Reed Hastings responds to criticisms and announces Qwikster - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netflix.com/2011/09/explanation-and-some-reflections.html

<comment><USER2> Netflix should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. There are a lot of successful companies that are much more diversified than Netflix is right now. This honestly strikes me as a panic driven move in response to the customer rage and their precipitous drop off in stock prices.

I'm trying hard but can't see the upside to this move. And I think this will cause a big hemmorhaging in profit for the short/medium term. Netflix has 12 million members that are on both the DVD and the streaming plan. These are the folks that got the 60% price hike. Although Netflix lost some customers (~5%) after the pricing change, that massive price hike put them in a position to increase profits, even with less members..

But now that Netflix is splitting itself in two, I can guarantee you a sizeable chunk of people who were just happy with the dual plan will end up picking one or the other.

That being said, I like that they're tackling video games. They ought to take a serious look at getting into competition with Steam, which is making $1Billion in revenue and growing, with high profit margins.

<comment><USER3> > I can guarantee you a sizeable chunk of people who were just happy with the > dual plan will end up picking one or the other.

But the upside for netflix is those people that end up picking both.

The time to analyze this is 6 months from now when the figures are in.

My personal best guess about what they're about to do is sell off the DVD division.

<comment><USER4> > But the upside for netflix is those people that end up picking both.

How's that an upside considering that's what they currently have? Instead of one charge on your credit card there will be two that add up to the same thing. At best (for Netflix). This will not raise revenues.

<comment><USER5> Picking both results in a 40% price hike. I think the OP was referring to the whole situation, not just the name change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not something you see CEOs write every day. Hell, this isn't something you see CEOs write ever in their careers. It took a lot of guts to write it, and regardless of the huge controversy surrounding their pricing strategies, I hope that this split succeeds.

Also, video games!

<comment><USER7> He's even replying to comments in the Facebook comments threads below. That impresses me a lot.

<comment><USER8> From what I saw, he's only replying to comments praising the decision, and not engaging at all with any of the vast majority who criticize or question it.

This does not impress me quite so much.

<comment><USER7> The first two comments he replied to (when I saw) were very critical.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the correction. I had a different impression when I first read some of the comments, but now I see I was mistaken.

I still have the impression that Reed isn't "getting" the two biggest complaints:

1) Customers who use both services are unhappy about losing the integration between them.

2) Quikster is a monumentally bad name

(Yes I know it's misspelled. I would look up the correct spelling, but that's exactly the point. How _do_ you spell it without looking it up? And how exactly did they come up with the name with nobody on the team saying, "Hey, my Amway friends tell me it's not Amway any more, it's Quixtar." :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While they seem to be going to great pains to be genuine and upfront about what they're doing, why does Netflix need to create a separate company in order to innovate? Apple doesn't have a separate Mac and iPhone business and they seem to innovate just fine.

What really seems to be going on is that Netflix is getting ready to spin off its DVD business. That this seems so obvious makes the repeated apologies feel like an insult to our intelligence.

<comment><AUTHOR> As Reed says, the streaming business is global, but the DVD business is US- only. Maintaining code that services functions that apply in some locales but not others will slow down Netflix's ability to innovate.

<comment><USER9> Again, Apple runs businesses (eg. Macs) that operate in some jurisdictions that their other businesses (eg. iTunes) do not. You don't need a structural separation to 'innovate', you need a structural separation to ease a sale of a business.

<comment><USER10> I honestly don't care how Apple runs it's business. I don't work for apple, I do, on the other hand, work for netflix, and not having to worry about DVDs will be a nice relief.

<comment><USER11> ^^ This is why Netflix is fubar'd. Totally internally looking -- not giving a shit what it means for their customers.

Yeah, we all _love_ paying two bills each month, having to search for content two places, having our ratings queues forked and kept out of sync. Thanks, we're all _so glad to hear_ that it's easier for you.

We'll make it even easier: find new customers. We're gone.

<comment><USER12> You pay $200/ month? Maybe you meant $20?

I would be interested in what you find as a good replacement because I might consider a switch if it were good enough. I just killed my cable and that was costing me ~$70/ month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> May be this is the wrong decision, may be it is the right decision - it is quite unclear and only time will tell. However, from an entrepreneurial perspective, Reed has all my respect - it is incredibly difficult to disrupt yourself and he has certainly placed his bet. That takes balls and I respect that.

As to why separate, I assume that from an operational perspective it makes running the businesses easier. It is strange that some things e.g. ratings, accounts, etc. will be separate though, that's for sure.

I can't wait to see this play out!

</comment><comment><USER14> To me, the classiest thing about this post is how Hastings is taking the time to personally respond to the blog comments. You don't see that very often from a CEO of a company as large as Netflix, and it's pretty darn cool.

<comment><USER15> It wasn't that long ago that it was "illegal" for CEOs to blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really, really liked the way Hastings wrote this post. It takes a lot to own up to your mistakes, but he seems dedicated to making Netflix succeed, and the decision to split the service into two is really... interesting, to say the least. I'll probably stick with streaming and forget about physical media, to be honest. It's much more convenient to drive to the Redbox down the street than wait a few days and have to deal with mailing discs back and forth.

Kind of glad to see video game rentals coming; too bad they're late to the party and will have to compete with Blockbuster, Gamefly, and Redbox.

<comment><USER17> _Kind of glad to see video game rentals coming; too bad they're late to the party and will have to compete with Blockbuster, Gamefly, and Redbox._

All of these services have trouble. Blockbuster has a tarnished name (and I personally have never used the service), Gamefly has poor turnaround time and stock, and Redbox has awful stock and a high price.

Netflix/Quikster have been in a prime position to totally disrupt this for years. That they haven't pounced on it sooner has always been odd to me. It's like they consciously decided not to make money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> To anyone who reads this from the Netflix team:

I love Netflix. And so my following criticism is intended to be constructive. The email and blog post that Reed sent out today starts off well...

"I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation........I'll try to explain how this happened."

However, after writing the above, Reed doesn't really give an explanation, and based on my colleagues' and other commenters' reactions so far, it seems to have come off as a smug non-apology. Rather than a wordy but empty-ish post, what you should have written about the overall price increases was a simple explanation at how your sourcing costs have increased. You might think that since that information is public, and geeks like us already know about it, but the majority of your customers might not be as news-savvy. And on the DVD side, explain to your customers some of the challenges that you are facing there, how they have become different from the streaming side, and why you needed to separate the businesses. (I personally don't really understand this one - the only reason I can think of for the clean separation is if you wanted the option to sell off one of the businesses later).

I believe people would have been more sympathetic had you given a simple, honest explanation of your challenges, especially after starting your post like that.

<comment><USER12> I noted this elsewhere, but I believe it has to do with Netlfix relationships and negotiations with the content creators, and how it differs from the Qwikster model of buying discs. Qwikster requires zero relationships and negotiations with the content creators.

I can't really understand why people get so upset about these changes because I can't find the catalog size/ low cost anywhere else. If anyone knows of a better service/value, I would be interested.

<comment><USER15> _Qwikster requires zero relationships and negotiations with the content creators._

This isn't quite true BTW. Remember the 28-day window.

<comment><USER12> Prior to Netflix offering any streaming, there was no 28-day window. The window came out of negotiations for streaming rights. So, not only is it true, the streaming piece of the business impacted the DVD-by-mail business.

<comment><USER10> correlation != causation.

the 28-day window was solely a way to lower the cost of buying dvd's. Those savings went into buying more streaming licenses.

And the the grandparent - the dvd company isn't _required_ to work with the content creators, but it would probably be dumb for them not to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was skeptical of this move at first, but I think the argument is fairly sound. I think a lot of commenters are focusimg on the technical aspect of the service and I agree, Hastings is being disingenuous when he says "they're two totally different businesses". What I think makes a sound argument is that they require a separate marketing approach.

Streaming is only a separate business model insofar as there are fewer degrees of freedom because of the studios; otherwise it's just a difference in how you deliver data. But that difference could be important from a marketing perspective. As Netflix pushes the streaming model, they risk damaging the DVD business by association. So it may be better to rebrand DVD business and carry it forward with a message concentrated around its (rather massive) benefits. That move is even more important if streaming becomes more competitive im the near future; war between cable companies, studios and streaming companies seems pretty likely, so the streaming space may become even more dangerous even while the conflict extends the life of DVD delivery.

So yeah, probably about as sound as a business decision can be. It may not work out but that's not guaranteed avoidable under the old setup either.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have to say, I think they blew it with this one. Spinning DVD-by-mail off into a separate business might make sense, but I just don't get splitting the ratings/suggestions up by not integrating the services. Considering that one of Netflix's greatest strengths is the (very good) rating system this is a questionable decision, and I think they'll catch a lot of heat for it from the crowd that maintains accounts on both services.

<comment><USER21> Netflix has 8 years worth of ratings I've made, so it's gotten _very_ good at suggesting me new movies.

