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Ok, you can start with LinkedIn, I'll wait...

If you are wondering how it works. You get a link from LinkedIn, it's from an email or just a post someone shared. You click on it, the URL loads, and you read the post. When you click the back button, you aren't taken back to wherever you came from. Instead, your LinkedIn feed loads.

How did it happen? When you landed on the first link, the URL is replaced with the homepage first (location.replace(...) doesn't change the browser history). Then the browser history state is pushed to the original link. So it seems like you landed on the home page first then you clicked on a link. When you click the back button, you are taken back to the homepage where your feed entices you to stay longer on LinkedIn.


Also www.reddit.com is/was doing the same back button hijacking. From google.com visiting a post, then clicking back and you would find yourself on Reddit general feed instead of back to Google.

I'm pretty sure what you're describing is this long-standing bug[1] I've experienced only when using Mobile Safari on Reddit - affecting both old.reddit.com and the (horrible) modern Reddit. It just doesn't happen in other browsers/engines except on iOS. It's especially annoying on an iPad when I tend to use back/forward instead of open-in-new-tab-then-close on iPhone.

[1] At least, I hope it's a bug.


A bug that just coincidentally affects the only reddit visitors that are worth any money?

Just like finally getting rid of r/all on mobile just happens to bury a bunch of political stuff reddit executives and their friends don't agree with

Huh? I exclusively view r/all and its loading fine for me across all devices.

Even manually typing reddit.com/r/all (or r/All, which was a workaround for a while) in the address bar on iOS Safari redirects you to reddit.com/. Since I'm guessing you're not browsing reddit.com, what client are you using?

This is available for me on iOS https://old.reddit.com/r/all/

I'm not sure what exact device you're using, but on iPhone 12 Mini, old.reddit.com is borderline unusable, very different experience compared to if you could access r/all like before via the actually usable web+mobile version, a comparison: https://imgur.com/a/AVGjjCN

Anyways, the end result has been I don't use reddit at all on the phone, so kind of ended up being good for me anyways.


I'm using an iphone 13, although I prefer to turn sideways and browse in landscape mode. What you consider borderline unusable is just how I prefer to browse reddit.

“Borderline unusable” is such a hyperbolic way to describe a fully functional design that doesn’t happen to be responsive. Hacker News must be borderline unusable for you as well then, no?

> Hacker News must be borderline unusable for you as well then, no?

On my phone? Yes, absolutely, impossible to hit the links correctly even if I zoom in. Both old reddit and HN is "Fully functional" on desktop, agree, but far cry from "fully functional" on my arguably tiny iPhone.


Is that a ios browser difference? I browse hn all the time on my android phone and I didn't think my screen was unusually big. Maybe they implement some different scaling?

I almost solely use HN on my iPhone browser. It works very well and the scaling is well implemented, although it is a little too easy to accidentally fat finger and vote/flag something without realizing it. I actually find the desktop site (on my laptop) to be a bit hard to use due to its narrowness and small font size, but I'm not sure how universal that is.

It's perfectly fine and usable for me. More so than the app or the 'new' Reddit design. I exclusively use the old design.


You probably use old.reddit and a legacy app, right?

> I exclusively view r/all...

You and I are very different Reddit users. I don't think I've even seen r/all for at least a decade. I exclusively view Reddit via the old.reddit.com URL in desktop mode with the Reddit Enhancement Suite add-on + uBO + a custom CSS theme. I'm automatically redirected to my 'Subscribed' page showing only the dozen or so niche subreddits I care about, none of which have more than 100k subscribers (most are under 25k). It's glorious... like a time machine to before Reddit enshittified itself and spammers, astro-turfers, shills and influencers took over.


Do you treat every iOS bug this way?

For mobile Safari on iOS/iPad, the back button imo is just completely broken. It’s either a bug, or Apple might say I’m ‘holding it wrong’. One version it just stopped doing its one job correctly and it’s messing with my mental model of how I arrived at each tab. Currently:

Safari iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. The Back button should be grayed out and isn’t, and clicking it closes the tab. (???)

Chrome iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. Back button correctly grayed out as the tab has nowhere to go back to.


"You're browsing it wrong." This and other bizarre behaviours are why you'll never catch me using the thing.

News sites are doing it too. Displaying a full display ad when you try to leave

I would just like to point out that this was one of the things that the AMP straightjacket prevented. The whole online news industry has conclusively demonstrated that it can't be trusted with javascript and must be hospitalized, but they refuse to acknowledge their own illness.

Is it news sites fault or is it the fault of web standards/browser developers for failing to build any viable mechanisms for monetizing content?

The issue is hardly isolated to news outlets. It's endemic to the web.


Yeah, and I think it's pretty much impossible to solve.

Look what happened with Netflix. They actually got it right, a reasonable price for a bunch of stuff which would end up appropriated based on demand (they needed to have the disk to rent.) And how you have a bunch of players trying to compete in the space, each with it's exclusive content to try to make you choose them.

