grantheaslip

As far as I'm concerned, in any country with a separation of church and state, any group that opposes the ability of gays to marry is no friend of the gay community. They may have made some token gestures, but that doesn't change their core thoughts on gays, which is that the way they are is unnatural, and must be fixed. As long as they see being gay as a disease, and not a natural tendency, they're homophobic.

Their scripture is still full of outright, undeniable racism, and they consider the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. That's all the proof I need. They may have eased back on public racism, but for them to disavow their religion's racism would be to disavow their church entirely.

Mormon men may be taught to respect women, but women are taught that they should more-or-less stay at home and make babies, and for most of the community, if a women gets past her early twenties and isn't a housewife, it's seen as a failure. I consider that sexism.

On the same line: "Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."

I might not word it quite as nicely, but this is stuff that I would say face-to-face. I'm not really an abrasive person when it comes to most topics, but there are certain things which I have absolutely no patience for, and the LDS is one of them. Any group which sees gays, blacks, and women as fundamentally inferior loses its case for respect in my mind. Civility has its limits, and doesn't mean that we're never allowed to express negative opinions (sometimes using strong language) toward anything.

I definitely see what you're saying, and that's a very good analogy. I guess the difference for me is that Wagner's music and anti-semitism were two mostly separate things -- his music wasn't being used to promote his prejudices. On the other hand, the LDS's SEO, by its very purpose, is promoting their ideology.

I just find this casual discussion about the self-promotion of a group which at its very core believes that friends of mine are inferior, sinful, damaged goods because of the way that they were born a bit upsetting. Even if SEO practise is a separate topic from their scripture, I think that this kind of discussion attributes to them an undeserved level of legitimacy.

Comment threads on HN aren't always about exactly what the article was about. I tend to see the article as a conversation starter, not a rigid, immutable topic. Sure, some people might disagree with what I wrote, but I don't think expressing a thought I had while reading the comments that isn't precisely about the article counts as trolling. Your opinion may differ.

I know that this comment section isn't supposed to be about the church itself, but I can't help but be baffled by the way people are able to separate analyzing SEO optimization from the fact that the church itself is a fundamentally terrible organization. The church is full of racist scripture, institutionalized sexism, and dangerous sexual repression; and has been a major proponent of denying rights to gays. As long as they continue to have such regressive and backward policies, I don't care how good their SEO is.

Again, it's not that I doubt their SEO prowess, but how are people able to separate what an evil organization the LDS is from their SEO practises? I don't want to side-track this thread too much, but I'm genuinely curious about the way people are coming at this.

I'm not convinced this is a real problem though. I don't think I've ever thought to myself "man, hitting this unsubscribe link is so annoying, I wish there was a better way!". Plus, why keep all of these emails in a label when you can just opt-out of them at the source?

The vast majority of the time it's a one or two click process. A few sites require you to log in to change your email preferences, but they're few and far between.

The one exception I can think of off the top of my head is MTV Networks, who got a hold of my email somehow and won't stop spamming me, even after I've unsubscribed at least a dozen times.

It's actually somewhere between IE7 and IE8. Obviously still not good, but we're not talking about IE6 here.

> There have always been shitty buildings that don't last, because poor people also need homes.

(Haven't read the article yet) That's probably where his mistake came from. He's judging the buildings of the past by the ones that are around now, which are (by nature of the fact that they still exist) higher quality. All of the shoddily-constructed ones are gone now. Textbook selection bias.

Don't get me wrong, the stories themselves are perfectly appropriate for HN, it's the comments (many of them very highly rated) that worry me. Comments like:

- "Anyone surprised he hasn't 'disappeared' yet?"

- "I have a conspiracy theory that the day he does get rubbed out, he won't publicly die, he'll just be "hiding" forever. Some nefarious organization will privately fill his role and take over Wikileaks."

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1948734:

- "The value of Wikileaks is that it makes secrecy more difficult for governments [...] Sadly, much of what has been leaked shows simply that the government is putting on a show for the American people and that much of what is kept secret is done so for propaganda reasons, not security reasons."

- "If public release of this information is damaging to US interest, the answer should not be to suppress this information, but rather to behave in an agreeable way in the first place."

- "So, yes. I do say that governments should have no secrets."

- "Every time I hear someone criticize Wikileaks it just seems to me like they simply don't want to know what's happening in the world."

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945352:

- "...the only reason for political parties is to have places where various special interests can line up against each other."