Amazon is the only other company that has a longer history of what I buy and what I like, and they're making some decent inroads into streaming movies now too. As soon as Amazon beefs up their selection and gets streaming videos available on my Xbox 360, I'm going to find it hard to justify Netflix altogether.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This move is uncomfortable but necessary. The two businesses are different at every level (supply chain, cost structure, technology, user experience, etc.), and the DVD business is on its way out over the nest 3-5 years.

Better to disrupt yourself now than wait for some upstart to do it and react.

<comment><USER23> And yet somehow Amazon manages to stream video and sell DVDs at the same time.

Heck, they sell lingerie and organic tea at the same time.

<comment><USER24> But if Amazon's DVD business, or selling organic tea, doesn't perform well in the long run, they'll still be in business. If renting DVDs or streaming movies doesn't perform for Netflix, they're out of the game.

<comment><USER25> That is a reason to diversify, not to Balkanize the organization even further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I bet the Quixtar (Amway) folks will object to this name.

<comment><USER27> And Australia has a "QuickFlix" that sounds pretty similar: <http://www.quickflix.com.au/>

<comment><USER28> Does Netflix operate its mail DVD service outside of the US?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As long as they are splitting the company, why not in three pieces, with a separate movie rating/recommendation service? That way both the separate DVD rental business and the streaming business could make web service calls to the recommendation service. As long as people "joined" their identities on Quickster and Netflix streaming, then customers of both services get better recommendations.

The "third company" might also make revenue from additional companies wanting a high quality recommendation system. Doing recommendation well is very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER30> I can't see how this is a good decision. Their streaming service is cheap but lacks titles. I use DVDs to get the shows and movies I can't get from the streaming service.

Obviously streaming is the future but the DVD part generates profits. The streaming only service - if it truly stands alone - is soon going to be competing with Amazon, Google, and Apple but without as much cash as these companies.

With their stock's price drop maybe Google or Apple will be willing to buy them. I don't see them surviving on their own without being bought out.

<comment><USER31> Most successful business don't make huge decisions like this if there wasn't a reason. And instead of speculation, we know why this split is happening. Think back with "The Social Network" was pulled from Netflix. The reason was that Netflix and Stars in their contract was limited to a certain number of viewers. In Stars' eyes, Netflix's total userbase was the number of viewers even though Stars was only concerned with streaming. So, to appease both the DVD licensing where they pay the studios per rental (and streaming shouldn't count against that) and to appease streaming licensing where they also pay by the size of the viewership (such as the case of Stars), they had no choice but to not only split the subscription model, but the company itself.

Thinking that Netflix would kill a good thing is pretty dumb and I sort of expected more from the HN audience in this case. Netflix is doing what they have to do, not what they want to do.

<comment><USER30> Your last paragraph seems to suggest that companies don't make dumb decisions by "killing a good thing". Maybe you think only Netflix doesn't make dumb decisions of this sort but there is a long history of companies making dumb decisions by killing 'a good thing'.

As stated I don't see how Netflix will survive long term.

<comment><USER31> Companies in the past have definitely made dumb decisions you are right about that, but typically they don't just kill off their main cash cow for no apparent reason. That's all I'm saying. All of the "why would he do this?!?" posts are dumb for thinking that someone like the CEO of Netflix doesn't know that this would be a pretty stupid split of the business if he didn't have to do it to survive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Maybe they should have considered who already has the Twitter handle before they settled on the name:

<http://twitter.com/#!/Qwikster>

<comment><USER31> When I first checked this account he had 19 followers, now he's 600+. He's going to wake up this morning thinking he's still tripping.

<comment><USER33> More likely he'll wake up to find that Twitter has given away his handle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think the challenge for Netflix here will be to disassociate Netflix with DVD rentals. People will go to Netflix's website, and expect their DVDs to be there alongside their streaming movies.

<comment><USER16> When I think of the term Netflix, I think of watching flicks on the Internet. I'm sure a lot of people don't look at it that way, but the term Netflix makes a lot of sense when referring to a streaming service (as opposed to a service that rents out physical media).

I know a lot of non-savvy people probably can't make that connection, but I think the company will make it clear that Netflix is no longer the place for DVDs.

<comment><USER35> When I think of Netflix, I think of renting flicks on the net... which is, um, what the original name meant. Also there's the whole last decade of this association.

When I think of Qwikster, I do not think of anything related to DVD by mail. The only associations that come to mind are Friendster and Quixtar. It sounds cheesy and cheap and fly-by-night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I bet a lot of customers evaluate Hulu and Redbox now.

<comment><USER37> Why?

Current Netflix DVD+streaming customers will seamlessly have Netflix+Qwikster accounts. Those who care about just DVDs or just streaming would probably have already left or already transitioned to the appropriate Netflix account option which would leave them with a Netflix or Qwikster account in the end, no action on their part.

So how would this move motivate anyone who hasn't already left to look at other services? I've seen other people on HN complain about needing to maintain two accounts, but switching to Hulu+Redbox has that same downside, removing that as a motivating factor to look at those options. Switching to just one has the downside of losing recommendations and setting up a new account. I don't see why anyone who hasn't already left Netflix after the pricing changes would leave because of this decision.

<comment><USER38> Because by splitting the accounts - they've removed pretty much the only piece of value that they provided over Hulu/Amazon/Redbox. There was one single place that I logged on to with my ratings, my recommendations, my queues for both streaming and DVDs.

Without that, their competitors are now almost pure drop-in replacements for their product. NetFlix had an advantage (to me) in that everything was unified. Now that they're split, that's gone - and they have to find some other way to be better than the other offerings to justify me keeping my subscription(s).

<comment><USER39> I totally agree. Netflix unified gave me the added value I needed to be a subscriber. Now that DVDs and streaming is not only separate subscriptions but even separate accounts, the value of Netflix/Qwikster has plummeted to me. I might just do Amazon for streaming and Apple TV for movie rentals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Roll out an "Import my recommendations" API integrated with IMDB and Amazon and Qwikster and other rateable sites, and you might have no trouble. Otherwise this is a very serious regression.

The customer wants one interface to rule them all, not to care about the leaky parts within.

For the next trick, sawing the millions of babies in half...

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm surprised they din't register the domain quickster.com as well. The QW in qwickster is cute, but it's easy to misspell.

<comment><USER42> Apparently the lack of the 'c' is easy to misspell too. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Must have been a though move to make.

Renting out DVDs is a different business model and one that will be obsolete in 2-3 years. Putting DVD rental prepares them for a future where they can fade out or sell the DVD business and go abroad with a simple offer for the Netflix brand.

</comment><comment><USER44> Let's hope Netflix can compete without having to splatter advertisements throughout the stream.

<comment><USER45> I'd be okay with a two-tiered system: a Netflix Light that is cheap and ad- supported (hopefully at the beginning, not interspersed throughout), and a Netflix Full that offers no ads.

Mostly though, I just want to have a decent selection in Canada. I was chatting with a friend about the possibility of doing a movie streaming startup, and I couldn't get past the fact that Netflix's biggest problems are not of their creation; they come from the studios. I wish them the best of luck, and hope that someday I might be a customer, but I'd hate to have to deal with the rights hassles that they do.

<comment><USER46> > I just want to have a decent selection in Canada.

As an American, don't worry, the selection isn't very good here either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> dvdflix would have been a more appropriate name

<comment><USER48> Until the medium changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Aren't there some synergies they would be missing out on by splitting into two companies? For instance, their recommendation engine.

</comment><comment><USER50> +1 to Mr. Hastings, sheerly for the courage and grit it took to write that.</comment>


Design patterns for invariant suspension - <AUTHOR> http://bannalia.blogspot.com/2015/06/design-patterns-for-invariant-suspension.html

<comment><USER2> _a class without significant invariants is little more than a tuple of values, which is why the presence of getters and setters is a sure sign of poor design_

Yikes. I know what the author is getting at, but dang that certainly sounds like it would tweak certain programmers I know.</comment>


Paid Cerberus 'lifetime' licenses are expiring, customers are mad - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/12/21/cerberus-paid-lifetime-license-expiration/ <comment><USER2> What a bunch of scumbags. How can a company revoke "lifetime" licences? They stated that they wouldn't touch the lifetime licences and are doing it anyway. Companies like this make me sick.

<comment><USER3> For the free lifetime licenses it was bad, but you could still kinda maybe see a valid point in it. This now makes me not even trust the company in even actually doing a good job at what their app claims to do.

I think in just gonna go full scumbag too, download their app and then give a one star rating after a while.</comment></comment>


Go 1.2 is released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.golang.org/go12 <comment><USER2> Looks like an algorithmic or manual bitcoin-sweep of the front page took place. I welcome a programming language article to the #1 spot.

</comment><comment><USER3> Official TLS 1.2 support? Oh yes please. Increases in JSON speed? Oh hell yes.

I'm loving how Go, as a package in the standard lib, now supports better TLS than most servers.

<comment><USER4> It seems kinda strange to me, honestly. All the big SSL libraries have had (and fixed) very subtle side-channel, timing, etc attacks... so why open ourselves to known exploits, if the fixes weren't re-implemented in Go?

<comment><USER5> They're implementing the reference so that the library can be improved over time. If you want a native implementation, you have to start somewhere.

