The Problem of Thinking Too Much (2003) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/thinking.pdf <comment><USER2> This made my day:

To be honest, the academic discussion doesn't shed much light on the practical problem. Here's an illustration: Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford.I had bored my friends silly with endless discussion. Finally, one of them said, "You're one of our leading decision theorists. Maybe you should make a list of the costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate your expected utility. "Without thinking, I blurted out, "Come on, Sandy, this is serious."

<comment><USER3> Feynman tells an intriguingly similar story from another angle.

When he moved from Cornell to Caltech, he had a sort of Buridan's Ass situation where each one would beat the other's offer and leave him with no way to make a decision. Even the weather wouldn't cooperate, with the snow driving him out of Cornell and smog driving him out of Caltech. He eventually landed at Caltech, basically arbitrarily, and realized the solution to the problem:

" _But I decided then never to decide again. Nothing—absolutely nothing—would ever change my mind again. When you're young, you have all these things to worry about—should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never mind—nothing is going to change your mind._ "

So when Chicago came calling later, trying to recruit him, he refused. Didn't listen to the offer, didn't consider it when they told him, just refused outright over his prior condition. Interesting to see how many people have decided that formal analysis is a hopeless way of approaching this problem.

<comment><USER4> Young people are experimental and open to novelty. Old people are conservative and prefer the status quo. The combination selects for a robust society. That's an evo-bio trope

<comment><USER5> Is because of memory. Old people remember how things were and want those memories to be continuously valuable.

If everything changes they have nothing over the younger competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thinking should be a time boxed activity, with time proportional to the priority of the thing at hand. As a classic overthinker I've realized my overthinking is a weird amalgamation of perfectionism and procrastination. That took me a long time to accept, since I've always rationalized my overthinking as ultimately a good thing. If you assume that action (instead of thinking) is the primary unit in the world, then you can see that thinking is just a tool which informs action.

<comment><USER7> I found it also useful to realize that there are many situations in life where there are just too many unknowns. You're faced with two possible futures: should I go to University A or B? This choice is necessarily going to radically alter your life: depending which university you pick, you'll make different friends, date different people, hang out in different spots, maybe live in different cities. Based on this choice, the life you'll have in 5 years will be completely different. How do you pick which future to choose from, which one is better?

The thing is, you simply have no way to know. What exact future you'll end up with is about as predictable as the weather on this day five years from now. You have no idea who are the people you haven't yet met that are going to change your life, what roadblocks you'll find on the way, whether you'll suddenly fall into a depression, etc. You can only rely on objective metrics (trends, statistics), testimonials, and general gut feeling.

For myself, 3 years ago, after my studies, I was wondering whether I should relocate to silicon valley for a big tech job or not. It was scary. I loved my hometown, had many friends, etc. I figured, however, that I might as well do this sort of experiment (moving to another city/country) while I'm young and have no spouse or property. I did make the move, and unfortunately, I didn't enjoy my big tech job, nor did I enjoy living in silicon valley, it wasn't a good experience, so I moved back, thankfully with a decent wad of cash to wipe my tears with.

I didn't like silicon valley, but I don't regret my decision to try it. Why, because I also knew that I kind of had to try it, because if I didn't, there might always be some FOMO in the back of my mind (what if I'd taken this big silicon valley job, would my live be better right now?). Now I've done it, I've been there, and I know what it's like. The pressure/temptation is gone. So my two cents are to trust your gut, do commit to decisions, and also don't be overly afraid of experimenting when you're young: it might not work out, but you'll learn something along the way.

<comment><USER8> I'm halfway reading "Stumbling on Happiness," and one takeaway is that indeed people are happier when they take action and it doesn't turn out to be as expected, than when they do nothing. Your experience fits exactly that.

Coincidentally, I'm reading the book because I'm trying to decide whether to leave my small city teaching job at a and move to SV to get a big tech job. And the book and your experience suggest that it is better to leave and fail to thrive than to never leave at all. But may I ask why didn't you like it, or what should I look out for?

<comment><USER7> Things I did like: I was on a small team, my team and manager were great people, and I got along with everyone. The work environment was very comfortable, great food, they got me a super comfortable chair when I complained about back pain, etc. The pay was great too, enough to save 40-80K per year depending on spending habits (and still live comfortably!)

One thing I didn't like was living in the silicon valley suburbs. It felt like a small town with nothing going on for me. It was really car-centric, my apartment came with a covered parking spot because they just assumed that of course you have a car. If I had to do it again I'd get a job in SF and live in SF. I don't want long commutes and I don't want to live in suburbs. Since you're from a small town, YMMV. The SV suburbs might feel like a big upgrade to you, and having to drive everywhere might be something you're already used to.

Another thing was that the work was dry. This might be very different for you based on what employer and job you pick. My team was doing mostly maintenance and incremental upgrades on a product many years old. I found that dreadfully boring. I need something creative. This is something I didn't know then. My current job doesn't pay nearly as much but the work offers a lot more novelty and creative freedom. If I had to do it again, I'd make sure to join a team that's working on a project that has me genuinely excited, preferably a team that's building something rather than doing maintenance.

It was also really hard for me to be uprooted from my hometown where I'd always lived and away from my friends. What made it even harder was that I fell into a depression right before moving to California. My mother was suddenly hospitalized, right as I was going through other stressful things and preparing for an international move. The extra stress was too much. Then I landed in California, and I had to start my first job, and I didn't have any friends there to support me. It's hard to boostrap a network of friends starting from nobody, and it's even harder when you're depressed... You have no energy to go out and you're coming from a place where you need people to help and support you, rather than a place of "I'm a fun person to spend time with".

Lastly, while I lived in California, after being on antidepressants for a bit and feeling more hopeful again, I tried dating, and I hated my experience. It feels, to me, like SV has an overabundance of men, because of the constant inflow of tech workers. If you're a single guy, you're moving to a place where there are too many men. In any other city, being a successful tech worker is something that will earn you points, but in SV, every woman knows they could date a Google engineer if they wanted to, at least that's how it seemed to me. Lots of ghosting and being treated in ways that I found disrespectful. To make matters more complicated, lots of people in and around SF are polyamorous, which is not something I want to get involved with.

<comment><USER8> I can't thank you enough for your story. It's incredibly valuable to me.

May I ask how do you feel now about your current life? Did you leave the States?

<comment><USER7> Yes I moved back two years ago. I don't regret leaving. I make less money, but still live comfortably. I can afford a two bedroom apartment a 15-minute walk away from work. I'm back in a bit city so there are as much social activities as I could want.

If you're asking if I'm happy, I would say I'm definitely more emotionally stable. I've been at the same job since I came back and currently don't plan to leave. I still feel down from time to time, not completely fulfilled, but I think I'd feel that way anywhere. I feel a little lost these days because I don't really know what I want to do with my life. I feel like I lack purpose.

Dating here in a big city seems easier than in the Silicon Valley suburbs. It's tricky (because dating is tricky), but I have no trouble getting dates. I did lose touch with many acquaintances after being away for a year. Party friends, when you stop going out with them regularly, stop thinking about you. I have a small number of close friends that I had before I left and I generally feel like I get enough social.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have realized some time ago that when some decision is difficult to make, it is likely that both outcomes are equally good (or bad), or at least, equally indeterminable. If one of them was much better, then the decision would be obvious!

So indeed, if you can't decide, spin a penny. You save time and the outcome will be similar.

<comment><USER10> The advice my mum gave me was similar: If you don't know which way to choose, flip a coin, and _see how you feel about the outcome_. That will tell you what you really wanted to choose.

<comment><USER11> That is also the poem in the conclusion of the article:

 _Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,_

 _and you're hampered by not having any,_

 _the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,_

 _is simply by spinning a penny._

 _No—not so that chance shall decide the affair while you're passively standing there moping;_

 _but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most decisions aren't A or B, they're I want A, but B is much safer/easier/etc. So the coin flip method (you'll make up your mind while it is in the air) doesn't help since you already know what you want. Pros and cons lists don't help since you already know them. Probability multiplied by reward doesn't help much, since you'll really only make the decision once, not continuously.

The only sure fire thing I've found helps is you imagine the realistic worst possible case scenario if you decide on doing thing A (the thing you really want) and if you can live with that, do thing A.

<comment><USER13> Yup agree. That and also understanding why you want A more than B which usually leads to understand why B doesn't give you those same things. At some point there is a balance of how much risk you are willing to put to get what you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My problem with thinking too much is when I'm faced with a decision, I find I often have a preferred course of action already in mind and whether that course happens to be objectively better than the alternative is completely immaterial to my ability to think long and abstractly enough about it to reason myself into believing that it is. I have had to train myself to turn off this abstract thinking as necessary. The upshot is when I do, the actual correct answer to the situation often strongly presents itself and immediately seems obvious.

<comment><USER15> How do you turn it off, how do you train for that? I cannot really do that that's why I ask for a second and third opinion and then talk it out.

<comment><USER14> >How do you turn it off, how do you train for that? I cannot really do that that's why I ask for a second and third opinion and then talk it out.

