it to be.

As a 12 year-old _without_ track & field training or experience, he was the fastest boy in his school. His interest was in cricket, but once he got to high school, his cricket coach noticed his exceptional speed and encouraged him to do track. Within two years, he posted a time of 20.61s for a 200 meter race! That's faster than many of the 200m times posted in the 2008 Olympics. In fact, 20.61 would have been fast enough to qualify in 7 of the 8 heats.

He did that at age 15. Think about it.

Gladwell's 10,000 hours yarn is bullshit. There is talent, and Bolt's got so much of it that he's been regularly demolishing more experienced, harder working opponents for his entire career.

[http://www.monstersandcritics.com/people/Usain- Bolt/biograph...](http://www.monstersandcritics.com/people/Usain- Bolt/biography/) <http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSISS99256920080818>

<comment><USER4> _Gladwell's 10,000 hours yarn is bullshit. There is talent, and Bolt's got so much of it that he's been regularly demolishing more experienced, harder working opponents for his entire career._

Good post. However, I think this needs to be clarified; running really fast is something that has a strong genetic component and a weak skill component. The idea that greatness is mostly the result of focused practice is more likely to hold true in fields with a strong skill component (for example learning to play the violin or writing code).

<comment><USER3> Musical talent may not have been the best example to choose to make Gladwell's point. Not only is genetics demonstrably important for musicians, but we even know that the strongly influencing genes come from a certain segment of chromosome 4.

[http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/musical-talent- genes-16460.ht...](http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/musical-talent- genes-16460.html) [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/musical-talent- pro...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/musical-talent-proves-to-be- air-on-a-gene-string-695379.html) [http://www.world- science.net/exclusives/080429_music-genes.h...](http://www.world- science.net/exclusives/080429_music-genes.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another thing to take into consideration is how prize money is awarded in track and field competitions: There is most of the times a separate amount of prize money awarded for breaking a world record as all hosts of competitions would love to see new world records set in "their" events. This prize money is often higher than the regular prize money for winning.

So for an athlete it makes kind of sense to try and set new world records in incremental steps in order to earn as much prize money as possible. It also might lead to more frontpage cover stories in the long run.

That being said, this might not 100% apply to Usain Bolt as he is already a popular figure contesting in a very popular discipline of track and fields but it might make sense for an athlete of a less popular discipline like Triple Jump.

<comment><USER6> It's generally acknowledged that Yelena Isinbayeva has been doing exactly that in the pole vault over the last few years.

<comment><USER7> And Sergei Bubka before him. Bubka set 18 indoor and 17 outdoor world records in the space of 10 years, often beating is old record by only 1 or 2 cm. There is no way he would have jumped like that if he didn't get a bonus for each record he set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe some of his success can actually be attributed to taking it a little easier, it does say in the article he used to train a lot harder and was held back by little injuries. This seems to happen in a lot of sports, once people get the chance to get over all the little niggling injuries performance really improves.

</comment><comment><USER9> Summarizing passage:

"Bolt is not just one step ahead but three. When he set his latest 100-meter record, it took him forty-one steps to reach the finish line. The second-place finisher, the American Tyson Gay, required forty-four steps to cover the same distance. So the simplest, most literal explanation for Bolt's speed is this: He cycles his stride nearly as quickly as other sprinters, but his stride length, owing to his longer legs, is significantly greater than theirs. Or even simpler: He's a tall man who runs like a shorter one."

</comment><comment><USER10> Single page link - <http://www.esquire.com/print-this/usain-bolt-bio-0410>

<comment><USER11> I

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I contest the notion that Usain is the greatest athlete alive. Running in a straight line or with a slight curve (the 200) is great and all, but doesn't correlate with overall athletic greatness. For all we know, Usain's hand-eye coordination could be bunk, he might throw a ball poorly, etc. Probably not, but its not impossible.

For me, the greatest athlete right now is Lebron James. At his size, his ability to move in an agile manner, his body control, his ridiculous jumping and court quickness...I don't think it compares. He shows the complete athletic package night in and night out, and has from a young age.

Usain's ability to sprint is great, definitely the best so far, but I put more stock in overall athleticism in events other than sprinting.

<comment><USER13> He's also quite decent at cricket. In a charity match last year he hit Chris Gayle (captain of the West Indies) for 6 and also bowled him out. Being able to both bat and bowl shows a great amount of general athleticism, most people are only able to do well at one of those.

([http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/other_international/...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/other_international/west_indies/8313778.stm))

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just a reminder after some of the comments directly after the Beijing Olympics: Bolt is tested to death and is clean. As where those 100m female runners who swept away _all_ the medals: Shelly-Ann Fraser, Sherone Simpson, and Kerron Stewart.