And look what's happened with Google's "news". It's more and more and more clickbait. I used to think the answer was a small charge per article, run through some aggregator that tracked payment. But these days we see things designed to get you to open the page, not to actually provide value. Or look at the problems Amazon has had with it's Kindle Unlimited stuff--books designed to game the metrics, groups engaging in read each other's books behavior etc.


AMP sites listed on Android Assistant routinely messed with back button behavior to trap you.

I wonder if Google will actually de rank them. Maybe a warning first for the big ones?

I do not see this behaviour on the latest version of Firefox. I do use old.reddit, however.

Old Reddit doesn't do this, it's the "new" one that pretends to be an app, that does it and host of other stupid/user-hostile shit.

In any case, Reddit lets open links in a new tab in their settings, which resolved the issue for me.

I don't use old Reddit, and haven't noticed this behaviour either.

Sounds like maybe some prevention against this is already implemented in either particular Android browsers, or ad blockers, maybe even for specific sites?

Just speculating, I can't imagine a reason why they'd implement this especially for Safari.

Other than A/B-testing or trash code that coincidentally doesn't work in all mobile browsers.

Maybe they use the same AI that generates their fictious relationship stories to add these dark patterns to their code base :D


My understanding is that Apple keeps Safari fairly broken and doesn't care to implement the Googleverse and leaves a lot of things E_WONTFIX. I have read speculation that broken Safari encourages apps in the App Store.

hm yeah but the History API is not new or exclusive to Google, also my understanding was that the discussion is about the annoyance "working" on iOS Safari, but not on other platforms. Any way, too many variables here.

I usually find the back button just doesn't work on new Reddit at all.

IIRC Reddit is also doing the same thing on their mobile (Android) app.

Even on old.reddit, it breaks the back button. When you navigate back, it usually reloads the entire page you were on and ignores all your collapse actions on conversations.

Regarding Google and LinkedIn, I keep complaining to them about a stupid feature of Gmail. If I get an invitation from someone, Gmail puts "accept" as a button in the subject of the email - so if you aren't careful you can accept while you are scrolling through the subject lines. That is just the worst feature to put in their subject line.

I like Gmail asking me for no reason to stay on the page when I try to leave.

New spam policy for navigate-away blocking, hope that's Google's next article.


Does "accept" support "undo send"?

Actually, it looks like they fixed this problem. I just checked all the messages with the LinkedIn label and I don't see it popping that "hotspot" anymore. The only thing that pops up in the subject line is now "Unsubscribe", so that is really good.

Wow they’re fast! :)

I don't think so. At least not from the inbox, where it happens. I'm not in the message - I'm just dragging on the subject lines to scroll, and these "hotspots" light up on the right portion of the subject.

> You get a link from LinkedIn [or such]. You click on it, the URL loads, and you read the post. When you click the back button, you aren't taken back to wherever you came from. Instead, […]

I've taken to opening anything in a new tab. Closing the tab is my new back button. In an idea world I shouldn't have to, of course, but we live in a world full of disks implementing dark patterns so not an ideal one. Opening in a new tab also helps me apply a “do I really care enough to give this reading time?” filter as my browsers are set to not give new tabs focus - if I've not actually looked at that tab after a little time it gets closed without me giving it any attention at all.

Specifically regarding LinkedIn and their family of dark patterns, I possibly should log in and update my status after the recent buy-out. I've not been there since updating my profile after the last change of corporate overlords ~9 years ago. Or I might just log in and close my profile entirely…


When I intentionally want to read something that is what I do. However once in a while I'm scrolling, selecting a window, or some other activity; and I happen to click on a link: instead of whatever action I intended I end up on a new page I didn't want to read (maybe I will want to read it, but I haven't go far enough cognitively to realize that). That is when I want my back button to work - a get out of here back to where I was.

Exactly, it has the potential to make you lose something important, forcing you to dig through browser history to find it again. If it happens to be a long-lived tab, you might be searching for a while if you forgot the name or site you were on.

given the level of hostility most businesses have towards their customers, we should probably be opening links in disposable virtual machines

Or just log all cookies and other localstorage against the domain of the top-level window.location which would achieve most of what a VM would with much lower overhead.

The only problem is that this would break some things like certain SSO systems, so you would have to implement a white-list to allow shared state, and the UX for that would be abused to nag users to whitelist everything. Most people would just click “OK” by default like they do with everything else, and those of us with more sense would have a new reason to be irritated by incessant nagging.


> Closing the tab is my new back button.

In Safari if you open a new tab, don't navigate anywhere, and click back, the tab closes and takes you back to the originating page. I've gottent so used to it, I now miss it in any other browser


>I've taken to opening anything in a new tab.

this is the way.


I have always done this, although mostly so I don’t have to reload the page I am coming from when I hit the back button.

Many years ago I was 'converted' to browse like that, one of the reasons was just that - to prevent back-button fatfinger.

Here's the setup I use:

[1] install this userscript, keep the default `include` i.e. 'every link": https://greasyfork.org/scripts/12367-open-links-in-new-tab; add to the `exclude` section the sites from [2].