Imagine you're a programmer and you're in some kind of professional rut. You consider your options. You could learn a functional language, maybe get into mobile development, find something else to do altogether, or any other of myriad paths. If you think long and hard enough about any single option you can probably convince yourself it's the right choice. Or maybe you get overwhelmed and just give up. The question is too abstract and so are the alternatives hence the overthinking.

What I do is take the abstract and make it concrete. Instead of looking at this monster problem from the inside, I picture the end result. What am I actually trying to accomplish; what will my life look like when I do. When I see that and it usually comes pretty easily, what to do is simple. Ask myself what's the very next specific action I can take to accomplish that vision. If the answer isn't obvious I get even more specific. Maybe I need to literally get up out of my chair. Whatever. I do that thing, ask the question again, do the next thing, then the next until I'm done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The conclusion is where the gold is at:

> One of the most useful things to come out of mystudy is a collection of the > rules of thumb my friends use in their decision making. For example, one of > my Ph.D. advisers, Fred Mosteller, told me, "Other things being equal, > finish the job that isnearest done." A famous physicist offered this advice: > "Don't waste time on obscure fine pointsthat rarely occur." I've been told > that Albert Einstein displayed the following aphorism in his office: "Things > that are difficult to do are beingdone from the wrong centers and are not > worth doing." Decision theorist I. J. Good writes, "The older we become, the > more important it is to usewhat we know rather than learn more." Galen > offered this: "If a lot of smart people have thought about a problem [e.g., > God's existence, life on other planets] and disagree, then it can't be > decided."

> Whenever you're called on to make up your mind, and you're hampered by not > having any,the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, is simply by > spinning a penny. No — not so that chance shall decide the affairwhile > you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in > the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping.

</comment><comment><USER17> Like we learn how to use our hands one should learn how to use our brains when needed, and when not needed how to put it down, that's all.

<comment><USER18> Just that learning to halt subvocal speech even for a couple of seconds seems to be a much harder task than learning keeping an untrained hand still. There seems to be active resistance, a compulsion to internally vocalize, even (/especially) when detrimental. Unlearning it seems possible but no easy task, requiring a large amount of hours and determination in my experience.

<comment><USER19> Is there a good way to notice you're doing subvocal speech?

<comment><USER18> Mindfulness type exercises / learning internal silence was the only effective strategy i found. I can still get carried away in my thoughts but there's a learned recurring return into silence that also gives room for meta cognitions of various sorts. The more I "practice" the more subconscious those silent moments appear, the higher their frequency and the easier it is to maintain longer stretches of them - and the more enjoyable it is to entertain them, in the beginning it can feel like a pointless bore.

<comment><USER4> Doea that help you _notice_ , or help you get better at suppressing it via practice and "muscle memory"?

<comment><USER18> The more quiet moments there are to reflect upon my thinking, the easier it becomes to notice and correct. I wouldn't call it suppressing, trying to apply 'force' in cognition usually leads to more internal conflict instead of resolution, at least in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is 'thinking about thinking' correctly actually an unsolvable problem?

Let's say I'm trying to do X.

\- Level 0 might be: do the first thing that comes to mind

\- Level 1 may be 'consider your possible choices and do a cost-benefit analysis'

Most people would say that Level 1 is preferable, but only for 'weighty' decisions where the cost of thinking is outweighed by the benefit of making a better decision. For example, nobody does rational deliberation for 'should I brake at this red light?'

So in practice, we seem to do some level of rational metacognition that takes into account the cost of thinking about a problem.

What about level 3? Are there large classes of problems where it's not really worth it to 'think about whether to think' \- you should _always_ ponder them, or never? And what about levels beyond yet?

<comment><USER21> Or maybe that is just what level 2 would be? Level 1 is doing cost-benefit analysis on all problems. Level 2 might be doing cheap meta analysis to determine if energy can be saved and a level 0 solution used, or if more thinking is required. I would think there is a top level, which is full memorization of the space in which thinking might occur. Than instead of any thinking taking place, a reference is made to this memory-truth-table and the correct action is produced in response. Such a truth-table sounds maybe a bit paradoxical though. Does it take into account its own presence in the situation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> " _Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,and you're hampered by not having any,the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,is simply by spinning a penny.No—not so that chance shall decide the affairwhile you're passively standing there moping;but the moment the penny is up in the air,you suddenly know what you're hoping._ "

A friend introduced me to a related version of this that works pretty well: toss a coin, see what result comes out, and then decide if you are happy or disappointed. If you still don't care, go with the coin. Or don't; it doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER23> Related: Our first instinct is far too often wrong (finantial times, 10 May 2019, Tim harford, pay walled article).

Another related article: Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness Steven D. Levitt [https://www.nber.org/papers/w22487](https://www.nber.org/papers/w22487)

</comment><comment><USER24> oh nice, i didn't know where the coin flipping quote came from: [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Piet_Hein](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Piet_Hein)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is a very Academia driven problem.

They have been so detached from problem solving that they forget how to problem solve.

Modeling a human randomness with math didn't give you perfect data and conclusions?

What was the original problem? To solve something unsolvable with our current understanding of biology?

Industry asks better questions and finds solutions. Academia waddles around in theoreticals, and makes minimal meaningful progress.

Edit, to clarify. Academia picks a unreal problem, and can't find a logic driven solution. Industry picks real problems, and doesn't make money unless they solve it. We should be learning to solve problems from Industry, not our underachieving professors.

<comment><USER26> And yet much profit has been derived from the privatization of publicly-funded academia.

<comment><USER25> This is the exception, not the rule.</comment></comment></comment>


Boosting Java performance using GPGPU [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06791 <comment><USER2> This is a direct comparison of their framework and [https://github.com/aparapi/aparapi](https://github.com/aparapi/aparapi) which you can use now.

The JDK is getting support for GPGPU via Truffle/Graal [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2913wuerth-20139...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2913wuerth-2013918.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks very interesting.

Any way we can download some code to test this out or is this still unpublished code?

<comment><USER4> The work we describe here is our research prototype, I'm currently working towards making the code base more stable before open sourcing. The plan is to release the code over the coming months.

Feel free to track our progress here - [https://github.com/aardvark- systems/tornado](https://github.com/aardvark-systems/tornado)

<comment><USER3> Great! thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's another project that's providing GPU access from Java code: [https://github.com/pcpratts/rootbeer1](https://github.com/pcpratts/rootbeer1)

<comment><USER6> Too bad it's CUDA and not OpenCL. I wonder what the rationale was. Seems natural to use an open GPGPU framework for a Java application.

<comment><USER7> Probably just because Nvidia cards dominate the market for most GPGPU use cases.

<comment><USER8> OpenCL is cross-platform, so it would support nvidia, ATI, Intel, CPUs, etc.

<comment><USER9> AFAIK only OpenCL 1.1 (or 1.2?) is available on nvidia though, not OpenCL 2.0 or 2.1. So, unfortunately, if you want to support nvidia (eg AWS GPU instances), then OpenCL may not be the best choice :-(

<comment><USER8> Oh, I didn't realize it was that bad. Looks like they barely implemented 1.2 and haven't announced support for 2.x at all. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Timeline_of_vendor_impl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Timeline_of_vendor_implementations)

<comment><USER2> If someone made a decent OpenCL 2.X to PTX compiler I think they would do pretty well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Golden Age of Design in Startups - <AUTHOR> http://bokardo.com/archives/the-golden-age-of-design-in-startups/ <comment><USER2> I just don't believe this. Companies are just not willing to pay for it. I can easily get a 50% increase in pay as a developer. If they really had a hard time hiring designers they would give salaries comparable to developers.

Personally I am giving up on design. I will still be doing design, but for personal enjoyment. My next job will most likely be a full-time development position.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that it's much easier to quantify a developer's output. Does that dropdown include all 50 states? Great, here you get paid. Do people using the dropdown know that its to enter a state? Well one guy says, "ya duh" and the other says "hmm not really".

<comment><USER4> It's also much easier for the skills of a developer to become commoditized for many of the same reasons. When what is needed and delivered is so easily quantified, it is also easier to find another provider of said services.

What makes a skilled designer so rare and desirable is the fact that they will bring up issues and concepts that may not even have been thought of until their input was garnered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is all about what you define a designer as. For me a designer who isn't knee deep in code and data driven rich UX is useless.

Also, I think it's so boring and limiting to keep talking about such deep separations between skillsets.

It's all so simple: Good generalists/polymaths are more useful than one or the other.

Anyone who buckets themselves into an either/or is doomed to a limited career. Anyone who just says fuck it and does it all and keeps trying until they get it right is a far more useful asset.

So it's simple; this is not a golden age of designers, it's a golden age for smart multi-talented cross-skilled people. As it always has been and always will be. No amount of chirruping from one side of the fence or the other will change that. - If you are on a side of the fence then you are already limited.

<comment><USER6> I totally agree, but I see more job openings describing hyper-specialists than "smart multi-talented cross-skilled people". Maybe who posted the job opening is like that, and he or she doesn't like competition around. Once I lost an opportunity just because I didn't know what a particular acronym stood for. It was said the acronym was a prerequisite for the job.

