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At the time of this writing:

This story: 19 points, 46 min ago, 2 comments: rank 35 (2nd page)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18405775: 17 points (less votes), 2 hours ago (older), zero comments: rank 11 (1st page)

It appears this story was suppressed off the front page.

Why was this article hidden from the front page? A similar satellite journalism article from the BBC about a killing in west Africa was allowed on the front page a few weeks ago.

Because it's about China, and information about Chinese human rights abuses is apparently considered "nationalistic flamebait."

Also, I speculate that giving articles like this prominence is bad for Y Combinator's business: it operates a startup incubator in China: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17820654 https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17763426

It's also worth noting that China human rights stories are censored in a way that gives the mods some deniability: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18185123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634964

Post-war Iraq is not the same as a war zone, so protection of the civil service, bureaucrats, diplomatic corps, etc. I think can be done by some kind of other trained force.

I said conflict zone not war zone, which I meant to encompass lower-intensity dangerous areas. But in any case, aren't American embassies traditionally defended by US Marines? I see no reason to change that.

In fact, it might be better in some ways - soldiers are trained to have a very aggressive posture, a very 'lean in' kind of assertion. The 'killer instinct'. And it involves a lot of training in heavy weapons, assaults, recons, urban warfare etc. etc.. We don't need that for these missions. Because in any serious engagement they should be calling in the actual Army.

These "contractors" are former soldiers with exactly that same "aggressive...killer instinct" training, so you're not avoiding it by hiring mercenaries for guard duty.

I have no problem with these guys as long as they are not doing military missions.

As far as I'm concerned, security of American assets and personnel in a conflict zone is a military mission.

'Enhanced security guards' are fine.

I don't agree with that. Didn't these mercenary companies start out as just "enhanced security guards?" It seems like once you allow them to operate in any capacity, the rot spreads until you have assassination operations like the one in the article.

The only military career path for Americans should be within the ranks of the US military.

Mercenaries may always exist, but American ones don't have to. Participation in them should be made illegal, and all these private military companies should forbidden to operate until they find another line of business or liquidate themselves. If some former soldier or former general wants to become a mercenary, let him renounce his citizenship and go find a new home.

The only military forces in the US should be explicit parts of official US military.

American private military companies like this one and Blackwater need to be abolished.

not a libertarian, but what do the alleged actions of of a theocratic monarchy have to do with the potential excesses of free market capitalism?

Probably because there's profit to be had in making deals with that theocratic monarchy. It's the same thing with China. If you're optimizing for market success as you are in free market capitalism, you're incentivized to overlook things that stand in the way of that success, like the immorality of making deals with foreign authoritarians.

This is horrible for Europe - where end users will eventually pay more for their preferred 'Google Android'.

It won't be "horrible for Europe." Those users have always paid for these apps in one way or another.

By obligating handset makers to load the free apps along with the Android operating system, regulators said Google had boxed out competitors.

It sounds like a very good thing to me to prevent companies like Google from having such terms, which allow them to use dominance on one area to fuel dominance in many others. Each product should stand on it's own, and the idea that the entire ecosystem is one big product is frankly BS.

Look at the comments that already exist - is there any way that you can imagine this not turning into a flamefest?

That's an interesting censorship tactic: if you don't like a topic or an idea, start a fight about it, the ruder and unproductive the better. Your disliked topic is thrown out like a baby with the bathwater, an objections to the censorship can be countered with the misdirection that the topic or idea isn't getting suppressed, just "fights."

That's why I think, in the interest of open, good-faith discussion, the flamers themselves need to be moderated, but not the topics that attract them.

They are talking about how likely the order relates to market structure.

What do you mean by "market structure?"

Months ago, senior Facebook executives briefly debated banning all political ads, which produce less than 5 percent of the company’s revenue, sources said. The company rejected that because product managers were loath to leave advertising dollars on the table...

Gotta remember what's most important. /s

Nah, this isn't a legal debt that they can forward to a collection agency, as pointed out in the article.

My understanding is that many collection agencies aren't very scrupulous about they debts they try to collect. Many of them are false, already paid, or lacking necessary documentation.

I doubt UA would follow through considering it is illegal to submit known false debts.

I wonder if they've snuck in a mandatory binding arbitration clause into their contract, and if that would cover disputes about false debts. Even if the false debts were totally illegal, arbitration could make it impractical to challenge them.

This is insane on a whole other level, because United profits when you don't get on that 2nd leg.

Not necessarily. If you use use hidden-city ticketing, they lost out on extracting the extra money they wanted to charge you for going to your intended destination AND the extra money they may have been able to charge someone else for the leg you didn't take.

That said, I think it's the airline's fault for using an over-complicated pricing model with odd behaviors that customers can take advantage of like this. There'd be no issue if they just charged the same per leg regardless of your final destination. That'd make everything transparent and totally remove the need for hidden-city ticketing.

The "free market" doesn't make fraud or misrepresentation illegal, the laws and regulations of the dreaded government do.

The worst the free market can do to a fraudster is to stop dealing with her as knowledge of her frauds becomes widely known. That, of course, doesn't work very well to limit fraud.

Only if you get caught.

This is the free market at work, throwing off its chains. /s

So you're saying the defaults should be setup for the unusual use cases like you describe, even if that means we get botnets of millions of routers?

You're not going to define one set of secure-by-default rules that's going to work for everyone. Rather, you want to try to define a set of secure-by-default rules that work for most people. Then but the burden of reconfiguration and maintenance on those with unusual needs, rather than the majority.