The go TLS stack does need to be seriously audited, but that's expected, and it's going to take time for that to happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't like Go's large number of inconsistencies. This includes the builtin function/keywords: len,cap,new,make,range and the built-in types: map,lists,arrays.

For example, as long as you were going to have built-in functions and keywords like len and cap, why not make them pretend to implement an interface so that user types could implement them?

Why can functions return multiple values but not channels?

Why vary range semantics between the different collection types? Seriously the first value over lists should be the index? Most everything else returns an error, but channels return ok for a second value?

They don't allow generic user types, but didn't even bother to adhere to some standard syntax for specifying the types in the built-in collections. I.E.: chan type, map[type]type, []type Sticking to some kind of system would at least give a preview of what user generics might have looked like. Now if they ever do implement generics they'll have to figure out some crazy system to make the built-in types make sense (or deprecate the old syntax).

There is a lot to like about Go, but I can't help but feel that re: hype, Go is the future MongoDB of PLs (overall I like MongoDB too).

</comment><comment><USER7> Shameless plug: a few friends and myself ported the reference toolchain to Solaris (illumos). We hope to integrate this upstream now that Go 1.2 is released.

<comment><USER8> How'd you get past the split stack not working properly on SP... oh... I guess this means Illumos still isn't running on SPARC yet. ;)

Nice work BTW.

<comment><USER7> When I was involved with illumos development, it did run on SPARC. Don't know the status now. Not many people interested in keeping it alive, I guess.

I'd love the technical challenge in bringing Go to SPARC, but writing a new compiler is significant work. Gccgo works on SPARC, in the meantime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People were also discussing this when the code hit, for those who didn't see that discussion.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818371)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is slightly OT, but I figured this thread is a good pool of Go people =).

What books/resources would you guys recommend for a beginner to learn Go?

I'm coming from a (predominantly) Python background.

I've seen Mark Summerfield's book (he also wrote the the PyQT book and Programming in Python) on Go, which seems pretty good, and I think I'll take a shot at the official tutorial.

Is there anything else you guys would recommend?

Also, is it just me, or is the word "go" hard to search for - I know there's golang, but I'm always worried I'd miss things, if people just use "go" when they write.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://tour.golang.org/](http://tour.golang.org/) \- as you already mentioned.

[https://gobyexample.com/](https://gobyexample.com/) \- a nice resource for beginners.

[http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/go/](http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/go/) \- quite dense but a good overview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's the pull request for switching to 1.2 stable in Docker: [https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/pull/2978](https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/pull/2978)

</comment><comment><USER12> Have the GC issues been resolved yet (particularly on 32 bit)?

<comment><USER13> Not fully, but mostly. See comment 64 of issue 909. [https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=909](https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=909)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's great that cgo now supports C++. I know that it's against Go's philosophy of short compile times, but more than once I had some C++ code that I liked to compile/link with Go code directly.

<comment><USER15> I think it's a good option to have, though some may see code compiled with Go that links to C++ code compiling slowly as the "supposedly fast" Go compilers fault.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is perhaps a silly request: I would love to see a preview of the HTML output of this tool! Is there a page somewhere I could have a look at (really for curiosity more than anything else?)

<comment><USER17> What tool?

<comment><USER18> There's a tool that highlights the code to show which paths are covered by your test suite. (See the other reply for pic.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't see `TextMarshaler` and `TextUnmarshaler` mentioned in `encoding/json` or `encoding/xml` document. Are there any reasons not doing that?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's a documentation omission. Please file an issue: [http://golang.org/issue/new](http://golang.org/issue/new)

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the link. Will do that now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> PR is up for the formula additions to homebrew.

<comment><USER21> And merged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> About test coverage. Is there techniques to exclude code that use the database so we get a higher percentage?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no mechanism for manually excluding code. But you can view the coverage profile in a web browser. We're going to publish a blog post about the new cover tool in a day or two.

<comment><USER22> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The test and coverage features might bring me back to Go.

<comment><USER24> What made you decide to leave?

<comment><USER25> Possibly the lack of test and coverage features that might now bring him back to Go.</comment></comment></comment>


Enqueue costs money now. know any alternatives? - <AUTHOR>

i thought my prayers for a minimal freeware osx audio player were answered when hacker news posted Enqueue (http://www.enqueueapp.com) but today their newest update came with a 1 month trial and $10 ultimatum.
i know $10 isn't much, but the software still has bugs and doesn't strike me as charming with a price tag.
are there any good free minimal audio players for osx out there? <comment><USER2> Use foobar2k via Wine.

This bundle may work, or do it manually if not.

[http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=7726...](http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=77261)

</comment><comment><USER3> We are in a community that tries to sell software and still we find it hard to spend $10 on a software we use everyday.

<comment><USER4> enqueue is very nice looking and seems like a great piece of software but it has bugs and has a lot of free alternatives.

Compare Enqueue to something like fantastical which is much more unique, bug free (AFAIK) and constantly saves me time - an easy $20 purchase that I still feel good about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> SongBird works fine - <http://getsongbird.com/></comment>


How We Built an Online Course That Generated $120,679 in 5 Days - <AUTHOR> https://www.groovehq.com/blog/how-we-built-online-course <comment><USER2> > _" a few weeks ago, we wrapped up the first six-week run."_

> _" We put a lot of work into this course, and while we didn't use any > developer or product team time on it, we tied up our marketing resources for > several months working on it."_

In that case, $120k doesn't seem so impressive unless the company didn't have many productive uses of its marketing team.

</comment><comment><USER3> When there's a gold rush, the money is in selling shovels.</comment>


Strong static typing made easier for web developers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.opalang.org/2012/07/programming-tools-ux-better-type-error.html

<comment><USER2> I am actually slightly tempted to start using Opa for this. Not enough to actually do it, just now, but wow, that's a nice feature. Would that all static type checkers gave error messages at least that useful.

<comment><USER3> It is really a shame that most statically-typed languages with nice type systems have such difficult-to-understand error messages. Sure, after you've been working with them for several months, you start to figure out what they mean. However, when you're starting you do wish that they could be easier to understand.</comment></comment>


How Australia's Gun Control Experiment Worked (2018) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWZcOWAIcPw <comment><USER2> Despite several terrible decisions Prime Minister John Howard made that still hurt, especially contracting away all our natural resources for basically zero profit (unlike Norway and Qatar who are smart) so now Aussies pay double++ for our own natural gas than our export recipients like Japan and India (even after liquefaction and shipping)... the gun buyback program was the very best thing Howard achieved to make Australia fairly safe comparatively on a global scale.

We had a population of approximately 18 Million at the time, and 640,000 guns removed from general circulation.

Good onya Johnnie.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...for 22 years until eventually undone by gun lobbyists.

One big help is that the country is an island with metal detectors guarding their airways.

<comment><USER4> > for 22 years until eventually undone by gun lobbyists

There have been no significant changes to Australia's gun laws that were implemented in 1996.

<comment><USER3> From the post itself at 3:12

"...following years of lobbying by pro-gun groups, Australia's strict gun rules have been eroded and gun numbers are almost back to the same level [as 1996]"

<comment><USER4> To quote that report on which the second article is based:

"While the most important provisions of the NFA remain substantially intact, no jurisdiction fully complies" [1]

But those claims in that article, and the description of them in the video, seem overblown.

I understand the authors are trying to sound an alarm in order to prevent any significant retreat from the positive changes that happened in 1996.

But that's all it is.

There is no claim that Australia's gun ownership or gun violence problems are back to pre-1996 levels and there is no evidence to back such a claim.

If you look at the various statistics on this page [2], the key figures remain substantially lower than their 1996 levels, including _Rate of Civilian Firearm Possession per 100 Population_ and _Number of Licensed Firearm Owners_ , and they have not materially increased in the past 10 years.

We just don't have a gun culture or gun violence problem in Australia. The total number may have risen, but apart from very narrow exceptions, none of them are semiautomatic or automatic, and I gather almost all are for use in farming and pest control on private land (pests including foxes and rabbits are significant problems for farmers in Australia).

Most notably, the rates of gun-related homicides and other fatalities in Australia remain extremely low by world standards [3].

[1] [https://sydney.edu.au/news- opinion/news/2017/10/05/australia...](https://sydney.edu.au/news- opinion/news/2017/10/05/australia-slipping-backwards-on-national-firearms- agreement.html)

[2] [https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_c...](https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_civilian_firearm_possession)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm- related_death_rate)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Listening Room - online group music listening - <AUTHOR> http://listeningroom.fettig.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> Saw some tweets about this and thought it was interesting. Example room where some others are posting tracks: <http://listeningroom.fettig.net/room/therad/></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find small bits of work? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering if anybody would hire a freelance programmer to complete very specific portions of work (coding an engine, a port etc.) or if there is a service that allows you to hire out this sort of work? <comment><USER2> Did you check out Freelancify?

