California to become first state to require companies to have women on boards - <AUTHOR> https://psmag.com/social-justice/california-is-about-to-become-the-first-state-to-require-companies-to-have-women-on-their-boards <comment><USER2> Does this only apply to companies incorporated in the state? Most companies operating in CA (at least I assume the ones they're trying to target) are incorporated in Delaware. Seems like this won't make a difference if that's the loophole.

On another note, what the flying fuck is this supposed to achieve? All this will create is scenarios where people are only there because they legally have to be, not because they're the best person for the job.

I'm 100% for equal rights. I don't judge a person by anything but their ability to perform the job as best as possible. This isn't equal rights. This is a legally binding pitty-hire. Hopefully people leverage it positively, though, and start considering more women for board positions. On that note, women need to also push for these positions, too. It's not exactly a cookie cutter issue.

<comment><USER3> "... would require a domestic general corporation or foreign corporation that is a publicly held corporation, as defined, whose principal executive offices, according to the corporation's SEC 10-K form, are located in California"

Thus, out of state businesses like Delaware corps are likely exempt. For the full text of SB 826, [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB826)

<comment><USER4> It doesn't matter where they are incorporated if they have their executive offices in the state of California.

Few businesses incorporate in Delaware have offices in Delaware because it's generally not a state executives want to live in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After skimming the bill, I have to say that this is a bad law.

Without even considering whether or not I would support the purpose for which it was written, I can't imagine it passing constitutional muster - on its face it violates both the Fourteen Amendment's "equal protection" clause and Title VII of the Civil Right Act of 1964.

If what they want to accomplish is "ensure that corporate boards are not made up entirely of men", then the law should have been written to say that in a way that is not gender-specific - instead of definition "female", it should have defined "minority gender", and required minimum numbers of the minority gender on boards of given sizes.

There's also the small consideration that as far as I can tell, a corporation that has only one shareholder of record can have a board with only one member. This bill appears to literally make it illegal for anyone who does not self- identify as a woman to form and operate such a corporation. Existing corporations in this class would be forced by law to add an additional board member if and only if the owner is not female. That's absurd.

<comment><USER6> The language of 301.3(a) is "a publicly held domestic or foreign corporation". I'm not sure if it's intended to be read as "publicly held AND (domestic OR foreign)" but it seems like that is how it should be read in light of 2115.5(b). In that case, how many _public_ corporations have one board member?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good. Now also the different races. Also the different religions. Etc.

Just kidding...

Why not turn it around, let them prove the best were not hired based on these variables. For example, if a comoany has all white males in the board, start and investigation if they could also have hired a non white-male. Just putting 'a' woman in is not going to solve the deeper problem. In fact that would just be cosmetically covering up the deeper problem. also if I were a woman, I'd liked to be hired for my skills, not my vagina...

<comment><USER8> It's OK, this crowd will disregard your vagina anyway. [https://twitter.com/ccchloe/status/1019633671853301762](https://twitter.com/ccchloe/status/1019633671853301762)

<comment><USER9> So this person is ok with 50% of the parliment being filled with a group that represents maybe 0.00001% of the society? Great.

<comment><USER10> Wait, I'm confused: do you think there are only ~700 trans people identifying as female in the world, or do you think there are only 7 of them in the UK?

<comment><USER9> Neither - I used a small percentage without actually thinking about the value, because I don't think that the number of zeros past the decimal point changes the point I'm trying to make.

<comment><USER11> It does.

<comment><USER9> In what way exactly? can you explain please? How is my point changed whether I use 0.001% or 0.000001% or 0.00000001%? The overall idea of a "very small number" is conveyed regardless of the number of zeroes used - if that's not true, please enlighten me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't having quotas violate Title VII of Civil Rights Act of 1964? Unless board members aren't considered employees?

Honestly, this is just a bad law and I'm a feminist. I don't think _quotas_ are the right way to solve inequality and only furthers the culture wars.

A lot of the landmark civil rights cases in the 1970s involved obtaining rights for men, such as spousal social security and spousal military benefits. This is a step backwards.

<comment><USER5> > Wouldn't having quotas violate Title VII of Civil Rights Act of 1964?

As far as I can tell (IANAL), yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like a great idea. My wife sits on the board of a nonprofit. The staff of this org is largely female yet my wife is the only female on the board. The men on the board have been truly insensitive to the needs of their staff, and my wife has had to work hard to advocate for them.

Just as important would be to require that boards have employees on them. Heck, better than that just do away with the board entirely and have worker cooperatives.

<comment><USER14> > Just as important would be to require that boards have employees on them.

Why stop there? Boards should include people from all the company's suppliers as well. And also people who live in the neighborhoods that the company does business in. And some government officials, too, since they have a vested interest in the company's tax payments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is probably an unpopular or taboo opinion, but I believe in equal rights and merit based achievements. Basing employment, status or title on a persons gender or ethnic background is the opposite of equal rights, in my view. I see it as two wrongs trying to equal a right.

<comment><USER16> Agreed.

I'm sure my thoughts are also unpopular but if gender is a choice then maybe I do a reverse Lauren Southern and register as a woman to get a board spot and lower car insurance rates?

<comment><USER17> A man I know has already done this in order to get cheap car insurance. Kinda sad, really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there any evidence that women are actively prevented from getting on the board due to bias? If not then I worry about these kind of laws. I am seeing too many big shots desperately painting themselves as minority messiah to boost own career and get attention in press. This is very slippery slope. What's next? Forcing businesses to hire people each race, country and sexual orientation? Once you abandon meritocracy, it's then all about what you are born with and not in your control. Laws are supposed to protect citizens from this! I hope one of these days Supreme Court makes these kind of reservation system illegal.

</comment><comment><USER19> Equal rights is not the same thing as equal outcomes. This law seems very ham fisted.

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, but my first thought is how long before someone claims MtF status for the exclusive[1] purpose of not really fulfilling this requirement.

[1] i.e. do not actually identify as female. I make no statements about genuinely trans people in this post.

<comment><USER21> Probably not very long. There was already a man in South America who identified as female in order to take advantage of females in his country being able to retire earlier than males, a male in Canada identifying as female in order to get cheaper car insurance, and a male in Canada who identified as female in order to get sent to a female prison instead of male prison.

It's probably going to be a problem as long as "you are whatever you choose to identify as" and "people that identify as certain things deserve govt regulated special treatment" co-exist as concepts.

<comment><USER12> I would think identifying as a female SOLELY to get cheaper car insurance (and not identifying as a female in any other aspect of your life) is just plain insurance fraud (which is illegal). Plus you risk claims being denied even if the policy was underwritten and you didn't get into any legal trouble.

<comment><USER22> Who are we to say that a woman's identity isn't defined by her insurance rates?

The obvious biological markers are no longer requirements, so why not.

<comment><USER12> Judges, juries, insurance adjusters, and (finally) state or provincial insurance boards say so. None of these people are stupid, they can easily tell if someone identifies as a female for the sole purpose of defrauding an insurance company. There is a huge difference between having a legitimate gender identity and simply lying in order to commit insurance fraud.

<comment><USER23> That creates a dangerous precedent that someone who can't easily express how they feel being ridiculed.

It's less money and bad press if you just let people claim what they want rather than going on a crusade of truth.

<comment><USER12> No it doesn't, we're talking about insurance fraud here, not actual gender identity issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On the workers-on-boards topic I mentioned this quote from Zero to One, which applies here too:

"A board of three is ideal. Your board should never exceed five people, unless your company is publicly held. (Government regulations effectively mandate that public companies have larger boards—the average is nine members.) By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large. When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: "Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run." Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. If you want that kind of free rein from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small." — Peter Thiel

More board members may increase intransigence, decrease oversight (cover over who is _really_ making the decisions and who is not), and turn US corps more bureaucratic. Never-mind who is joining the board, this _is_ going to increase board sizes, and that's pretty unfortunate for some philosophies of effective management.

