Incredible that you’ve managed to bring this conversation to immigration. In fact, it sounds like you’re saying the root cause of this crappy policy is somehow immigrants.
It's a valid topic for discussion. Even as a foreigner who was in UK on a visa and eventually got ilr I'm still concerned about it.
The current situation regarding small boats is not sustainable, particularly when it's proven that the majority are not fleeing persecution but are economic migrants. They're taking advantage of a system designed to help people in trouble, how could you defend that?
And when does it end? Will the UK always accept small boats ad infinitum?
I played by the (harsh) rules and got here legitimately. Why should I have bothered.
> The current situation regarding small boats is not sustainable
the current situation regarding small boats is the inevitable conclusion to a badly implemented brexit policy and a negligent tory party rule over 13 years. Startmer took 5 months in power to talk to France and have them agree to tackle it on their side of the water. Also no brexit, no boats. The anti immigration chest thumpers caused the problem and then scurried like rats. Farage was impossible to be found the year after brexit won, dude aws the face and suddenly wanted to part of the "glory"
If we are going to start discouraging tangents on HN, which would be a drastic change, we're not going to do it selectively for topics you don't want to see discussed.
>If we are going to start discouraging tangents on HN, which would be a drastic change
This is straight from the guidelines
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. "
Bringing up immigration policy in regards to a new internet identification legislation seems less like a "discourageable tangent" and more of an "overt breaking of one of the few enforceable rules of the site"
Sure, let me break it down. You attempted to dress up the point about increased survailance (low trust society -> increaed authoritarianism to control low trust society) which is tangentially related to the VPN regulation, in a number of far right buzz words. that gives it enough cover to not count as flamebait or politics, even though it arguably IS both of them and should be removed.
The guy below you, whom I replied to, is nowhere as good at dogwhistles as you and straight up brought up the boat conversation, which has 0 to do with vpns and honestly its just "build a wall" but for the sea, a conversation so boringly transplanted from american media is almost not wroth discussing.
You bragging about how you manged to say the things you shouldn't by talking around it and how many people either fell for it/or agree with you and know the dogwhistles is not something I would be proud of.
Just to be perfectly clear, the far right is surging because the demands of the lower and middle class are ignored, in serving both old money aristocrats, landlords, media moguls and foreign oligarchs all of which are economical leeches. We are in a post Tatcher "there is no society" world, not in some kind of left kumbaya "we are the world" reality. The far right is up because they thrive in dog whistles and anger like you are riling up, good at burning down Reichstags more than building any sort of succesful society.
> increased survailance (low trust society -> increaed authoritarianism to control low trust society)
That might be a factor, but the main things I see is that British society is very sharply divided -- dangerously so maybe -- and that these new online safety rules might be an attempt to reduce the ability of one side of the division to influence the public discourse and to engage in collective action. If so, then immigration policy is relevant to this thread in that it is probably the issue most central or essential to the division.
That's a lot of assumptions in one comment. No one claimed that the far-right is the solution (or at least I didn't) but rather the consequence. HN demographic is not even generally far-right and the agreement comes from the fact that people understood the context of the comment that you just failed to understand.
thats the advantage of dogwhistling, is that you can always feign ignorance
> No one claimed that the far-right is the solution (or at least I didn't) but rather the consequence.
the consequence of the far right economic model of hyper individualism? So far right breeds more far right, and calling it out is just "making assumptions"?
> HN demographic is not even generally far-right
It is one of the more susceptible groups to fall for their spell though. HN tends to skew nerdy and libertarian, two groups that think of themselves as intelligent which means if you trick them into thinking something they tend to internalise it because they think they came to the conclusion themselves. It is also a highly targetted demographic by far right groups.
Or do you think its a surprise that the "far left hippie" Sillicon Valley reputation got shredded in a second when half of LA was in Trump's inaguration? We had tech bros in front of elected officials. Crypto, videogames all oriignally very HN areas are all now constantly under threat of "manosphere" influencers, all paid by the same 5 think tanks, and far right billioanires.
> he agreement comes from the fact that people understood the context of the comment
Sure, thats not an assumption, that is you being an all knowing entity that can analyse why 60 people upvoted something. I mean it could be one russian farm pushing for "destroy cultural identity" text recognition as they have been known to do on X and Reddit. Or it can be 60 hyper rational individuals all of which understood the context I clearly seem to miss. But your assumption is right of course.
Just to be clear, I am not accusing you of being far right, you are just repeating their talking points and strategies. If you are doing it on purpose and pretending to be unaware that bad. If you simply are unaware I am explicitely explaining how and why they do and say the things you said and did.
Well you clearly have a higher sense of awareness and probably intelligence than a lot of other people in the community. I'm just going to let the Russian farm and the easily tricked continue to engage how they want.
I dont, im a dumbass like everyone else. But im not unaware of the kind of people visit HN or what our achilles heel is. Knowing that far right movements are infiltrating and would like to use me to repeat their viewpoints is something I found worrying and worthy of self reflection.
Your flipant attitude is either lack of self reflection or worse, you are aware of what youre doing and downplaying bad faith dogwhistling.
> badly implemented brexit policy and a negligent tory party rule over 13 years.
How about:
2018 - Sandhurst Treaty
2022 - Interior Ministers’/ Home Secretaries’ joint declaration of November 14th
2023 - UK-France Joint Leaders' Declaration
Yes, these did nothing. Starmer's/Macron's joint declaration will also do nothing. If you don't understand why, try starting with the past 204 years of anglo/French relations.
Immigration is becoming the #1 political issue in the UK for a reason.
If they didn't want this, they could have just restricted it and it would have largely gone away as a topic of discussion, but current levels makes it inevitable it will become the main thing people think about
It's the #1 issue because the Tories spent 15 years running the economy into the ground and are now trying to blame someone else. It's a power grab - don't look at their piss-poor fiscal policy, it was... uh... immigrants! Please elect us again!
