x03

Adam Curtis, a documentary film-maker and journalist, has a brilliant aptitude at analysis in this area. His work in general, at the intersection of reporting and politics, is pretty excellent.

It is some malice, more than you might expect; with with a great dollop of ineptitude, far more than you might expect; that allows this climate of total disorientation to exist.

Take some of his thoughts:

"Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events.

"But now there are no big stories and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated.

"And journalism - that used to tell a grand, unfurling narrative - now also just relays disjointed and often wildly contradictory fragments of information.

"Events come and go like waves of a fever. We - and the journalists - live in a state of continual delirium, constantly waiting for the next news event to loom out of the fog - and then disappear again, unexplained."

The rest of that article is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/ae14be85-3104-...

And the documentary-film that he's referring to in that post, Bitter Lake, is available on iPlayer (for British viewers...or people on a VPN...), here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bi...

The difference being, surely, that Snapchat has 26million users, not 26million customers.

That said, it may very well be worth $4billion, or north thereof. The article concedes that it's difficult to speculate from the outside (and thus labels it "insane"), but fails to concede the simple point that it may be entirely justified.

"— All Mac App Store customers get 1Password 4 for free. Yes, all of them

— All website customers who purchased 1Password for Mac in 2013 get v4 for free. Yes, that’s a nine-month free upgrade window

— Launch sale price for new customers: $39.99 – that’s 20% off the regular price of $49.99

— Launch upgrade sale price for website customers who bought before 2013: $24.99 – that’s $10 off our regular upgrade price of $34.99".

The top answer to the question is visible without an account, and is interesting enough. The rest of the answers (frustratingly) require a Quora account to view.

Of planeraty size and mass.

It looks great and all that, but wouldn't 'FastPal' have made for a better name?

I'm a little surprised by the HN crowd's desire to turn this into some kind of Michael Bay movie with diplomatic explosions left, right and centre: the phrase "act of war" is being dropped around as if some kind of violent confrontation would ever actually occur between Ecuador and the United Kingdom based on this. This is simply not the case; at most, it would be loosely unfair of the British government to 'bully' Ecuador into its bidding and they would protest as harshly as they could (not very). This is not a fair system; international relations is a system wherein "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must"[1].

The Government here has advised that under through a sound legal process it may revoke the legal status of an instituion within and on its territory. Is this right? Well, it's a little unusual...alternatively, ignoring the interests and desires of Sweden, the European Union and the United States would be still further unwise for the British. Britain has its interests, and it must do what serves them best.

In this case, doing something less than usual is worth it: there's virtually no downside to upsetting a small Latin American country in the process. The British government just won't care. It's not fair, but for better or worse, that's that.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides

The pilots, mostly, acted legitatemly based on the flawed and lacking data of which they were presented with.

Initially, the captain's non-fear of the storm was based on incorrect weather data based on a mis-configured radar system. His data seemingly grossly underestimated the severity of the weather: had he had the correct data originally he would almost definitely, like every other pilot in the region, known to avoid the area to which they eventually flew into. As soon as the radar was configured correctly, the pilots banked left to avoid it as best they could. How common a misconfigured radar is and how easily it is done is perhaps the most vital piece of information here. No aircraft should be allowed to fly with such important data being incorrect, ever. This needs to be checked and re-checked far better in future. It is the original link in this fatal chain. It was wrong data, not a wrong human assessment of data, that started off this crash sequence. Given the original radar data, the captain made the right call. And there's nothing obsentibly wrong with him going to take a nap, insofar as that's typical protocol.

Due to flying into the wrong weather-zone, the autopilot turns itself off. And that's that from there. Given that this is such a rare event it's notification is relatively minor within the grand scheme of fear and confusion that one would expect to exist for such an event that so drastically affects flying itself. There exists such a massive difference between autopilot and pilot-driven flying that there needs to be an unignorable physical presentation difference between the two: perhaps gently vibrating the control stick, changing the entire colour of the cabin (to, say, orange) using some LEDs and even changing the posture of a pilot's seat to a more upright position to subtly but distincly make for a different "feel" to computer-led flying. You'd just know based on these indicators alone. Perhaps it'd be harder to mentally block the stall warnings based on the notion that "we can't be stalling, the airliner won't let us" when it feels like you're personally in control of the whole airliner. They didn't just "ignore" the 70+ stall warnings, they completely ignored the very idea that it was possible for them to be stalling at all.