<http://www.freelancify.com/>

I just saw it here on HN, in a startup story link re: learning Ruby on Rails:

[http://www.webstartup.me/learned-ruby-rails-12-weeks- launch-...](http://www.webstartup.me/learned-ruby-rails-12-weeks-launch- freelancify)

</comment><comment><USER3> Freelancity: $900 for a foreign exchange site! Good place for experience, at intern wages, or less.</comment>


The Golden Age of Cord-Cutting Is Over. Now What? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/7/12/20691261/hbo-max-cord-cutting-golden-age-over-new-streaming-services <comment><USER2> I would expect cord-cutting to increase with the addition of more services. More streaming services means more incentive, not less, to cut back on traditional cable tv service, or eliminate it altogether.</comment>


OrientDB becomes Distributed using Hazelcast - <AUTHOR> http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=65313&page=1

<comment><USER2> Wow, the Hazelcast guys came to our office and allowed us to pepper them with all the questions we could. They were smart, open and honest with their answers. I think this is the sign of things to come with some of the jvm targeted libraries who use standard Java collections.

Now if only we could get them to produce a nice Scala version.

<comment><USER3> I've toyed with Hazelcast under Scala. Anything in particular you think it's missing? Is it under-the-covers optimizations you're looking for like serializing case-classes or something more obvious at the API level I just haven't run into with my experiments yet?</comment></comment>


The International Space Station is full of floppy disks - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/22/18107919/international-space-station-floppy-disks-discovery-iss <comment><USER2> Erm... they opened a locker that contained some (nifty but that's beside the point) floppy disks. This is decidedly not what the article title implied at least to me: the ISS is like the Nuclear Command controlling the nuke launching sites with floppy disks.

OT but I still use 3.15" floppies on a weekly basis though, moving things from my Win7 64 to a Win 98 AiO Compaq with a 13" CRT</comment>


Things I Learned in the Gulag - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/12/forty-five-things-i-learned-in-the-gulag <comment><USER4> 30\. I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

This is incredibly consistent with my observations.

Possibly an explanation for the nature of the Founding Fathers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unchecked power is a bad thing to hand to another human being.

</comment><comment><USER6> On a similar note and for anyone interested, I read "Zone 22" recently

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zone-22-Tig- Hague/dp/0718153561](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zone-22-Tig-Hague/dp/0718153561)

It's the story of a UK business man who got caught with a small amount of hashish in his pocket at Moscow airport and ended up spending 4 years in a prison camp.

It makes for a pretty interesting -if grim at times - read.

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxpq1-eqcuo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxpq1-eqcuo) Clouds by Galich. brings up this song for me

Here is a translation of the lyrics: [http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/stalin/d2...](http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/stalin/d2.html)

      The clouds float by, the clouds,
      Without hurrying, like in a film.
      I'm eating chicken tabaka,
      And I've sunk a load of cognac.

      The clouds float off to Abakan [a Gulag area].
      Unhurried they float.
      They're warm, I bet, those clouds,
      But I've been frozen through forever!

      Like a horseshoe I froze into the sleigh tracks,
      Into the ice I was chipping with my pick!
      After all, not for nothing
      I blew away 20 years in those camps.

      I still have that snow crust before my eyes!
      I still have the din of frisking in my ears!
      Hey, bring me a pineapple
      And another 200 g. of cognac!

      The clouds float by, the clouds,
      Floating to Kolyma [a work camp] that dear old place,
      And they don't need a lawyer,
      An amnesty's neither here nor there.

      Me too, I live a first-rate life!
      Twenty years I swapped for one day!
      And I sit in this bar like a lord,
      I've even got some teeth left!

      The clouds float off to the east,
      They've no pension, no worries.
      Me, on the fourth, I get a money order,
      And another on the 23rd.

      And on those days, just like me.
      Half the country sits in the bars!
      And in our memory off to those places
      Float the clouds, the clouds.

Translation taken from Smith, Gerald Stanton. (1984). Songs to Seven Strings: Russian Guitar Poetry and Soviet Mass Song. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 195-196.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone interested in this would do well to read Victor Frankl's _" Man's Search For Meaning"_ about his imprisonment in Auschwitz.[1] He found that a sense of meaning was critical to survival there, and went on to develop a new school of psychotherapy he called "logotherapy", which focused on finding meaning in life.[2]

[1] - [https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor- Frankl/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor- Frankl/dp/080701429X/)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logotherapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logotherapy)

<comment><USER9> I picked this up on a recommendation similar to yours and I now consider it one of the most important books I've read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If anyone wants the original: [https://shalamov.ru/library/29/](https://shalamov.ru/library/29/)

<comment><USER11> Strangely, #5 from the original is missing from the English text:

"5\. I have understood the difference between the prison strengthening character and the camp depraving human soul"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps 7. is one reason for the religious radicalisation thriving in prisons.

</comment><comment><USER13> A good book on prison lessons is Soledad Brother by George Jackson, a black man who was imprisoned in Soledad Prison, California, USA. He was killed by a guard at San Quentin in 1971.

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Jackson_(activist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Jackson_\(activist\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > 44\. I understood that moving from the condition of a prisoner to the > condition of a free man is very difficult, almost impossible without a long > period of amortization.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of Victor Frankl's book, Man's search for meaning. Very profound.

<comment><USER17> Primo Levi wrote three books about his experience at Auschwitz. The last one (The Drowned and the Saved) is centered on the "philosofical" issues.

[https://theorangutanlibrarian.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/grapp...](https://theorangutanlibrarian.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/grappling- with-the-drowned-and-the-saved/)

"Though of a similar nature and sharing the same subject matter (Auschwitz and the Holocaust), Frankl's book is one of the most uplifting reads I've ever experienced. Victor Frankl more than just physically survived the war; Primo Levi on the other hand felt like a different story. Put simply: Levi is the darkness to Frankl's light."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >I understood why prisoners hear political news (arrests, et cetera) before the outside world does.

What does this mean?

<comment><USER19> When someone politically notable gets thrown in the prison system, word of it gets around within the prison communities straight away. The official version released to the press has to go through officials and PR people, and arrives a bit later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > 38\. I realized what a terrible thing is the self-esteem of a boy or a > youth: it's better to steal than to ask. That self-esteem and boastfulness > are what make boys sink to the bottom.

Sounds like start up culture. Move fast and break things. Better to do than to ask permission.

<comment><USER21> Only superficially.

"Better to do than ask permission" long predates startup culture and often holds just as true in large corporations. Especially true in fact, often there's a lot of red tape that people won't bother to enforce if you can present a working solution in the correct manner.

"Move fast and break things" largely means "grow quickly enough that you're breaking stuff", which may or may not be a positive.

Contrast that to choosing to steal another inmate's food instead of asking, because it would be too humiliating to ask or trade. All that's going to do is make you enemies, and reveals an underlying character weakness that will probably hurt you in other ways.

<comment><USER22> I prefer Grace Hopper's version, "It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission."

<comment><USER23> it's very true, but one might add "if you're acting for the general good", not if you're only trying to have fun or disrupt social fabric

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity > in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the > sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests.

I'm curious which religions were represented, and what he meant by "sectarians". Christianity at least would seem to be implied (by "priests") and the fact that this was a Soviet gulag — Christians in particular were strongly persecuted under the USSR. (Perhaps at least partly because they resisted ideological assimilation more strongly than any other groups — even to death and martyrdom in many cases.)

It's also very interesting that military and party members were the first to lose it. No wonder communists feared and/or hated religion — they knew their own ideology couldn't strengthen people or hold them in its grip anywhere near as well.

<comment><USER25> Mostly Russian Orthodox. Sectarians were also russian orthodox but also members of these psuedo-monastic religious orders that were popular at the time.

<comment><USER26> Baptists, pentecostals and other non-traditional denominations are usually termed as sects in Russian/Soviet usage. Old Believers (schismatic Orthodox) would be included too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast > in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

I remember hearing that from some Czech artist -- he said it was very surprising to see that all the civilized culture we have can be wiped out in just two weeks. What's so bad in stealing, lying, raping, murdering for food?

He learned to respect that fragile balance of culture we built over animal human nature.

<comment><USER28> "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy" - Alfred Henry Lewis

<comment><USER29> If you have a 3 year old:

"There is only 1/2 a meal between mankind and anarchy"

<comment><USER30> After reading the article, I needed that laugh. Thanks! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >7\. I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests.

This, to me is the point of religion. We need religion when things are hard and unpredictable. In a world where most things are certain and predictable, religion has no value.

<comment><USER32> > In a world where most things are certain and predictable, religion has no > value.

Not much is predictable in your life.

<comment><USER33> The more white and privileged you are - the more predictable your life is.

<comment><USER34> And then - BAM! You've (or someone from your relatives) got cancer. Or something.

 _\- True, man is mortal, but that is itself only half the evil. The trouble is that man is sometimes suddenly mortal, that 's the tricky part! Basically, he can never say what will happen to him this evening.

'What an idiotic way of putting it..." thought Berlioz, and objected:

\- Certainly, that is an exaggeration. I know more or less exactly what will happen this evening. Of course, if a brick falls on my head on Bronnaya...