If this were the case, then you have to explain why other things that are heavily leant on (e.g. global warming, or trans issues just to give two obvious examples) by a large part of the political establishment and mainstream media fail to have much cut through with most of the population.
The reason immigration has cut through is it corresponds with people's own direct lived experience. It's not an abstract concept to people, it's visceral and real
There are some issues that people are absolutely feeling: housing costs, low wage growth, job losses and unemployment, stress on the NHS, crime, societal change etc. These are very real issues that are causing people pain.
Some politicians and certain parts of the media are blaming immigration for all of those issues. There's a constant barrage of talking points on the news and other forms of media. They cut through complex issues and appeal to 'common sense'.
People are directly feeling the pain. People are being given a reason for the pain. People feel that reason is the direct cause of their real pain.
None of these problems live in isolation. It all feeds back to the same system that is driving itself into the ground.
The refusal to accept these problems is what is creating a surge in far-right popularity. The very people that oppose them have inadvertently become their biggest cheerleaders.
Why is it that the only people who have to justify their beliefs are those who are not in favour of enormous demographic, economic, and political change required to facilitate mass immigration?
One of the reasons they want to make discourse on the internet as painful as possible is because immigration has become an mainstream concern in the UK. Many of the things that are being soft censored is clips about from the British parliament where this and related issues are being discussed.
Just because people like yourself happen to think it is uncouth to discuss, doesn't mean that it isn't part of the equation.
Everyone always wants to bring it back to immigration, because they've seen US ICE snatch squads and internment camps and decide that they want some of that here.
Growth is much easier with mass immigration than mass emigration, regardless of if those crossing either direction are skilled or unskilled.
And the UK welfare system isn't all that good. I'm a landlord, and at one point a letting agency told me they refuse to deal with anyone on the welfare system because it's simply too difficult to actually get the council, who are supposed to pay, to actually pay. The necessity for food banks is another big hint that the government system isn't covering basics.
(As in: migrants will be asked to prove entitlement, it won't be assumed).
If you moved to the UK for work, you're paying twice for the NHS, because not only is it supposed to be covered by national insurance contributions, but there's also an NHS immigrant surcharge: https://www.gov.uk/healthcare-immigration-application/how-mu...
States such as California were allowing them access to Medi-cal, their version of medicaid. Many get free housing- NYC entered into a $980 million dollar contract to house people in hotels.
Federally, no, they aren't getting assistance, but it's all a slush fund as money flows back and forth between local and the federal governments anyway.
California also has, like, the 4th highest GDP in the world. Take complaints about their money mis-management with a grain of salt - of course people from economically failed states like Louisiana and Tennessee are going to tell you California has all these problems. PS - I live in the South.
The US guarantees ER health services regardless of citizenship or ability to pay. They also get free public education (with all the burdens of being non-english speaking).
They pay taxes (in Texas) through gas, property and sales taxes which fund much of the state.
Yes, immigrants are a critical component of several industries like healthcare.
Legal permanent residency/work visas should be easier for skilled workers who want to work in high demand jobs. And all wealthy nations should be more wary of unlimited, unchecked economic migration by poorer populations.
(IOW it's complicated)
I think social media is at least as big a cultural weapon against us, and if I had to choose between deport/imprison a small number of business and political leaders who abuse that weapon or four million undocumented US residents, I would choose the former.
What tangent? pjc50 was responding fairly directly to points in the comment he replied to. Who was in turn replying directly to his comment. Which was a direct reply to the next parent up. Which was expressing surprise to immigration being present at all in a root level response to a story about UK use of VPNs.
Veen made a comment about US ICE suggesting that political positions limiting immigration are a backdoor to human rights violations as a matter of fact, and suggesting that immigration has nothing to do with the push for more surveillance.
My comment was responding to that and to pjc50's reply.
Veen was in reply to pjc50, who also did not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44712105 — "they've seen US ICE snatch squads and internment camps and decide that they want some of that here."
("here" can be read as either being "the UK" or "all places outside the USA", but the one place it can't be read as is "the US" because the US already has that).
• Los Angeles County General Relief (“GR”, undocumented adult) $2,348/yr
221 × 12 ≈ $2 650; actual monthly household max 2 adults = $442 (LAC DPSS 2023 schedule). Family with kids rarely gets full GR cash, so book 50 % = $2 348.
-------- Food
• CalFresh for 3 citizen kids $8,940
Max allotment for 3 children household = $780 / mo × 12.
Housing-subsidy value (Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher)
• Local Payment Standard (3-br in Central LA, 2024) 28,640
FMR $2 655 / mo × 12. Actual voucher covers 26 600 after utility allowance; market-value differential is tax-free.
-------- Medical care (only the kids qualify under “Restricted Medi-Cal”):
Is this actually what a typical immigrant is getting, or did you just pull this straight out of your ass? Who is actually getting these benefits to this degree? Do we not understand that it's very difficult to apply for a lot of these and most people don't know how to do it?
Also, elephant in the room: California has the 4th highest GDP in the world. Clearly, what they're doing is working. So well that they provide what, 1.5x more federal dollars than they take?
I mean, Louisiana doesn't provide jack shit to nobody. And how's their economy holding up? Anybody check on them recently? Last I checked, despite providing fuck-all, Louisiana isn't even breaking even with federal dollars, let alone touching California's 1.5x ratio.
It’s interesting to see both kinds of drones in Ukraine as well. Ukrainian drones are built for €300 or so and they’re staggeringly effective. “Western” drones as made by Helsing and other companies cost several thousand. While they may have more features, it’s not clear that they’re doing 10x more damage than the Ukrainian ones.
Ukraine plans to buy 4.5 drones in 2025. They’re definitely going with volume over software features. Further they’re allowing frontline drone regiments to earn “points” based on kills and using the points to buy their own drones instead of allocating them top down. The regiments appear to be favouring the cheap drones over expensive ones like the Helsing HF-1.
What’s interesting is that European governments are probably going to end up buying tens of thousands of the expensive drones because the laundry list of features, rather than investing in true mass production like the Ukrainians have. Going the Protoss way, rather than Zerg.