[2] install this one and turn OFF the default: https://greasyfork.org/scripts/4416-open-links-in-current-ta... add any sites you want to stay in the same tab to the `include` section (e.g. see [0]). Depending on how you browse, this will be a small list.

You can couple this with a tab-memory addon: example-- set [1]-Tabs to 'sleep' after a certain time; that way they're not using resources but still available later.

AND if you decide you're not gonna read those tabs anyway, just manually close them with having to activate them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763404


This too. Particularly required for broken SPA-style sites that reset when you re-enter instead of properly maintaining their state, or infinite scroll based pages that don't remember where you scrolled to/through.

This is the way. People think I am eccentric for the number of tabs I keep open.

I am eccentric, née properly insane, which is part of why I have so many tabs left open over my various devices. Sometimes a browser crash that loses some or all that context is a benefit!

I do that everywhere, but it seems to fail for LinkedIn: they don’t redirect the link if it’s not in the same tab.

Bad design on their part, another reason not to revisit! If a site breaks my workflow I generally stop using the site, rather than changing my workflow.

Though I'm guessing it would work in the cases being discussed in this article & thread: when you are navigating into a site (such as linkedin) from another, rather than following internal links.


Facebook does this as well.

Thanks for explaining how they do it BTW! I didn't really think about it. I just knew it was shitty.


LinkedIn is malware and it's frankly embarrassing that we seem to be stuck with it. It's like a mechanic being stuck with a wrench that doesn't just punch you in the face while using it, it opens your toolbox just to come out and punch you randomly.

You know what's funny, just the other day I tried to do an "export" of my data from my account.

The option I chose was "profile data" because I wanted to get my whole work history/projects/etc. for a new resume.

The export took several hours.

When I finally downloaded it, it included my name, Email, short description, and my Email address...


What do you mean "stuck with it"? I just don't use LinkedIn. Do you need it for job hunting for example?

> Do you need it for job hunting for example?

God I hope you are being funny. Why else would anyone install this crap?


The amount of times I saw a "LinkedIn profile URL" as a required field on job applications outside of LinkedIn is concerning, to say the least.

I think it’s kind of companies to tell you they don’t want applicants.

What I do is put the link to the job listing in that field. haha, suck to be in HR if you think you're getting my profile info!

I've never seen any ATS that required Linkedin for login, but even having it as an option I've always thought of as weird.

Then again, I have see many an ATS that include Facebook and other slop sites, so welcome to another layer of jobhunting madness.


LinkedIn won't bother - they don't rely on SEO

Would this actually fall afoul of their new policy, though?

Assume the way that universal links work, is that the site main page is loaded, and some hash is supplied, indicating the page to navigate to from there. That's annoying, but perfectly valid, and may be necessary for sites that establish some kind of context baseline from their landing page.


It's not valid. You went to a page. They said "no, you're actually on the feed," and then immediately navigate you to the page you'd actually intended to visit. This is that they're doing today, and it's terrible. If I go to a URL, I'm NOT going to your homepage feed. I never wanted to go there.

Well, a lot of content, these days, is really data presented in a “window.” You don’t have the old HTML address, anymore.

It’s like reading an eBook in a reader. You always use the reader to interpret, format, and present the data.

It kind of sticks a spike into the old “each page is a document” model.


The experience you're describing still doesn't need to break the back button. Going back means going back, not closing a window I never opened. If that's an awkward experience, don't build one that works that way.

Fair ‘nuff, and I agree, but would they be able to argue that they never explicitly “broke” the back button?

I remember when JavaScript became a big Web site driver. The arguments against using it to fetch and build content usually included broken back button functionality.

I don’t think a lot of folks really paid much attention to it, though.


and then if you click the back button again it just reloads the page, trapped in a vicious loop!

Can we reach out directly to Reid Hoffman? Or is he too wrapped up doing damage control from being all over the Epstein Files?

The fix is to hold down the back button so the local history shows up, and pick the right page to go back to. Unfortunately, some versions of Chrome and/or Android seem to break this but that's a completely self-inflicted problem.

That's not a fix. It's a workaround.

It's a fix because it completely solves the issue on any site, without requiring changes from LinkedIn or any other actor.

My car leaks oil. So I refill it here and there. This fixes issue with any car maker and does not require action of any other actor.

Yes, it’s a workaround because it doesn’t require anyone to fix the issue.

>it completely solves the issue on any site

It doesn't solve the problem with Instagram links, which in my experience do the following:

1) Open a new browser tab, with no history. 2) Close the original tab, so I can't easily get back to where I was.


That's a different kind of dysfunction, though. You can address it by copying the link and pasting it in a new tab, or if that's not possible, copying the current page to a new tab and clicking on the link there.

I've noticed that on Instagram, too. Absolutely infuriating.

It's a work around to them making changes to deliberately change the expected results of pressing "back"

It's also not a very effective workaround, because some of the websites in question end up spamming multiple instances of their home page in the history stack.

You can usually address this by going back as far as possible, then holding the button again so more of the history shows up. And IME, it's only really broken sites that have this problem in the first place.