<comment><USER5> I guess I'm talking from a founder perspective. It's this 'design co-founder' focus that suddenly people are imaginating out of the sky.

What does design focus mean? Does it mean that it looks pretty or that it loads quickly? Because if it's just looks pretty then great, you have a co- founder for pretty looking stuff who doesn't know how to incorporate the company, do share options, hammer out some SQL, connect to an API, fire off some marketing emails, make the app scale well, call up some lawyers, write a privacy policy and evaluate seven different authentication mechanisms... I guess I don't get what a design cofounder is. What is he/she?

The most successful startup will have: AN EXPERT IN EVERYTHING.

So we've moved from focusing on tech founders to saying 'oh thank god we're finally focused on design'.

Bullshit! It's always been important, it always will be, this stinks of people connecting invisible threads to make an argument for a particular type of person which I would seriously question the validity of in a real boot strapping environment.

Tech startup founder: You code, you hack, you chat, you design, you build, you forget to sleep, you sleep too much, you get drunk, you build some more. Cherry picking individual skillsets out of that as a golden child or focus is just blog filling nonsense.

<comment><USER7> Can we put the "design = looks pretty" chestnut to bed already?

Thinking a technical co-founder is going to bring the same skillset as a design co-founder, plus coding, is unrealistic as best.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely happy to. What is the skill set for the design co-founder?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Design is a game changer.

We design the world around us in everything we do. We design friendships, companies, culture, products and vision. Everyone is a designer.

I think it is the golden age of design awareness. Design is the look, but also the feel and texture of the product and company.

Look out your window or walk down the street. We live in a designed world. Even if you are walking in the woods, miles away from civilization the fact that the area has been untouched is an aspect of design. Someone designed policy or designed a national park to save this area.

What this "Golden Age of Design in Startups" means is that we have to embrace this cultural awareness of design and bring it into our company's everyday life. Design intentionally is really what it comes down to.

</comment><comment><USER9> Misleading article. Since when is Android founded by designers? Youtube is founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Only Chad has studied Fine Art etc.

So, please stop starting an article full of misleading information.

<comment><USER10> Blame the designer fund: <http://designerfund.com/>

Oh wow, FeedBurner! A company known far and wide for its amazing design sense and its delightful user interface!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does 'Golden Age' imply that it's at a peak right now? I think this will only accelerate. Design-focus is as much of a competitive advantage as having a star-hot technical team.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would agree that in recent years designers are becoming a lot more important and having a good designer as part of your team is probably more important than having the right business guy or sales guy in the beginning. I'm not sure if I would say that it is the Golden Age of Design though. Developers are still a little more important than designers I would believe at least at the early stage of a company.</comment>


Impressive Demonstration of Facebook's AI by Yann LeCun - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_Wgc1JOsBk <comment><AUTHOR> Some interesting thoughts by Geoffrey Hinton that's relevant: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2lmo0l/ama...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2lmo0l/ama_geoffrey_hinton/clyl2dh)

>Traditional AI researchers will be horrified by the view that thoughts are merely the hidden states of a recurrent net and even more horrified by the idea that reasoning is just sequences of such state vectors. That's why I think its currently very important to get our critics to state, in a clearly decideable way, what it is they think these nets won't be able to learn to do. Otherwise each advance of neural networks will be met by a new reason for why that advance does not really count. So far, I have got both Garry Marcus and Hector Levesque to agree that they will be impressed if neural nets can correctly answer questions about "Winograd" sentences such as "The city councilmen refused to give the demonstrators a licence because they feared violence." Who feared the violence?

>A few years ago, I think that traditional AI researchers (and also most neural network researchers) would have been happy to predict that it would be many decades before a neural net that started life with almost no prior knowledge would be able to take a random photo from the web and almost always produce a description in English of the objects in the scene and their relationships. I now believe that we stand a reasonable chance of achieving this in the next five years.

>I think answering questions about pictures is a better form of the Turing test. Methods that manipulate symbol strings without understanding them (like Eliza) can often fool us because we project meaning into their answers. But converting pixel intensities into sentences that answer questions about an image does not seem nearly so prone to dirty tricks.

<comment><USER2> If DNN are so smart then why they can be easily fooled: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897)

<comment><AUTHOR> Humans can be easily fooled too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion)

Anyway this issue has been explained and fixed somewhat in this paper: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572)

And karpathy has a post which explains it: [https://karpathy.github.io/2015/03/30/breaking- convnets/](https://karpathy.github.io/2015/03/30/breaking-convnets/)</comment></comment></comment>


Which is the most expensive country in the world? - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1867733/which-is-the-most-expensive-country-in-the-world/ <comment><USER2> More importantly and relevant :-)

[https://www.finder.com/nz/international-beer-price- map](https://www.finder.com/nz/international-beer-price-map)</comment>


Google's Testament to Political Correctness - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jeremybernier/googles-testament-to-political-correctness-eb7d9ac974b5 <comment><USER3> What I found unusual is that many of the initial stories about the memo _had no quotes from the memo whatsoever_.[1]

Is this SV PR doing a good job, or is it that it was impossible to verify the memo? From what I read, I did not see any mention of attempts to find, verify and link to/quote/distribute the memo in question.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google- fi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires- employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo)

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16111724/google-sundar- pic...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16111724/google-sundar-pichai- employee-memo-diversity)

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/08/google- fire...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/08/google-fires- employee-behind-anti-diversity-memo-perpetuating/)

The Federalist is the only site I found to apparently include the memo, though I did not fact-check the article: [https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/08/read- the-google-diversi...](https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/08/read-the-google- diversity-memo-that-that-everyone-is-freaking-out-about/)

<comment><USER4> Considering the main version of the memo that was circulated was doctored (and the article stated they had doctored it), I wouldn't put much stock into anyone having bothered verifying it. But I don't think that's the reason nobody has quoted the document, it's because nobody bothered to do their research.

"Professional" journalism really isn't doing it's job well at the moment. Everyone just copies the same article contents and titles, and nobody does any actual research. It's quite apparent if you read two articles by similar publications on the same topic -- they contain effectively the same contents which tells me that very little independent research is done.

There was a particularly striking recent example of this, when the director of the movie "The Red Pill" was being interviewed on Australian TV. The questions being asked of her came from people who clearly had only seen the movie trailer, and upon asking whether they had seen the movie (she had sent them links to stream the movie for free several times) they said they "couldn't get it to work". Which means that they objectively were conducting an interview without the faintest clue what the subject was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think it's safe to comment on these types of articles online. These comments are stored and indexed forever and whatever we say could be used against us at some point in the future.

You may think you are reasonably debating or discussing something, but you have to consider that someone in the next 50 years may review your post history and use it against you.

Theoretically, we would need to make throwaway accounts to have meaningful discussions.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's essentially the problem that the article is trying to bring attention to - our culture of intellectual hostility.

The only way this will ever change is if people stop caving in to political correctness.

I realize it's a prisoner's dilemma in that individually it's in nobody's best interest to speak out, but that's an incredibly selfish mindset. We need to start valuing integrity and doing the right thing. It was never in any slaveholder's best interest to speak out against slavery, or in any white person's best interest to speak out against racism in a Southern community in the early 1900s after a lynching - but speaking out was the right thing to do and should be commended.

<comment><USER6> This is not the same thing, is it? From reading the comments in most forums, looks like people seems to at least partially support the contents of the memo and the guy for writing this. Also, he is not speaking out in support of the minority, he is insinuating that they may be biological not suited for the job.

<s>If only we could decide the characteristics and job of a person based on the person's birth, race and other things totally out of a person's control, society would be so much better.</s>

<comment><USER7> but that's not what he's saying at all is it? The memo says that the diversity initiatives that google puts in place (I presume trying to get close to 50/50 gender representation) is a bad idea because more men than women are going to be developers naturally, due to gender differences in interest or aptitude. That doesn't mean women can't be developers or that female developers are less capable - it means there are naturally going to be less of them. I don't understand why so many people are misreading what the memo author was saying. Is it wilful?

<comment><USER6> I read in comments from people who claimed to work for Google - <USER2> initiatives in Google aim to bring the diversity close to the male-female ratio in the applicant pool. Couple of other companies I know where number of employees are in thousands, the diversity initiative aims to achieve something similar. That does not seem like a bad idea at all.

Humans are complex beings. Is interest in a specific field or profession a function of only gender? Would not the surrounding environment, role models, religion, books read, experiences in life and various other countless factors affect a person's interest and character?

I don't think he was wilful. He was wrong to reduce a complex subject like human interests and behaviour into a simple statistical function.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Google aim to bring the diversity close to the male-female ratio in the > applicant pool.

This is a laudable goal only if gender isn't used to discriminate against candidates. Discrimination on gender and race is wrong, period. Discriminating against men, whites, and Asians is still discrimination, and is not ok.

Nobody's going to disagree with you that environment and the individual play a strong role in affecting one's character. These straw man arguments are getting old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> According to the article some of the things that will "and will get you socially lambasted"

"Any statement that perpetuates female stereotypes is sexist, even an innocuous joke (or even a misconstrued joke in someone else's private conversation)"

"Prostitution is sexist against women" etc

Um wtf? No these are not appropriate in a work environment. If you want to have a place with meaningful controversial discussion that's not the work environment.