If you do not believe this will increase board sizes, then you must believe that all companies are willing to fire some number of current board members to meet their quotas, which seems terribly unlikely to me.

If currently all-male (48% percent of companies have no women on their boards), requiring at least 3 on boards of 6, unless you fire half your current board, is exploding the board size by 50%. Requiring at least 2 on boards of 5, unless you fire ~half your current board, brings the number up to 7. But then you need 3 (its over 6), so you have to add one more, so a board of 5 gets a 60% increase in size to 8 people.

If you want businesses to be successful, you probably shouldn't expand their boards against their will. It is not that female representation isn't a problem, it is that an effective company structure _must_ be foremost, ahead of any other (more arbitrary or ephemeral) requirements. Or else there won't be as many great companies to steward in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER25> Whereever you might fall on the left-right spectrum, this law is sexist, discriminatory, idiotic, and an escalation of the brewing gender war.

If the law required a 50/50 gender split on boards, or at least one member of each gender or similar, I wouldn't find it offensive. As is, it allows all- female boards and bans all-male ones.

Laws like this are what energize the Trump political base.

<comment><USER26> >If the law required a 50/50 gender split on boards

I'm curious why you would see that as an improvement. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER27> As written (assuming the article is an accurate portrayal), the law is a blatent violation of the equal protection clause, as it provides a protection for women that it does not provide for men. A neutral requirement is not such a blatent violation. Although it still runs the risk of a disparite impact argurment and, perhaps more damming, seems to be in direct contradiction with federal (and likely state, but more specific wins there) anti discrimination laws. Or rather, compliance would involve violating other laws, at least in some cases.

<comment><USER26> Ah, gotcha. It seems more wrong to me, but I guess I'm thinking in terms of 'What would this do' as opposed to 'Is this law a violation of various laws / legal philosophy'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> To me it seems weird that the law should even consider the gender of a a person. I do realize most countries have different legislation for men and women which is just very hard for me to understand the justification for.

Can someone think of corner cases where it should matter whether a person is a man or a woman?

</comment><comment><USER29> oh boy. So far all the responses here are negative.

Look, nobody wants to see non-merit-based appointments. The seemingly rational argument generally amounts to, 2 wrongs don't equal a right. The problem is that natural bias by existing boards and existing founders leads to over- selection of males. In many of those cases, a female would do equally as well.

Choosing the best candidate isn't a strict rank order function. Each candidate has many intangible / hard to quantify positive qualities they bring to the table, and there's always a tradeoff of which qualities are the most important. I'd wager that in 99% of cases, it's impossible to choose a single best candidate.

Instead of assuming that forcing females onto the board leads to picking less- qualified candidates, why can't people assume that females are just as qualified as males, and that this legislation just forces a representation more in line with demographics? ie, when given 2 "equal" candidates (and I'll argue there are never just 2, there are often "many"), a female candidate will be preferred so as to bring gender representation closer to population demographics.

Please do keep in mind also that board membership is not generally merit- based. The old-boy network is real.

And in practical terms, this will have near-zero effect as far as HN crowd is concerned. Tech companies incorporate in Delaware. Companies that are incorporated here that want to reject this legislate will re-incorporate elsewhere.

<comment><USER30> The real advantage of this bill has nothing to do with equality. It does sort of have something to do with busting up "old boys networks."

The idea is simple. The women who will be eligible for these positions will understand who put them onto the board. Not the people who hired them, but the people who passed this law. And the people who laid the philosophical groundwork that led to this law. That will create a sort of ideological loyalty.

Now boards will be staffed by many members of a cohesive "class" that have common interests and loyalties.

Ideological loyality is awesome. Especially when the ideology is radical equity. It creates a more cohesive society. So I say more power to them, literally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm a minority and consider bleeding heart, big government, free market capitalist. But I can't agree with this. Corporate America should have "affirmative outreach" and not just recruit from Ivey league schools and even partner with colleges and high schools with large minority populations and reach out to females to widen the top of the funnel.

<comment><USER32> While I disagree with the law as well, I can't disagree with the problem the law is trying to address. Ivy league schools actively develop alma mater networks (that's the old boy's network everyone speaks about). It's not the case that board members from the Ivies see this as a problem; this is something they actively work to foster, encourage, and support. Most would never consider affirmative outreach; they actively do the opposite.

The only reason a law like this can pass is the Ivy League is now pretty evenly split on gender. It doesn't break the network.

I'll mention a lot of policies are this ham-fisted as a compromise -- allow a particular demographic (women, African Americans, etc.) into seats of power, without fundamentally breaking the power dynamics. A lot of racial issues you see are due to e.g. aggressive outreach to a very small number of African American who fit a certain cultural mould, rather than a broader outreach to poor people.

The Harvard crowd would never want to let poor people attend the school (unless they're e.g. poor but politically connected, or otherwise likely to end up in a seat of power).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This might not be so bad, since the board of directors doesn't have a huge impact on the day to day, usually.

Does it require the members have voting rights?</comment>


If the U.S. Won't Pay Its Teachers, China Will - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-19/if-the-u-s-won-t-pay-its-teachers-china-will <comment><USER2> The most moving and informed coverage of the US education system I've heard have all been through This American Life.[0][1][2][3]

Ok, there's an easy four hours of content to listen to. Enjoy!

The short takeaway for me was basically that local funding through property taxes is a terrible idea if you want anything approaching fairness.

If you can afford to live in an area with high property taxes, the US school system is great, your kids probably go to a great school. If you are struggling to get by, though, living in an apartment? Your kids are usually banned from going to that same great school by law.

It's like anti-literacy laws were too obvious, so we just made them more byzantine.

[0] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/562/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with)

[1] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/563/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/563/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-two)

[2] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/512/h...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/512/house-rules)

Significantly, on how redlining contributed to the achievement gap. The heartbreaking story of why a girl who wants to go to school down the road is turned away.

[3] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/534/a...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/534/a-not-so-simple-majority)

A description of another poor high school where the kids basically have recess, lunch, or permanent substitutes all day, because it's failed by local control.

<comment> hash-set Not true in MN--you can open enroll your kids in any district. You may not get the exact school you want due to demographics, but it's still a valid counter- example.

By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? I'm all for trying to pull people up by their bootstraps, but we can't just level everything out in some misguided attempt at 'fairness.' You will never achieve that fairness. The wealthy will always find ways to gain an advantage.

Sucks about that high school, but a lot of these areas need serious political reform first before anything else can get fixed.

<comment><USER3> > By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages > in life?

Sure, let wealthy ADULTS have more advantages. However, children have no say in their circumstances, so I do think it is right to at least give CHILDREN equal opportunity and resources.

<comment> hash-set Focus on what I said: You can never achieve that. The wealthy will always find ways to undo whatever leveling you attempt. The elite social class in the US is its own little society and most of us are not in it!

<comment><USER2> > You can never achieve that.

You can't live forever but I still believe in hospitals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > In the U.S. and Canada, teachers are often underpaid—and many have quit the > profession because they couldn't make a decent living

Is there a source for this? I often hear similar notions lamenting the demise of US education spending but from what I can tell, the US spends more than most other countries per student. And spending has been growing in practically every respect

> This graph shows that average education expenditures per pupil (for fall > enrollment) rose from $3,400 in 1965 to $8,745 in 2001. This graph shows > that spending on education from all sources—local, state, federal, and > others—rose from $249 billion in 1990-91 to $442.7 billion in 2000-01 and > $501.3 billion in 2003-04. This graph shows that the federal investment in > the Elementary and Secondary Education Act rose from under $2 billion in > 1966 to $15 billion in 2000 and $25 billion in 2005. [0]

Perhaps teachers are underpaid, but where is the money being spent going?