Yes, but that's super annoying and at that point graduates to being a shitty workaround.

The fix is to not to implement anti-user patterns. What you're describing is a loophole around it.

> The fix is to not to implement anti-user patterns.

That's not a fix the user can implement themselves. Holding down the back button is comparatively trivial.


Why on Earth would the user be expected to implement a fix for a problem they didn't cause themselves in the first place?

Why the Earth should the user not want to implement a fix/workaround/whatever for a problem they didn't cause themselves but can trivially solve?

Because I expect my browser to work for me instead of having memorize workarounds for the new web annoyance of the day.

Clicking "back", noticing that the site broke it, moving the mouse and long-pressing "back" (I normally navigate with a mouse thumb button or a trackpad gesture) is much more annoying than my browser just preventing this from happening in the first place.


The problem is, there are two conceptions of the back button, and the browser only implements one.

One conception is "take me back to the previous screen I was on", one is "take me one level up the hierarchy." They're often but not always the same.

Mac Finder is a perfect example of a program correctly implementing the two. If you're deep in some folder and then press cmd+win+l to go to ~/Downloads, cmd+up will get you to ~/, but cmd+[ will get you back to where you were before, even if this was deep in some network drive, nowhere near ~.

I feel like mobile OSes lean towards "one level up" as the default behavior, while traditional desktop OSes lean more towards tracking your exact path and letting you go back.


Desktop had this solved, on Windows there was and remains a distinction between "back" (history) and "up" (navigation).

Browsers actually used to have hierarchical navigation support, with buttons and all, back in the age of dinosaurs - all one had to do is to set up some meta tags in HTML head section to tell which URL is "prev"/"next"/"up". Alas, this has proven too difficult for web developers, who eventually even forgot web was meant for documents at all, and at some point browsers just hid/removed those buttons since no one was using them anyway.

The "Back" remains, and as 'Arainach wrote, it's only one concept and it's not, and never has been "up one level in the hierarchy".

EDIT:

The accepted/expected standard way for "take me up one level in hierarchy" on the web is for the page itself to display the hierarchy e.g. as breadcrumbs. The standard way to go to top level of the page is through a clickable logo of the page/brand. Neither of those need, or should, involve changing behavior of browser controls.


> The problem is, there are two conceptions of the back button, and the browser only implements one.

In web browsers, there is only one concept.

There is no concept of "up one level in the heirarchy". If you want that make your own button in your website.


> There is no concept of "up one level in the heirarchy". If you want that make your own button in your website.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-move-up-one-url-level-in-chrom... *shrug*


> Chrome/Firefox: Ever been reading a site and wish not to go back to the last page you visited, but the last page in that web site's hierarchy?

This statement makes no sense to non-tech people. Most people don't think of sites hierarchically, at least not from a url path perspective.


Those are third party extensions, not browser features, and they're not consistently applied.

Going from an image to a root domain is not a hierarchy and as a pathological data hoarder who has downloaded a lot of images from a lot of sites I don't understand why I'd ever want that feature. It's wild that that's their first example use case on the article.

Similarly, going from page N of results to page 1 isn't "up a level in heirarchy".


Isn't the problem already solved at the browser level? Most (all?) modern browsers support a press/click & hold of the back button to view the back history and quickly jump to any page in that tab's history.

*Edit - I left this in the wrong place, those extensions behave slightly differently.


amazing, took me 5 clicks of the back button to finally get back from that link

Agreed. I remember addons from the XUL Firefox era that did this.

I miss that feature. And that era.


> one is "take me one level up the hierarchy." They're often but not always the same.

Who expects this behavior? It doesn't make sense. You just want to go back where you were. Most file browsers I've used wanting to implement going up a level in hierarchy, have an arrow pointing up.


GNU Info and many Web 1.0 navigation schemes involved a hierarchy which did involve "Next", "Previous", "Up", and "Home" type dimensions.

For example, the Bacula documentation is still online, as a prime example of this: https://www.bacula.org/9.6.x-manuals/en/main/Getting_Started...


Nobody

If you reached point B from point A - and you tell someone "I would like to go back", then you are expecting to go back to A. Not some intermediate, arbitrarily chosen point C.

You're describing 2 different concepts, back and up, not 2 backs

Exactly. It is crazy that they described MacOS finder as doing this correctly when finder has no concept of up, it only has a back.

Command–Up Arrow: Open the folder that contains the current folder. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650)

I'm not sure what the expectations is supposed to be. Is Google supposed to have 100% adoption rate? Even OpenAI and Anthropic don't have that.

I have managers asking similar things at work: how can we increase AI adoption in dev teams? Why though? How does it benefit the manager? How can we increase the vim adoption rate for dev teams?

Google has thousands of mature products. You don't just throw a single solution (AI) to all problems.