I'm a lady and I honestly would feel uncomfortable if people were discussing these things at work. I really could not care less what other people's opinions are on these issues but I know I'm there to do my job as best as I can no get siderailed into lengthy controversial and highly likely uncomfortable discussions.

Suggesting that Google needs to be a place to comfortably voice off your random ideas is pretty irrational. It really doesn't.

Anyway, what does that even look like tangibly? Unprofessional... uncomfortable. It would not result in people agreeing with each other more just becoming less likely to like one another.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was simply a list of topics that PC culture has deemed indisputable and heresy to even question. The topic of whether or not they're appropriate in a work environment is a whole different discussion.

The Google memo was pertaining to their own company's diversity policy, and hence should be fair game for discussion. If that makes you feel uncomfortable, then the Obama quote at the bottom of the article summarizes my thoughts.

<comment><USER8> They appear completely related to what is heresy to discuss at Google. The section starts off with

"Some takeaways from this whole fiasco"

"Here are some of those politically correct assertions that take on almost religious-like qualities..."

And thus appear to be completely linked to the topic of the Google "fiasco". Very confusing way to present the article if they are not relevant.

College is a very different place than a workplace. I am not required to interact with anyone on my college campus. Additionally, a workplace works best without the friction of being a place for the discussion of politics or controversial topics. Let alone "innocuous" jokes.

The author is upset that he is not greeted with hugs and applause for his memo. So what?

I only read the first part - and I'm no expert on these topics but I haven't experienced any exceptionalism within this profession as a woman. To the contrary, my code is out there in the open ready for scrutiny all the time. I truly believe this is a meritocratic profession. My understanding is that companies aim to hire equally qualified workers from more backgrounds of diversity. Even better, they have an economic incentive to do so.

Many of the time the people writing these things are looking for something to complain about. I haven't worked at Google but I haven't experienced this to be imbalanced in the way it's being portrayed.

I guess you can say the memo was put out there, and a discussion was had.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies if the presentation was unclear, will see if I can make that clearer.

> Additionally, a workplace works best without the friction of being a place > for the discussion of politics or controversial topics. Let alone > "innocuous" jokes.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here. I prefer workplaces, or any environment for that matter, where we all respect each other enough to be open to the discussion of any topic and not easily offended over stupid meaningless jokes. That does not mean that one has to share their political beliefs or be pestered to engage in controversial debate - but a culture where everyone has to watch out for every little thing they say because any non-PC mark could be misconstrued and used as grounds for firing simply because someone deemed it offensive is intellectually hostile, unhealthy, and not the type of environment I want to be in.

> The author is upset that he is not greeted with hugs and applause for his > memo. So what?

That's not why the author is upset. The author got fired.

<comment><USER8> The author was fired but I certainly wouldn't describe the reason as due to "any little thing they say". Most of the time people are fired for harassment, which can be nuanced but a normal company compliance training can get one up to speed.

The author was probably fired for going through the wrong channel to voice this. Now not only has he attacked his company but he also alienated his female coworkers who may feel he finds them potentially undeserving of their jobs or in excess supply, as implied by the article.

Sounds wonderful for the work environment, no? At the end of the day, Google is a company out to make money and build good culture in their company.

I respect your desire to surround yourself by those who aren't easily offended or too PC and I trust you will find many friends like that. However, that isn't really appropriate for the workplace where it's not your right to be treated well for any behavior.

Its an interesting topic to discuss but personally I think progress is with diversity. Not just for society but it benefits companies as well. I think they are seeing that and ultimately they are allowed to do what they wish.

<comment><AUTHOR> The channel he voiced the memo was apparently opt-in, thus I don't see that as inappropriate.

If an opposing viewpoint backed by facts and evidence make you feel alienated, then the problem is not with the person who presented the facts. Affirmative action by definition discriminates in favor of women and underrepresented racial minorities, and this is simply a fact - the very definition of affirmative action itself.

I'm a huge proponent of diversity in the sense of embracing people with different perspectives and ideas. Deciding that you need X% of females and Y% of colored people does not make you a proponent of diversity, except in the shallow sense of wanting some set of racial representation. The strongest advocates of this form of racial diversity in my experience tend to actually be the most hostile towards diversity of opinions - like all the people deeming this memo sexist who fail to bring up any coherent argument backing up their claims (since most of them never read the document).

And one of the points of the memo was that we need to de-moralize diversity and allow people to have an honest discussion over it (which he ironically got fired over).

Diversity of thought > Diversity of appearance

<comment><USER8> As I already explained diversity of thought isn't appropriate in a workplace. If it were, that would mean bullying and teasing would be appropriate. The problem is where to draw that line.

Where Google drew this line was firing someone for implying some people were undeserving of their jobs due to the biological argument. This declaration breeds hostility and is an outright attack on the qualifications of his coworkers.

As far as I know, affirmative action is practiced in colleges while companies practice seeking diversity out of the same pool of qualified applicants. I agree with this and think it's great companies can make their own decisions.

I've applied to jobs for startups where I would have been the only woman on the small team and bro culture was strong. I don't fault them but I declined those positions. I've gravitated toward companies like Google and their diversity policies have attracted talent like me. Companies do this in their own self interest.

I just want to clarify I'm not at all offended that the memo writer wrote what he did. I would feel offended if someone I worked with felt like there were too many woman in their office while there were only 5% and I felt that they were all qualified.

Even measuring qualification is tricky as unless you are someone's manager. More often than not, I've witnessed men make poor assumptions unaware of their own prejudices. For example, I got accepted to a very good college. I was surprised as to how many men thought it was only because I was a woman. However I knew for a fact I got better grades than them. I simply didn't advertise mine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bullying and teasing is not diversity of thought. Diversity of thought means being open to people with different perspectives and opinions. Bullying and teasing is unacceptable.

The author did not state or imply that his co-workers were undeserving of their jobs. He was simply stating that biological differences may influence one's career ambitions.

For example: Women tend to be more empathetic than men, and this may have something to do with why they're more likely to pursue psychiatry as a profession than men.

This statement does not imply that men shouldn't pursue psychiatry, just that they're probably less likely to do so. I don't see how that statement is sexist.

> affirmative action is practiced in colleges while companies practice seeking > diversity out of the same pool of qualified applicants

I'm not sure what the difference there is. Google calls itself an "affirmative action employer", and thus likely engages in the same kind of affirmative action that colleges do.

It's unfortunate that you've been the brunt of such prejudices. But as long as affirmative action is conducted the way it is (discriminating in favor of underrepresented minorities), those prejudices will always exist.

A better and more fair way of promoting diversity is to keep the interview process strictly meritocratic and gender/race-blind, but engage in initiatives that help prepare underrepresented minorities (ideally from low income backgrounds) for the interview process and encourage them to apply. My one stipulation would be that these programs should be open to anyone, rather than being restricted by race/gender.

<comment><USER8> "Diversity of thought means being open to people with different perspectives and opinions."

Where exactly do you draw that line? As some thoughts are felt as hostile/ insulting to other people and enter grey territory. You can't really obligate people to be open to all thoughts - good luck with that.

What does that look like anyway within a workplace? If such a memo was sent out in my workplace and I had a slew of different thoughts on the topic, would I be allowed to spend work time to pitch my ideas to my coworkers and discuss them to my hearts content or simply send out a memo of my own? And then where does it end?

"Women tend to be more empathetic than men, and this may have something to do with why they're more likely to pursue psychiatry as a profession than men."

While that may be true statistically it's impossible to prove woman choose psychiatry because they're empathetic rather a myriad of other complex reasons. I can tell you as a woman, I don't think Biology plays a large part at all.

"But as long as affirmative action is conducted the way it is (discriminating in favor of underrepresented minorities), those prejudices will always exist."

Affirmative action is meant to level the playing field and balance out the effect of existing prejudices and biases when interviewing etc. So the real question is do you think those prejudices exist and can be alleviated by affirmative action? I do and talking with the woman of the previous generation I would say we've come a long way thanks to affirmative action.

Thanks for the discussion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not going into the merits of any particular point of view, but it's amazing to me how few people talking about identity or diversity work to ensure that their arguments aren't perceived as naked self-interest.

In most areas of political life factions work to recruit seemingly nonpartisan entities to advance their agendas. They go to great lengths to compellingly demonstrate how what they want is really good for everyone. Saying "I was elected by X so I'm doing Y" is only used as an argument of last resort.

But on diversity issues people get up on soap boxes and unabashedly advocate for their side. Arguments for diversity as a broader virtue are seldom advanced forcefully, and when they are there's usually not much of an effort made to reconcile that virtue with specific policy prescriptions. It's bizarre.

The end result is that you have a game of tribes and quislings, where facts don't matter and nobody agrees on what appropriate steps are to deal with diversity issues because the only thing people agree on is that everybody else is acting selfishly.