€300 drones are anti-personal ones. They unable to penetrate tank armor except when tank is abandoned and sits open. Drones in current generation are 10x more expensive even when produced in Ukraine.
> There was no real standing Army until WW2 since it's against the Constitution.
This isn’t true. Firstly it isn’t against the Constitution to maintain a standing Army. What the Constitution says in Article I, Section 8, Clause 12 is “The Congress shall have Power To ...raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years...”
The people drafting the Constitution knew that a standing army could be abused by a tyrant, but having served in the Continental Army also knew how vital a standing Army was to maintain peace. That’s why they designed it so Congress controls the purse strings and authorises military spending only for 2 years at a time. The executive may give the orders, but there’s a time limit on the Army he can give orders to.
And the second part - the US has had a standing Army since 1796. You remember Robert E Lee resigning from the Army to join the Confederacy? If there was no standing Army, what did he resign from?
But even leaving aside these two historical facts, think about it logically. Throughout history military advantage has always been with the better trained, more experienced troops. Even if you rely on conscripts in a war, they need to be trained and led by professionals. Saying a standing army shouldn’t exist is like firing all your firefighters and saying you’ll start hiring when someone reports a fire.
Controlled in the sense that most of the maintainers are Google employees. But how does that make a difference? The tool chain is available as FOSS, there’s no possibility of a rug pull.
All of the same things were always true, and are true today, of Java. You can use Java entirely without touching anything Oracle-tainted. And yet, here we are.
Not to mention, nothing stops Google from deciding tomorrow to stop distributing any Go code freely. They pull the public repos, pull the public docs, pull the package server and cache, everything. They release everything back only under proprietary licenses: it's their code, they can change the license at any time.
Sure, you could still use anything they released yesterday, if you still have a copy. But would anyone feel that is a sound business or even personal decision?
I'm not saying in any way that I expect Google would do this. I'm just pointing out that this is 100% within their legal rights to do, and under their ability. I think Google is quite trustworthy on this, but if you feel they are not, you should be aware that the license doesn't act as any kind of real shield.
But my philosophy is about libre, in the context of an educational institution. Teaching java was a mistake, and it would be the same to do so with golang for the same reasons. Students should be learning the concept embedded in the language, rather than the commercial ecosystem associated with the language.
I think it’s easy to implement this, but the flip side of making platforms responsible is that they become much more restrictive in what’s allowed to be discussed. They start banning topics preemptively, just to limit their exposure. And if you’re thinking “good”, it will make the public discourse sterile.
Then the same companies will be penalised in other jurisdictions for being overly censorious. There’s no way to simultaneously follow all the rules.
And if you’re thinking “good, I just want to see those companies fined”, that’s fine too. But then that’s just about feeling good, rather than setting good rules for discourse.
Even today YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape. These are terrible things which we'd like to see less of, but we can't discuss how to make things better without discussing them at all.
If we force videos to avoid mentioning that could offend anyone anywhere, we're not going to be able to discuss very much at all.
> YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape.
I'm with you on finding this personally annoying. But the question is whether a dedicated forum for discussing suicide or rape, one where the incentives of an unqualified influencer paid by views and product endorsements are better considered, is superior for these matters.
We don't, by analogy, randomly launch into suicide and rape in the middle of a cocktail party. Instead, we naturally seclude ourselves with the people we want to discuss it with, people we tend to have chosen thoughtfully, and usually with some warning that what we want to discuss is weighty. Not doing any of that online strikes me as, if not a problem, a legitimate concern.
Who is going to join a forum dedicated to discussing rape? Absolute weirdos, that's who. But you're not going to enact any kind of broad societal change by talking only to those weirdos. You need to reach a broad audience and convince them this is a problem worth tackling.
> Who is going to join a forum dedicated to discussing rape? Absolute weirdos
The folks who go to these [1] and these [2].
We are way into that at least I am not knowledgeable about. I’d be curious about an expert’s take on the value of unmoderated YouTube and TikTok content on this issue.
These guys are fine, but they can’t drive broader societal change if the words “sexual assault” or “rape” is scrubbed from mainstream discourse. Imagine if HN autodeleted any comment with these words, we couldn’t even have this conversation.
We have the postal system and telephone system, which are in theory (and I think most of us believe) content-neutral. You can say whatever you want over these channels, and, as far as we know, the USPS and phone company don't investigate the content and block naughty thoughts, nor are they held liable if we say naughty things or conspire to commit a crime over their channels.
Newspapers, magazines, and TV are at the other end: If they publish naughty stuff, they're going to be held accountable, and therefore they exercise editorial moderation and selection over what they publish.
Social Media and Internet forums are in this weird separate bucket that was simply conjured up by Section 230. They get to have their cake and eat it too. They can both 1. editorialize and moderate their users' content but 2. dodge liability over what they publish. What a great deal!
I think whether you are liable for what your users post -should- come down to whether or not you editorialize and put your thumb on the scale of what gets posted and shown. If you're truly a "dumb pipe" that allows everything, then you should not be liable for what your users send over the dumb pipe. But the minute you exercise any moderation or curation, you are effectively endorsing what you are publishing, and should share liability over it.
You can draw a swastika and a machinegun for sale on your regular mail envelope and it will show up in informed delivery, but as black and white.
If you try to get it displayed more prominently in an advertising campaign, it violates their second set of 'guidelines' that stop what you can put in the more prominent colored advertising image.
They use this mechanism in a matter different than most social media curation, but it's still a form of curation, and favoring the particular kinds of speech they like, using two different sets of guidelines -- one guideline for de minimis B&W presentation and a second set of 'guidelines' (which even at USPS are a bit vague) about whether you can get the pretty color image in informed delivery.
Surely this curation by the USPS doesn't extend to content inside of envelopes, though! I guess my overall point is that Social Media and forums are "opening the envelope" and making moderation decisions based on what they find inside.
For most of the world, war between two countries in the middle east doesn't really have any direct impact, right? Liek, if I didn't know about it, nothing would change for me.