I was writing about this recently [0]. In the 2000s, we were bragging about how cheap our services are and are getting. Today, a graduate with an idea is paying $200 amounts in AWS after the student discounts. They break the bank and go broke before they have tested the idea. Programming is literally free today.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/programming-tools-are-free


I often see these angles, how we should have prepared better or attacked this instead of that, or the unexpected strategy from the adversary. What about not bombing? The best safety trick the US can use is not bombing others.

It's a lot more than "just" not bombing. We also need to stop meddling in other countries' affairs. 9/11 and the war on terror are a direct result of all of our "nation building" over the prior decades. If we'd left well enough alone, the twin towers would likely still be standing, and we might still be able to bring as many liquids as we want on planes, and see our loved ones off at the gate when they're taking a trip and we're staying behind.

We need to stop treating business's resource extraction from foreign countries as "national security".

And I'd be all for "nation building" if it actually worked and moved countries to be democratically run. The +$6T spent on Iraq and Afghanistan are an indictment of our efforts to "help".

We just fucked with Venezuela -- where are the reports of us "helping"?


Who did the US bomb before 9/11? Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor? Who did the US bomb before its embassies in East Africa were attacked? https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/east-african-embass... Who did the US bomb before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 ?

I would love for nobody to bomb or kill anyone. Did Ukraine bomb Russia? Is Taiwan bombing China that declares it is going to take Taiwan by force?

There isn't a single conflict in the world today where I can see that someone can just say "we're going to stop" and they'll be safe. There is always something more to it. If Ukraine says we'll just stop attacking Russian soldiers is that war over? If Russia says we'll just stop attacking Ukraine and stay where we are is that war over? Is there any other conflict where the answer is simply stop and it'll be fine?


> Who did the US bomb before 9/11?

Iraq, during the Gulf War.

> Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor?

Japan, though the US didn't bomb them, it instituted an oil embargo and asset freeze.

> Who did the US bomb before its embassies in East Africa were attacked

Iraq, during the Gulf War.

> Who did the US bomb before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 ?

Tripoli and Benghazi, Iran Air Flight 655.

I don't understand the purpose of these questions. Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it?


The US are also the major enabler of Israel's colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This was clearly expressed by Bin Laden himself as one of the motives behind the 9/11 attacks.

> Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it

As I remember, this was exactly the way the US explained 9/11: "they hate us for our freedom".


Yeah, he also justified it by citing the US's acceptance of homosexuality so maybe it's more complicated than that.

No, he didn't. His "letter to America" starts with the question:

"As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

Because you attacked us and continue to attack us."

And proceeds to list all the ways the US are militarily attacking and oppressing Muslims in the Middle East. It's a long list.

Homosexuality is mentioned only once in the letter, in the next section, where he criticises American society and morals in general and calls it to embrace Islam. This is explicitly an exhortation and not part of the reasons for the attacks (so probably intended as a diagnosis of the symptoms of a moral disease and the proposal of a cure - note that I'm not endorsing it, just explaining its function in the letter).


[flagged]


No, there is no "or else", you are plainly making it up. As I've said, this is the exhortation part of the letter and it's not listed among the reasons for the attacks. Regressive, certainly. Brought as a justification for terrorism, no.

He orchestrated a terror attack that killed almost three thousand people, that is the "or else".

Sure, but I'd hope any commenter here would be smart enough to not believe such a facile explanation.

[flagged]


You asked "who did the US bomb before 9/11" and you got the answer. Now you're arguing that they shouldn't have reacted even if the US bombed them before (calling it "an excuse")?

As for the peace process with Palestinians, it was always a sham. The US (as it's evident now to many) are entirely unable to apply any sort of pressure on their "ally". What they've done is just buying time for Israel to expand its colonisation under the temporary pretense of some ongoing "peace process".


>There is always an excuse

"excuse" is a funny way of wording it -- "motivation" or "explanation" might be more appropriate here. is the expectation that the US can and should be able to kill and destroy and the victims just turn the other cheek?


West bank and Gaza were never under full Palestinian control since 1967 both were under brutal occupation or blockade + contant Israeli meddling into internal affairs.

[flagged]


So are the Palestinians?

> Who did the US bomb before 9/11?

Korea, Vietnam, Laos...


Bombing Korea led to bin Laden attacking on 9/11?

You did not read that GP was saying. He's saying that many conflicts are not started because US bombed a place.


Yugoslavia?

Before 9/11:

Afghanistan

Yugoslavia

Before 98:

Libya

Panama

Iraq

Kuwait

Somalia

Bosnia

Iran

Sudan

Afghanistan

Before 88:

Korea

China

Guatemala

Indonesia

Cuba

Guatemala

Belgian Congo

Guatemala

Dominican Republic

Peru

Laos

Vietnam

Cambodia

Guatemala

Lebanon

Grenada

Libya

El Salvador

Nicaragua

Iran

Japan

Before Pearl Harbor:

Dominican Republic

Nicaragua

China

Mexico

Russia

Wow, that's a lot of bombs! Hope this helps.


> Who did the US bomb before 9/11? Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor?

Right, they just hate the US because of their freedoms.

/s


Well yes, and actually instead of wasting billions creating understandable cause of hate, this could be injected into domestic social spendings, and there would probably still be a lot staying on the table to throw in humanitarian endeavors around the globe creating love through so called soft power.