\- Bricks are out of the question, - the stranger broke him off sharply, - <USER2> a single brick will ever fall on anybody's head. Under no circumstances, I assure you, does this constitute a threat. You will die a different death.

\- And perhaps you know just which? - inquired Berlioz with the most natural irony, he had clearly been drawn into some kind of absurd conversation, - <USER3> can tell me?

\- Certainly, - responded the stranger. He measured Berlioz with his gaze, as if he were sewing him a suit, and mumbled through his teeth, something like: 'One, two... Mercury in the second house... the moon is down... six - misfortune... evening - seven..." - then he loudly and delightedly proclaimed: - You'll have your head cut off!"_

\- The Master and Margarita. Mikhail Bulgakov.

<comment><USER33> If a rich person's got cancer - he'll be able to pay off his dying and live in acceptable conditions before he passes.

While someone poor would probably end up being unable to pay for his painkillers and dying while praying to his relatives so that someone killed him not to endure his death.

So no, rich people do have a better ability to hedge their risks.

<comment><USER34> This has nothing to do with the initial statement though.

Not to mention that the result is the same anyway.

>live in acceptable conditions before he passes.

And no, this is not as simple as you are trying to picture. Sometimes - yes, you can deal with it this way, in many other scenarios painkillers and other shit is not enough and the only way to stop the suffering is either forced coma or suicide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't know that much about the Soviet Union. This guy was basically sent to prison for 'participating in "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities.' I have been following some leftist stuff and saw this article recently by Trotsky. It is called "Hitler the Pacifist" and starts out "Hitler wants peace." Trotsky didn't seem like that good of a guy, but i haven't read that much about him yet. In any case here is the article:

[https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/11/pacifist.ht...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/11/pacifist.htm)

<comment><USER36> If you know anything about the GULAG, you know that people sent there as "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activists" very often did not have anything to do with counter-revolutionary activist, or Trotsky, or anything. Very often it was just being unlucky, and even then, they strongly believed in the Soviet system, they just thought there was some clerical error, and tried to appeal to higher leader to have those errors fixed - without understanding the point of the Terror.

Most people eventually did understand, of course.

<comment><USER37> And... The point of the Terror was ..?

<comment><USER36> Stalin's regime maintained its citizens in a state of fear and uncertainty to stay in power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > 22\. I saw that women are more decent and self-sacrificing than men

The majority of men love themselves while women love others. Men will sacrifice for themselves. Women will sacrifice for others.

Why? Is it global culture teaching a woman from birth her life is about others? A husband and kids? While teaching men that their value is in their work, their job, their income, their power?

<comment><USER39> If I had to make an admittedly uneducated guess, I bet females being more self-sacrificing than men can be seen across species. It would only make sense that the sex generally responsible for child-rearing would be the sex most likely to self-sacrifice.

I know nowadays, especially in the tech scene, it is frowned upon to suggest intrinsic differences between the sexes and to imply those differences can affect behavior at a statistical level, but with this fascinating historical context, it's an interesting thought.

<comment><USER40> Funny, if anything I'd say it would make more sense for females to be LESS self-sacrificing across species. Surely evolutionarily it is more important that females get enough resources to survive; males should self-sacrifice to enable that. And of course there are also lots of stereotypes about women being selfish, wilful, demanding etc. Not sure the one about them being self- sacrificing is any more true than that.

<comment><USER41> That reasoning might work at a species level, but natural selection acts at a genetic level. I think the idea is that females need to be self-sacrificing to ensure that their offspring (and hence their genes) have a decent chance of survival. Males might devote a certain amount of resources to the same, but it soon becomes more advantageous to go and try to impregnate another female with their genes.

<comment><USER42> I can highly recommend Behavioral evolution and in particular robert sapolsky writings, but to give a summery, a common categorization in behavioral evolution is pair-bonding species vs tournament species.

In tournament species it is the observed strategy of males to devote as little as possible on offspring and to maximize impregnate as many females as possible, while the female strategy is to maximize the gene quality as that is the only contribution to the success that the male gives to the offspring (and the continuation of her genes if one view natural selection to be about the continuation of genes). Males tend to be large then females, and usually evolve disadvantaging traits for survival in favor of traits that increase competitiveness against other males. A typical example would be Elephant seals. Common traits among tournament species is a large difference life expectancy among male and females, and only a short portion of the male population that successfully reproduce.

Pair-bonding species create a balance where both the male and female spend approximation the same amount of energy (resources) on offspring. A big benefit is the extra insurance that two parents provide, and there is a directly associated chance for twins in pair-bonding species. A typical example is most birds who spend approximating similar amount building nest, brooding, collecting food and feeding the offspring. Many people think when they see a bird sitting on eggs that it must be the female, or when one is carrying nest material that it must be the male, but that is just us projecting our culture onto nature.

And to answer the question on where humans fit in this categorization, the answer is somewhere in the middle and it is unclear why we have not settled on a single strategy.

<comment><USER41> Thanks. If I remember rightly this is also touched on in the Selfish Gene, though it's been over a decade since I read that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rich-and-poor

      7. I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a
      minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse
      were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of
      them), and most priests.

      29. Russians' uncontrollable urge to denounce and complain.

A warning for those who loudly denounce Western society as a great tyrannical patriarchy, who wish to replace the old culture. Be wary of complaining, denouncing, secular men and women.

<comment><USER43> Eh, kind of a stretch. Religion is not a purely Western invention, and you're reading what you want to in #29.

<comment> rich-and-poor I admit it is not a precise argument, but eradicating religion & denouncing your nation's culture as a tyrannical, oppressive force were the two major ingredients for the revolution that led to the slaughter of 60 million Russians. The two motivations that led to the communist revolution are alive and well in our present culture.

<comment><USER44> Wheat and gunpowder were also major ingredients in the revolution. The fact that the revolution was anti-religion tells us nothing about the wisdom of being anti-religion, any more than the Crusades tell us about the wisdom of being religious.

<comment><USER45> >The fact that the revolution was anti-religion...

It's more helpful to think of Communism as just another kind of religion.

<comment><USER44> Indeed. The structures are more or less the same, just the names change.

<comment><USER45> It has a lot of the same narrative structures, yes, and there's lots of symbology and people playing the roles of High Priests etc. Of course, so does consumerist Capitalism. The symbology there is just corporate symbology coupled with dogmatic adherence to "free markets".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Let's recall that there are people living these experiences and worse, right this moment, in Gulags in North Korea (and possibly other places I'm not thinking of).

<comment><USER47> One doesn't need to go to NK for that. Modern Russian state still tortures political dissidents in prisons even now. Not in large-scale labor-camps, just because it is not that necessary.

And they still send people to frozen shitholes to fuck them over. ref: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Sentsov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Sentsov)

<comment><USER48> And the re-education camps in China. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/china-re- educatio...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/china-re-education- camps.html)

<comment><USER4> Of course we wouldn't mention CIA black sites, the possibility of more Abu Ghraibs, or even those in the US allowed to be beaten, killed or tortured at the hands of other prisoners, guards, or even police.

<comment><USER24> Communist dictators and other ideological authoritarians in political power (who demand assimilation) are orders of magnitude more murderous and deadly than US torture places, bad as those may be.

<comment><USER4> Yes that's absolutely true. We here in the US are nowhere near as bad as China or Russia, but we better keep an eye on it because we seem to be the exception --something special--in history.

<comment><USER49> The US is pretty bad, if you consider all of the wars from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq, Afghanistan, all,of the CIA activities in South and Central America, the impact of drug prohibition, Racist policing and slavery and de facto slavery via prison labor (and the largest prison population). I think you could strangle a gnat on the different in ruined and lost lives between Russia, China, and America.

<comment><USER24> All that may be bad, but it doesn't hold a candle to Mao Zedong (49-78 million civilians killed) and Josef Stalin (23 million civilians killed).

Hitler himself ranks _third_ behind those two, at 17 million civilians killed.

<comment><USER49> Not as bad as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao... could the bar be any lower? If the only way you compare favorably is considering the greatest mass killers of the last century, that should tell you something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity > in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the > sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests.

I am an atheist and don't need religion to tell me it is wrong to kill another man, or so I've always believed.

This makes me think about the value of religion in our troubled history, and in shaping our culture.

Because would I still be moral if I hadn't eaten for 5 days? I'm not sure.

<comment><USER51> > I am an atheist and don't need religion to tell me it is wrong to kill > another man

You do - but religion can be non-theistic. As an atheist, you nevertheless strive towards ideals that have ultimately no reason but your belief in them... That is religion - it is personal and it does not require supernatural beings.

<comment><USER52> _ideals that have ultimately no reason but your belief in them_

It's a pretty big claim that ethics has "no reason but your belief in it". There are plenty of logical reasons why one would want to behave ethically, even self interest, beyond you simply believing it.

<comment><USER53> That self interest is usually rooted in how society would react to your behavior. So in the end if it's society basing the idea that something is immoral on religion, you're still indirectly basing it on religion.

