robotkilla

A trump presidency would be horrific -- I'm very opposed to it happening, but if he took power I wonder if it would wake up the swindled masses.

> why does this stuff happen in democracy

because democracy only works when people actually care. most us citizens are more concerned about the superbowl than government.

> How is it possible to pass a law in US that is clearly against everyone's will?

Who is everyone? Again - most people don't give a shit.

links? i just signed an acceptance letter for a FT job but would be willing to help remotely if possible.

> If you really expect Sanders will be any different if he gets in power, you are kidding yourself

i don't recall obama being an actual socialist or talking about breaking up the banks. i do recall obama being a dem and giving the banks bailout money though.

> he is being undermined by the DNC

agreed.

if correcting one's attitude is step one, what is step two? voting? what real victories have been won on this front recently? and i'm not advocating for extremism nor am i advocating for complacency, the game just seems stacked with zero possibility of change.

I'm honestly starting to think sander's is our last hope -- I was on the fence until seeing this. Meanwhile he is getting undermined by the media.

I feel like I'm living in a twilight zone episode. I don't think we're ever going to see an end to this and I think its going to get worse and worse and no one is going to notice until there really is no way out. I'm sick of seeing comments about voting bad / good lawmakers out / in. Clearly that doesn't work because most citizens don't give a shit because they're too stupid to understand what is happening. Even when you educate them they're so shell shocked by the news that they're willing to let the powers that be shepherd them into servitude. We're all megafucked. Just wait until trump worms his way into office and uses this to round up whomever he hates at the moment. Imagine if bush had this level of power when he made the comments about atheists not being real citizens... i'm genuinely worried about the future.

Not sure why you single out the UK - fbi recently gave an anti-e2e speech.

I don't know if you meditate but I can't overemphasis how much mindful meditation helped me when I was spiraling, especially during panic attacks and especially at night.

I downloaded a video of a monk teaching it a while back (have since lost the vid so I can't say which one it was) -- i don't agree or believe in any of spiritual teachings associated with meditation but the physical / mental benefits were impossible for me to deny, even if it was a placebo effect.

I think it probably has to do with focusing your thoughts rather than letting them run wild -- i can't help but think of brains like a computer, and mine tends to get stuck in a recursive loop of negativity, but mindful meditation would almost always break me out of that loop.

Interestingly when I was religious I would pray during those same panic attacks (and always at night) and it would also calm me down. My former religion would have us pray as though we were actually carrying on a one sided conversation with god... being that I'm an atheist I think of prayer as a form of meditation now so i think the effects are very similar.

> more a case of social media bringing deeper problems to the surface than social media being the actual cause

I think its a combination of both. You draw a parallel between social networks and budweiser. Alcohol worsens depression and I believe social networks do as well. Whether or not they CAUSE depression is a totally different matter of course.

> depression... distorts your worldview

I think this should be up for debate as well. Even though I've echoed this sentiment myself, as someone with depression I'm starting to suspect that my own is brought on due to a very accurate understanding of the world. I've been painfully aware of my own and my family's place in the world (lower-middle-class) since I was a kid. My own and my family's mortality is another thing that makes me extremely depressed if I allow myself to think too deeply about it. Wars, world injustices, the ultimate meaninglessness of life... I've been thinking about all of this since I was around 5 years old. That's not a distorted worldview, its reality.

I think a lot of my own depression stems from the inability to block out all of the negative things in my life. Once I started meditating, stopped following the news so closely, got rid of my repressive religion, stopped letting lack of funds ruin my day (partially by blocking out all advertising), deleted my social networks and got into an excellent sleep routine I've been able to manage my depression and I feel a lot better.

I agree with all of this completely and had a similar experience. Our lives are not episodic soap operas, but FB turns them into one. It disconnects you from reality and allows you to judge, stalk and condemn real life humans in a way you can't otherwise do.

I didn't read the article as I'm too busy at the moment, but I keep seeing these types of posts pop up on HN and thought it might be worth throwing in my 0.02.

I've long quietly suffered from depression. I didn't bother to make this known to friends or family. I didn't want people to think of or treat me differently. I didn't want to go on medication and knew if I revealed my suicidal thoughts that people would look at me differently and probably force me to go on medication.

Several years ago I went through some really rough experiences -- divorce, loss of religion, family shunning, all at the same time. This hit me incredibly hard, but I buried my depression in constant recreation, work and alcohol. That's not to say I became or am an alcoholic - I'm not. I go for months without touching the stuff sometimes... but I began frequenting bars for a while on a near nightly basis.

Several years prior to that I also caved and started using social networks - twitter, facebook and instagram. Eventually my depression won out and started to show through. I couldn't stop complaining about everything in real life, but more so on social networks.

When I hit peak depression I felt like I was also losing my mind... and it showed in my facebook / twitter posts. As I feared my friends started viewing me differently. I got dumped by my GF because of my depression and inability to seek help (this was made known to me on her exit). That caused me to go on medication and then things got really bad.

The shit the doctor put me on had me thinking really crazy and I made plans to kill myself, which I obviously backed out of (not a ghost lol).

Eventually I went off the pills and got my head strait and I recently got a fulltime job and have been living with a new wonderful GF who understands depression for a couple of years now.