The US is a country of violence and war. Founded from a war, massive civil war, almost perpetually at war for the last many decades.

Military spending costs a trillion a year (Trump wants 1.5 trillion). It’s big business and makes some people very rich.


Pacifism at such a large scale is a self-defesting strategy though. If its well understood that a country will never respond, eventually someone will take them over or wipe them out.

Responding to a threat and meddling proactively half the world away are quite different things, are they not?

For sure, and I wasn't arguing that they are the same.

Hey! If we did that Palantir’s stock price would go down.

Unacceptable, more children must be bombed. ‘Tis the only thing to do.


[flagged]


> When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time.

Where's the proof that Iran has, or is even remotely close to having, nukes? I mean, actual proof, not the kind of "proof" that led us to invade Iraq in '03.

> I'm not at all mad at the US government for deciding to get rid of Iran's regime.

Ah, you're one of those people. You probably thought "Team America: World Police" was an instruction manual, and not satire, yeah?


Iran having nukes is unsubstantiated. I also don’t think they wanted to have nukes. But they also enriched Uranium up to 60% according to IAEA which has no non-military use. They perhaps wanted to use that as leverage in negotiations which turned out to be not much of a deterrence.

Difficult to reconcile the justification of current efforts of "Iran can't have nukes" with the unequivocal claims made less than a year ago that Iran's nuclear capabilities had been "obliterated".

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/sunday-shows-pre...


It's possible for both of these to be true: The leaders of the US are incompetent, and bombing Iran was the right decision.

"Even a stopped clock..."


Pretty sure if the leaders are incompetent, it's not gonna be the right decision to bomb anyone. Seeing as that act requires competence as well.

As we're seeing, they're incompetent at waging war against Iran as well.


Tell me about the problems outside of N. Korea that have resulted from N. Korea's ownership of nuclear weapons?

North Korea started out with a "nuclear weapon": Seoul is within artillery range of the border. Consequently the Kim regime has been able to starve and torture its own population, and yes - develop nuclear weapons - without anyone willing to stop them.

You think the problems inside North Korea are ok? Koreans are human too.


Why are we ignoring the problems inside of North Korea? I take slavery and starving people pretty poorly regardless of where it happens.

That said North Korea routinely acts against the rest of the world in ways that are only possible because the rest of the world is unable to retaliate, with the government sponsoring everything from extorting hospitals with ransomware, to dealing drugs, to counterfeiting currency, to abducting film makers (from Hong Kong).


> I take slavery and starving people pretty poorly regardless of where it happens.

A great many of us feel that way, however historically GreatPowers do not - it's control of resources that move the needle for them.

Currently the US makes much of 30K protesters killed in Iran (number in dispute) but it is very much an action rooted in petro dollar geopolitics, oil, and Israel.

Starving people globally no longer get USAID .. a fractional cost compared to the Iran excursion.

The US didn't feel the need to get involved in regime change following any part of the Rwanda Genocide, and the US took the side of Indonesia (who were going for the resource control) against the West Papuans .. the US and UN turned a blind eye to exactly who and how people were tortured to get a favourable vote.

There's a long long list of starving and essentially enslaved people globally that have been ignored in favour of others by the French, the Dutch, the British, Belgium, USofA, etc.

> That said North Korea routinely acts against the rest of the world in ways that are only possible because the rest of the world is unable to retaliate

In real politik terms the same can be said about the USofA and has been said about the former British Empire.


> In real politik terms the same can be said about the USofA and has been said about the former British Empire.

Sure... I think minimizing the number of entities who have this sort of impunity is a good thing even if we can't eliminate all of them.


> When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time.

There was also the choice of “Iran let us verify that they are not making nukes, and in return we remove economic sanctions from them”. It was called the JCPOA, and according to non-proliferation experts it worked. And then on the 8th of May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.

Let’s not pretend that there were no other options.


[flagged]


Unilateraly on the level of countries. The other signatories (China, France, Russia, the U.K., Germany and the EU) believed that the deal was good and Iran was holding up their end of the bargain at that time.

If the USA government had credible evidence that it is not so, they could have picked up the phone and presented their case to the other signatories. Or at least to their allies. Then once those countries were convinced that something is off they could have withdrawn together from the agreement. Would have less of a terrible optics than how it went down.


I seek only to point out that we, the United States, have a constitutionally-outlined treaty-making process which involves Senate ratification, and that in the case of the JCPOA, the Senate did not ratify.

An accord reached between Iran and several world powers, including the United States, in July 2015.

Not Just Obama.

Can the world be saved from central north American partisan squabbling please.


It would be truer to say the agreement was between several world powers and Obama, as the Senate didn't ratify.

did the senate ratify starting a war with iran or president is ok to bomb with isreal at will but any agreement requires “ratification” by senate?!

Re starting wars, you’re preaching to the choir.

Re international agreements: yes, the idea is that _broad support_ is required for binding international agreements. Senate ratification represents broad support.