[0] [https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite- chart....](https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.html)

<comment><USER5> I always hear that lament, then I talk to my friends who are teachers.

Most are in my age group (late 30s) and are making $70-85k, with summers and another month of vacation and good pension/healthcare. The only lousy benefit is that maternity leave sucks.

They all are incredibly frustrated with the increasing meddling and red tape attached to federal and state funding. Half the job is paperwork nonsense, which wasn't true even a decade ago.

<comment><USER6> More like 35K-50K for teachers here in their early to mid 30s. Mid-sized midwestern city, so the cost of housing is low, but that's still not great, especially considering that you need advanced degrees to approach the top end of that range.

Compensation varies greatly by district—typically the worst districts pay _the best_ , but they're still undesirable for teachers because the conditions are _terrible_ —being cursed at and threatened daily by 5th graders (no joke) and witnessing assaults gets old fast.

[EDIT] I should add that their healthcare plans tend to suck and are _totally_ useless (1.5-2x as expensive as other options) for covering one's family, but the retirement's good. They're also better for people planning to take maternity/paternity leave than probably any other employer in the area, especially if you time it so your leave rolls over into Summer and are willing to be docked a couple weeks' pay—you can achieve near-parity with lower end of normal for parental leave in other OECD states that way! What a perk.

<comment><USER7> While we're at it: I think it's a terrible idea to confine 20-30 5th-graders together. This is the age when interpersonal relationships form, and hierarchies start building.

20 kids of same age have no other way to build a reasonable hierarchy except forming cliques and having fights. They are all peers, painfully pitted against one another.

For most of the human history (and pre-history) kids grew in multi-age groups. This allows older kids assume roles of leaders, care about younger kids and protect them, and teach the younger kids what they already learned (the best way to learn something is to teach someone). The younger kids have some role models before their eyes who they can relate to more easily than to adults.

This setup seems to work well in e.g. Montessori schools. It's sad that the majority of schools do not adopt multi-age groups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Headline is wildly misleading. The company that is the subject of the article pays $21/hour, which works out to $42,000 a year, probably without benefits. The 25th percentile for a US high school teacher is $45,520, plus significant benefits. Median pay is $57,200.

<comment><USER9> The purchasing power of that money is much higher in China.

<comment><USER10> Yeah but the teachers are in the US, giving classes over the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It continues to amaze me that the US is so unambitious in this regard.

Donald Trump on education: [http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Donald_Trump_Education.htm](http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Donald_Trump_Education.htm)

His solution?

School choice, competition.

Completely ignoring what the 25 countries do that rank higher when it comes to education.

<comment> hash-set What do they do besides make the population so desperate to escape poverty that they will push their kids to the brink of madness to study for exams that are make or break for their lives?

<comment><USER12> Most people in places like France and Germany are not "desperate to escape poverty".

<comment> hash-set I was referring the India and China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For anyone wondering what VIPKid lessons look like, here is a sample demo of one from their Youtube channel.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it5fb0KlUjU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it5fb0KlUjU)

<comment><USER14> It's interesting how overly animated he is given that the student is not a child, but you can tell that she is pulled in by all of that energy. But if you look at other videos you'll see that most teachers are a little more contained (and maybe sane-seeming): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swc0RTrxjpw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swc0RTrxjpw)

The one thing, I saw that in their teacher training they aim for a 70/30 ratio of student to teacher speech and I haven't found any videos where that was the case. Though maybe it is only for more advanced students.

Overall a really nice platform though!

<comment><USER15> >It's interesting how overly animated he is given that the student is not a child

Absolutely don't knock this. I teach robotics and tech part time to middle schoolers and if there's one thing that has helped me connect more than any other its being a living cartoon. Exaggerate everything. You should be half- way to full clown when lecturing or you're simply not getting through.

To prep for lessons, I don't study circuits, I watch CN. I'm a 40yo man who quotes Rick and Morty and can name all of the Crystal Gems. But it works like crazy.

<comment> hash-set Ha! I found out the same thing teaching college students!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good story about Cindy Mi transitioning her business to online, and also the teachers in the USA now getting 20+ dollars an hour with remote flex time work. Off topic, but as a computer programmer I have been hired twice in the last ten years by customers in China: I told my friends I was trying to reverse the balance of trade imbalance <grin>. Anyway, even with the time zone differences, it was fun.

</comment><comment><USER17> First, in the US I think we need to convince a substantial chunk of the population that it's not religion that will solve our problems, but better education.

<comment><USER18> Probably you should start by providing evidence of this. Most of the evidence I've seen suggests we are far past the point of diminishing returns on education, and we should have less education rather than more.

<comment><USER19> Would you be willing to cite some of this evidence? That's a conclusion I'd be interested to see...

<comment><USER18> So one important fact is that most of the knowledge taught in school is not directly useful. Combine this with the fact that transfer of learning is almost nonexistent (e.g. [http://amzn.to/2hExO6u](http://amzn.to/2hExO6u) ) and you discover that most education is wasted.

There is extensive evidence of a sheepskin effect, and most studies of educational effectiveness are consistent with signalling theories and ability bias (more able individuals get educated).

[https://www.nas.org/articles/The_Sheepskin_Effect](https://www.nas.org/articles/The_Sheepskin_Effect)

There is likely to be some benefit to education, but it's far less than what politicians currently believe and what current policies are predicated on.

<comment><USER20> That could simply mean that our education system is inefficient, not that education isn't valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It sounds like the pay is pretty good compared to other online tutoring stuff. In grad school I was an online tutor for Pearson for 3-4 years and the pay was minimum wage.

I hated every minute of it. You would log onto a creaky old system (one entire year their scheduling system was down and we had to sign up for hours by filling out a google form) then download a rnadomly assigned college paper. You were expected to critique it in 30 minutes and give feedback using their very specific format. There was often little context to the papers or what the actual assignment was. I would often get nursing papers full of all kinds of medical things I didn't know anything about.

Then you would get evaluated by your suprevisor and emails about how long you took per paper. So there was constant pressure and it sucked so much.

<comment><USER22> Why they have non-experts grading specialized subjects is beyond me. I don't want my physics work graded by the PE teacher or vice versa; unless they're knowledgeable in both.

Profit motive? If so it seems short sighted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is ridiculous. All most all of the comments here are about the US education system instead of the company the article talks about.

</comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone know how much a typical teacher in China is paid? A quick google told me $17k which sounds high for me.

<comment><USER25> I live in China and that seems about right, and it's probably even more in richer cities like Shanghai/Beijing.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: The Value of the Software in an Acquisition - <AUTHOR> I'm currently trying to estimate the value of software in case of an acquisition of a SaaS company from a technical angle (People, Process, Technology). So far, I could attend several due diligences. As it seems, it's all about MAU, MRR and Conversion Rate and so forth. The technical value of the development team (e.g. seniority), their processes (e.g. automated deployments) and the software (e.g. cloud-native architecture) built so far seemed not to play a big role in determining the value of the SaaS business.<p>So, what's your take on this matter? In the eyes of an M&A consultant, is software just a tool you can easily rebuild and replace and all that counts is the current business stats that it enables? Or is there anything I can do as a founder to raise the valuation of my business by polishing people, process and technology in the R&D team? <comment><USER2> My experience in a couple of my own exits and having been on due diligence teams for a few organizations. Rarely is your software what the value is based on, it is the business, revenue and people. The software is just the tool which you are using to solve the problem so it will not get much value assigned to it. Patents hold value, and so if your software implements the patent that does help change the picture some, but the value of the company will still be in the business.