There is one thing that was shoddy though, with a bit more effort the ladies could have got equal times and picked up three golds in the race instead of one gold and two silvers :-)

\- Paddy.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why is this on hacker news? Not interested

</comment><comment><USER16> I thought this was going to be about Peyton Manning. :(

<comment><USER17> Hahaha

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Journalism is fucking dead. People write these days like they're Charles goddam Dickens and the page should be dense with their words. Like they're crafting great literature when in reality they're writing something that someone (with an iPad) will read while taking a crap at work.

Clarity. Precision. Transparent conveyance of content.

When writers turn in pieces for periodicals, they should be shocked with a voltage in equal proportion to the density of their prose.

<comment><USER19> I like good writing. I can enjoy a good story and get ideas for how to write my own.

This is why I subscribe to real periodicals and try to read those in favor of blogs. For technical stuff, you can't go wrong with a blog. For general- interest topics, I've never found a blog worth reading.

<comment><USER9> > For general-interest topics, I've never found a blog worth reading.

Check out Arts & Letters Daily

<http://aldaily.com></comment></comment></comment>


The 48 Laws of Power - <AUTHOR> http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cg/courses/cgt411/covey/48_laws_of_power.htm

<comment><USER2> It's a classic. I believe the updated version with 50Cent is more relevant today.It's called 50th Law.

</comment><comment><USER3> :) super thank's!</comment>


Show HN: Mine, blockchain content id - <AUTHOR> http://www.minefile.info/

<comment><USER2> A fine idea, it's certainly interesting. A couple of questions:

1\. It only connects to twitter? Why not other options including CoinBase?

2\. What do you do with the code that's generated?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment.

1\. We chose twitter as the ID layer for our MVP because we think a lot of the creators for who we think Mine will be very valuable have a prominent twitter presence. It was also the easiest to implement in the MVP as an end-to-end example of tying a fingerprint to an identity, and then later being able to recover the identity where the file is consumed. Twitter is also a semi- trusted entity because of its scale, so you can be relatively confident that a creator was the first to claim their fingerprint on twitter. With that said, we strongly believe in the ID layer of Mine being decentralized as well, and envision the future service similar to a Bitcoin wallet, but for file hashes. The public keys will represent the many digital pseudonyms you may choose to have, and files on your hard drive or mobile device will be automatically fingerprinted and embedded in the blockchain.

2\. We store the metadata of the fingerprint and the corresponding transaction so you can easily retrieve it whenever you want by submitting the original file again. You can also store the json output yourself, and it has all the information necessary to trace the fringerprint's location in the blockchain. If Mine ceases to exist for whatever reason, all of the "truth" is permanently in the blockchain and the proof json is all you need to verify.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the answers, it's helpful. I would say though that for the people who this is most useful for (journalists, photographers, etc) they probably don't want to use it.

In order to claim a file they have to send a public tweet for a single file. That's a good way to fill up their feeds with random resources they're using. I think metadata is much more useful for them.

That's not to say the blockchain can't be used to great effect, I just think that there should be a more private way to claim resources. (Maybe profiles linked directly to twitter with a history of uploads.) If I just upload something without claiming it first, it's just some numbers. If I claim it separately on the site, it's no better than just uploading the file to my site before anyone else and therefore having the earliest record of use.

Maybe this has been considered, I'm only thinking aloud. :p</comment></comment></comment>


Taboola and Outbrain are merging to create a clickbait giant - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/business/media/online-advertising-chumbox-merger.html <comment><USER2> Why is this cancer allowed to exist and not blocked by every antimalware/safe browsing lists? They fit most definitions of malware, it's annoying, designed to trick/mislead you, can lead you to other malware, and spies on you (so it's spyware as well).

<comment><USER3> Because some, like, Adblock Plus and I assume all the other ad blockers who take part in the ridiculous "Acceptable Ads" programme, receive money from Taboola to allow those ads to show. Here's an entry where Taboola was added: [https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991](https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991)

<comment><USER4> The day adblock plus coined the concept of acceptable ads was the day they were compromised by the alure of payment.

The last bastion left is ublock origin. Please, more people need to move to it (and while at it, consider moving to firefox as well).

<comment><USER5> What's wrong with pi-hole?

<comment><USER6> Not the OC, but I use uBlock, not pi-hole simply because:

\- hardware, and I'm lazy (admittedly, that doesn't really qualify as a good reason);

\- I browse on mobile, at work, from cafés, etc.