<comment><USER54> I don't want to defend a naturalistic perspective on morals, which is unfortunately popular nowadays and leads to a lot of immorality, but there _are_ definitely bio-logical reasons for not killing others in your group. Humans are altruistic, group-based apes whose survival depends on collaboration. Originally, this might have been small groups only. Today society is based on the collaboration between (nearly all) nations, because modern technology and labour division would break down entirely within about six weeks without massive global trade and shipping.

There are also some moral principles that follow directly from factual matters, provided some very basic first assumptions are made. Theories of just resource distribution and social justice are of that kind. The principles that get things going are very basic, e.g. reciprocity, generality of moral statements, and fairness in the sense of trade/bargaining/exchange fairness get you very far.

It is a myth that religion provides values, as it can be shown very easily by historical comparison that it never has. The values defended by major religions such as Christianity and Islam have changed over the centuries again and again. Modern Christian values, for instance, mostly come from the enlightenment movement and were not endorsed at all earlier. (Christianity is just an example, AFAIK this is true for all religions.)

Churches and 'holy men' have always had a vested interest in selling their values as a product of their religion, though, and they are very good at selling this false story to the public.

<comment><USER55> I'm curious: What "first assumptions" do refer to as "very basic"?

Also, for the final paragraph: Your theory of religion seems to be based on intelligent design. I think it is more accurate (and less prone to conspiracy theories) to think of the evolution of religious memes in darwinist terms of "natural" selection.

<comment><USER54> The Principle of Reciprocity, the No Harm Principle, and Democratic Power Division.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Kolyma Stories is probably the best book about the reality of communism.

<comment><USER56> It's a one-sided and highly exaggerated view.

<comment><USER57> It's pretty hard to cover whatever the other side is when you're stuck in a prison camp. Not sure in what way it's 'exaggerated', though. The worse stuff, nobody was left to write about.

<comment><USER56> Parent comment was saying that these are the books to read if you want to know life under communist rule. I wanted to say that it's not true. This kind of literature describe only a small part of a life.

Not everybody was living in a prison camp in USSR, not even a majority of the population. This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it supports the western society discourse.

Person who judges life in USSR by these kind of books will have a very skewed opinion.

<comment><USER58> > This kind of literature was funded and promoted by the West because it > supports the western society discourse.

I mean, I'd agree that the material is a thin slice of the society, but come on. These are real personal narratives of people who lived through these experiences. The implication that "the West" is why these books exist, not just why we're able to read them, is absurd.

<comment><USER59> There was real injustice, but it is important to also realize the vast usefulness these narratives had to the West (and in more recent times descriptions of the injustice of Saddam Hussein's Iraq were used in part to justify his overthrow). And conversely, the Soviets published many descriptions of the horrors of the Jim Crow US South for similar reasons.

<comment><USER57> _Soviets published many descriptions of the horrors of the Jim Crow US South for similar reasons._

Can you think of some that weren't, I dunno, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' or Huck Finn? The notion that a survivor's memoir like Shalamov's is some kind of Western plot was absurd in its time and plainly disgusting now.

<comment><USER59> I'm talking about _contemporary_ descriptions of US racism during the Soviet period. Things like lynching of black men because they supposedly looked at a white woman and the murder of civil rights leaders like MLK jr. These obviously were terrible things, but why were they reported in Russian? To make Soviet citizens feel that their land was morally superior. And likewise with Gulag literature in the West. It's easier to complain that your neighbors' house is dirty than to clean your own.

<comment><USER57> _And likewise with Gulag literature in the West._

No no no no no no. How do you jump from one to the other? That's like saying Anne Frank's diary's credibility is tainted by the injustice of the internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MOOCs could be disastrous for students and professors - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/07/moocs_could_be_disastrous_for_students_and_professors.html/#

<comment><USER2> I'm pro-MOOC, but I think he's attacking the wrong straw man. Because the costs are so low, a high drop out rate is fine.

If you want to experiment on a subject in a 30 person live class, the financial and opportunity cost (taking someone else's seat) is high. In a MOOC it's a non issue.

I also think that it's not the current $2700/course teachers that have to be afraid. MOOCs still will require some aspect of human intervention for grading, and there will still be some in-person coursework needed. The people who should be nervous are the current Phd students who want to be tenure track. Future tenure track spots will disappear for everyone who isn't a rock star researcher.

I view the future model as "Anything with an existing body of knowledge will go the way of MOOCs, and live discussion classes will be smaller and focused on subjects that require more debate." This is actually good for the humanities.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Because the costs are so low, a high drop out rate is fine._

Self-education is a different model. It's more fault-tolerant. You fail (as in, don't understand) about 30-50% of the stuff you try-- at least, that's my noncomprehension/loss-of-interest rate when I attack a random-ass paper-- but that's okay, because it just means you fill up the prerequisites and get back to it.

MOOCs are making self-education _much_ easier. With lectures split up into 5- to 10-minute pieces (that's good and bad) you can watch them on the train or even at work. I feel like one place where MOOCs are really going to kill is in corporate training; companies will realize that MOOCs provide resources and (for a fee) people to build their in-house "here's how you use our shit" tutorials better than what's out there in most places. Of course, that will also make it easier for people to use MOOCs at work; I like that, but I'm not sure it's what typical corporate managers want.

College education is based on a different model with a known, fairly static prerequisite graph and a low tolerance of failure-- but failure (even defined as a grade of D or F, and C for in-major) is also pretty rare. College is this packed-tight model (designed for efficiency in time by providing an immersive community) where you get (in theory) what'd be 8-12 years of self-education in 130 weeks spread out over 4 years.

However, the world changes fast enough that this "learn, then earn" model doesn't make any sense. Education has to be more interleaved than it used to be.

Also, 18 years old used to be an adult; but our culture is so incoherent and (I can't find a values-neutral word for it) chaotic that adulthood now is about 24-27. I think college _was_ an extremely efficient educational process when it was full of adults; but now it's full of kids, not because admissions changed but because society did.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to be clear about it, I'm pro-MOOC. However, I think there is an interesting discussion here.</comment>


Over 10 million accounts compromised at Trapster - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworld.com/17690/over_10_million_passwords_possibly_compromised_at_trapster

<comment><USER2> Actual article title: Over 10 million passwords _possibly_ compromised at Trapster

I see you left out "possibly" from the original title to bait people into blindly voting for this. The article states that the company doesn't even know for sure if that data was compromised.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the contrary, compromised means weakened, and security of all accounts was weakened. The original headline was a weasel word.

Bait would have been to say 10M stolen, since they're not saying which or how many were actually taken. But any could have been, meaning all accounts' passwords are to be considered compromised.

<comment><USER2> You know that in the context of that title and the article compromised meant stolen and one of the definitions of 'to compromise' is to breach a security system. Regardless of what the article meant, it's obvious that _your_ edit to the title was intended as vote bait. Otherwise there was no reason to change it as the change was obviously sensationalist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, sensationalist theories aside, I typed in a headline on an iPad long after copying the URL to clipboard in a different app. The omission of the original author's weasel word was unintentional.

No, I do not know that in that context it meant "stolen". That's not the conventional meaning.

I stand by the assertion that compromised means compromised, and that information in that article makes it clear _all_ accounts were compromised (had their security breached), while unknown which individual accounts were stolen.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


This Cat Does Not Exist - <AUTHOR> https://thiscatdoesnotexist.com/ <comment><USER2> But why?</comment>


Most people use R and SQL for data mining (45% and 32%) - <AUTHOR> http://www.kdnuggets.com/2011/08/poll-languages-for-data-mining-analytics.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I wander if this trend is accurate:

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=s|r+programming%2C+matlab+pro...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=s|r+programming%2C+matlab+programming)

Maybe there is a better query</comment>


Ask HN: Please review my new product Tour My App - <AUTHOR>

The pitch: A big challenge for web app developers is quickly engaging their users. Tour My App allows you to add guided in-application tours and messages to your web apps. You can use it to orient new users, highlight new or advanced features, guide users through specific tasks, show guided demos of your app, and more.<p>Link: http://tourmyapp.com <comment><USER2> Very cool idea. You might also want to check out ZURB Joyride ([http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature- tour-p...](http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-tour-plugin)) for more inspiration. A good looking jQuery tour plugin we are using on our product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the hattip! Infact we created tourmyapp mainly because we found such plugins to be inadequate. We envisioned a solution that will make it easy for app developers to add the tour without any coding. Encoding the tour steps in the page in which it needs to be displayed, ties the tour to the build deploy cycle. We wanted to create a solution that would make creating tours and editing them easy so that the marketeer can go ahead and do it without having to depend on the developers. This also helps clean the developers off any additional workload and also helps ultimately keep the code base cleaner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Beautiful idea, something I've wanted to do actually for a long time, I think this can be killer. I want to chat with you guys, I am relaunching my product in a few weeks and can put some decent numbers through your system and would love to utilize the metrics you provide.

me [AT] dchuk.com

<comment><USER3> First thing I've noticed: There's no tour when I first login...kind of a big deal for you guys to throw me into a tour as that is your product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like it, a lot.

Some notes:

* The actual site isn't great. The casual style logo and professional looking site appear to be at odds with each other.