One of the biggest things that helped was near complete seclusion -- I noticed that the pressure (and worse - feedback) on facebook was crushing me. Often I would get mocked or would draw the ire of some of my "friends" for some of my crazy / emphatic posts. Rather than trying to understand me or help, these people turned on me. Interestingly these were people I know in real life (I had a rule that I would only friend people who I considered real life friends). When I deleted my facebook account for the first time, I gave warning and got at least one "good riddance". These were from adults in their 30s by the way.

Instagram was no better. I kept it around for way too long. I would get almost no likes on my photos or the same mocking comments (from different people than the FB posts). Then my "friends" started following my girlfriend and would like her photos, but would skip mine over, or they would like photos I posted of her art but would ignore my work. That could have been completely innocent and coincidental of course, but in my depressed state it felt like a judgment of myself.

I ended up deleting everything -- fb, twitter, instagram, gmail, yahoo, my phone number... i left it all behind and after a couple of months have felt like my old self.

I know this is all anecdotal, and its possibly a coincidence that my depression became more manageable after dumping all my accounts. I also know that social networks didn't CAUSE the depression, but they absolutely kept me locked in my head and in a moment in time that I need to move past. Deleting them seems to have helped and I have no intention of going back.

> What makes it harder to prove

maybe nothing, I'm not overly familiar with the various types of insurance fraud schemes, but it does seem like masquerading as internet bullies via vpn and feigning a ruined life would be easier than faking your death, for example.

It seems like fraud would be really hard to prove for a policy like this.

My very first thought is - why wouldn't the policy holder make some anon accounts and "bully" themselves, lose their "job" (twitch or youtube broadcaster for example) and claim the money.

> you can't stage a mass shooting with a knife

and you can't stage a mass stabbing with a gun.

I visited Japan over a decade ago and it seemed like everywhere i turned there was anime and manga and adults reading it.

I stayed a couple of nights in an inn as well and there were several shelves of manga (mostly hentai) on the bookshelf in the waiting room.

Also all of my Japanese friends in America (admittedly they were in their teens) were into manga and anime.

I think its a pretty well known and accepted fact that anime and manga are popular among all age groups in Japan.

They also seem to be fine (at least more fine than midwest America) with softcore porn. There was a lot of waste-up porn on news stands and I saw a row of Japanese men looking at more explicit porn mags in a bookstore in front of the magazine rack like it was a sunday paper -- totally nonchalant.

edit: fixed paragraph layout and spelling

I wish someone would start a privacy religion and use it to demand privacy as a religious right.

right but isn't it going to give the existing ones bigger teeth?

I'm glad to see that people are generally in acceptance of the notion that there is a lot to keep up with if you want to survive, and that using references is a good thing. I believe its good to be a specialist as well.

I've been using the docs since I started on qbasic, and I learned theory through the years through building websites and keeping up with the latest trends (and it turned out most of the theory is how I understood code to begin with).

Stack overflow is awesome because its accessible and useful to everyone, and I don't think there's a danger that people would just fake it until they make it with SO - that's nearly impossible.

I rely on it at times for best practice concepts since I work alone and don't have real people to talk to.

> Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's

isn't that what the tpp is supposed to fix?

I'm in that boat unfortunately but it goes back to the 80's for me - heard right wing conspiracy stuff from old people who were getting it from the radio and everyone called them crazy... then the 90's, to 2000's aaaand now its real.

That whole paragraph creeps me out i try to avoid this whole discussion now because I don't like observing anymore - I'd like to completely check out of it. The mass murder stuff is horrifying and I hate that its a part of my reality, and worse yet my kid has to see that shit on the news, and other kids have to live it. People need to let ideologies go and work towards space travel peace. If all the other bad stuff has become a reality, I just hope the star trek future we were promised can come true ;)

edit: by part of my reality i mean via the news as well - it hasn't directly affected me thankfully.

It does seem like his anti-illegal alien rhetoric could easily be shifted to Muslims. Either way shenanigans do seem to be afoot with that whole thing. I feel like I'm living in a cartoon these days.

Its our own fault for embracing those shitty walled-garden apps.

But honestly - they're not trying to appeal to us. Every time I get stressed at the Googlemonster or Facecrook I remember that all I have to do is press delete and use something else.

edit: these apps are built for 1. people who don't / didn't care in the first place 2. noobs 3. my parents 4. advertisers wallets

Super excited to see this released - perfect timing as I've been working on JS heavily as of late and have been searching for a good memory debugging tool and I'm not too big on chrome's option. This looks easier to read and use overall.

I ran into this for the first time just recently when installing ruby and was very surprised and hesitant to follow the instructions ( see here https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst... ). Glad to see people speaking out against it.

I see the illogicality in my reaction but it still makes me nauseous - I can't quite put my finger on why.

That's horrifyingly nasty. Between this, the cowspiricy documentary, new studies surrounding meat consumption and cancer I'm strongly considering becoming a vegetarian again.

> I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?

I wouldn't, I would build one.

I think I'll stick with my two 8gb (16 capable), gtx 960, i7 easily upgradable custom gaming rigs instead of your planned obsolescence crapple machines. Thanks for the suggestion anyway, Tim.

And there are the reddit style down votes as expected...

For the record I'm not saying clapper was in the right or that he shouldn't face charges, but in a country where sanctioned torture is the norm why should unpunished perjury by an official from a spy agency be shocking?

Clapper didn't get punished because he did his job. Lying and spying is what he's been paid and ordered to do. If he didn't commit perjury my guess is that he would have been disappeared. I'm not arguing for him or the system but I'm not at all shocked that it was swept under the rug.