The JCPOA was written in pencil.


> Iran has been the driving force behind a lot of instability in Middle East

I'm loving the current stability that the USA has gifted the world and looking forward to many decades of peace and calm in the middle east. Thank you so much.


That choice is doubly false. On the one hand, there was a diplomatic option. It was working until Trump decided to kill it. On the other, it's insane to think that you can bomb a large, industrialized country of 90 million people out of the ability to make nuclear weapons short of wiping them out of existence.

> we only planned for the absolute best case scenario, why didn't that scenario happen?

IRGC sympathizers across the world that would rather have the current government than the more progressive predecessor.


Last year the same idea made it to the front page [0]. I understand that the apps can be faster, or easier to use. But that's intentional. Developers are deliberately making the web experience worst to force you to use the app. The reason is they have control over the experience in the apps. For example, blocking ads on the apps is much harder, and they can extract things like your contacts, GPS data, and run in the background.

At this point, the only apps on my phone are bank apps. Even that is something I'm trying to get rid off.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44689059


Tougher adblocking is the best argument I’ve heard.

Just this last week, I wrote about the confusion this creates in the workplace[0]. My coworker said "copilot" literally referring to any code assistant, the same way we say bandaid or kleenex. I thought he was talking about Copilot, the one I see nagging me on Microsoft teams. We had a full discussion about completely different tools without realizing it.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231


What's fun is getting into the co-pilot comparison conversational because they are definitely not all equal. Co-pilot 365 is a donkey for one

I refuse to believe any are as bad as the Azure Portal one.

It feels like pre-GPT levels of smart.


I remember when a Century Plant just sprouted in my back yard. In the span of a month, it grew 8 meters. It looks very alien in the process.

[0]: https://imgur.com/gallery/what-kind-of-plant-is-this-grew-le...


That was a flower bloom. Also not a tree.

Nuclear is the answer to our infinite appetite for energy. For the long term, nuclear will be part of the solution.

With that said, there is no such thing as an energy shock right now. Instead, Europe has allies who blatantly attacked a sovereign nation. The answer to that is to condemn and sanction the instigators. What are laws for if they can selectively applied? This is a political problem.


> Nuclear is the answer to our infinite appetite for energy

Approximately 100% of the energy in our solar system radiates from the Sun. Long term, solar is the answer. Nuclear is a really good carrier. In the medium term, we need more energy. Preferably cheap. Ideally clean. Going all in on one mode doesn't make sense because it virtually demand the creation of bottlenecks and single points of failure.


What do we do if another asteroid strikes, raises dust plumes and causes volcanic activity for years? The solution is to diversify renewable energy sources.

Nuclear takes to long to plan and build. If that is fixed, then great.


> solution is to diversify renewable energy sources

There are two economically-viable renewable sources: solar and wind. Everything else is, to put it succinctly, bullshit.

We're not producing and deploying as much solar and wind as we can. But global production has limits. Going all in on just those two (together with batteries) requires massively overpaying. That, in turn, makes the economy uncompetitive.

> Nuclear takes to long to plan and build. If that is fixed, then great

Permitting takes forever, too. Nuclear can be done quicker and cheaper, we've seen China do that. It's a good part of the mix because we just need to add power, and ideally, with economies of scale.


Geothermal is also looking promising, probably more so than nuclear.

> Geothermal is also looking promising

Europe should absolutely develop it. But it's no panacea.

Optimistically, "around 43 GW of enhanced geothermal capacity in the European Union could be developed at costs below 100 €/MWh" [1]. That's 3% of European energy demand [2].

[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/hot-stuff-geotherma...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... 36.6k PJ/year ~ 1,160 GW


Especially in the eiffel region.

In the case we have dust for years that significantly reduces solar output, most people die. What powers our electric grid doesn’t matter if agriculture is crippled.

> What do we do if another asteroid strikes, raises dust plumes and causes volcanic activity for years?

A few nuclear plants will do absolutely nothing against a nuclear winter.


What "nuclear winter"?

In context it seems clear they intended to short hand the possible effects of possible global dust clouds that are possibly aloft for some time with the term "nuclear winter", itself a name for a possible effect of some number of large ground level nuclear blasts.

Yes, a nuclear winter is theorized to happen when a lot(thousands) of cities are struck by nuclear weapons. It's unclear how this is related.

Cities?

Surely it'd be a nuclear winter if the same number hit not-cities.

eg: Castle Bravo .. not a city, but a ground level strike.

> It's unclear how this is related.

From a geophysics PoV meteorite strikes are not unlike ground level nuclear explosions in so far as dust plumes go.

> another asteroid strikes, raises dust plumes and causes volcanic activity for years?

At least that's my recollection from those old old first approximation nuclear winter papers that were largely circles and arrows on the back of envelope guesstimations.

If we're to quibble, I'd be asking about the meteorite strikes causing volcanic activity (or is it the dust plumes that cause that activity?) .. cause that seems tenuous unless it's a direct strike on an unstable part of the Ring of Fire / Yellowstone Caldera.