- "The government is censoring our means of communications, end of story."

- "While it no longer makes economic sense to manufacture buggy whips, perhaps there is a Renaissance in the construction and sale of jack boots?"

I'm not 100% pro-government, and I'm not at all pro-American (though I think America has not-completely-deserved bad reputation), but these issues are complicated and nuanced, and I get the impression many of these commenters think they know a whole lot more than they actually do. A lot of this stuff is on the same level of discourse I expect from YouTube comments, not Hacker News, and I find it kind of upsetting because this is one of the few public communities where I'm pretty consistently impressed by the level of discourse.

So my apologies if it seems like I'm lashing out, but I really don't like seeing this bizarre late-night-AM-radio underside of HN.

1. The belief on HN that the WikiLeaks release was a responsible thing to do, and will produce a net benefit because, you know, OPEN=GOOD and SECRETS=BAD! Here's my thoughts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949234

2. The belief that shutting down a few domains selling counterfeit goods and trafficking stolen goods is the first step toward widespread government censorship of the internet. My thoughts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945648

I come to HN for the tech stories, not for completely ill-informed, conspiracy-theory-laden political speculation. I get that it's not my place to say what HN should or shouldn't be, but some of the nonsense I've been seeing recently, especially about the domain name seizures and WikiLeaks, is really making me lose respect for this community.

I'm a political science student and a web developer, and though I don't claim to be an expert on either, I think a lot of you seem to think that the world is a whole lot simpler than it actually is. I've said it before—I think a lot of what makes geeks great at conceptualizing data and logic makes them terrible at understanding nuance and subtlety, and without the ability to see shades of grey, you're always going to have simplistic, naive understandings of the world. How do you operate on a day-to-day basis when you think that the government is out there to take away your freedoms and cover up conspiracies at every turn?

The simple-minded open=good mentality is thin enough when it applies to technology, but it just plain falls apart when you're talking about diplomacy.

Let's be clear: What Assange and WikiLeaks are doing is incredibly irresponsible. They're uncovering important channels that are going to close up if neither side can trust that what's said won't become public (this is especially true of critical Middle Eastern relationships). Even worse, they're outing confidential informants and information critical to national defence. I hope they're prepared to have blood on their hands.

These documents will undoubtedly reveal some important stuff that the public should know about, and I'm not saying that everything that the government does is automatically good, but I think that most experts in the field would agree that Assange is doing way more harm than good here. There are important trust-based relationships and sources, nurtured for decades, that have just been utterly ruined, if not severely damaged.

Diplomacy is incredibly complicated and nuanced, and this naive belief that indiscriminately releasing thousands of documents and cables is automatically going to make the world a better place is totally out-of-touch with reality.

My theory (and sorry if this sounds mean) is that the same personality traits that make geeks great at visualizing logic and data comes at the expense of being able to understand nuance. You see it with the tech press' bizarre, highlanderistic insistence on everything being a something killer, you see it in the anti-government streak that is rampant on HN, and I think you're seeing it here.

Advertising for what? Other content that's also supported by advertising? Someone has to be paying for something at some point in the chain for advertising to make sense.

> A surprise domain-name seizure without notice only makes sense in emergency situations.

Do you think that the police give the owner of a store filled with pirated DVDs a chance to make their case? No, they seize the stolen property and close the store.

> Our culture is richer because whole genres of music and other creative arts have at times ignored the rules against sampling, collage, and other reuse.

You seem to be picking and choosing here. The subjects of these domain name seizures weren't using this stuff in a fair use manner, they were straight up distributing (and profiting from, through ads) stolen goods and selling counterfeit goods. Our culture isn't being made richer by someone selling counterfeit purses or helping people steal movies, TV shows, and video games.

It's easy to make these statements in vague terms, but imagine if you were an iPhone game developer whose $2 game was being distributed to tens of thousands of people by piracy networks, hurting your already lower-middle-class income. Do you think that's making our culture richer?

Again, this isn't your decision to make. These companies may be acting in a way that you consider counter-productive (and you may be right), but that doesn't give you the right to take their content in a way that they haven't allowed.

I consider people who live their lives leeching off the work of others degenerates and scumbags, and those who defend them idiots (especially because, in the long run, they're not acting in their best interest). I use civil language talking to people who I respect.

This isn't about freedom of speech, it's about freedom to sell stolen and counterfeit goods. You're trying to turn this into something it's not.