I feel like it can matter a lot to be able to make a reasonably reliable prediction about whether it's likely to go up or down tomorrow and by about how much, and thus whether and when to act on the potential need to ensure some sort of access to supply.
For me, that largely entails just not doing anything. I do own a car but rarely use it since my neighborhood is very walkable, and the tank is usually close to full. Even my lawn tools are electric. But if I relied on gasoline for a commute (for instance) then being able to make good guesses about getting hold of it is advantageous, in a way that is fungible and easily shared.
You say that as though they were two semiotically distinguishable activities. Futures trading is wholesale and what we talked about is retail, but they are the same general line of business and if you think no one would ever do it to try to avoid waiting all day for an empty pump, then check out how the 70s oil shock and supply crisis - the last time anyone ever dared "sanction" the U. S. and A. - played out here domestically.
If it is supply you are actually concerned about you buy a couple jerry cans that you keep full. Watching geopolitics to try to time anything still makes no sense.
Then you're only getting things important to viewership. Nobody's putting an economically critical trade deal on all the channels, or a genocide in Yemen. But Princess Diana dying, that's gonna get coverage.
> Especially as she's supposed to have died 28 years ago
If you don’t watch television news, flipping through the channels can be genuinely surprising. Because if it’s Princess Diana’s birthday, I almost guarantee one of them will be running a retrospective segment.
I really like the Economist as a source of weekly news.
Somehow I’ve ended up primarily reading their daily recap in the app. They already have a full article on this crash. That usually means it’ll be in the magazine next week.
They've always been upfront about their bias, in no way are they trying to hide it.
Way back when I was in college 20 years ago they ran a very funny article poking fun at all the PhD's doing "deconstruction" on The Economist. Like super post-modernist fluff. I could tell the writer had a great time responding to it.
Their punchline: "so there you have it - a newspaper to make you feel good about tomorrow by promoting capitalism today!"
I have gave up on E. once they supported GWB over Gore. I can barely understand over the top devotion to neoliberalism and deregulation. But the shortcomings of GWB were sticking out in the campaign, so closing the eyes and singing "la la liberalism" was way too much for me.
I had been a Economist subscriber for almost 20 years. But then gradually I realized that their reporting on some issues are extremely biased and they conveniently skip reporting some facts to match their intended narrative and lead the reader to distorted conclusions. So I would assume they would be doing the same with other topics as well. I did not renew my subscription.
What do you read? I’m an economist reader too for weekly news.
Would love other sources, but it’s hard to find anything with similar depth and a similar lack of sensational-ization found in most news.
Edit: Oh, and global reach. The economist covers earth in almost equal detail for every region. Not quite equal of course, but darn close compared to most outlets.
I think WSJ is a good complement to the Economist. They have good, unsensationalized coverage of the facts. I ignore their opinion columns as they don't seem very serious.
That hasn't been my experience at all outside the opinion section, which is precisely what you described.
The main section feels pretty anti Trump, actually. Not by choice but reality has an anti Trump bias ;)
They are also quite good at labeling their opinion sections clearly, which I think a lot of other papers aren't doing. Their news section is basically Reuter's.
WSJ is nearly tabloid quality. If you have self respect, read the FT; if you just want weekend reading, read the FT Weekend (it comes with the FT Weekend too, which is excellent long form journalism but not “news” per se).
That's just another Murdoch rag, I wouldn't wipe my arse with it. Better no news than his news. You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.
You think the opinion pages are the only place he pushes his agenda? The very stories they report are selected to further the narrative he wants. That's why apologies and retractions are always tiny.
In my experience, WSJ just reports what happened and who said what in a very dry way.
My impression is that their news section provides a very anti Republican party view. Note that this is my impression, not the paper's stance. They don't really take any, apart from the opinion section, which I ignore. The opinion section has a massive pro republican bent.
> Lying by omission
I'll admit, I might have a blind spot here because I'm only reading 2 newspapers. That being said, I'm not sure of any stories reported by the other news outlets which were ignored/downplayed by WSJ.
> apologies and retractions
Happen when they happen. I remember a few per month. But since they're so dry, there's very little scope for major corrections. If they say, "this guy said that", there's very little to correct there. Occasionally, they mis-paraphrase someone and have to correct their report. Most sound like honest mistakes to me.
EDIT:
> You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.
Fair enough, but you mostly don't get any points to counter in the first place. Only plain dry facts. I go to the Economist for opinions and counter opinions. (*side note, the Economist should publish more counter opinions IMO)
https://newlinesmag.com/ has been a favorite of mine lately if you wanna give that a try, it's got global coverage and there's always something interesting to read
I also read the Economist.
Other than that, Wall Street Journal is quite good at purely factual, unopinionated coverage. Note that their Opinion section is heavily biased towards the American right, but I mostly ignore it. It's clearly labeled as Opinion.
Between the Economist and WSJ, I get a good overview of opinions and facts.
I really enjoy the Monocle "Globalist" podcast which is well-produced, of global range, and a welcome departure from the npr/kqed bubble I was immersed in.
> Form your own opinion, based on multiple source plus your own judgement
I think the essence of these statements is less that you should literally listen to whatever distilled amount of world news your coworkers are talking about and take it as fact, but that if it's remotely necessary for you to even be aware of, let alone have an opinion about, it'll present itself somehow in real life. After that, if it qualifies as relevant to your life, then go about searching for more info, but a vast majority of anything you could hear or read about or watch probably doesn't qualify.
Government policy, sure, if you need to respond to or act on it somehow. Conflict in the middle east? Sure, if you or someone you know has ties there. But again you'll probably just hear about it because it's directly impactful, or you can monitor specifically for those updates using narrow channels.
The problem is, they often assume you already read the news and don’t say what happen just provide the analysis without context.
Heck, Spiegel does that with news on the same day. You get some background article without starting with the facts of what happened, as if everybody reads the news every two hours.