If you want your business to be valuable it is the combination of the software, people, process, clients and revenue that will make it valuable. If you have negative revenue then you will only have the value of the team, processes & clients, the software (without patents) will be worth nearly 0 and even with patents will only be slightly more valuable. Usually new founders struggle with this fact thinking the software is super valuable, when in reality it is no different then having a CNC machine. The CNC machine doesn't hold the value, the parts coming out of it, clients and processes hold the value.</comment>


Bubble Indicators - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/09/bubble-indicators/ <comment><USER2> For me, the biggest similarity between now and the late 1990s is the impending sense of economic slowdown, e.g. [http://seekingalpha.com/article/49434-economists- reduce-2008...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/49434-economists- reduce-2008-growth-outlook-for-third-time?source=feed)

I remember at the end of 2000 (I was working for an i-bank at the time) everyone was talking about the "possibility of recession next year".

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not completely certain we're not in some kind of bubble, but I can say that if we are, it pales in comparison to where we were in the '98-'01 era. EToys.com had a peak market cap of $10 billion. PlanetRX.com had a peak market cap of $10.8 billion, and I don't even remember that one.

Though they were and are still successful, Amazon and eBay had market caps of $28 billion and $17 billion respectively in early 1999 -- long before they had near-term prospects of showing a profit.

In comparison, $10 billion for Facebook today doesn't seem all that unreasonable.

References: [http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_20/b3732716....](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_20/b3732716.htm) <http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/189.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't get over a few things.

One, how many of these so-called startups are actually receiving outside funding? It's one thing to hack together a dumb idea and put it online with ad banners all over the place, and another to actually receiving funding for said idea.

Funding hackers versus straight-up entrepreneurs is smart on YC's part for a number of reasons, but most of all because sites like YouTube blow up just as much for the technology behind the scenes as the implementation of the idea itself. Justin.TV is viable not just for its idea, but the clever things they've developed to make live video streaming cost-effective. And this likely plays into why YC looks more for smart people, as opposed to smart ideas.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think people are right to distinguish between the apparent Web 2.0 social software fashion and a true financial bubble. Anyway, at least I finally know what bubble sort is good for. Getting them bubbles sorted ;-)</comment>


Mailgun Down – SSL cert is expired - <AUTHOR> http://status.mailgun.com/ <comment><USER2> Ugh. Should be fixed now. Sorry to anyone that experienced disruptions due to this stupid error.

</comment><comment><USER3> We've had issues previously with Rackspace and SSL certs expiring (webmail api certs, not mailgun previously). My app has been "broken" twice in the past due to expired certs, to the point that we now monitor all SSL certs used on third party api's that we rely on. (As well as monitoring our own certs of course).

We've got our eye on Rackspace's webmail reseller api's SSL cert, which now has less than 14 days till it expires: [https://admin.webmail.us/excedentsoap/excedentsoap.wsdl](https://admin.webmail.us/excedentsoap/excedentsoap.wsdl)

<comment><USER4> Pretty well unacceptable for a major vendor of SSL certs. Wouldn't you hope that Rackspace could help keep you out of this trouble if you bought a cert from them? I wouldn't expect it, since they can't keep themselves out of this sort of trouble.

<comment><USER3> To clarify. We don't buy SSL certs from Rackspace. I was referring to Rackspace allowing their OWN certs to expire, breaking api calls made to those endpoints. The URL I linked to was a webmail.us URL which is a Rackspaced- owned domain.

Edit: fixed grammar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is probably a good time to piggyback an Ask HN: What are the best SSL providers these days with regards to price/hassle vs device/browser coverage?

I'm ashamed to say my company is still on VeriSign (ie. Network Solutions) simply out of inertia because by the time we realize the cert is near expiring there's no time to evaluate and switch providers.

<comment><USER6> For noncommercial websites, [https://www.startssl.com/](https://www.startssl.com/) offers free certificates.

For commercial websites, the cheapest certificates I've seen are PositiveSSL certificates resold by gogetssl [1]. It's $4.55 for one year or $17.25 for 5 years.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with either site. I've never used gogetssl, but I will probably give them a shot the next time I need a certificate.

[1] [https://www.gogetssl.com/domain-validation/comodo- positive-s...](https://www.gogetssl.com/domain-validation/comodo-positive- ssl/)

<comment><USER7> StartSSL has a good deal for commercial websites too - for $120/year you get unlimited certs, including wildcard.

Only downside is they do proper identity checking which is a bit painful to go through (they will need to see official company documents, verify ID by phone etc) - but worth it in the long run IMO.

<comment><USER8> Yeah and sometimes they just drop the ball on the ID check. I didn't have a bill ready that has my physical address on it (none of my bills print this info) so they said they'd send me a piece of mail with a code in it. Never showed up, all attempts to contact them were ignored. Ended up just getting an $8 cert somewhere.

I will say that once you do get into StartSSL (which I have through a previous company), it's nice to be able to create/sign unlimited certs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised there aren't companies that look at the expiration dates of SSL certificates and try and get them to use their service to get a new one, like domain people do. Seems like it could also be a feature of New Relic / Pingdom / etc.

<comment><USER10> We have this at our website monitoring and recovery service [https://t1mr.com](https://t1mr.com) and it's free.

<comment><USER11> Would you consider adding a check for particular string on page? That would be handy.

Also, if you check SSL cert validity, you should totally advertise that! I remember I've been paying for one such service where they would monitor SSL url, but would not alert you about SSL cert expiration. I found out the hard way.

<comment><USER10> Sure, checking for a string on the web page is also in the basic functionality. We also ping your site every minute, so you'll know about problems immediately.

The advanced (paid) functionality is a restart of your vps or other automatic ssh action trying to recover it when it's down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Had an expired SSL cert bite me in the ass yesterday actually. They auto renew on the billing side, but if you have a year SSL cert, you have to generate a new one each time. So I saw that the billing renewed, didn't think anything of it, then was reminded of the manual generation step by a bit fat warning on my app. Yay.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oddly, their uptime charts still show 100%

<comment><USER13> well, technically, their system was up, the certificates were just expired.

<comment><USER14> Anything that makes a system unusable is downtime...

"Technically our site was up, just the database was down..."

<comment><USER15> Right, but if their uptime monitor is internal, and they are resolving from an internal address, nothing is wrong.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, but if your status page is made to be seen by external people, the right thing to do would be to monitor it just like if you were using it externally. There are whole slew of problems that wouldn't be exposed correctly if your monitoring point is internal -- like this exact problem, DNS, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, more or less bad than when Azure let their SSL cert expire last year?

[http://www.zdnet.com/windows-azure-storage-issue-expired- htt...](http://www.zdnet.com/windows-azure-storage-issue-expired-https- certificate-possibly-at-fault-7000011705/)

<comment><USER18> My favorite is when Passport.com expired, taking down Hotmail, and a good samaritan renewed it for Microsoft.

[http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-234907.html](http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-234907.html)

<comment><USER17> I hadn't heard of that episode. That's hilarious - particularly that it was a Linux consultant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Expiring certs and domain names kinda haunt me. It's such a silly task and for most of us we only have to deal with every year or two. Yet if you forget, your site goes completely offline! All the work spent scaling and automating the site and one stupid renewal can undo it all.

I have all manner of alerts for these things, but still I worry about it and check from time to time to make sure nothing is expiring soon.

</comment><comment><USER20> I use [http://sslcertcheck.com](http://sslcertcheck.com) to monitor these situations for me. You can do so for free, real simple service. Just gets tiring to deal it's these sorts of issues, and great to get a bigger warning before the service goes down as a result. Full disclosure: I'm friends with the owner.

</comment><comment><USER21> Heh. I wrote 3 calendar reminders 60, 30 and 15 days out for our engineering team on Friday reminding us to do this when the time comes. Now, I will reserve the right to feel smug.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I mean, if you're responsible for an SSL cert, why isn't this common practice. I'm going to join you in smugness, because I did this as well on a web app I was partially responsible for. It's super easy, and if your system is at all critical (mine wasn't even, really - it was an internal-only wiki with a self-signed cert from a different internal team), then there's no excuse not to.