I like the idea of having a device that handles my connection everywhere and my mobile and laptop are always "on wifi" with that device. I'd love to have a centralised solution to use the dodgy wifi connection at airports, for instance.

<comment><USER7> You can set up pi-hole + a VPN on a cloud provider to solve the mobile problem. I did that, and it's great, but I do recognize that it has greater time demands (setting up the server, hardening it, setting up the CA, generating keys, ongoing maintenance, etc) and expense.

Here's a dated but reasonable overview of the process from Digital Ocean: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- bloc...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-block- advertisements-at-the-dns-level-using-pi-hole-and-openvpn-on-ubuntu-16-04)

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately DNS based ad-blocking solutions are nowhere near as effective and convenient as an extension like uBO. Even if you have a publicly available DNS based service they will tend to be more lax in order to not break sites which lets many ads through.

I use a combination of PiHole, Firefox+uBO, and VPN + FW rules to stay as much away from ads as possible even when browsing mobile. uBO is the single most convenient and effective measure out of all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Adam Singolda, who runs Taboola and will take charge of the combined > company, characterized the deal in a statement as a way to "create a more > robust competitor to Facebook and Google" while "strengthening journalism."

Do potential investors/employees actually believe this kind of drivel or is it a sort of expected formalistic dance?

<comment><USER4> Drivel. Investors care about business model, and potential profitability. And annoyingly, these click baits do work to drive traffic, and drive advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm very surprised that I see Outbrain ads when I visit cnn.com. Google have a decade of of my email history, my search queries, my Android location, my YouTube history, etc, etc. Yet apparently Outbrain's advertising is so effective that they can offer more money to CNN to place ads. What is going on?

<comment><USER11> Outbrain doesn't offer more money as much as steady money. When I talked to an advertising person about it, she told me we had a guarantee from them for a certain amount. That makes budgeting much simpler. You don't have to worry about if you make your traffic numbers or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Had a dubious pleasure to implement both on a website of a major publisher. Eventually both got removed due to low business value. They didn't actually drive any traffic.

<comment><USER13> I've often wondered about this. Many of the places I see them, they seem so very out of place in the context of the main content of the page. I would love to know what the percentage of clickthroughs actually is, and how valuable they really are.

<comment><USER14> I run into them on slashdot where they don't seem to fit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When the founders look back at their life and see "litter the internet with garbage" as their biggest accomplishment, I wonder if the money will be worth it.

<comment><USER16> They probably don't care or see it as a way to keep newspapers in business.

I'm running an adtech platform for newspapers (I do price comparison and I believe that I add value to the product review articles) and newspapers need to generate revenue. They usually have loads of staff from decades ago when people were still buying paper journals and magazines.

<comment><USER15> I'm not against the idea of ads, at their best they actually serve as a form of product discovery for viewers. What I am against is deceptive and low quality clickbait.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> These two cancerous clickbait entities were basically 95% of the sole reason I started using adblockers to begin with many years ago. I can't stand seeing their crap on any webpage I visit. It is filth that ruins the Internet for majority of people who don't have a mental filter to not click on this stuff.

The other 5% reason is malicious ads/tracking. I'd actually be open to not running adblockers anymore if these two reasons were eliminated from the web. I'd be fine with small non tracking ads from non cringe worthy gigantic ad networks that invade basically every webpage I visit nowadays.

PS - Ublock Origin actually doesn't block these two networks (Taboola/Outbrain) by default - you have to enable Fanboys Annoyance list to do so.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nevermind adblockers, these outlets deserve to be blocked at the hosts file level.

</comment><comment><USER19> As much as I dislike seeing them on publisher websites this is just going to be further bad news for publishers in finding revenue outside of ads and subscriptions.

We're just going to see crappier content at a larger scale that earns them less money due to significantly reduced competition.

</comment><comment><USER20> Might this help by reducing the size of the pi-hole black list?

</comment><comment><USER21> Taboola and Outbrain are like the Mossad in your livingroom. They spy on your browsing habits for who knows what reasons

</comment><comment><USER22> This seems like a very bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER23> ("Taboola and Outbrain, the two biggest chumbox providers, are merging to create a clickbait giant.")

<comment><USER24> Yes, photo captions are often a source of better titles. Thanks!</comment></comment>


CNN team arrested by Minnesota police on live television - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/us/live-news/george-floyd-protest-updates-05-28-20/h_4ed08403663fa4ed3518221d0f2a1552 <comment><AUTHOR> 1:47 2:40 wow

Reporters arrested while reporting, after having asked about where to position themselves, and while asking for further instructions about how to cooperate with police.