Unfortunately for everyone's brains, this turned out to basically not be true with COVID- only real news fans (or people with expertise in the relevant science, but there are way less of those) were remotely aware that offices probably weren't going to be closed for only two weeks[0]. If you followed the news closely you stocked up on toilet paper when there were runs on it in Hong Kong, before there were runs on it where you were, etc. But if you only got news from the office water-cooler you'd have been none the wiser.
This is one of those exceptions that prove the rule though, I think.
[0] I had this conversation with people multiple times so it must have been common
If nobody followed the news or social media, there wouldn’t have been runs on toilet paper to begin with, as there never was a shortage to begin with and it was all just mass hysteria.
It was never clear to me, but at least part of it was supposedly due to everyone pooping at home using consumer TP instead of at the office, using commercially packaged TP (two-ply, giant rolls for big dispensers). And that sudden shift started to empty shelves. If people had stocked up over a period of time, the empty-shelves situation that produced the fear probably wouldn't have happened.
Of course in practice there really was plenty of it to go around, dollar stores seemed to be the most flexible at navigating the supply chain derangement and if you didn't mind buying it by the roll, it was never really hard to find.
Also- you don't need to follow the news for there to be a panic, empty shelves will do that all on their own. Everyone deciding to stock up a little on everything was enough to deplete shelves, people walking in after saw empty shelves and stocked up more, etc. I don't think most people were following the "omg supply chain" news, they just saw depleted shelves.
I never really understood the importance of it anyway. People were locked in their home so they could just use the shower head if it came to it. Of course a real bidet would be better and cleaner but I don't think they exist in northern America or Northern Europe.
It's also common in Asia (at least South East) they can survive without toilet paper :) The Japanese even have entire water jet massage toilets, they do it like a king.
Or if you don't want to use water, you could use serviettes, tissues. Even newspaper.
That's why I didn't understand the fuss about it. Sure it's annoying if you run out but not the end of the world especially when you're at home where there's always a shower to hand. I don't understand that people were so obsessed with toilet paper.
What would be much more important is food, water (in my city the tap water is terrible so I don't drink it), medication etc.
I would put it at 1% here. They are extremely rare. Bidet attachments have become relatively popular here over the past decade though. It's been life changing (or maybe butt changing). It's amazing how pretentious Americans can be while having such a gross habit.
Yeah, the deep irony of the GP comment is that, had all of these supposedly knowledgable people just read the original report from the WHO (~early 2020), they'd have realized many things about the virus (such as the extremely skewed age distribution of the seriously ill) that would have greatly mitigated the overall panic. It literally took years for the chattering class in medicine to understand basic information that was available at the beginning of the pandemic.
COVID was a perfect case study of mass hysteria, and how you can't even trust "the experts" in these situations, because the "experts" you hear from early on are also generally the ones who are the most willing to spout pure speculation for attention. Humans are gonna human, and a background in science doesn't change that fact.
A million Americans did die of it, the lost QALYs was... a lot. A lot of people died who had more than a decade, actuarially. That's a big deal.
But it doesn't matter for what I'm saying: paying too much attention to the news about a weird new virus from China would have clued a person in that something big might be coming, on whatever dimension you care to measure it.
But would that have been actionable information for the average person? What would you have done differently on the first day, given perfect information?
The Covid pandemic lasted much longer than would have been reasonable to prepare for via hoarding of supplies etc.
In my view, that was the entire problem: Much of the world overreacted in the short term (hard lockdowns including fining people going for a walk by themselves etc.) and underreacted in the long term (limiting avoidable large indoor gatherings such as most office work, air filters etc.)
Many governments did as much as people would tolerate for as long as they could (which meant, for some, doing nothing at all), rather than focusing on doing effective things they could actually keep up as long as required.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but I really hope that’s a lesson many learned from it.
That was pure panic. I live in the gulf coast. Anytime there is a minor chance we are getting hit by a hurricane people panic buy and suddenly there isn't any water on the shelves anymore. You'll see average folks with 20 cases of water being shoved in their massive SUVs for a family of 3.
Sure. However, I bought a large pack of toilet paper when I saw headlines about hoarding in HK, before the shelves began to dwindle here, and thus dodged the whole thing. That it was basically panic is neither here nor there: paying too close attention to far-off news did actually pay off in a tiny way.
TP shortages in Hong Kong were rational, based on an expectation of bulk shipping issues. Stocking up in North America based on shortages in Hong Kong was idiotic. If there are shortages of TP in Hong Kong that means there would be a surplus of TP in North America, since North America is where the pulp for most TP is made.
Sure, probably. It still helped me dodge the panic that set in a couple weeks later though. Sometimes midwit thought works. I wasn't stocking a Scrooge McDuck room full of the stuff. I think it was when I saw stories of hoarding spread to Australia that I realized that maybe this it was going to have legs, rationally or not.
Yeah in my personal experience I like honorifics for the same reason. Not possible in English but in the other languages I know I make it a point to address everyone (except family and friends) with the higher honorific. Especially restaurant staff or other service workers. Sometimes I wish English had an easy way for me to convey "I respect you" as subtext.
>Sometimes I wish English had an easy way for me to convey "I respect you" as subtext.
I find that sir/ma'am plus politeness (please, thank you, etc.) works nicely.
While there is the chance that you might misgender someone with that, that's not very common (at least for me) as long as you, you know, pay attention.
That said unless they have a note tattooed on their forehead with their preferred term of address, I can only use non-language cues to determine the appropriate term.
On the rare occasions where I use the wrong term and am corrected, I am fastidious in adhering to the requested term(s).
None of that's is rocket surgery, just simple respect for other humans IMHO.
When was the last time you were threatened (“we’ll will bang on your door and take down your accounts”) by a company like Kik and you defended the principles and values you believed until the end?
I’m quite familiar with both western and eastern traditions, don’t know any better source than Ghazali’s “the alchemy of happiness” about how people make decisions.
It’s kind of ironic to see people being triggered by just the mention of it though — just reflects what your heart tends to reject impulsively. I wish you curiosity.