<comment><USER21> There was a bit of jest in the smugness, but in my case it was because I inherited the SSL responsibilities from an outgoing engineer and randomly thought to myself "I wonder when these servers certs expire?". It's the type of thing that multiple people need to keep an eye out for, not just one person in the event of inevitable turnover. For something that can entirely take down your site/service for an indeterminate period of time that is entirely out of your control, it's a necessary evil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> protip: nagios.

<comment><USER24> More specifically, you can use the nagios check_ssl_cert plugin [1], which checks if the server is running and delivers a valid certificate. We use this plugin extensively and it takes the surprise out of an expired ssl cert. You will get multiple heads up, say 90, 60, and 30 days out (it's configurable), that your cert is going to expire. Seems like a no brainier.

[1] [http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Network- Protoco...](http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Network- Protocols/HTTP/check_ssl_cert/details)

<comment><USER25> This feature is built into the standard check_http with the right flags.

Specifically: `/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http -H <ip/hostname> -C 60`

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is a free service called [http://certalert.me](http://certalert.me) that can warn you about expiring as certificates. Check it out!

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder what is the economic impact of this error.</comment>


Zigbee light link master key - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/MayaZigBee/status/579723961661022209 <comment><USER2> This may not be much of an attack. The master key is used only during "commissioning", when a controller is introduced to a light. Then they exchange keys, and the random key generated by the controller is sent to the light, encrypted with the master key. The light then stores the controller key. The controller and light must be physically close for this to work.[1]

Once you've done that, it's difficult to reset a light to factory defaults. There's a program called "LampStealer" which does this, but the controller and lamp have to be brought very close together, and even then it doesn't always work.

Some devices can be reset by connecting to the Zigbee bridge with Telnet on port 30000, then typing various simple commands. That's a bigger worry than a leak of the master key.

[1] [https://docs.zigbee.org/zigbee- docs/dcn/12/docs-12-0255-01-0...](https://docs.zigbee.org/zigbee- docs/dcn/12/docs-12-0255-01-0mwg-exploring-new-opportunities-with-zigbee- light-link.pdf)

<comment><USER3> It's worth noting that for the port 30000 Telnet interface (At least on the Philips Hue bridge), it also needs to be physically close for it to work. In fact, this is how LampStealer works - it sends the command to the bridge over TCP.

<comment><USER4> How does it enforce requiring close proximity?

<comment><USER5> by very weak transmission power, probably

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For more about this, there's an excellent paper about hacking lightbulbs: [http://www.dhanjani.com/docs/Hacking%20Lighbulbs%20Hue%20Dha...](http://www.dhanjani.com/docs/Hacking%20Lighbulbs%20Hue%20Dhanjani%202013.pdf)

"In order to change the state of the lightbulbs (such as turning all the associated bulbs off) the bridge uses the ZigBee Light Link (ZLL) wireless technology and protocol....

"ZLL requires the use of a manufacturer issued master key. This master key is stored on the bridge as well as the light bulbs. Upon initiation (when the user presses the button on the bridge), the bridge generates a random network key and encrypts it using the master key. The lightbulbs unwrap the network key since they also have the master key and use it to subsequently communicate with the bridge."

</comment><comment><USER7> Philips already ships the absolute best zigbee light hijacking device with their bloom and living colors lamps. The remote.

The first thing I did when I got my hue set was try to see if the bulbs worked with the living colors remote. Not only can you force-pair (steal) the bulb with it, you can then no longer connect it to the bridge without removing it to get to the serial number, or bringing it close to the bridge and using the lightfinder app or telnet.

Quite a hassle, and all you need is the standard remote and proximity.

<comment><USER8> Presumably you can get around the "proximity" limit by just using a more powerful transmitter, I can't imagine they have any actual near field communication or anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain me what this post is about?

<comment><USER10> As far as I can tell the master key of ZigBee pairing has been extracted and posted. This is used when pairing a new device to a ZigBee network which is used by many home automation devices (such as SmartThings).

Also, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but the attack window is very narrow in that you have to be close to the source and you have to reset the device (or use a new device) in order to really do anything. Not sure how much of a risk this is at the moment.

<comment><USER11> Note that this is only the Zigbee Light Link master key. A lot of devices use the Zigbee Home Automation specification which has a different well known master key (in that case it's in the standard which is freely available).

The ZLL key is slightly more interesting because you can factory reset (and effectively steal) devices in someone else's network, but that does require physical proximity to the device.

The master key also means that you can make your own device to add to someone's network. Most ZLL networks have a simple push button adding process, so you just need to be close to the button for a few seconds in order to add your own device to the network, after which you can control any other devices already in the network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In case this gets taken down, the tweet said:

#DIY lover #ZLL master key [redacted] #ZigBee #Philips #Hue Please RT @travisgoodspeed @stevewoz

<comment><USER13> Redacted due to DMCA takedown request.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Suddenly I realize that I had almost forgotten 09 F9 11 02...

<comment><USER15> I like to think of that moment as Digg's swan-song.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is why we can't have nice internet of things...

<comment><USER17> I'd rather have an internet of nice things anyway</comment></comment>


Quantum Approaches to Consciousness (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/ <comment><USER2> Philosophers latched onto the idea of QM in consciousness bc they thought the randomness aspect left room for free will. Of course it doesn't, any more than hooking up an axe over your head that will only drop if a certain atom decays means that you can now choose the time of your death. The point being we don't control the randomness, it evolves according to the laws of QM and therefore there is no role at all for "choice" to play. Also observe that a rock has the same level of access to the underlying randomness of QM and we don't say it has free will. Even if the human brain propagates the randomness upwards to larger systems, there is still no choice in how that is done. Theoretically, it is possible for a rock to exhibit crazy quantum behavior every once in awhile as well.

Of course, free will is an inconsistent notion predicated on the idea that there is a "you" separate from "your chemicals" that would do something different if only that dang physics would let it. But separate yourself from your chemicals and you don't get free will, you get literally nothing. People don't realize the implicit dualism in all of this free will stuff

<comment> Capt-RogerOver Your views sound outdated. There is a "you" separate from "your chemicals". In the same way a character in a video game is in fact very separate from the transistors that power the computer that the game runs on. They live in different worlds, by different rules and both have very different implications for life.

There is a perfectly valid and functional world model that incorporates both the science and it's atoms and spirituality. Functional in a sense that people having this view can both apply their knowledge to the scientific domain (building new mechanical machines) and also to the spiritual domain, that is be truly happy and enlightened in the way the experience their own life. (Seeing yourself (factually incorrectly) as ONLY a chemical machine does not produce happiness, mission, love, etc. (nor good health for that matter, because health is affected by psychological wellbeing a lot) without a solid spiritual foundation.) Jordan Peterson has a very good video about this, something about reconciling science and religion.

The point is, "Free Will" is not a scientific concept, it's a concept from spirituality. And can very well fit with all of the science that is known to humanity today. Free will comes not from the randomness of quantum mechanics, but from implications of the chaos theory (which has basically killed determinism as a means of understanding the human life experience).

<comment><USER3> You can't really define Free Will as something different and then claim it exists. Free Will has an agreed upon definition.

Free Will is the capacity to have done differently given the same situation.

Free Will is completely absent in a enormous number of circumstances. Are you free to stop understanding English? Are you free to not be persuaded by a logical argument you comprehend? When presented with a donut while on a diet are you free to determine your level of will power to resist?

Free will conditioned on chaos theory is just jargon and ventures into "not even wrong" territory. If free will is sensitive to initial conditions then actors evolving in time are not free to choose their trajectories.

If your happiness is conditioned on incorrect beliefs about your essential nature and capacities then you should reconcile your beliefs with reality, not argue that the understanding of essential nature is incomplete or wrong.

<comment><USER4> Your response may not be as productive as you intended, it sounds a little dismissive.