</comment><comment><USER2> Over-militarized police. Put people in armor and combat gear and they immediately slip into the totalitarian oppressor mentality just as demonstrated in the Stanford prison experiment.

<comment><USER3> >just as demonstrated in the Stanford prison experiment

That's like one of the worst example because that was pretty much a fraud experiment and was debunked several times

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17287319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17287319)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17796953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17796953)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387601)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8073748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8073748)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108801)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660709)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And somehow I'm not surprised. Shocked. But not. Some incredible footage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Crystal clear 1st Amendment violation. Feels like the pivotal scene in a documentary about how things fell apart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting that when they arrested the team, the arrest happened after Jimenez showed his card. Then, as Jimenez was being led away, a police officer handed the mike to another of the staff. So at that point it doesn't seem like the officers had any intention to arrest the rest of the crew. Only after did an officer return to arrest the rest of the crew, perhaps after realizing the optics of arresting the sole colored of the crew and the only one who identified clearly as a reporter.

</comment><comment><USER6> Importantly, the news crew was released about an hour later (per CNN).

<comment><USER7> That's not the point in this specific scenario -- noting this as "importantly" indicates you believe this is no big deal.

People are often arrested and released without charge. It's a tactic to get people out of a situation and sort it out later. I would have expected no less.

Arresting a news crew reporting on an event like this breaks significant norms (and possibly laws?).

<comment><USER6> > _... noting this as "importantly" indicates you believe this is no big > deal._

Your assumption is 100% wrong.

I absolutely think this is a big deal but I thought it was important that people reading the article and comments were aware that the journalists had since been released.

We've got the rest of our lives to discuss this event but the most important thing -- the immediate concern -- is that the news crew was no longer in police custody.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it normal to immediately put handcuffs on someone that is arrested when there is no resistance at all?

<comment><USER9> Imagine it was not a reporter, but rather someone who allegedly had burgled a house or stolen a car--someone who, unlike the reporter, is not sure that they are going to be released soon probably without being charged. Someone who maybe has prior convictions and might be looking at the wrong end of his state's "repeat offender" laws.

It's pretty obvious you'd handcuff them as soon as you arrested them, because even if they are not resisting or trying to flee now, there is a real risk that they are only not doing so because they don't think the odds are good at that moment, but will do so if the opportunity arises. They might just be waiting for the officers to be distracted, or to be left along with only one officer.

None of that applies to the reporter, of course, but do we want police making that kind of judgement? At the very least it would raise thorny issues about bias in how they choose who to handcuff and who to not handcuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not surprising. Clearly the police of Minnesota are not well trained and are not in an environment that promotes serving the people.

It is terrible, and should not happen, but until the police culture of Minnesota changes we should expect more of the same.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why does police brutality happen at all in the first place? Why do police fail at handling riots? Seems like there needs to be some major changes made.

</comment><comment><USER12> Automatically plays video and has audio.

<comment><USER12> OK, for the future, can someone explain why warning others about this gets down-voted? Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is this on HN? It's not remotely tech/culture. I don't want to be a jerk but please keep this stuff on reddit where it belongs.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if people will still be asking this question when the tanks roll into San Francisco.

(Sure, HN's leaky "no politics" rule, but ultimately you can refuse to deal with politics only so long as politics refuses to deal with you. It will be interesting to see what the effect of the Section 230 executive order will be... which also got flagged off HN)

<comment><USER13> I would hope the tanks roll in if they try to burn the city down. The politicians in SF/CA have made every attempt to disarm the public. What happens when the SFPD abandon their post and looters are going house to house?

And it's not so much a refusal to deal with politics as much as we are already dealing with it everywhere else. It's nice to have a refuge. Although I find it strange that thread was pruned as Section 230 is definitely related to tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Black CNN reporter. The white CNN reporter wasn't arrested.

<comment><USER16> The full video shows all 4 crew members being arrested one at a time. They left the camera rolling on the ground.

<comment><USER15> CNN @CNN · 57 m A black reporter from CNN was arrested while legally covering the protests in Minneapolis. A white reporter also on the ground was not.

[https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1266323257520766976?s=20](https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1266323257520766976?s=20)

<comment><USER16> Ahh, I see. Okay thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Choose Your Docker Base Image Wisely - <AUTHOR> https://www.innoq.com/en/blog/choose-your-docker-base-image-wisely <comment><USER2> I'd say your underlying problem is using TLS 1.1 and not updating your LDAP server, the version of which must also be too old. Wouldn't you agree that it's bad practice?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, of course. Unfortunately, as a consultant, you don't always have the necessary influence to change boundary conditions.</comment></comment>