P.S Here’s the full quote, it entertainingly describes the ignorance here:
“first, they didn't look at the dates of the emails. They don't understand the timeline.
second, they can't relate to standing your ground in a high pressure situation involving threats.
and third, they haven't read Al-Ghazali yet, don't quite understand how (free) people make decisions”
They are citing something which changed their life significantly, and leaving pointers to the same thing if you're interested (or need further explanation).
If getting wisdom from others is not your thing, I can respect that, but low-key insulting them for leaving you pointers for a more enlightened place is rude.
You can instead say "I don't understand why Al-Ghazali relates to this", and that would be completely OK.
The author made an implicit assumption, and you're making the same one, that they're filled with wisdom received straight from al-Ghazali. Firstly, only wankers act like they're wise and their audience isn't. Secondly, they said "haven't read al-Ghazali yet", implying that it's only a matter of time before everyone reads him.
Lastly, it's fine to quote someone but you need to explain how it's relevant to the conversation. The author could have summarised al-Ghazali's idea about free will or whatever and it would have been fine. But he didn't even bother, as if the ideas so basic and well known that it's not even worth doing.
I'm pretty comfortable with the way I've poked fun at the author's pompousness. If you need further explanation it's because you haven't read Chanakya yet.
I'll read Chanakya, but I don't see how he's supposed to appease to your taste and style of writing.
I don't think that you're pompous because you cited somebody I don't know that existed. I'm not a god. People show me things I don't know, I take note of them.
Maybe I won't agree with the direction you show me, but at least I have a new direction to discover.
I don’t see a problem in someone deleting 1, 100 or 1000 repositories and moving on. Neither Open Source nor Free Software makes no promises of indefinite availability of the source code.
Incidentally, HTTP has a status code for this. It’s 410 - Gone.
I mean, they have seen that NPM did ate their hats to bow to a company and they decided to not have it, and they removed their packages. Why the anger?
Yes, they have asked NPM to remove all of their packages. It's on them. NPM didn't do it, but gave a tool to do it themselves.
I deserted GitHub the day Copilot came online. I archived my repositories just because I didn't want broken links on comments and notes I have written god knows where.
I stopped uploading photos to Instagram the day they started doing AI training with my images. I didn't delete them because my partner likes them.
I can delete these repositories, photos, whatever I have online. I have no obligation to anyone. It's same for them. It's their code they developed by themselves. They can delete them, and just don't care what happens next.
Why this freedom bothers you that much?
P.S.: We don't do ad-hominem attacks here. Please refer to guidelines for more information. Thanks for your cooperation.
Please don't, regardless of how annoying someone else is or you feel they are. We ban accounts that abuse the site like this, and as I told you that last time this came up, I don't want to ban you.
Edit: this has unfortunately been a problem for a long time:
Oh, I don't defend them. I'm just another person who's disagreeing with you. The only thing is their and my values align on some aspects, and we both disagree with you on the same issues more or less. I'm not here to defend anyone.
When I was writing these replies, there were no flagged comments, and if there were, I can see them, if I want. That's an option you can change. I'm sure you know this better than me. You're here since 2014, and I'm here since 2017. Our comment histories are open. You can check whether I'm a sockpuppet or not.
The MIT license doesn't tell anything about availability of the source. In fact, MIT licensed software doesn't have to be Open Source at all. I can get the source, modify, compile and distribute the binaries without the source code attached, and no one can compel me about opening the source code. That's a requirement set forth by GPL family, and even these say that source should be available for a reasonable amount of time, not indefinitely, and certainly not online. IOW, I can sell GPL software, without putting its source code online. The only obligation is to provide the source to the people who have gotten the software (i.e.: How RedHat operates).
My only example was not my Instagram photos. I have also talked about my GitHub repositories (which I am not deleting because of my personal reasons), and again, I'm not here to defend them. To reiterate, I'm a completely different human being who happens to disagree with you.
HN's no delete policy was there since I joined, and I agreed to this when I started participating here. If they do something which is against my values, I'll leave this place, too (like I left Reddit back in the day). I'm not afraid to put my values first. In fact, this is why I have replied to you this much. I'm putting forward my perspective and values, which is not defending someone. I'm a lone person, walking my own way.
Your prejudice and anger is blocking your view. Currently three comments of you are also flagged.
It's enough that you're reflecting your beliefs and prejudices to other people in the form of low-key insults. Also your tea is going cold. It's not polite to not aceept a friendship drink offered in good faith.
This is my last reply on this comment thread, because this is a new day, and I have to handle other matters, too. Without any hard feelings, I wish you the best of luck, and have a nice day.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly and badly in this thread. Please don't do that, regardless of how wrong or annoying someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Also, it unfortunately isn't the first time you've done this (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42565389), although it seems to be the first time you jumped into a full-blown flamewar. Please don't do it again. We have to ban users that abuse the site like this, and I don't want to ban you.
Let's consider an example about a tangible phenomena: Gaussian Integration, Quantum Entanglement, Crystalline Structure Formation in Alloyed Metals with Heat Treatment, Combustion Dynamics in a Gasoline Engine, etc.
Let's put the same sentence:
"I'd love to explain to you, but if you haven't read $SOURCE_MATERIAL, you wouldn't understand it anyway".
i haven't read it, now i'm interested in it, and frankly you sound like much more of a "wanker" at the end of things for centering your own (lack of) experience in this discussion.
Given that this post is meant to explain your perspective at the time, I think it would make sense to explain it at least a little. At the very least, I am curious. What does Al-Ghazali have to say about making decisions that influenced you? I have not read Al-Ghazali yet.
Yes, when theres's no impulse strong enough to outweigh reasoning. You don't need Ghazali for this, Kant also explains it. Before suggesting that I rephrase things, I think you should explore the domain first.
That’s beside the point. It’s perfectly valid to draw inspiration from Kant or Al-Ghazali for your decision-making framework, but neither explains how people actually make decisions in general-their work is fundamentally normative. By the way, I'd be surprised if a true Kantian would have arrived at the same decision as you.