So here you have a guy who wrote a thing advocating for guys. The rest of the world views him as a sexist. Sundar fires him. The guys who agreed with the author of the manifesto view Sundar as a quisling. The rest of the world still views Sundar with suspicion as a member of Tribe Guy. Nothing improved, but lots of anger was generated. Eventually there will be something from Tribe X, and more or less the same thing will occur with roles reversed.

Is it so hard to consensus build on these issues that even bothering to frame the discussion better is a waste? Or is it just easier and more cathartic to be angry and build support that way?

<comment><USER10> > it's amazing to me how few people talking about identity or diversity work > to ensure that their arguments aren't perceived as naked self-interest

I argue strongly for diversity etc. and I am a privileged high-earning healthy English speaking white dude - literally one of the easiest levels of life there is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of all the things the author mentions as being propped up by political correctness, this:

> Capitalism is the best economic system

sticks out like a sore thumb. I thought progressivism was more of a market socialism type affair? A disproportionate number of diversity quota advocates are open socialists or communists.

<comment><AUTHOR> Open communists? Interesting, I've never met any of those. Perhaps Silicon Valley and California are a lot different in that regards to NYC, where declaring yourself a communist is sacrilege.

<comment><USER7> well I don't know the situation on the ground so well as I'm in the UK, but certainly online most of the PC types I've spoken to are avowed socialists (as in proper socialism, not the Republican definition) and a few are communists. Looking at the on-the-ground anti-free-speech protests that have become so iconic of the movement you'll see a lot of anarcho-communist symbology and tactics like the black bloc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand this stupidity - the original dude who wrote this thing.

A company is not a place to air out your public opinion internally and expect no consequences. This is not the National Monument. This is not your open Mike night in your comedy club. This is not where you scream and run and then cry first amendment first amendment.

This is a place of work. Actual women work with this dude. Imagine how they would feel. Imagine the potential number of people he interviewed that were women or minorities.

Nobody's telling this sad dude what to do outside of work. He could very well go and participate in all far right movements as he pleases.

But to espouse a stupid thing as 'women are less capable' and expect NOT to be fired seems like he was playing with fire by first setting things on fire.

And let's not get started on 'did you ACTUALLY read his memo? He didn't say that on page 4 line 43' like this is some Tolstoy level philosophical meta writing. This is mediocre crap written by a dude looking for a reason to get offended and throw shit around - someone who I think probably landed on the wrong side of Reddit or 4chan often times.

Sorry. The most serious crime I think is his ingenious creativity that made the CEO and many well-respected people to actually read his crap. If I only had that talent, I would become a professional performance artist and quit software engineering.

<comment><USER6> This exactly - it was mediocre crap. When you insinuate that some of your co- workers have certain drawbacks because of their gender, it makes that gender more aware of their behaviour and they are put in a position where they to take extra effort to prove otherwise. This is creating hostile environment for them. This is the reason why similar forms of generalisation, like racism, is frowned upon – not just because of innate sense of right or wrong. If this is being politically correct, then damn right I am politically correct.

This reminds me of the movie Gattaca - let us start deciding the traits of people based on the gender, race and blood samples and assign jobs based on that.

<comment><AUTHOR> So is stating that women tend to be more empathic than men sexist and creating a hostile environment?</comment></comment></comment>


Julian Assange charged with violating Espionage Act - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2019/05/23/wikileaks-julian-assange-charged-with-violating-espionage-act-u-s-officials-say-in-case-that-could-test-first-amendment-rights/ <comment><USER2> Regardless of your thoughts on Julian Assange's personal behavior, this is extremely frightening to me. Sure, there have been cases in the past when the U.S. has cracked down on free speech in the name of "national security secrets" when it was really about keeping downright evil things from the public eye, but this one goes beyond the pale. It seems like the kind of indictment you'd see from a banana republic or an autocracy.

</comment><comment><USER3> The biggest failure in this whole debacle is Europe's. The evidence was that the US was massively spying on us, and not one nation (France, Germany, Netherlands) offered him amnesty.

</comment><comment><USER4> Journalists around the world pay attention: The US government has control over journalism and that's the way they intend to keep it.

</comment><comment><USER5> The actual superseding indictment: [https://www.justsecurity.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/05/Assa...](https://www.justsecurity.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/05/Assange.indictment.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> Big discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19995363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19995363)</comment>


FeedbackArmy.com - simple, cheap usability testing for your site - <AUTHOR> http://www.feedbackarmy.com/

<comment><USER2> Wow. There's a lot of negativity and criticism on here, don't be disillusioned, you got something up and out in 2 weeks that says more about you than most other people spending time "commenting" on here :-)

Best of luck, and get on that usability thing these people are talking about...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the encouragement. I've been meaning to play with mechanical turk for awhile and this seemed like a good idea. I'm going to hire a professional and get a snappy design going as quick as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hmmm purchasing usability testing from a site using a dated design and bright green font on a black background?

No thanks.

<comment><USER4> Here's my free usability review of that site:

The font is too small.

<comment><USER5> I thought the same thing. I closed the tab a moment after coming to the page, despite being in the market for such testing.

<comment><AUTHOR> <3 I can't disagree with what you're saying. My design skills are weak but I wanted to validate the concept first. Today I've seen enough interest to validate moving forward with the project. I'm going to invest in a site facelift to bring the presentation to Web 2.0 standards. Thank you for taking the time to look and post your thoughts here. -- Raphael

<comment><USER5> Checkout the account creation or sign in form on Tumblr. <http://www.tumblr.com/login>

It's huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I went ahead and bought a review. I just spent a few hundred dollars launching a mini-site, what is an extra $7? Rounding error -- if they catch a typo I'll consider it money well spent.

I'll let you know about the quality of results. One request: my results should not be available on a publicly accessible URL. It doesn't bother me, personally, but it will bother some people.

<comment><USER6> Here are the results of my experiment, as promised.

Here's my little mini-site:

<http://www.christmasbingocards.com>

This is a holiday promotion aimed at my customers. They're overwhelmingly non- technical folks, and not too sophisticated at the Internet. (I am well-aware that most people here would not purchase my software. I'm totally OK with that: you are not the audience.)

I asked the Turkers three questions (and will tell you my rationales):

1) Is it IMMEDIATELY clear what the site offers when you open it? [Rationale: This site is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel. I want them to understand what it offers before they hit their back button. If thought is required, I failed at design.]

2) Try to print out Christmas bingo cards. Tell me how long it takes you from me giving you that instruction to something coming out from your printer. [Rationale: My target is that fourty-something mother with kids, with no special computer skills, can accomplish this in 90 seconds. There is actually a bit of an overlap between Turkers and my market.]

3) If you thought your friends would find Christmas bingo to be a fun activity, would you recommend this site for it to them? Why or why not? [Rationale: The Turking population has a significant overlap with my core audience. Why not ask a quick thumbs up/down?]

What it taught me:

1) The site achieves its singular purpose fairly well. 2) It is attractive enough to move several testers into mentioning it to their friends. (As in, not hypothetical.)

The feedback lets me know "OK, the site is basically OK and needs to be built- out more than rethought from scratch". Knowing that, and the peace of mind from knowing that, are worth $7 to me easily. I hope this service continues getting developed, because I can see a lot of uses for it in my business.

(Yeah, I could roll my own with the Turk API... but I value my time at $100 an hour. This means I never want to be playing the sit-at-computer-refreshing- Amazon-so-I-can-authorize-fourty-cent-payment game.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are the odds that the idea came from reading comments here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372305>

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually the idea came from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362459>

<comment><USER3> What value to add to the process?

Why wouldn't I just post up the job on Amazon?

<comment><AUTHOR> Lets assume you've never posted a job to Mechanical Turk before. Here is what you need to do:

1\. Create an Amazon Web Services account

2\. Figure out how much you want to spend (and don't forget to calculate Amazon's share)

3\. Prepay the exact amount or more

4\. Create a Human Intelligence Task template

5\. Publish the Human Intelligence Task

6\. Login to Amazon's portal regularly and navigate several pages to find your results. Have fun clicking refresh.

7\. Review the results and promptly pay your workers (or they may ignore future requests)

How much is your time worth? Feedback Army spends the majority of the fee towards paying the mechanical turk workers. The Feedback Army software saves you from many of these steps and conveniently transforms the results into an RSS feed.

<comment><USER3> I have never used Mechanical Turk before and I see that you are adding some value.

If you improve the look of your own site you might have something here.

Another idea might be to offer larger scale tests with graphical reporting on the results, basically using the low cost/test advantage that Turks offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. This is a pretty new project for me (< 2 weeks old) following the release early, release often mentality. I've seen enough interest to validate the idea and so I'm reaching out to a few designers I know to get a proper face lift. I'll also dump a few dollars into making some design firms aware of the service and see where that takes me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tried feedbackarmy - from a purely ROI perspective I think the usability methodology is flawed.

It seems that the folks who give the feedback are actually trying to be a bit too helpful - to the extent that they think about questions as a challenge and try their best to answer them.

For example - If I pose a question that "What does this site do?" in a usbility experiment, I am expecting to figure out if the audience immidiately grasp the utility of a site.