>>Free Will has an agreed upon definition

It may have definitions, but used in isolation it's actually ambiguous as hell. Even between science and philosophy the discussions can be pretty divergent.

>>you should reconcile your beliefs with reality, not argue that the understanding of essential nature is incomplete or wrong

Quite wrong I would say. Our common goal is to interpret our existence in a way that provides the best life possible for us, and hopefully for those around us.

If a person can lead a happier life and do the most good for others only by not accepting a scientific principle then I would not discourage them from that.

In fact, if I could somehow unbelieve some science and be guaranteed my family would be happier I might consider it.

Some of us are just made in a way we can only worship at the alter of objective truth no matter what the cost or the pain. I don't think there's any way to change that, but I certainly don't want anyone to join the club at the expense of the most important goal we have.

<comment><USER3> >if I could somehow unbelieve some science and be guaranteed my family would be happier I might consider it

I don't see how this can be defended. It commits you potentially dangerous and unethical behavior.

Suppose you were to unbelieve, "africans are humans." By not holding this belief you might be quite able to happily own and mistreat slaves.

This example is extreme, but the point I'm making still stands. If ones happiness is contingent on holding false beliefs then what value is the happiness. How can self-deception through pleasure seeking mental states be elevated in opposition to engaging with objective reality?

Seeking pleasure certainly does not ensure ethical behavior and in many cases explicitly conflicts with acting ethically.

>Our common goal is to interpret our existence in a way that provides the best life possible for us

I'm very wary of interpretation motivated for pleasure as opposed to clarity and truth.

<comment> Capt-RogerOver Your stance is completely true. In theory.

In practice the situation is very different, because noone knows (or has any way of knowing) what objective reality is, and whether one's beliefs are "false" or not. Yes, we do have the scientific method and some ways of trying to figure things out, but ultimately it's a question of choice of right mindset. The right framework. An experiment might get some data within a framework. It cannot give you a framework.

With the belief "africans are humans" example, we might all agree on that. However on the beliefs like "if it feels hard to learn this skill, it just means I'm not cut out for this" versus "I can learn anything, universe is friendly and will ultimately give me what I need, I'll keep trying to learn this" \- something like that will give you hard time if you're doing solely by scientific method and if you think that you can even know whether the belief is truthful to some "objective reality" or not. Both of the stances can be shown to be "truth" or "false", and they they will yield so different results in the personal life of a human that chooses to acquire them. Is believing one of them is self-deception? Maybe it's believing the other that is self- deception?

>> I'm very wary of interpretation motivated for pleasure as opposed to clarity and truth.

And it's very interesting how that has been working out for you? In most people that I've studied it does not lead to a particularly happy life. (Not just stable, but happy.)

I think the core issue here is that in the internal world of humans' souls, there is no such thing as "clarity and truth". It does not work that way. Something like pleasure (but concepts of love, compassion, greatfulness, and others can give even better results) are just better suited. Because in the areas where they are used (the happiness and enlightenment) those things are just easier to find. Concepts of "truths" on the other hand are notoriously elusive and in many ways simply non-existant. What is your life, a tragedy of stoicism? A pointless nihilistic movie? An enlightened miracle? Which one is the "truth"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Beware that in professional physics Rogers Penrose's view on QM and consciousness are not considered mainstream (to put it mildly). I had a great pleasure of talking him in person, and he falls into the Platonic trap. The best antidote is to talk with some actual neurobiologists, or read philosophy of mind (e.g. Daniel Dennett with Consciousness Explained).

At the same time I recommend reading "How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival" by David Kaiser ([http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/](http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/)) - a general reading on the beginnings of quantum information (also, why quantum metaphysics is tempting but does not work); bear in mind it overvalues hippies - this field has also different, Soviet roots - vide Holevo's theorem.

Or even better - start actually interacting with some quantum mechanics, rather than considering it mystical or esoteric. As Griffiths put it in his Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (Chapter 4.4.1, [https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToQuantumMechanics_7...](https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToQuantumMechanics_718)):

"To the layman, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a statement of the form "this particle doesn't have a well-defined position" [...] sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is none of these."

...an of course, play [http://quantumgame.io/](http://quantumgame.io/) :) (a recent submit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432176](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432176))

<comment><USER6> > Platonic trap.

i.e. is a believer in the mind & body dualism, an idea first put forth by Aristotle and Plato, and later famously championed by Descartes. Though the "quantum" variant is not as far out as the "soul" one. However neither are supported by science, but the knowledge gap regarding consciousness is still large enough that something might still hide in it.

Though Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle fell into many traps, this is probably the relevant one.

<comment><USER5> Well, once you start believing that mathematical objects (or any other concepts) exist in some abstract sense (rather than are some kind of emergent property of our bodies, minds and social interactions) it's an easy path to get to ridiculous conclusions. (Cf. a very naturalistic vision of science itself by Ludwick Fleck.)

Sure, we don't understand consciousness yet (or maybe we never will). Still, it doesn't mean that it is good to fall into some plausible, and comforting, mental trap. Vide Feynman's "I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong".

<comment><USER6> Is there an name for this "reality first" or "reality triumphs" concept? The closest I can think of is _The Talos Principle_ , it is the name of a game, but in its context the meaning is, paraphrasing: "At the end of the day, even the mightiest thinkers and philosophers are made of flesh and bone".

On the other end, there is a Greg Egan (science fiction) novel where exactly this does not hold and pure maths can create virtual worlds in some abstract math universe, i.e. not running on a physical computer (though I think one was needed to bootstrap this into perpetual existence). The name escapes me at the moment.

You might be able to weave the consciousness problem into there by following the simulation hypothesis and claiming that the brain (of humans or some smart enough ancestor?) was either created with a shortcut to the underlying compute power or that over the course of evolution (think the FPGA + evolutionary algorithm story) this link developed, possibly independently multiple times. And since most concepts underlying biology are understood, "Quantum-woo" is the last holdout (see Penroses microtubuli idea).

<comment><USER7> > The name escapes me at the moment.

You're referencing Greg Egan's "Permutation City", I think? [http://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html](http://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html)

<comment><USER6> Exactly that one, thank you two walnut-shaped minds, both thinking alike.

Greg Egan calls this concept (see the linked FAQ there) the Dust Theory, and again

> > How seriously do you take the Dust Theory yourself?

> Not very seriously, although I have yet to hear a convincing refutation of > it on purely logical grounds.

it juuuust might maybe true (however unlikely).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As it turns out, tools from quantum mechanics just so happen to be very useful in modeling stuff from the human realm, like decision making in surveys, word/concept associations, game theory, and more.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition)

This is mildly controversial to people hung up on classical rationality or uninformed "skeptics", in spite of the fact that the research is pretty mainstream and doesn't make many philosophical assumptions about the 'reality' of quantum theory.

There has been a yearly conference called the Quantum Interaction conference where people have presented research using quantum theory outside of physics. I don't know what's up with the 2017 edition, but it's been held for quite a few years.

[http://www.quantuminteraction.org/](http://www.quantuminteraction.org/)

<comment><USER5> Well, big controversy is that it uses word "quantum" (to sound it sexy and attractive; any imply, even if implicitly, that mind has anything to do with QM) rather than "linear algebra".

And linear algebra is a very powerful framework for describing phenomena (including things related to cognition like word2vec, vide [http://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king-man-woman-queen- why.html](http://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king-man-woman-queen-why.html)). Also: it is the language of Deep Learning.

<comment><USER8> The research is more centered around a specific use of Kolmogorov's classical probability theory, which takes context into consideration. This realization has allowed "classical probability theory" to be used in a characteristically "quantum" way, by paying attention to higher dimensional probability distributions, and how "observation" tends to draw these probability distributions through lower dimensional subspaces. Some people doing this research also employ fancier probability theories, but to me it is profound that classical probability theory can be used in the same basic way.