I don't know that I fully buy this either, at least not the anger part.
I can look back on all this with wry amusement nowadays but I remember it being pretty frustrating at the time.
It sort of felt like, well, either you knew what the impact of unpublishing all your packages would be and you did it anyway, which makes you kind of antisocial, or you didn't know what the impact would be but did it anyway, which makes you kind of a hothead. And in this latest piece Azer has admitted that he didn't understand what the impact would be so... y'know... I do wonder if anger was at least a small factor.
Regardless, it's pretty clear that npm bear a lot of the responsibility for what happened. It's also something that happened a very long time ago and, as I've already implied, is just a funny story nowadays, not something I can manage any ire towards Azer over.
The 3rd option is the one Azer describes in the post:
He wants to remove his stuff, but isn't sure what the right way to do it is, so he asks npm. npm provides him with a set of scripts to run to remove his stuff, and he, presuming that it's "ok" if npm told him to go ahead and run them, runs them. The impact isn't especially important to him, But since npm just gave him a set of scripts with an implicit "oh okay you want to remove your stuff, here I wrote you a script you can run to get it done," makes it more of an npm choice to handle it in this manner. npm asked him to handle it this way, so he did.
At a certain point, no, you can't unpublish because the world only has one arrow of time. Imagine if Torvalds decides to unpublish his code in the Linux kernel. It's easy to understand how that would work: His code would remain out there for all time because doing anything else would be a massive disruption and cause people actual problems. People don't just give others a way to hurt them like that if they know what they're doing, even if they got a lot of value from them in the past.
Lesson: Vendor your dependencies, I guess. Although a lot of the ire around left-pad was programmers using a library for something so trivial, but that's a different conversation.
> Although a lot of the ire around left-pad was programmers using a library for something so trivial, but that's a different conversation.
Very true.
Although, from 2012 onwards, up to around the time of the leftpad incident, the trend - and the pressure - was to minimise the amount of work your code was doing and to publish tiny packages that only did one thing or solved one problem, deferring to other tiny packages for anything non-core. I remember colleagues more embedded in the JS world than I was passionately arguing for this in 2012/13.
And it did make some sense: bandwidth matters, particularly on mobile devices (which became a key source of traffic during that period) so why pull in some gigantic do everything library when you only need a handful of functions[0]? Sure, minifying and pruning help but, due to JS's nature, pruning can only get you so far.
But, yes, I think leftpad was something of a teaching moment on the downsides of this approach.
[0] Of course, if you then stick 6 different tracking scripts in all your pages, it's super-easy to undo all the good you've done by minimising your bundle size, but that's a different conversation.
> If NPM would have prevented the depublishing, he would have made a scene and in the worst case, they would have looked bad.
I mean he says he asked them to remove all his packages, expecting them to do so gradually, following whatever mitigation strategy they felt appropriate (e.g. some kind of warning and fadeout process), and instead they gave him a script to do it immediately so he did that.
> That’s precisely why unpublishing an entire package/crate/gem is not a supported operation on any mainstream repository.
Every competent repository has a process for unpublishing. Sooner or later someone will upload something that someone else claims the copyright to, and then either you take it down when you get a DMCA notice or you lose your safe harbour.
Maybe you replace it with some sort of tombstone. Maybe you warn all the reverse dependencies first. But you have to have a way to remove content.
Please. It looks like he was doing dev as a hobby, asked a big company how to handle removing his packages, and did what they told him to. They might not have had the right policy, but that doesn't make a guy who doesn't want to give his packages away to a company just because they're making threats into an asshole. It makes him typical.
He had already given everyone a license to use his software. That’s what FOSS software is - the users are granted a license to use the software and it can’t be revoked, even if the author is throwing a tantrum.
Sure, but that license doesn't include the requirement to host in perpetuity, and anyway, I wouldn't expect a hobbyist to need to worry about this. If I decide to make my gamer-profile private / offline or something and that breaks your crawler, even though I previously granted unrestricted public access to that data, that's really not my problem.
??? I didn't say anybody using npm wants this. I'm saying npm had the wrong policy around deletion, that npm could have handled the situation differently, and also that Azer not knowing or caring about the effects of removing the package doesn't make him an asshole or even negligent (although it also doesn't mean he ISNT an asshole; that's a separate matter).
The point is that Azer didn't owe anybody anything; not even to know what he was doing. npm did.
That said, I'm glad the wake-up call came in such a relatively benign way.
Personally I understand both Al-Ghazali and "Not driven by logic, anger" parts very well. I have been in that position as well.
Being neutral and seeing a good way forward is not something practiced, taught or celebrated in western, esp. American culture much. One always needs to have a thrust source (mostly an emotion driven by logic, taught during being grown up (e.g.: You should be angry about it)) to make decisions.
In fact, sometimes, you just don't have a thrust source, you just feel like doing it. It feels the right thing to do, and you do it with no emotions attached.
This is a boon, in fact it's called "clarity" brought by being with yourself. Either spending time outdoors, doing some reflection work, or by meditating. I use the same methods when I face with a non-urgent but important decision. Let the way reveal itself. Putting logic and emotions aside and finding the right way is not easy, or the process is not smooth sailing, but I never arrived to a wrong place by following that path.
They weren't too lazy to avoid it. Depending on other peoples' packages was actively encouraged within the JS community during that period, and the perceived benefits of doing so were loudly trumpeted.
We westerns do the know much about the Socrates from the eastern side of the world. I can only imagine people from there know who al-Ghazali was just like we know who Sartre was.
So, im gonna try and read something by al-Ghazali.
When this happened, people started making assumptions. A few of them:
1. I’m irrational
2. I’m angry
3. I’m greedy
They came to one of these conclusions, based on how they see themselves in the same position.
I can be of course one of these three in some other situations, but in the left pad incident, I done all purely with my heart, to stick to my values and principles which was behind my motivation to do open source for such a long time.
Ghazali is the best source I’m aware of about how to put heart in the driver seat of life, and without fighting but using logic, greed, anger etc as tools.