Whether it's nuclear or meteorites the theory rests not so much on number of ground events as it does on volume (and type) or particles raised up high ... the Iridium K-Pg anomaly layer is global yet postulated to have come from a single (large) strike.


Because cities have more concentrated flammable material than random locations on the earth surface, and will typically be the targets in a nuclear war, and is why most calculations are done with strikes against cities.

The nuclear strikes would create columns of burning material that stretch into the atmosphere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSFPcA62H5s

Nuclear war and meteors colliding with the Earth are different scenarios.


A concrete and glass city is more flammable than an Amazon jungle or barely submerged oil field?

Citing Sagan's guesstimations on this is hardly credible.


I responded to a comment using a concept "nuclear winter", in a way not widely used.

It was interesting, because I assumed to commenter meant that "humanity powers through with nuclear power during the long winter", compared to nuclear winter as in "humanity attacks itself because of greed and stupidity", as it is commonly used.

You then interpreted it in the common way, but explaining it using meteor strike dust plumes, which is not how nuclear winter is commonly explained, as the mode is typically burning stacks of flammable material("guesstimated" first by Carl Sagan and his peers). It's been a long time since I researched the very plausible nuclear winter(stockpile in Switzerland is my plan).

Yes, it is also likely that strategic oil fields will be set ablaze by nuclear strikes, another dimension to the nightmare.

I don't know how valid this theory is, it seems plausible. It was just an interesting scenario, with nuclear powering us through a catastrophe, man made or otherwise, and with current leadership the best we can hope for.

Sweden, my native country, had a similar idea(offensive nuclear capabilities combined with SMRs) in the 50s and 60s, but was eventually(probably for good reasons) cancelled and dismantled it's nuclear weapons program and eventually closed it's first and only SMR in operation, Ågestaverket, eventually building a capable but conventional nuclear industry that provided cheap electricity to the country for decades.

https://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/WiresClimateChangeNW.... https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gestaverket


Fun question: What time was this taken?

The exif includes time, but not time zone. They are not quite at the moon, and Lunar Time is under active development but not official. Also clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)

Anyway, what time was this taken?


I think the clocks on board Orion are set to Houston time, which would be 5 hours behind UTC (because of Daylight Saving). But I'm not sure. I would expect the EXIF time to be in whatever time zone the spacecraft's clocks are set to.

> clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)

Compared to clocks at rest on Earth, clocks on board Orion right now are ticking faster, because it's at a high enough altitude above the Earth that the faster ticking due to higher altitude outweighs the slower ticking due to speed relative to the Earth.

That will be true for most of the mission. For clocks in orbit about the Earth, the "breakeven point" where the altitude effect and the speed effect cancel out and the clock ticks at the same rate as an Earth clock is at, IIRC, about 1.5 Earth radii. So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates).

For a spacecraft moving at escape velocity, which is going to be roughly true for Orion all the way until splashdown, I think the "breakeven point" is higher, at a little over 2 Earth radii. Orion will reach that point on the way back a few hours before splashdown, I think.

The Moon's gravity well is too shallow to make an appreciable difference in any of these calculations.

I should emphasize that all these tick rate effects are tiny, on the order of one part in a billion to one part in a hundred billion. Even when you add up the difference over the entire mission, it's still only on the order of hundreds of microseconds (i.e., the astronauts end up aging a few hundred microseconds more than people who stayed on Earth).


> So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates)

I'm curious, and hope you or somebody else might be able to answer this: is it a single adjustment for each thing, where they just set it to always adjust by X ratio, or does it vary (enough to matter) as it orbits, such that the adjustment needs to be constantly varying slightly?


The exact difference in clock rates is not constant, because the orbits are not perfectly circular and the Earth is not a perfect sphere. So both the altitude and speed of the satellite, and the Earth's gravitational potential, are varying with time, and that means the clock adjustments will vary with time as well.

For the GPS satellites, their time signals are constantly compared with ground clocks, and adjustment signals are sent up to the satellites as needed to keep their clock corrections in sync with ground clocks.

I'm not sure what, if any, adjustments are made to clocks on the ISS, or how they're done.


Thanks! I figured the orbital paths not being exact circles meant they'd be slight variance in the difference, just wasn't sure if it was enough to matter or if they could treat it as if it was exactly the same all the way around without it mattering.

Line 30 of the exif dump in the gist linked above gives an offset of -05:00

I'm 100% an advocate for not using LLM for writing... But I'll tell you were I use them just for that. For ceremonies.

A large part of our work is about writing documents that no one will read, but you'll get 10 different reminders that they need to get done. These are documents that circulate, need approval from different stake holders. Everybody stamps their name on it, without ever reading it. I used to spend so much time crafting these documents. Now I use an LLM, the stakeholders are probably using an LLM to summarize it, someone is happy, they are filed for the records.

I call these "ceremonies" because they are a requirement we have, it helps no one, we don't know why we have to do it, but no one wants to question it.


If it's very mechanical you probably aren't losing out on anything by using a machine to produce it.


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