However in this case it seems that the audience takes that as a challenge modifying the question to mean "Can you figure out what this side does?" and try out very hard to find the utility of a site and in the process totally defeating the purpose of a usability review.

It might be an artifact of the way I posed the question, but then I was just following the sites examples. I think using the site in the way it is setup (messaging, mturk) the concept does not give a good ROI w.r.t usability.

However, one thing that I did like was that the turkers gave some suggestions to improve the site - some of which was really valuable. So maybe if you change your positioning to something like an active feedback/testing tool it might work better.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know if this uses Amazon Mechanical Turk?

<comment><AUTHOR> it does (see the questions page)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is going to sound incredibly assholish, but it's incredibly true.

FeedbackArmy.com is going to tank. <http://www.feedbackarmy.com/feedback.slp>

1)That page is why. If someone has the capacity to produce (or have produced) a website, they have the capacity to create a form with two elements and garner feedback. It is incredibly lackluster, easy to replicate and _certainly_ not worth $7 for 10 responses.

2) Based on the comments here people aren't sold on Usability Feedback on websites when the website you've created doesn't suit the needs people are coming to the site for in the first place.

3)The process lends itself quite easily for scammers and cons. There's almost no security measures in place, the design is inherently broken and doesn't provide any peace of mind from the process that you have to perform to get "feedback".

I'm not sold. This can be done about 50 ways better than what it is now; I really do not see myself paying any amount of money for the presentation you've put in front of me. It's an effort, I wont say good effort, I wont say bad effort. It's an effort made, and at this point I'm going to say no to this.

<comment><USER11> It's $7, lighten-up. I'm about to spend $15/person/hour for deeper usability tests and now I can ask less in-depth questions but as often as I want for much less? Pure gold.</comment></comment>


Optimizing for Size - <AUTHOR> https://www.natano.net/blog/2019-12-19-compiler-opt-fun/ <comment><USER2> Compiler optimizations are designed to optimize code humans write (or code humans write code to generate)

The neat thing with this "optimize for size" thought experiment is that as an executable you can bundle the decompressor, & use any compression format you want. This has a lot of prior art: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_compression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_compression)

In the table there's Crinkler, listed without any info. It's played a role in the demoscene: [https://in4k.github.io/wiki/crinkler](https://in4k.github.io/wiki/crinkler)

GCC could implement an executable compressor as part of its size optimization, but it gets away from most of what GCC is. Unix philosophy, as they say</comment>


Twitter fired its VR manager because of something he posted to Facebook in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/813926/twitter-twtr-hired-and-fired-its-head-of-vr-in-one-day-because-of-an-old-deleted-facebook-fb-post/ <comment><USER3> Is Twitter extra sensitive because they were the driving force behind the gentrification of the shady part of SOMA? Apparently you can displace the homeless but you just can't voice negative opinions about them.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I wouldn't be suprised to find out they are just using this as an excuse to shed some overhead.

If I were at Twitter I would have my resume ready and be interviewing already.

<comment><USER5> He started there on Monday, so this doesn't apply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This makes me furious. Political correctness run amok. I don't feel safe expressing my opinions publicly for this very reason. I support Donald Trump - could I get fired from my (tech big 4) workplace for tweeting that publicly? That's not entirely out of the realm of possibilities! What is this world coming to? If I don't fit into their mold they fire me. My heart aches - <USER2> feels like the road to totalitarianism. These self proclaimed "progressives" and "social justice warriors" are not liberal in the classic sense - they are radicals hell bent on cutting down anyone who does not fit into their world view. A classic liberal would have said "I may not agree with what you say, but I will die for your right to say it." What happened to our country?

<comment><USER7> Supporting Donald Trump isn't just a straight up political point of view, it shows that you are at least tolerant of some of the most horrible values he has exhibited during this election. They include promotion of sexism and racism and downright violent behavior toward minority and people with different religions.

If I were your employer, I would definitely consider firing you because I do not believe my company should employ people who are tolerant of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and political violence.

It's the same reason I would fire any employee who are openly in support of KKK or Nazi. Some people may argue that they disagree with Donald Trump on those things but support his policies. That's like saying it's ok for me to support Hitler because his economic recovery plan for Germany is sound, but I just disagree with the whole genocide business.

EDIT: I do believe in the First Amendment. As long as they don't violate Federal laws regarding hate speech to incite violence, Mr.Trump and his supporters should be allowed to exercise their free speech without fear of government prosecution.

However I am also for the right of any private party to distance and disassociate themselves from Mr.Trump and his supporters, including their employers.

<comment><USER8> > If I were your employer, I would definitely consider firing you because I do > not believe my company should employ people who are tolerant of racism, > sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and political violence.

But where does that end? You could use that against line of reasoning against _literally any political topic_.

You could just as easily say, "I would definitely consider firing you for being pro-choice, because I do not believe my company should employ people who are tolerant of murder".

or "I would consider firing you for being Christian, because I do not believe my company should employ people who are tolerant of discrimination, judgement, and torture."

<comment><USER9> Being Christian does not imply being tolerant of tolerant of discrimination, judgement, and torture. Being a Trump supporter does mean giving support to Trump and all he stands for.

<comment><USER7> >Being a Trump supporter does mean giving support to Trump and all he stands for

It means at least you put other things at higher priority than discrimination, torture, and promotion of violence and hatred and you are willing to at least ignore those.

In my eyes, that's simply not acceptable. We aren't talking about economical policies or debate on tax laws here, we are talking about basic human decency.

<comment><USER10> But being the secretary of state of the administration that assassinates US citizens without trial (including a 16 year old US citizen) and laughing on television about a world leader being killed and sodomized with knives by a mob on television is acceptable?

We are all complicit in this madness. You should fire everyone and then fire yourself.

<comment><USER7> Clinton did not order nor promote sodomizing a "world leader" (a brutal dictator, you made it sound like he's an elected leader from a democracy or something).

The killing of the U.S. national without trial was done due to such individual's action. There was no condemnation of violence toward a large group of people due to racism or sexism.

The world is obviously not perfect, but you can't use that as the basis of argument for "everything and everyone is just as bad as each other and things cannot possibly be worse".

<comment><USER10> No, she just helped destabilize the country until he was killed and sodomized. And then laughed about it, on television. Surely this was the administrations intention all along. Of course they didn't expect him to be sodomized but as long as he died one way or another I really doubt they cared. Of course, now Libya is still embroiled in civil war.

The point is that there are legitimate reasons to support Trump over Hillary that don't involve someone being a racist, sexist, bigot. The world definitely isn't perfect and we have two (major) candidates to choose from that make a lot of reasonable people on both 'sides' existentially concerned about the future of the republic.

I agree with your concerns about Trump. I just think Hillary is even scarier, especially because a lot of the type of people who would protest and politically mobilize against the actions I think she might take support her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks twitter for teaching us the dangers of posting something on social media.

<comment><USER12> in the future we will all use pseudonyms, the politically correct noose is getting a bit tight

<comment><USER11> In the past we usually did. White supremacists, POC, leftist, tightest, gays, Christians, etc could all happily cooperate because those issues were outside of a project or companies scope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not related, but it kind of is.

In 2008 I was working on a joint co-production for one of the biggest TV stations in Europe (it rhymes with RTL/Endemol) and we were stationed in Asia where we were shooting a Big Brother show.

One of the colleagues wrote something on his facebook wall (2008, after all) which was set private and he had a tight circle of friends. What he wrote was really bad, comparing his German employer to Nazis or something. Real bad. His, well, our boss then heard about it (he wasn't on his facebook) and guy got promptly fired and dispatched to Europe. The evening he got fired he wasn't even allowed in the same hotel we were at. They transported him immediately to another hotel where he would wait for transportation back home.

That event made me aware of what this thing will be in our futures, but also to always be open and vocal about your issues in all channels of communications or shut up completely.

edit:

I forgot the 'detail' about the story though. What he wrote was before he landed the gig (with that company), and boss found out during the production.

</comment><comment><USER14> If true, the troubling part for me is this sentence from the article:

> He's since deleted the post, and seems to have spent a better part of the > last few years trying to understand and ameliorate the issues of > homelessness and mental health in the city.

Basically, it sounds like he said something wrong (awful, even) years ago, recognized it as a problem (sure, perhaps after being told it was), and has spent most of the time since then working to gain a better understanding to avoid repeating that sort of statement.

To me, that sounds like a good thing. Unless there's more to the story, I'd expect he'd be less likely to cause the same (/related) problem again than most other people.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, I'll just state for the record that San Francisco is overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash.

Looking forward to being fired in 2019!

</comment><comment><USER16> My guess is that Gopman posted something incredibly insensitive in a moment of frustration and probably really regrets voicing his opinion, even if he still believes it. It's hard to have sympathy for him given that.

Still, this argument that we should use someone's past actions against them indefinitely is oddly reminiscent of our penal system. Are criminals inherently incapable of rehabilitation, even with an idealized correctional system? Should we hold their past actions against them indefinitely? If not, what's an appropriate amount of time? What if they seem truly remorseful of their actions?