Addressing either of these two issues alone could have helped save AF447. Evaluating the other problems presented, like why two pilots can input vastly different instructions through their joysticks with both being in ignorance of one another clearly needs to be addressed (perhaps even a weighted average towards the more experienced pilot's input rather than a straight up average?); why there existed no clear chain-of-command; why the captain didn't get back quickly enough and how to "force" captains to be quicker; the best way to brief exactly what you've been doing more quickly; and perhaps a new technology that's basically "Clippy" for flying, that could say things like "You're in a stall, consider pointing down?"

This was a tragic mistake that ought not to have happen. Based on so much, let's not so easily condemn the pilots actions to stupidity and instead take a moment to consider the sheer horror they suffered after commanding such a massively complex machine in such challenging conditions with so much noise, lights and general "WTF"-ness.

Consider that environment the next time you get frustrated investigating a non-obviousl compile error in your quiet, air-conditioned, well-lit office.

Well, of course, as one would expect the poor to take out hugely unfair debt agreements to load up their small houses in bad neighbourds with all the electronic gear they can muster for as much entertainment as they can barely afford to have.

They do not, unlike the (European and American) middle class take foreign holidays, drive foreign cars, take trips to the movies, go to theme parks, go on school trips, shop at nice places, eat healithly, etc...just because they have a bunch of cheap electronics crap stuffed inside their homes it does not make them rich.

Seriously, what do you think life is like for the European middle class? In rich Europe, it's extremely comfortable.

While "1 in 6" appeals as a lot, the actual statistic of 15.1% poor people seems significantly less harmful -- as, ipso facto, the vast majortity of all American people (84.9%) are not poor.

Isn't this the way the model essentially works out in our system? There is a small "working class" at the bottom, then a giant bump in the middle for the middle class, and a tiny spot at the top for the 1% of wealthy -- wealthy, not merely rich -- individuals.

I wouldn't simply try to brush off poverty, as surely every effort must be made to ensure social mobility among the classes (both up and down), but in a country as large as America having 45 or so million poor people isn't only to be expected, but actually relatively necessary for our economic model -- which, on the whole, works quite well for most people.

If large companies have the extra cash to drop extending their online identities in this very small way, then there's really no harm to the broader eco-system of domains.

There will likely be a few "fun" uses of this, say drink.coke, but coke.com will still remain the far more compelling implementation and their own personal TLDs will simply become presences that offer little practical benefits, but were bought simply because they were there -- and the press coverage that the purchase may achieve may in fact just garner equal to or more than the $185,000 they originally spent.

Overall, this will likely just be a small boon for the kind of consultancy firms mentioned in the original article: but it will offer little in the way of actual affects to the rest of us.

If you're looking for some language/translation help, then feel free shoot an email to the address in my profile and we'll see what we can do to help you guys out. :)

Although it's not specifically focused on HN users, http://usesthis.com/ is a really cool site showcasing the hardware, software and work flow of some pretty successful people.

Thanks! :)

I'm working on getting us a "Team" page to showcase all our talent with pictures, Twitter links, etc...

We're seriously not even trying to be web2.0 (have you seen our site?), we just liked the name and pretty much everyone we've talked to agrees on that.

We appreciate your feedback though! Thanks a lot for taking the time to let us know your thoughts. :)

We'll look into it, we really will. But we'll still have to strongly advise everyone to again have them independently verified within their own territory and by a lawyer familiar with their situation.

There's no way around that.

We feel all the documents on PearWords are solid, concise and fair to both parties.

That said, we've not had these certified by a practicing lawyer simply because even if we do most people would still rather have a lawyer they know and trust do it for them before signing a contract, especially considering the variety of territories that PearWord's audience is located. It should be a fair bit cheaper to have a lawyer look over and change where appropriate any details than have them write an original document for you.

PearWords strongly advise that any person have a lawyer vet and modify where necessary any legal documents before signing them, no matter the situation.