If my reference made curious about him, I couldn’t be more happy. Here’s a great lecture about his book, The Alchemy of Happiness: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zBwWc0DflRQ
Hey - thank you for your interesting post today. It set me off on a personal journey which, in my mind, involved the discovery of many secret trails and camping spots, metaphorically ..
One thing I have learned about al-Ghazali today, thanks to your efforts, is that philosophers aren't always right, faith and logic can work together, and doubting everything can lead to truth.
But, most importantly, live ones faith honestly - and this is especially true for those of us who detest imperialist/corporate interference in spiritual activities, such as publishing packages to the npm ecosystem intended to make ones fellow human beings lives' more rewarding, in spite of the lack of personal rewards to be gained in doing so.. that the value in seeing this is lost on a lot of HN responses in this thread so far, is no big surprise - but it is surely disappointing.
I hope you will consider adding Aquinus and Augustine of Hippo to your references, also. Sometimes it helps to see how the universality of true philosophy crosses cultural divides.
>(definitely the most pompous and self-important part of this post)
What compels you to say this? Would you be more satisfied if he'd suggested the reader acquaint themselves with Thomas Aquinas or Augustine of Hippo? Are you familiar with al-Ghazali, the scholar, or is he new to you?
You have, rather literally, proven the philosophers point - while remaining, it seems, ignorant of it.
Or perhaps, you mean to imply that /u/akoculu was doing a good deed not because he cared, but to show off?
The irony is, al-Ghazali asked his readers to question their pomp and self-importance, and to do good deeds because they truly cared, not because it would result in social acknowledgement by the mass collective, whose motives should always be questioned, effectively.
Perhaps, then, your position is more of a reflection of your own condition? One would hope your disdain is borne on an actual understanding of al-Ghazali's position, vis a vis self-doubt ... or rather, one would hope your current position is based on an ignorance of his works, actually.
One should never feel so compelled to deny the enlightenment of others, especially if by doing so, you resort to personally-motivated obscurantism in response.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
I have a fun anecdote. About 5-6 years ago, Elixir completely disappeared from the top 100 after spending some time in the top 50. People reached out to me and then I reached out to TIOBE to understand why and the reason given was "bad presence on Amazon".
After further investigation, the root cause seemed to be that we finally had enough published Elixir books. At the time, if you searched for "xyz programming" on Amazon and only found a few results, Amazon would pad those results with non-relevant entries. However, because Elixir reached about 20-30 books, we were no longer padded, so we suddenly got worse rankings than every other language with only a handful of books. This happened on every Amazon domain they searched on, so it compounded and effectively kicked us out of the top 100 altogether. This all happened at a time Elixir language activity had already reached top 25 on GitHub PRs/stars.
And secondly, Like you are saying of "xyz programming", then to my understanding let's say I searched "elixir programming" on amazon, and then earlier there were not much books so it was (padded?) but once it reached 20-30 books, it wasn't padded but then how does it have an impact on search ranking. I still can't comprehend how having more books can have a negative impact on a popularity index and if such an index like TIOBE is doing so, then its clearly messed up.
My understanding (which may be wrong) from the exchange is that they literally search for "elixir programming" on several websites, including Amazon. So it is very sensitive to whatever changes those websites do to their own search engines. I can no longer reproduce the behaviour from back then but it is very understandable that websites like Amazon are optimizing their search results for sales and other key metrics rather than term precision.
I tried a couple of very new/niche languages like granule/futhark/carbon/jasmin but got either no results, or only obviously unrelated junk. For the languages above I quickly scanned the top result and they looked relevant.
That's pretty funny, since the search turned up downright confounding results, like books about programming with an author named "Jasmin". For "carbon programming" I got a ton of books about C, can't guess why, but it's surely not good data.
Maybe I'll make a language called "Introduction to" or "Linear" and shoot to the top of the index.
If you wanted accurate statistics for each language, you'd probably have to go closer to the source:
- How many downloads for the compiler/runtime/toolchains have?
- How many downloads do the packages on the package manager (if any) have?
- How many downloads do base containers have? How popular are the SaSS/PaSS offerings geared towards the languages?
But of course, doing that for a bunch of stacks would be quite difficult and time consuming, so people feel confident in just looking at Google Trends or an equivalent (or aggregating similar surface level data from a bunch of providers) and just calling it a day.
> How many downloads do the packages on the package manager (if any) have?
This will overrepresent languages that rely heavily on external packages, such as JavaScript and Rust, while underrepresenting languages with a large standard library where packages are not needed as much.
Getting those stats seems practically impossible if you want to include as many languages as possible (I don't know how many TIOBE includes, they don't seem to state that anywhere on their site).
How do you measure the downloads on Github? Do you include only releases or also git clones? How do you compare languages with a package manager vs languages without one? What if the language compiler is hosted on a less popular git platform or maybe a personal website? Do you contact those regularly to give you the precise numbers? How do you know those numbers are reliable? How do you e.g. count the number of Rust toolchain installations without putting telemetry into rustup? Do you count nightly + stable + testing toolchains separately?
So it makes sense TIOBE only uses search results as those are comparable - or at least they seem to be, because search engines change their ranking and filtering methods over time and maybe personalize results.
I think those stats might not be easy to come by. I know you can find download stats for Rust at https://lib.rs/stats but I don’t think it’s easy to find a similar data set for other languages?
Anything beyond directly asking developers (SO posts, Github repositories, books...) ends up being extremely biased. The Stack Overflow Annual Dev Survey is the only source I check, and even there the population targets and questions are not free from bias. For instance, I've been adding OpenScad in the free text option for the last 5 years.
> TIOBE gives you search popularity of a given language
No it does not. It gives you the number of results returned by a search engine, which has nothing to do with how many people are searching for that term.
While one can choose to dismiss the TIOBE index (I don’t have any strong opinion about it), there was also a screen shot of PYPL showing a steady increase in Ada over recent months. Something positive is happening!
Far fetched and not cool.