I don't know that I have a good answer for those questions, but it's interesting to see some of the same people arguing for a more humane penal system simultaneously holding these long grudges against people for their (admittedly incredibly insensitive) actions.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Twitter's headquarters happens to be in a San Francisco neighborhood called > the Tenderloin, where some 6,000 homeless reside—right on Market Street.

erm, no, Twitter's HQ is not in the Tenderloin...

and Greg Gopman's story is pretty well known, if that was really the reason for him being fired, then Twitter's HR should also be fired..

edit: the actual article with the "news" [https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/18/in-its-vrar-push- twitter-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/18/in-its-vrar-push-twitter- trolls-itself/) apparently he was just a contractor

</comment><comment><USER18> Honestly, the title should be:

Twitter fired its VR manager because of _Techcrunch reviving_ something he posted to Facebook in 2013

<comment><USER19> This is more on Twitter than TechCrunch. Any background check should have turned this up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why does anyone in tech use their own creations? They should know better by now :)

</comment><comment><USER21> Was he fired because what he wrote was inhumane, or because it was true?

</comment><comment><USER22> TIL that Twitter has a burgeoning VR business

<comment><USER23> > burgeoning

Citation Needed.

<comment><USER22> It's from the actual post, very first paragraph:

... "Twitter had hired Greg Gopman, formerly in business development at virtual-reality media company UploadVR and the founder AngelHack, a startup that runs hackathons, to lead its burgeoning VR business" ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> edit: I did not scroll far enough in the article to see his second comment. That one is much worse, but firing people for their opinions strikes me as a dangerous precedent.

<comment><USER25> To be fair, the post in question:

      In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city…You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us. It's a burden and a liability having them so close to us. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I'd consider thinking different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too close to her cardboard box hasn't made anyone's life better in a while.

I hate the contemporary pastime for witch hunts against the bad-think, but that strikes me as a pretty distasteful post. YMMV

<comment><USER26>
       pbpaste | fold -s -w 77 | sed "s/^/   /" | pbcopy

^^ makes it way nicer to read

The quote in question:

       In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt
       you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the
       city…You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the
       world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for
       the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so
       close to us. It's a burden and a liability having them so close to us.
       Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I'd consider thinking
       different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too
       close to her cardboard box hasn't made anyone's life better in a while.

<comment><USER25> Awesome. I was looking through HN formatting options to find something like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Of course the rank and file routinely not get canned -- but in this guy's case, apparently have their professional lives irrevocably destroyed -- for running their mouth a bit too far in public. A few people online may grumble, but that at the executive and investor level, no one bats an eye about it.

But at _their own_ level? Meanwhile YC can't fire you-know-who, 'cause, you know, "diversity".

</comment><comment><USER4> Did he actually get fired for saying SF has a lot of homeless people?

<comment><USER9> No, he got fired for making derogatory remarks about them. Did you read the article?

<comment><USER4> "overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash,"

While a little harsh, it is not inaccurate.

<comment><USER28> He went on to say further things about them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sheet2Site – Create Websites Out of Google Sheets - <AUTHOR> https://www.sheet2site.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I made a tool that can generate a website from Google Sheets. It using Google Sheet as a DB.

Examples of sites: [https://www.sheet2site.com/s/best-cities-for-digital- nomads/](https://www.sheet2site.com/s/best-cities-for-digital-nomads/), [https://www.sheet2site.com/s/best-coffee-shops-for-work- in-c...](https://www.sheet2site.com/s/best-coffee-shops-for-work-in-canggu/), [https://www.sheet2site.com/s/top-100-cryptocurrencies](https://www.sheet2site.com/s/top-100-cryptocurrencies), [https://darkmodelist.com](https://darkmodelist.com)

</comment><comment><USER2> I love your idea. And there's a huge market of individuals living on Excel that will pay you for doing this. Congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I hope!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> FWIW, YC funded startup Cloud Stitch does something similar [https://cloudstitch.com/](https://cloudstitch.com/)

<comment><USER4> One cool thing about sheet2site is that the sheet2site's idea is presented clearer than the cloudstitch's one. I mean when I opened sheet2site website I understood what it does in a moment. But in case of cloudstitch I have to force my brain to work to understand what this means: "Cloudstitch lets you manage websites & run your business, all from your office suite."

<comment><AUTHOR> haha, thanks :) Maybe if you are "true" startup you can't be simple and clear? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like HN broke your server ;) Looking forward to checking it out when you get it running.

Is there a service that can easily stress test your app? Like a "TEST HN" service? Would be nice to run a project through that before posting to HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just checked and seems work, can you please try one more time?

<comment><USER6> Checked it just now. Broke for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> maybe me now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great work!

An alternative I have been using recently for some projects is Molnify [1], it has more focus on exposing calculation logic in the app created and less control over background images and layout. Takes either a Excel file or a google sheet doc as input.

[1] [http://www.molnify.com/](http://www.molnify.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I like the simplicity. Also, I'm assuming it's not free, it would be nice to know what's the price before signing up. Maybe you could just add some sort of a disclaimer, e.g. Generate / Create new site (free up to 1k visitors/month, $5 after). Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree! I've just added that for 1 custom domain it's for $5 /mon and for unlimited domains $10 / mon

<comment><USER9> Oh! If you don't mind my asking, how do you go about selling custom domains? Or if there are resources you can point me to, that would be helpful, too.

<comment><USER8> Not sure @andreyazimov is actually selling domains, only allowing you to connect your own, right? But if you want to actually sell domains via your application I'm sure that's possible via Namecheap API or something similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not selling domains for sure, just connecting :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reaffirming that Excel truly is the universal format for everything. Good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree! Go Excel! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Too funny -- about a month ago I built a web site backed by a Google Sheet so that my father could easily update content. Great idea with Sheet2Site and good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice work Andrey! Good luck with your $1000 MRR challenge.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks like a really cool idea.

What I noticed is that is somehow hard to understand how to create the page. ( Click here, then there, then copy paste, then click publish, etc... ). If this process was more it would be awesome.

Keep going the good work! I checked your $1k goal and wish you all the best in achieving it!

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, agree this instruction is sucks . Can you maybe suggest how I can improve it?

<comment><USER14> Move the steps around to remove switching between apps. My recommendation would be: 1, 6, 4, 2, 3, 5, with title and background info/other info as "advanced" config.

Make steps have sub steps, so step 1 is use this template, step 2 is prepare the spreadsheet; sub-step 2a is "press publish", sub-step 2b is "edit title on the main-page sheet" Step 3 is "Publish!" With sub-step 3a being copy url, 3b paste, etc.

It requires changing the code a bit, but should _feel_ simpler, since there's no switching back and forth, and some complexity is hidden inside the sub steps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Typo on your homepage image;

[https://www.sheet2site.com/img/tabs.png](https://www.sheet2site.com/img/tabs.png)

"backgroung"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Fixed

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fun idea. I learned recently that Sheets also works as a JSON service to post and get data if you have a static site and don't want to stand up a DB server.

<comment><USER17> Any resource for this you can point me to?

<comment><USER16> There's a bunch on the web actually. The gist is that you create a Google App Script linked to your Sheet and deploy it publicly, which can receive GET and POST requests and respond as you like. See:

      http://chriszarate.github.io/sheetrock/

      http://douglasduhaime.com/posts/crud-operations-on-static-file-sites.html

      https://github.com/liddiard/google-sheet-s3

      https://www.johnastewart.org/coding/twine-game-data-to-google-sheets-via-javascript/

      https://medium.com/@dmccoy/how-to-submit-an-html-form-to-google-sheets-without-google-forms-b833952cc175

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Tried to access the site, but getting the error. Screenshot [1]

[1] [https://ibb.co/kYtL5H](https://ibb.co/kYtL5H)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Please try now

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great idea! Any ideas for expansion? I imagine you could map rows/columns to a bootstrap-like grid system for more custom layouts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks) I'm thinking to add a custom script from the sheet. Like Google Analytics or chat

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can you explain the backend? When the spreadsheet is updated, is the generated website automatically updated?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just getting a JSON from a spreadsheet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Your copy:

They are working but I need to explain you how :)

could be improved to

They are working but I need to explain to you how to use it. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Done! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The site is down for me. HN Hug.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah probably with HN traffic, now seems work. Can you please try one more time?

<comment><USER23> All of the links seem to throw application error.

<comment><AUTHOR> All should works now :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awesome work Andrey!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Twitter predicted to become a big TV screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/twitter-predicted-to-become-a-big-tv-screen?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=78a0a9b18e-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-78a0a9b18e-281895037 <comment><USER2> <quote>Twitter isn't just going to disappear. It's just going to become a new way to follow celebrities, corporations, and the like," said Toubia.</quote> Funny, I thought Twitter IS that for the past few years... :-) Essentially, what they're saying is that Twitter is a passive way to consume information. Didn't we all know that already. Am I missing anything?</comment>


Memeful comments extension for Visual Studio - <AUTHOR> http://mariusbancila.ro/blog/2017/11/23/memeful-comments-extension-for-visual-studio/ <comment><USER2> This seems so annoying. I'd really hope to never encounter code "comments" with just links to a useless gif.