Thanks for your comment! :)

Thanks...yeah, we appreciate that an email disclaimer isn't necessarily the most effective means legally, but they're still in such wide-spread use that they do carry a certain weight to them that a lot of people find re-assuring to have, hence their inclusion.

We hope a lot more people will find the privacy policy, NDA and the coming terms of use more helpful...and we hope to have some other documents up soon, too...so, don't forget to bookmark it! :)

Since April 6th you've been able to incorporate directly online with Companies House at: https://ewf.companieshouse.gov.uk/9e98c6d412c60b928876bc14d4...

I'm a fairly eager, though passive, Hacker News reader and it seemed that a lot of startups were getting the message about what exactly they do a little jumbled: I imagine it's their own entrepreneurial excitement bouncing around with their own understanding of what they know they do, and so presume others will, to.

So I setup a service (http://www.pearwords.com) to help startups get their message across to sites like Hacker News, The Startup Foundry, TechCrunch, etc, and, to use on their own websites to give customers a "two-second summary".

We hit profitability in our first 24 hours and we've have had a steady stream of customers since (some of whom are working on some really cool stuff -- communities like HN really are fully of some brilliant people). We've spent zero-dollars on advertising and have only posted a couple of comments (literally two) around on sites where people might be interested.

I attribute our success so far to: being very specific in what we do; high-quality work; being very quick; a clean website; and being cheap, though I think we could charge a fair bit more with little impact on orders -- we're just keeping it low for launch time while we really ramp up.

For anyone interested, there's a service to help you along with this at: www.pearwords.com

Do you have a contact email? I can show you a quick preview of something I have...it's very rudimentary, but it works.

If you're getting into tracking multiple packages, Delivery Status does a very good job of this: http://junecloud.com/software/iphone/delivery-status-touch.h... -- although it's not a webapp.

The slight angle of being egotistical was included to almost make fun of the Journal itself: it's not meant to be a serious publication, per se, in that academics and others want to read it but merely a place for undergraduates to share with one another.

It is basically meant to be a site for undergraduates to read essays on topics that are similar to their own for their own understanding at their level: it's fairly common for undergraduates to let their undergraduate friends on the same course read their essays, especially around exam times. So while I appreciate that some embittered TAs might read essays with a sense of loathing for minimum wage waiting for the sweet release of deathm viewing this site, or any for that matter, from such a tainted perspective is somewhat unfair.

I appreciate your comments regarding the verbosity and obscurity of some of the text though and I'll look into making everything a bit clearer! :)

Okay, great, points noted. Thanks for your feedback! :)

I think the critical point from your reply is that instead of there being a summary of what the essay is about, there should instead be a summary of what the essay is saying -- to basically relate the authors points quickly and succinctly as a teaser. We need to work on that.

Thanks!

I didn't realise that introductory paragraph was such a barrier -- I'll look into getting that amended. As for the images, you're right: they're too same-same and identical, it was just meant to provide something other than text-text-text though.

I appreciate all your points and I'll look into them!

Okay, there generally seems to be a feeling of anti-PDF sentiment so I'll look into providing just a standard HTML+CSS page as an alternative. (To note though, almost every academic article is provided as a PDF directly by Journals or through repositories like JSTOR).

It's kind of the chicken and egg problem: there's no content because they're no users, and they're no users because there's no content. I'll try and "force" a few friends on to drum up everything up a little and increase the excitement of the site.

Also, thanks for the link!

Cheers, --x03.

That's a fair point: the idea of it being a "Journal" isn't so much that it's Nature or Foreign Affairs or anything carrying such weight, more that it's a collection of well-written essays that cover topics that undergraduate students of IR typically cover so they can turn to them for inspiration, ideas and as revision material...

It's kind of like a synopsis of a lot of "insightful, thought-provoking, well-researched articles" as that's what undergraduate essays tend to be, rather than necessarily outstanding works of original thought.

It's an option to consider though and I'll definitely look into it...

Thank you for your feedback! :)

Whoops! I fixed that error in Discussion Points. Thanks for catching it...

That's a good point, perhaps I can provide an alternative HTML+CSS option to display them in so it's kept in the browser. Journal articles are typically PDF and students are used to dealing with them, hence it was my default option. I'll investigate alternatives though...

Thanks for the feedback! :)

That looks super-useful, thanks!