1) This data privacy glitch is just like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, except it isn’t.

well, if its not, then why even bring it up? that part smells like sensationalism to me..

It's the same type of glitch, except there's no evidence that it was exploited (which is a different statement than it wasn't exploited; it may very well have been).

Surely the author, editor, and publisher of this article, and anyone likely to read it, are aware. We are aware.

That's a really weird statement. Articles are published so that readers can be informed of things that the author and editors have become aware of. Often many articles are published on the same subject because 1) many people missed previous articles, 2) there a new update that people aren't aware of, 3) people forgot and it's a good time to remind them, 4) it's not news-facts article but a persuasive piece, 5) etc.

> 2. Much of the awareness that does exist was not the result of those companies being transparent about their practices. It's the result of inferences based on scraps of information and speculation.

This means that "we" aren't as aware as you make us out to be.

It's a tradeoff. You have to balance that negative against the negative of having botnets of millions of never-patched routers.

Automatic updates should be the default, but you should be able to shut them off if you want to make a different tradeoff.

Can we really continue to claim that we're unaware Google, Facebook, and other web companies are monitoring everything they can and sharing the information they collect, sometimes for profit, sometimes accidentally, and sometimes compelled by legal orders?

Yes, we can.

1. Some people (mostly technologists) are aware, but many people aren't.

2. Much of the awareness that does exist was not the result of those companies being transparent about their practices. It's the result of inferences based on scraps of information and speculation.

An "automatic" update that would potentially cause the router to reboot and bring down the network would go over very poorly with customers, even if it happens at 3 AM.

Maybe the the trigger for the automatic reboot could be more complicated than just a time-based trigger. Something like

    Reboot when
        localtime > 2AM & 
        localtime < 5AM & 
        traffic averaged over the last 5 min < 5kbs

the same group with fanatical penchants who mercilessly eviscerated the Alexandrian mathematician/philosopher Hypatia.

IIRC, that's a bit of a myth. According to Wikipedia, she was murdered due to a political power struggle in Alexandria:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia#Death:

Socrates Scholasticus presents Hypatia's murder as entirely politically motivated[95] and makes no mention of any role that Hypatia's paganism might have played in her death.[95] Instead, he reasons that "she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed.

This is also interesting:

...Hypatia['s] sudden death not only left her legacy unprotected, but also triggered a backlash against her entire ideology.[146] Hypatia, with her tolerance towards Christian students and her willingness to cooperate with Christian leaders, had hoped to establish a precedent that Neoplatonism and Christianity could coexist peacefully and cooperatively.[147] Instead, her death and the subsequent failure by the Christian government to impose justice on her killers destroyed that notion entirely[147] and led future Neoplatonists such as Damascius to consider Christian bishops as "dangerous, jealous figures who were also utterly unphilosophical."[147] Hypatia became seen as a "martyr for philosophy"[147] and her murder led philosophers to adopt attitudes that increasingly emphasized the pagan aspects of their belief systems[148] and helped create a sense of identity for philosophers as pagan traditionalists set apart from the Christian masses.[149] Thus, while Hypatia's death did not bring an end to Neoplatonist philosophy as a whole, Watts argues that it did bring an end to her particular variety of it.[150]

Shortly after Hypatia's murder, a forged anti-Christian letter appeared under her name.[151] Damascius was "anxious to exploit the scandal of Hypatia's death", and attributed responsibility for her murder to Bishop Cyril and his Christian followers.[152][153] A passage from Damascius's Life of Isidore, preserved in the Suda, concludes that Hypatia's murder was due to Cyril's envy over "her wisdom exceeding all bounds and especially in the things concerning astronomy".[98][154] Damascius's account of the Christian murder of Hypatia is the sole historical source attributing direct responsibility to Bishop Cyril.[154]

And the ideologically-motivated myths seem build from there.

I wonder if you could test this theory using helium gas from one of those cylinders they use to inflate balloons. Put an iPhone in a bag, inflate it with helium, and see if it malfunctions.

On the Leadership Team of the Bro Project, we heard clear concerns from the Bro community that the name "Bro" has taken on strongly negative connotations, such as "Bro culture".

My understanding is that the negative connotations of the word "bro" come wholly from outsiders who co-opted it to use as a pejorative to attack a community. It originated and remains an in-group term of endearment and familiarity in that community.

It's interesting to note that seems like an inversion of what I understand happened to certain forms of the n-word. It started out as a pejorative slur used by outsiders to attack a community, but then forms of it were "reclaimed" by that community to be used as an in-group term of endearment and familiarity.

How about actually leaking documents on day, I dunno, how the Chinese government is trying to brainwash Uighurs and erase their culture and religion?

Wikileaks legitimately may not be in a position to acquire such documents to leak. My understanding is that they mainly distribute documents provided to them by others, and has never exercised much editorial discretion. If Wikileaks is best known in the US/Western Europe, it'll likely only acquire documents related to those regions.

For a Chinese person to leak documents about Xinjiang to Wikileaks, that person must first know about them, then be able to contact them, then be able to send the documents to them. I wouldn't be surprised if Wikileaks itself is blocked by the Great Firewall, and that its typical communication channels for leakers are blocked and/or difficult to use from the PRC, which makes the whole process doubtful.

Are there still any places you can get Gros Michel bananas? I've heard they still survive in a few places, and I've always wanted to try one.