On the other hand, it does look like a fun side project!</comment>


Pwncloud – Bad crypto in the Owncloud encryption module - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/880-Pwncloud-bad-crypto-in-the-Owncloud-encryption-module.html <comment><USER2> > "First it is important to understand what this encryption module is actually > supposed to do and understand the threat scenario. The encryption provides > no security against a malicious server operator, because the encryption > happens on the server. The only scenario where this encryption helps is if > one has a trusted server that is using an untrusted storage space."

While it's a good finding that even in this specific scenario the crypto- module is screwed up, I think an even bigger problem is that most people hosting owncloud either don't know or care about all threats not covered by this scenario.

I heard stuff like "Owncloud has crypto, so it must be secure." from people hosting owncloud on server they didn't have much control (especially physically) about. It's not only the "malicious server operator" but everyone with administrative access (legitimate or not) to this server.

But unfortunately I don't know a selfhosted easy-to-install-and-use alternative with strong client-side encryption, which boils down to: Dropbox (or any other cloud storage provider) with client-side encryption of your own choice is more secure than owncloud with only the crypto-module.

<comment><USER3> I just want to add a big emphasis to "YOUR OWN CRYPTO" with Dropbox. Stuffing data into Dropbox without encrypting it first for example with VeraCrypt is a bad choice. Even Dropbox says their own employees "need" access to your data "occasionally". (Also, I meant to upvote you but I fat-fingered it on my phone, sorry!)

<comment><USER4> VeraCrypt or other FDE-like tools (that are meant to be used on actual drives or their imitations using a file-backed device) are not so great idea for use with Dropbox or alike file/object storages. Here's why: [http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/04/30/you-dont-want- xts/](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/04/30/you-dont-want-xts/)

<comment><USER5> Is there a client side encryption tool that works with Dropbox and is usable by non technical people (plus for being available on both Windows and Mac)?

I personally use encfs to create a partition within Dropbox, but I don't see that being easy to setup and manage...

<comment><USER6> EncFS is specifically not safe to use in situations where an attacker has multiple versions of your data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Still recall running across a vendor that was hashing credit cards using MD5. Asked them why, and their response was that they were PCI compliant. Called the main PCI line, asked them if MD5 hash was an acceptable way to store credit cards securely, and the answer was yes.

<comment><USER8> How many bit of entropy are in a credit card? I ran the numbers a few years ago but don't remember now. Well within a very small rainbow table in any case.

<comment><USER9> You have 10^15 possible values from a 16-digit CC number (due to Luhn's algorithm). The first 6 are for the issuer/bank; if you know that, you have 10^9 or about 30 bits of possible values.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a really great writeup. But CTR+HMAC is, in fact, a composed authenticated encryption mode. If you have a working system with CTR+HMAC, I'd recommend against spending effort switching to GCM, which is actually harder to get right.

<comment><USER11> I thought AES-GCM was on its way out? Isn't poly1305-chacha20 what we should use now, given that it's quite a bit cheaper in terms of cost, and the keys are much smaller (32 bytes)?

Also, the code for chacha is easily available.

<comment><USER9> Also: Don't implement chacha20-poly1305 or AES-GCM yourself, unless you're a crypto expert.

You'll more than likely make a mistake.

Libsodium offers both (but AES-256-GCM is only available if you have hardware support for constant-time implementations).

        crypto_aead_chacha20poly1305_encrypt()
        crypto_aead_chacha20poly1305_decrypt()
        crypto_aead_aes256gcm_encrypt()
        crypto_aead_aes256gcm_decrypt()

[https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium](https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They mention that Windows will still execute the DOS stub when it can't find a PE header. Is this still true in 64-bit Windows? I would think that the DOS stub would be 16-bit code, which is not supported anymore in 64-bit Windows.

<comment><USER12> Indeed it isn't, at least according to Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable#Compatibilit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable#Compatibility) says: _64-bit versions of Windows cannot execute them._

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So what is the implication of this? The major reason to use the crypto module is that my users can add their google drives to owncloud and its encrypted on there.

Whats the recommended course of action?

<comment><USER2> If you want to go along with owncloud (and I don't know a proper alternative) there's not much you can do then upgrading to Owncloud 9 and hope that the fix was done right. In the meantime you could encourage your users to use their own client-side encryption while giving up the idea of an easy setup.

<comment><USER13> Im already running the newest version. I hope they approve on it in future versions. Client side crypto would be cool.

<comment><USER14> There are some community activities to implement client-side encryption. But as far as I know there doesn't exists any running code at the moment. So don't expect to much in the next few months.

In general I want to note that client side encryption is great. I also like and use it in many areas. But you also have to keep in mind that it will make most of the web interface and it features useless. Personally I run my ownCloud in my basement. The connection to the server is secured by https and the hard disc is encrypted with LUKS. In this case it doesn't make sense to me to add additionally server-side or client-side encryption.

The first step is always to check your threat model, your setup and your requirements to see if you really need server-/client-side encryption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's quite worrisome..

<comment><USER16> Ach, look at it this way. If it was in a proprietary product, you could sleep safely because nobody would ever tell you that your data was insecure. ;-)

We pay researchers and others to check ownCloud for security issues (the writer of this post got paid by us), we have security checks done by various companies etcetera - see [https://owncloud.org/blog/hackerone-case-study-on- owncloud/](https://owncloud.org/blog/hackerone-case-study-on-owncloud/)

But it is, of course, still insecure because nothing is secure. I only can say we're pretty much the project with the best security processes and most attention towards security in the file sync and share space. From the open source ones, at least - you'll never know about the closed ones, they keep things hush-hush. Protecting your sleep (not your data).</comment></comment>


150 years of data proves it: Strongmen are bad for the economy - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1688397/data-proves-it-authoritarian-leaders-are-bad-for-the-economy/ <comment><USER2> If you're interested in Singapore's story with Lee Kuan Yew here is an in- depth review of his book.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ceajmw/book_revie...](https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ceajmw/book_review_from_third_world_to_first_by_lee_kuan/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not only is the study in itself flawed, the data on which it relies on is flawed as well.

<comment><USER4> Please elaborate. Please.</comment></comment>


A Slack Client with Built-In Task Management - <AUTHOR> http://swipesapp.com/slack <comment><USER2> I'd kill for a client like this which also included email. Slack has become our goto communication tool internally, but linking emails into slack for sharing external customer communications isn't quite right yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't this what you were looking for: [http://slackhq.com/post/126629257535/email](http://slackhq.com/post/126629257535/email) ?

<comment><USER2> No. I mean actual email features with the ability to send, receive, cc, bcc, forward (to email or slack channels/contacts), emails.

Emails are still the bulk of my non-office communication :(

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the new feature allows you to do it one way : from emails to slack channels but that's all...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Individual/startup applications for Quantum Machine Learning incubator open - <AUTHOR> https://www.creativedestructionlab.com/quantum2018/ <comment><AUTHOR> Disclosure: I am a co-founder of one of the startups graduating this year. The program accepts (international) applications both from individuals and established companies. I thought it would be helpful to provide some insight how the program works.

As part of the program (situated in Toronto), you get both financial and hardware support. Financial support is in the form of a pre-seed SAFE from VC funds (Bloomberg Beta, Data Collective and Spectrum 28). Hardware partners include Rigetti computing and D-Wave, providing training and access to the hardware.

The program starts with a month long bootcamp, providing scientific and business advice. The science part is lead by actual scientists working in the field (Peter Wittek, Seth Lloyd, Michele Mosca, Roger Melko [1]).

Once you are accepted and your venture is established, you are periodically mentored in 2-month intervals when the "CDL sessions" take place. You get 1-on-1 meetings with accomplished business mentors / VCs / scientists, who can volunteer to work with you over the next 2-month sprint and set your objectives. Companies not attracting any attention from mentors are eventually cut.

The QML incubator is one of several streams under the Creative Destruction Lab, and they are open to international applicants (although they are encouraged to apply sooner). The deadlines are May 10th and May 31st.

If you have questions, comment here, and I'll do my best to answer with the insider knowledge obtained over the past year.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23474](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23474)

<comment><USER2> @tbabej I don't think you could've given a better run down of the program!

I am also a co-founder of another CDL startup, and I have to say, the program is absolutely fantastic. The resources available to those who enter and are accepted are really helpful. CDL has been instrumental in our success, and we wouldn't be where we are today without their guidance and support!

I would highly recommend this program to any entrepreneur or any academic looking to do something entrepreneurial to look at the CDL's various streams. Especially if you are interested in Quantum as, in my opinion, the CDL is easily the best program out there for Quantum Machine Learning startups.

<comment><USER3> The best part about the program is you get access to quantum hardware from D-Wave and Regetti. We are in the process of building a quantum ecosystem in Toronto. I speak for myself and others in the program when I say that QML truly is one of a kind.</comment></comment></comment>


Seeking the Gears of Our Inner Clock - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/science/seeking-the-gears-of-our-inner-clock.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10800707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10800707)</comment>