So yeah, the research relies on linear algebra, sure, but specifically in the same way quantum theory relies on linear algebra: as a way of projecting probability distributions into different subspaces during measurement ("collapsing the wavefunction").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The original motivation in the early 20th century for relating quantum theory to consciousness was essentially philosophical. It is fairly plausible that conscious free decisions ("free will") are problematic in a perfectly deterministic world,[2] so quantum randomness might indeed open up novel possibilities for free will. (On the other hand, randomness is problematic for volition!)"

This is an aspect of this debate that utterly fascinates me. Many people reading this have probably heard the argument that free will does not exist because the human brain is just a molecular computer. If we could measure it's state perfectly at a given moment, have knowledge of future inputs, and possess adequate classical computational power, we could perfectly predict the future decisions made by your brain. Hence, you are a _deterministic_ creature with no free will.

Quantum processes underlie all classical processes, not unlike how the physics of individual water molecules underlie the behaviour of a river. While individual molecules or even drops of water can do bizarre things, the course of a river is easy to predict. A coin toss or weather patterns may seem random, but they're classical systems that would be utterly predictable if we had a perfect measurement of their current state, knowledge of input from outside the system in question, and the computational resources to work out their future evolution. As with a river, the weather, or a coin toss, quantum weirdness should average out on the scale of a human brain, leaving only classical predictability behind.

Or does it?

One aspect of this quantum weirdness I'm referring to is truly random behaviour. Single quanta (e.g. photons or atoms) can be manipulated to produce measurements with truly random results that are, according to quantum theory and every experiment conducted to date, impossible to predict, even with perfect knowledge of the system, knowledge of all inputs, and infinite computational resources. Free will and being unpredictable are intrinsically linked. If your brain is just a classical machine behaving according to the laws of chemistry and physics, you are predictable and have no free will. If your brain amplifies the results of quantum outcomes to a macroscopic level, your brain may be inherently unpredictable and thus you may possess free will.

Fascinating stuff!

<comment><USER10> > Free will and being unpredictable are intrinsically linked. If your brain is > just a classical machine behaving according to the laws of chemistry and > physics, you are predictable and have no free will. If your brain amplifies > the results of quantum outcomes to a macroscopic level, your brain may be > inherently unpredictable and thus you may possess free will.

But how do you address the last part of the quote you lead with ("randomness is problematic for volition")? How is your will any more free if it depends on random physical processes rather than deterministic ones?

<comment><USER11> The type of free will people often talk about is the type where if you rewind time to give you a second chance there is a potential for you to chose differently.

But whatever decision you want to make will ultimately be a function of your state of mind. How can you will something that isn't a result of your experiences? What else informs your will? The type of counter-causal free will people think they want probably doesn't exist.

You have free will, but it is determined. It's a result of physical processes. How we think may be difficult to computationally reduce, so it still might not be predictable. Counter-causal free will would force you to look outside the universe for causes. You get duality. Quantum randomness is not an escape for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm currently on the Free Will chapter of Aaronson's Quantum Computing Since Democritus [0], where he treats this question directly in the context of computational complexity theory. Highly recommended to anyone interested in this stuff!

[0] [https://smile.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since- Democritus-...](https://smile.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus- Aaronson/dp/0521199565)

</comment><comment><USER4> Would it be difficult to to use this start a religious cult? Something like:

1) Lead with content that for some people mixes science and spirituality: Quantum Approaches to Consciousness

2) Add context using sources here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism)

3) Add self-serving message (give me your money, I am the messiah, etc)

2) Coup de grâce: Hold up domain from an institution of high reputation: stanford.edu

</comment><comment><USER13> For me the best way to think about consciousness is that it's a function of the brain, one of the organs of the body (that's pretty much a fact as far as we can test it).

If some statement seems profound when it refers to consciousness it's best to replace it with another function of another organ, for example digestion.

Suddenly "Quantum Approaches to Digestion" and "What happens to your digestion when you die?" sound way less profound.

<comment> wu-ikkyu >the best way to think about consciousness is that it's a function of the brain, one of the organs of the body (that's pretty much a fact as far as we can test it).

Using consciousness to determine the nature of consciousness...how is that not fallacious? Like trying to see if fire burns things by burning fire with fire.

<comment><USER13> Using physics to investigate physics. Fallacy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> wow, working in the field, i must say this is the best written piece of bs I have ever encountered.

"The most discussed counterarguments against the validity of such strong reductionist approaches are qualia arguments, which emphasize the impossibility for materialist accounts to properly incorporate the quality of the subjective experience of a mental state, the "what it is like" (Nagel 1974) to be in that state"

If that is the most discussed counterargument you probably could have stopped there, it is not a counter argument at all. The apparent immediateness and reflexive nature of consciousness is in no way proof of its immaterial or "quantic" nature. Consciousness is a seemingly unitary process, a monade, an indivisible phenomena, but it is not. It is partial, biased, composed of continuous unconscious preprocessing steps, of attentional, memory retrieval, reflective post-processing that can be measured, deconstructed, and tempered with through experimentation. Their argument is that a qualia appears to be more than the sum of its parts. All evidences would actually favor the opposite, consciousness, and the information it holds is less than the sum of its part. I will not delve into the details, because I am depressed/frustrated by the fact HN comments disappear so fast in the abyss, and time is precious, but i will give an example.

Taking a simple psychophysical GO task, let's say click on a button every time you see a dog in a series of fast pace images appearing on the screen. While performing the task sometime a dog will appear and not produce a conscious recognition nor a motor response, but recording the brain using EEG, you would usually be able on those trial to detect error signals. Those signal appears for rare events of interest -here the dog. Although this error information is present at a subconscious level, and implied already a load of preprocessing steps (proportional of the delay between stimulus and the error signal), it did not reach full consciousness to produce the motor response. A machine then, trained to recognize such error signals on both correct trials and errors of omission will be able to detect the dog, when the human did not, using the signal of the human's brain. This is proof that consciousness is less than the sum of its part, it is using a final filtered hyper relevant representation of your inner and environmental reality. Not to talk about the monadic indivisible view of consciousness which is even more absurd: just look at heminegligence. Functions is lost, but the brain even forgets it had ever access to this function, it forgets it had a left side, that there is a side side in the room. This is not an isolated syndrome, focal neurological deficits are often associated with some degree of negligence of the loss functions. Wernicke's Aphasia for example produce a syndrome in which patient do not realize they are saying or hearing non-sense, what could be there qualia then ? If you believe your consciousness is more that the sum of its part, and monadic, just take an LSD trip and you will see what your brain has in store for you, what it filters out, what it can enhance or produce by itself - but also what is your consciousness then, is it not different above and beyond any information processing? But maybe then you will say LSD molecules are in resonance with a central string of the universe, it is the gateway to the quantic perception !

The brain has nothing to do with qualia, it works at the opposite of what a monade or a qualia is supposed to represent. The brain use distributed computation, distributed representation, multiple neurons for one concept, and each neurons participating in various concepts. Multiple brain regions for a function, and each brain region participating to a function. Conscious experience arise from these distributed networks interaction, make the mental experiment of killing one neuron one by one (leave the pons and medulla alone) and you will not see the qualia disappear abruptly, but you will see part of the experience, part of the function, of what constitute the notion of self first slightly disfunction then progressively disappear at different unpredictable pace with complex interactions between functions.

"As a consequence, it is inessential whether a detector or the human brain is ultimately referred to as the "observer""

From a dualistic view arise false premises. The brain is not an observer, you are not observing the state of your brain, or collapsing any function. You are your brain, living in an illusion created by the interaction of systems inside your brain. It is all well packaged with your sense of self, which is an illusion, a function that can be altered: depersonalization, derealization.

And I wonder, in their view, which animal nervous networks have access to such quantic wonders? The worm ? the ant ? The squid ? The dog ? The chimp ? Or just us ?