Are you saying that if we stop paying for content, more is going to be produced? For music, it's possible that it could be true (though I don't completely buy it) because of concerts and the fact that music is pretty low-budget, but if nobody pays for TV shows and films, they're not going to be made, at least those that require huge budgets and crews.

And either way, it's not our place to break the law because we're convinced we know better than the people we're stealing from. If musicians decide to give away their music and make money from concerts, fine, but for the most part they haven't, at least not yet.

And yes, I agree that this incident is problematic, but I think that they've probably done the right thing for the wrong reasons. The law is slowly evolving to meet these 21st century problems, but things take time. I personally don't see a huge difference between a website selling counterfeit goods and a physical store selling counterfeit goods, and I wouldn't have much of a problem with a store being shut down the moment it was caught openly selling counterfeit goods rather than after the trial.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of details here, and I'm not at all well-versed on this stuff, but I think people tend to be way to quick to defend individual scumbags who are openly and knowingly distributing stolen and counterfeit goods whenever the internet is involved.

I hate to say it, but looking at the list of sites that were blocked, good riddance:

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-sea...

Sites like these are the scum of the internet, run by the scum of the earth. I'm not familiar with every site personally, but I have little doubt that they were all involved in flagrant copyright infringement.

And looking at torrent-finder.info, I have no doubt that 99.99% of the people going to that site were going there for the purpose of stealing stuff, not finding linux distros. The cheeky incredulity with which fans of these sites say "it's not their fault that everyone that uses their site is using it to traffic stolen goods!" is laughably transparent.

The western world is moving away from manufacturing physical goods, and these idiots using file sharing are making damn sure that nobody produces content either. What's going to be left? Finance?

There's a totally legitimate slippery slope argument to made for not blocking websites, and this story does smell bad in terms of legal due process, but I have a really hard time feeling sorry for the degenerates who ran theses sites.

But "normals" just aren't always going to do that. If Wordpress installations automatically updated without any user intervention, then maybe it would be better, but I still think it's dangerous to get non-geek friends to use a self-hosted Wordpress unless they really understand server administration—not just following an installation guide, but how permissions work, how to back up databases, how to properly vet add-ons, etc.

Plus, a lot of the Wordpress exploits have been zero-day. Even if they are checking their Wordpress dashboard every day, or even every week (and that's probably not a good assumption to make), their installation could be silently compromised before an update was even available.

I think geeks tend to assume that regular people understand and care about even the most basic (by our estimation) best practices. You could argue that that's their fault, not ours, but I think there's a certain lack of pragmatism involved in thinking that regular users can responsibly administer a Wordpress install. I'm sure contrary examples exist, but there's a lot of horror stories as well.

But then it's not self-hosted, and really isn't substantively different than using Posterous, Tumblr, or really even Facebook (provided that Facebook exports notes).

We're never going to convince regular people to run their own Diaspora server. I mean, look at this:

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Installing-and-Run...

Even Wordpress is increasingly becoming a huge liability for someone who isn't a sysadmin to run. Telling a non-geek friend to use a self-hosted Wordpress install to host their personal blog strikes me as incredibly irresponsible in the same way that jailbreaking/rooting a non-geek's smartphone would be doing them a huge disservice. Nobody should be self-hosting unless they know exactly what they're committing to. I'd much rather they use a hosted platform with a good export mechanism than use wordpress, see their site hacked using a zero-day export, and completely lose faith in "openness".

Data portability is something that average people can understand, something that sites can implement fairly easily, and something that's compatible with how regular people use computers. If geeks push self-hosting, they risk completely losing their credibility with regular people in the same way that the FSF has. Data portability might not be as sexy, but it's something that we have a chance of seeing through.

There's a reason why people used closed systems like Facebook, and it's not ignorance—it's convenience and quality. People aren't going to move away from these systems for the sake of "openness", but they might be convinced to push companies to implement true data portability if we can convince them why it's important.

I'm not 100% sure this is still the case, but I recall not being able to buy apps on iTunes using gift card credit a year or two back. I got the impression it had something to do with the way that software is taxed in Canada (Ontario specifically)—music and gift cards weren't taxed, but apps were.

So as far as I'm aware, you do need a credit card to buy apps, at least in Ontario.

This is one of the most scattered and unreadable articles I've seen in a while. It took me two passes to figure out what exactly Gillmor was trying to say.