* I'm not keen on the price model. It would make more sense (to me at least) to have a limited number of tours as opposed to tour runs. What happens when I reach my tour run limit? Does the functionality disappear? Do I get charged more?

I do like the product though.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback!

Agreed on the logo, its a stop-gap logo for now. We are in the process of getting it professionally done.

Regards the pricing model, the reason we limit on tour runs is because most SaaS products need a bunch of tours. Maybe one for getting started, another couple for common tasks and so on. Even a tiny app in private beta might need 5-10 tours.

With tour runs, the intention is to segment on traffic: products in private beta or low traffic apps might be on the basic plan. Products that have some more sign ups and some early revenue might fit on the next plan, while higher traffic sites and some steady revenue might fit the third plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This could be very useful. Do you have any other templates or themes for the guide itself available to show off?

<comment><USER5> I've uploaded a screenshot of the inbuilt themes here - <http://tourmyapp.com/archives/260/tour-my-app-theme-gallery>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> looks like a good idea. i could use something like this for native mobile apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> we have been thinking about extending the functionality to mobile apps but i guess its still a long way to go. However if you use phonegap, titanium or something similar, tourmyapp might still work for you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can it guide users across different pages?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes it does guide user across different pages.</comment></comment>


Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://matthiasott.com/articles/into-the-personal-website-verse <comment><USER3> Following on from this excellent article, would other HN users care to share the URLs of their personal webspaces?

Mine is: [http://www.jaruzel.com](http://www.jaruzel.com) (yes, I know it's not SSL'd!)

<comment><USER4> Here's mine: [https://paulstamatiou.com/](https://paulstamatiou.com/)

Been running it since 2005 (and posting mostly regularly.. about 1200+ posts now but the vast majority of that was me posting about tech news back when I had first started it).

It's a mix of tech, design, photography and generally whatever personally interests me at the time from fido2 security keys to NAS storage for my photos and so on. I recently wrote a bit about how I built it: [https://paulstamatiou.com/about-this- website/](https://paulstamatiou.com/about-this-website/)

<comment><USER5> Oh my god, I remember drooling over every iteration of your website back when I was first learning how to code. Glad to see you're still at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just be careful to manage your expectations. This idea won't solve the central problem of the attention economy - low average attention per unit of content. Modern social networks are actually better at that, because they entice people to spend attention on lots of content. Getting hundreds of views on your YouTube video, Facebook status or Medium post is much easier than on your personal site. That's how the "new web" won creator mindshare. The "old web" will keep losing until it finds an answer to that.

<comment><USER7> > getting views

This is the disconnect between the modern commercial web and the real web. Personal sites aren't usually about gettting views, making money, or grabbing attention. Those are profit motives.

Personal sites are about putting something out there you care about. It doesn't matter who, if anyone at all, sees it. It doesn't matter if your site only has 90% uptime. Or if it looks weird and only works in some browsers. The only thing that matters is if you like it.

<comment><USER8> For the most part, yes. The personal site lets you experiment in the way you want to.

But most people will still need some kind of validation to make it feel like they're not just putting information out into a silent, gaping void. You don't have to stoop to Twitter style hot takes to do this, but some acknowledgement from the outside world is still desirable.

Back in the day, there were "guestbooks" you could sign and webrings you could join, linking to other related sites. Blog software had user comments and blogrolls built in from Day 1. Unfortunately spambots and useless pingback notifications killed the discussion sections.

<comment><USER7> Webmentions are pretty cool as is covered in the article under discussion. I recently implemented a static webmentions receiver for my static site and got a pingback implementation as a side effect ([http://superkuh.com/blog/2020-01-10-1.html](http://superkuh.com/blog/2020-01-10-1.html)).

Pingback is old and well known so it gets a lot of spam. But webmention is still new enough it's still useful. Sure, it'll eventually get spammed out to but this is the lifecycle of web-objects. Gotta get use of out them while they're young and not terrible yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think I know why personal websites aren't popular anymore. It's the same reason retro video games aren't as fun as they were when they came out.

What's missing is the context of the time when they were popular. They were new and had a high-tech aura about them.

Nowadays making a website doesn't differentiate you in a good way unless you have a super creative way of coming up with the website and a lot of content to fill it with.

Nowadays you have to take it to the next level. What's a skill that's beyond the reach of most people? This could be why PCB business cards are so appealing. Because it's a thing most people can't do and if you can do it it shows your technical prowess. I think that's my personal web pages were popular back then and why they won't ever be popular again.

<comment><USER10> You are probably onto something with this train of thought. I had an Angelfire website when I was 17 in the 90's. All my friends were blown away by my terrible design and color choices because they weren't on the web. Putting something accessible by the entire world out there seemed like magic to them. The web in general felt much more magical then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love this article, and that people are leaving their own sites below - <USER2> food for my RSS reader!

Here's mine: [https://jamiesnotes.com](https://jamiesnotes.com)

<comment><USER12> > Email status: 2 unread.

Love this! Although the response rate of people online is extraordinarily high, it's nice to get an extra datapoint about whether you're buried in emails right now and to not expect a response right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The author is right, one day, all these services will be gone, unless you control a domain name and self publish, you are risking a lot.

<comment><USER14> I'm not convinced that owning a domain name is that reliable. Facebook is less likely to let their registration lapse in the next 30 years than I am.

<comment><USER15> But nothing guarantees that the content you want to stay on Facebook will still be there in 30 years. You have total control on your own domain, not on theirs.

<comment><USER13> If Facebook is still around in 30 years, I'll buy you a pint!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The first step of this is to explore more ways to establish new and > strengthen existing connections – and also to improve findability. We don't > have to reinvent everything from scratch but can build on so much that > already exists.

I use ActivityPub as both the broadcasting mechanism and the mechanism to obtain comments for my personal site. It also allows people to follow my account on my blog from the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc).

So far, not much engagement (mostly my fault for not posting too much). But a working proof of concept. It isn't easy to do though, and I skipped all the other tech to do the AP support first (webmentions, rss/atom).

<comment><USER17> Could you explain a bit more about how you implemented it? Can you share your website to see how it actually looks like?

I've read a lot recently about the Activity Pub protocol and I've been following Mastodon / Pleroma for a while but never really made the jump

<comment><USER16> Sure, see:

[https://cjslep.com/c/blog/this-blog-is- federated](https://cjslep.com/c/blog/this-blog-is-federated)

It's pretty bare bones and has had significant downtime due to Mastodon spamming "account Deleted" activities, which would crash my little server. I hope I have now fixed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone else remember "web rings" from the 1990's?

<comment><USER11> Yes. There are a few smaller webrings about, but blog discovery is a problem unsolved.

<comment><USER19> Here's a list of several including an "IndieWeb Ring" that was started in the last two years that features personal websites: [https://indieweb.org/webring](https://indieweb.org/webring)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great article. I have thought a lot about personal websites and the lack of any built-in "social" aspect. Comments, forums, guestbooks, webrings, topsites, etc. all used to be commonplace, and these have all but disappeared as social networks have risen.

I am not sure that any of these ideas themselves will make a comeback, but a remix of them might fill some gaps that exist today, especially with discovery.

My attempt at a social discovery network of sorts, for content websites: [https://cruton.app](https://cruton.app)

It's a Reddit-style presentation, but instead of votes, it ranks URLs purely on traffic and qualitative metrics. Add it to your site if you want to help me test it out and improve it :)

</comment><comment><USER21> My personal site is for the archival of early iOS stuff (iOS 1.x apps pre dating the AppStore and what not) as well as some forks and new software [http://lexploit.com](http://lexploit.com) . Purposely 90s in style.

</comment><comment><USER22> In the feed reader section of the article, he mentions an RSS reader, Feediary, which is already dead only months after he wrote about it: [https://feediary.com/posts/2019-09-02-goodbye/](https://feediary.com/posts/2019-09-02-goodbye/)

Since the demise of Google Reader, I've never found an RSS reader I'm entirely happy with. I hope someone does more to update the concept, perhaps with additional support for the Fediverse to fully use the features of projects like WriteFreely [https://writefreely.org/](https://writefreely.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> My personal site is where I review music I like. Good opportunity to practice design ideas that wouldn't otherwise find its way into my work-related material.

[http://fuzzcrush.xyz](http://fuzzcrush.xyz)

Yes, there's no SSL.

</comment><comment><USER23> Great article. Brings back many good memories.

I blog about tango music, which probably won't be of any interest to this crowd. [https://tomaskohl.com/tango](https://tomaskohl.com/tango).

Planning to start a more techy blog, and looking at static code generators. Too many of them! :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Just restarted mine recently with new content brewing now. [https://blog.dianazink.com](https://blog.dianazink.com) Old one was DMOZ listed so it points to my biggest project [https://www.dreamlist.com](https://www.dreamlist.com)

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a personal website at [https://matansilver.com](https://matansilver.com)

At some point I'd like to spend some time building out a larger body of writing to post, maybe a gist-like snippet list.