You do not need anything but distributed computation to explain everything about the brain.

But I guess everybody needs to believe in something, at least he is not teaching creationism, and seems open to debate.

<comment><USER15> > This is proof that consciousness is less than the sum of its part, it is > using a final filtered hyper relevant representation of your inner and > environmental reality.

I don't really see how this experiment "proves" that consciousness is not an "indivisible phenomenon", just that it relies on lower-level functions to exist. Some preprocessing clearly goes on in the brain before making it to "consciousness" level, but I don't think that the existence of non-conscious processes really show consciousness is divisible - any more than the processing of information in the eye does.

<comment><USER14> This example was to illustrate that consciousness is less than the sum of its parts.

The other examples were taken to illustrate the illusion of indivisibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> the universe is deterministic. it might not seem like that because of the massive scale, but it is therefore free will is an illusion</comment>


Man Sentenced to Death for Blasphemous Facebook Comments in Pakistan - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/man-sentenced-to-death-for-blasphemous-facebook-comment-1796018170?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_twitter&utm_source=gizmodo_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow <comment><USER2> This might be an unpopular opinion, but due to the relevancy of this post, and the current political tendency among the regressive left to excuse actions like this, I think it's an important one to share:

Criticizing religious ideology, no matter how deeply held or benign it is to for believer, should be encouraged by everyone who values social progress. We cannot improve as a society if it is deemed rude and intolerant to criticize ideology. Criticism is the function of analysis and improvement.

There is a fine line to tread between criticism and simply insulting, but in the case of "derogatory acts toward the prophet Muhammad", it is important that we exercise our right, and what I believe to be our social responsibility, to not be silenced by fear of social reprisal or violent retaliation for the demonstrably effective method of allowing people to confront ideology critically and without apology.

This of course applies to all schools or thought, whether religious or philosophical, though the latter generally don't cause much issue when you confront them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Draw Muhammed and burn Qurans, because magical thinking must never be allowed to install another Holy Roman Empire or Caliphate.</comment>


The frighteningly popular extremely careless trend - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@byjad/ive-recently-become-aware-of-the-frighteningly-popular-extremely-careless-trend-of-publicly-542b396a0372 <comment><USER2> These companies are mining society of a public good for their own benefit. It's a tragedy of the commons where only a handful of actors are the ones destroying the commons.

There are arguments against "dockless" cars that are always trotted out when these scooters come up but if you park like an asshole, that is to park outside of a single parking spot, you are likely to get your car keyed or damaged as well.

I don't see how this author could be anything but completely ignorant of social norms with public spaces or this is a submarine pr piece when they write like this is surprising

Edit: It especially seems like a pr piece when they talk about the jobs they bring to the area as a plus when we see how exploitative these jobs are from the people that perform them[1]

[1][https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/charging-bird- scooters-...](https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/charging-bird-scooters- overnight-is-like-a-much-less-fun-version-of-pokemon-go.html)

<comment><USER3> People stealing scooters to scam the Charging fee hardly seems like _Bird_ exploiting anyone.

<comment><USER2> Bird is exploiting people by selling them on a pie in the sky view that this job can earn decent money when its wrought with fraud that they are aware of. Some people disagree, but my personal view is that this is a job for an employee that Bird is trying to foist off onto "contractors" who have far less protections, so that they can earn more money than competitors who would operate ethically

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> When you smash one you are saying "i vote car." I vote to continue to make the status quo system of cars how we move from point a to b. And there are a lot of problems with cars. Are you sure you want to be on team car?

<comment><USER4> > When you smash one you are saying "i vote car." I vote to continue to make > the status quo system of cars how we move from point a to b. And there are a > lot of problems with cars. Are you sure you want to be on team car?

You're being too black and white. These people could really just be against "team dockless" [1].

There's also nothing wrong with being on "team car."

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=dockless+bike+pile&source=ln...](https://www.google.com/search?q=dockless+bike+pile&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X)

<comment><USER3> Cars are left in public too: [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=parked+cars](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=parked+cars)

<comment><USER4> > Cars are left in public too: > [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=parked+cars](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=parked+cars)

You'll notice the cars in those photos _are not piled haphazardly in the middle of the street, obstructing traffic_ ; but rather in neat rows on the side _in spaces designated for them_.

You could arguably call a parking space a dock for a car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I live in K-Town in LA. I'm convinced these scooters are perfectly suited for getting and my neighborhood, but they haven't rolled out here yet... So I have been bringing back carloads of them from Venice and Santa Monica and introducing them myself. I'm only doing like 4 a day, but I've already seen a number of them being used that I dropped off (I vandalize with a distinct but subtle mark on the neck of the scooters to 'track em')

A few anecdotal observations I've had:

\- People in Venice hate them more than in Santa Monica. Way more are damaged intentionally in a way that ends up being super useful for me: they use a sharpie to block out the barcode. Since I go out in the evening it's rare to find fully charged scooters in a nice line, which these jackpots are. It's easy to clean it off with nail polish remover.

\- People are very curious and positive about them in K-Town so far. One time I pull into the parking lot of Boba Bear and drop off a few off.. and got a free boba tea as the manager said that it helps his business. Since I like to go there I end up leaving scooters there, and it's almost as if it's known as a hub for them. :)

\- The crowdsourced recharger contractors do not mind coming out here to pick up low battery scooters. They never stick around.

\- The biggest menace of these things is there damn beeping. It's loud and annoying as all hell, Jesus fuck.

\- The biggest danger these present are janky scoots with bad breaks, or sticky/erratic acceleration. A lot of these scoots are beat up badly, but are still working and being used.

\- Lime let me sign up as a 'Juicer', bird has me in queue. I interpret this as lime having less oversight on that process, since my address is not in an area they try to service. I haven't received the charger kit yet though, all this is just happened in last few days.

Personally I think of this as a fun robin hood style adventure. It will be interesting to see how perception evolves.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure that destroying property really counts as "frightening" or "very violent."

<comment><USER7> It's pretty damn environmentally wasteful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mods please fix clickbait title

</comment><comment><USER9> After you smash the scooters please put them into a recycle bin</comment>


Tech Industry Condemns Migrant Child Separation Policy. But What Will They Do? - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2018/06/20/data-sheet-tech-industry-morality-migrant-children/ <comment><USER2> What bothers me about the tech industry side of this is that there are 3 giant multi-billion dollar companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) currently embroiled in defense-related issues creating PR blowback, yet they basically shrug and act like there's nothing they could do. They knew what they were getting into and when they get called out they try to talk their way out of it. It's like watching someone with a "Save The Planet" sticker on their car throw cigarettes out the window.</comment>


Dear Apple: Please use these ideas to modernize the Mac - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/back-to-the-mac-modernizing-apples-aging-computer-lineup/ <comment><USER2> The main problem is the way Apple is organized. It's what people have called a "unitary organizational form".[1]

Which means there isn't a group whose full time job it is to concern themselves with the Mac Pro, or concern themselves with the Macbook Pro, etc.

When it's not _someone 's_ job to worry about a product, then it becomes _everybody 's_ job, which in reality means it's _nobody 's_ job. Unless and until top management deigns to allow people to work on that specific product.

This seems totally fucked up to me, but Apple has achieved $227 billion in yearly revenue, so it's "working" for them. To the aggravation of many outside observers.

[1] [https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational- crossroad...](https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroads/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Mac Pros are hopeless I think. GPUs need to be switchable in a device geared for this market, and it absolutely needs to support Nvidia hardware.

</comment><comment><USER4> MacBook Air

LAST REFRESH:March 2015

LAST REDESIGN:October 2010

I have been wondering about the Air, the 13 inch feels so clunky compared to many newer 13-inch ultrabooks that were inspired by it. Is Apple going to abandon the 13 inch entry level unit? Surely not.</comment>