This is yet another example of someone whose life revolves around the "social media" echo chamber having next to no idea how regular people use the internet. Gillmor might use dozens of nearly-useless social networks and thus think that "the stream" is overtaking email, and he might assume that this is a common problem because Robert Scoble and Dave Winer agree with him, but I don't think that regular people, whose lives don't revolve around the never-ending churn of new social networks and new gadgets, would agree in the slightest with almost anything he wrote. They probably wouldn't even understand what exactly he was talking about.

Sure, in the mainstream Facebook is definitely starting to take the place of email, but I don't think that's more of a product of convenience than it was a product of people being overwhelmed by "the stream". I mean, seriously:

"What happens now is that these stream objects are lit up with transactional properties. Code gets run based on incoming events, pulling it out of the teeming inbox before we see it and converted into actions predetermined by our inference engines and workflow rules."

That sentence describes the workflow of maybe 0.1% of the general population. Commentators need to look outside of the echo chamber once in a while before declaring that Google needs to change course because it doesn't fit their extremely niche needs.

He's pretty much made a career out of making inflammatory statements about companies whose fans get riled up easily. It's not a result of ignorance, it's a result of calculated attempts get hits on his articles (I think he's more-or-less admitted this multiple times). The obvious target has always been Apple, but Google (espcially Android) fanatics have been equally quick to get their backs up lately—maybe he's just diversifying.

It's possible to be a good tech journalist without having coded something yourself (though that's not to say that Dvorak is a good journalist). Sure, it would probably be an asset, and a lack of technical context can make people write some stupid stuff, but not having built something does not automatically invalidate anyone's opinions.

Most journalists have never worked in their fields, but nobody's complaining about that. The asinine idea that nobody's allowed to have an opinion about any tech company without being a programmer is getting old fast.

I'm using the latest 10.2 beta release. It's actually a marginal improvement over the official 10.1 package in the Ubuntu repositories. I'm using a Lenovo X201 with a common Intel graphics chip (I think it's referred to as "Intel HD Graphics"). The chip isn't the speediest out there (games are out of the question), but it's more than fast enough for HD video.

I don't need any unsupported closed-source drivers, and my system is basically all Intel hardware, which as far as I'm aware are the most Linux-friendly components out there. I'm using a more-or-less stock Ubuntu install. One thing worth pointing out is that performance seems to be worse in 10.10 compared to 10.04, but I'm hesitant to blame Canonical, as Flash seems to be basically the only thing suffering.

The thing is, I'm probably in the top 1% of computer users in terms of competence. If I can't figure out how to make Flash work on my laptop, how the hell is my Mom going to? If it won't just work on one of the most ideal Linux environments, something is fundamentally wrong.

Agreed. I use 64-bit Chrome in Ubuntu 10.10 and it's unusable. I'm not sure if it's better in 32-bit, but there's frankly no way I'm going to compromise on my browser choice purely because of Adobe's incompetence. It usually freezes or drops down to maybe 5 FPS when I make a video full screen, it constantly uses a ridiculous amount of CPU time, it crashes tabs, and the font rendering is as shitty as ever.

I love when videos are on Vimeo because all of their videos play natively, and when I click on a YouTube video, I'm always hoping that it isn't one of the Flash-only videos that I need to switch to Firefox to watch. HTML5 might be in its infancy, but it already sucks a lot less than Flash, at least for those of us that aren't using Windows.

The issue isn't just performance—it's who I want controlling web technologies. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are open standards that anyone can implement. Whether or not the performance is the same right now, I have way more faith in Mozilla, Apple, Google and Opera than I have in Adobe (and if they all drop the ball, someone else will pick it up). Adobe definitely has talented engineers, but they've demonstrated again and again that they're just not capable of making Flash stable and efficient. I'm not sure if this is the legacy cruft built up in Flash, a lack of interest in performance on platforms besides Windows, or just pure incompetence, but I don't care. They've had over 5 years (over 10 if you count Macromedia) to work their shit out, and they haven't.

Flash may have had a role back when web technologies just weren't up the task for displaying any kind of rich content, but that day has passed. It's telling that the vast majority of articles I've read defending Flash are written by people who directly profit from Flash continuing to be a relevant technology. Some are Flash evangelists, others are just people who decided to hitch their careers to Flash and are just now coming to terms with what a bad decision that was, and a few just plain don't understand what they're talking about (e.g. Dave Winer). This author isn't one of them—he's actually provided a reasoned argument, and the awesome CSS3 stuff he's been putting out shows that he's not just blindly defending the only tool he knows—but people like him seem to be few and far between.