</comment><comment><USER26> My web projects: [https://gelform.com](https://gelform.com)

My music reviews and podcast: [https://BassTourist.com](https://BassTourist.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> [http://shitmyself.com/](http://shitmyself.com/)

no HTTPS

compatible with every browser you can throw at it

</comment><comment><USER28> My website is: [https://luord.com](https://luord.com)

Really need to write a new post, I just can't think of what about.</comment>


How wise are crowds? - <AUTHOR> http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/crowd-wisdom-1115

<comment><USER2> If you want a real world example of this.

There is a phenomenon in finance called Post Earnings Announcement Drift ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-earnings- announcement_drif...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-earnings- announcement_drift)), meaning there is a tendency for companies to move too much or too little after announcing their earnings and their price eventually snaps back to a more suitable price.

I spent the better part of 3 months trying all sorts of models to figure out how to trade this.

The most profitable model I could come up with....

Take each analysts who follows the company, rank them by their previous historical success at predicting earnings and then weight each analysts' estimate by the analysts rank.

This grade 8 level math beat out my "fancy" regression models.

I was pretty humbled by that discovery:)

Hopefully my blunder can save someone else here 3 months of their life:)

 __The only caveat to this is, beware of crowds when guessing costs nothing. When you get free guesses then the results can become useless very quickly. __

The analysts rankings work as a financial analyst has exactly one currency, their reputation for predicting earnings. When this goes, so does their job:)

<comment><USER3> What do you think of Estimize (crowd sourced estimation)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just want to start off any discussion of this with an accurate understanding of Surowiecki's catchphrase.

"The wisdom of crowds" doesn't refer to a general tendency for large groups of people to be right about anything, under any circumstances. It refers to the fact that crowds with market-like dynamics tend to be surprisingly good at ascertaining information accurately.

It suggests that the whole converging-on-the-right-price aspect of markets might be a specific instance of a more general phenomenon. For instance, gamblers are also quite good at assessing probabilities, and when country fairs hold competitions to see who can guess the weight of a cow, the guesses tend to cluster around the correct answer.

Obviously, as with anything related to economics, there are a ton of caveats, and people who don't understand the phrase's intent have misused it wildly.

<comment><USER5> > For instance, gamblers are also quite good at assessing probabilities, and > when country fairs hold competitions to see who can guess the weight of a > cow, the guesses tend to cluster around the correct answer.

Does each guess submission cost money? If so, then that's a pretty standard market. People who know more about cow weights are more likely to spend money because they have more to gain. Of course, even with free tickets, it could just be that people at rural fairs know a reasonable amount about cow weights.

<comment><USER6> Under the right circumstances, prediction markets can work surprisingly well even when no money is involved and even when not all the participants are expert. Of course, there needs to be some expertise/information in the group. Random picks aren't going to converge on the right answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are they saying? Can somebody explain like I'm 5?

"the idea that aggregating or averaging the imperfect, distributed knowledge of a large group of people can often yield better information than canvassing expert opinion."

What? Often? If I have a pain in my lower right abdomen and I poll the human population, I'm going to get a better answer than a doctor?

If I poll the human population about a physics problem, I'm going to get a better answer than a physicist?

"But as Surowiecki himself, and many commentators on his book, have pointed out, circumstances can conspire to undermine the wisdom of crowds. In particular, if a handful of people in a population exert an excessive influence on those around them, a "herding" instinct can kick in, and people will rally around an idea that could turn out to be wrong."

Conspire? Undermine the wisdom? Wow...

So when somebody realized blood-letting wasn't helping, I guess those folk 'conspired' to 'exert an excessive influence on those around them' until a 'herding instinct' kicked in...

 _Brain explodes from the stupidity_

When it's wrong, somebody conspired, when it's right, oh, well, don't mention that it's the exact same process.

<comment><USER6> As tessierashpool notes, it's not a statement that a random bunch of people will always give a better answer than an expert, especially if that expert knows the correct answer with high confidence. Rather, it's an observation that crowds who know something about the question being asked will often do better than experts who are also "guessing."

It requires a particular set of circumstances and tends to be most associated with people independently guessing numbers about things they can hazard an intelligent guess about.

<comment><USER7> "It's an observation that crowds who know something about the question being asked will often do better than experts who are also 'guessing.'"

Can you give some examples of this? I don't think that works at all. If you ask me and 100 strangers about programming, I'll do better than 100 strangers every time. Unless one of them is a better programmer than me and has the authority to convince the others that they should listen to him/her OR! they work together to solve the problem. In which case um yeah.

So either way it boils down to 2 groups of experts, not the crowd.

The 'particular set of circumstances' are not well defined in the article from what I can tell - which renders the whole thing worthless doesn't it?

It's like saying it is going to rain. When? Well, under a particular set of circumstances it will. lol :)

When it comes to guessing numbers - there are no experts, so who is the crowd's opinion better than? I still feel like I'm 5 and not getting it.

<comment><USER6> I'll give you one very specific example from data that I crunched myself.

A friend of mine has run an Oscar contest for about 25 years.

Everybody picks their choices in the usual manner. In addition, he has a score for "consensus"\--which is a virtual contestant which predicts each category winner based on the most popular pick. For example, if 30 people picked Birdman and 20 picked Boyhood, consensus would pick Birdman.

Here's the thing. A few people usually beat consensus in a given year. However, over the course of 25 years, no single person has a better average score than consensus and, in fact, not even a small panel of those who (retrospectively) were the best pickers do.

As others have said, in contests like how many jellybeans are in a jar, the median or mean tends to do better than the vast majority of individuals as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I remember correctly, the book also described another phenomenon where if the guessers were allowed to see everyone else's guesses, there was a good chance that everyone else would end up guessing closer to what the first few people guessed. This decreased the accuracy of the crowd because it placed higher weight on the first couple guesses and removed most of the variance in the guesses resulting in decreased accuracy.

</comment><comment><USER9> My finance professor told my class a story about his wife and himself were at a fair and encountered one of those games where you have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. His wife has a consulting background while he has a background in finance. She observed the jar, tried counting the number of jelly beans on the bottom and extrapolating an estimate from those values. He, on the other hand, just looked through the first couple of cards others had turned in and picked a number that seemed in line with the estimations of others.

He got closer to the actual value.

The wisdom of crowds approach is alive and well in finance. For better or worse, the wisdom of the crowds approach allows an analysis with much less work than the engineering approach. But more importantly, it serves as a type of defense mechanism to the person making the actual prediction especially if he has no skin in the game. If you're way off, at least you're in good company. Okay for counting jelly beans, but it has a potential of being disastrous in other situations.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well that's a relief. I only read that article as I've usually relied on a "wisdom of the crowds" approach to large decisions. I tend to reach out to a number of people inside and outside of my immediate "herd" and then aggregate their opinions to help influence my own.

Had I just learned that the wisdom of the crowds was not a thing I would have had to seriously re-evaluate my life!

</comment><comment><USER11> > For instance, he says, if you notice that a Chinese restaurant in your > neighborhood is always half-empty, and a nearby Indian restaurant is always > crowded, then information about what percentages of people prefer Chinese or > Indian food will tell you which restaurant, if either, is of above-average > or below-average quality.

The situation described here wouldn't tell you anything about the quality of the restaurants. It _might_ tell you what kind of food that neighborhood prefers. It _might_ tell you which restaurant is more affordable. It _might_ tell you which restaurant has a better public image. Or maybe it just tells you which restaurant is renting out its parking lot to a nearby car repair shop. To wit, quality cannot be determined by observing human behavior. Quality is determined exclusively by predefined parameters. Loudness, brightness, velocity, purity, etc., are measures of quality. In other words, quality is antipodal to popularity. Every human relation to an object, such as cost, availability, relevance, etc., has priority over quality at all times. It is even more accurate to say that quality is never a direct factor in choice. A person does not choose a knife, for example, because it is sharper than other knives; a person chooses the knife because it is _sharp enough_ to meet their needs and, more importantly, because it is accessible to them. The only exception is the case where a person seeks out the highest quality option for the sake of quality itself, i.e. "I want to find the sharpest knife in the world." In this exceptional scenario, however, one learns nothing by studying the quality-seeking crowd that could not have been learned by simply measuring and comparing objects, i.e. it is much easier to find the sharpest knife by measuring knives for sharpness than by trying to determine which humans buy knives strictly because they are sharper than the alternatives (in such a case you would still have to measure the knives to confirm any conclusions you came to). All of this being said, I can't believe people at MIT studying human behavior would make such an absurd analogy. It indicates a complete misunderstanding of not only human beings but of logic as well.

<comment><USER12> Yes, in theory, theory is more accurate that practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> However, this model assumes that the people are actually sincerely trying to help you. In practice, any use of the wisdom of crowds really boils down to dealing with abuse/trolls/spam.

</comment><comment><USER14> Original paper (since the link in the story is broken):

[http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~ilobel/bayesian-learning- social-...](http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~ilobel/bayesian-learning-social- networks.pdf)

<comment><USER15> I see this paper is 8 years old..

<comment><USER14> The story is from 2010, the same year the paper was finally published.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone remember the name of the wise crowd app that just launched in beta? It's a GUI interface that let's groups pick things like basketball game results or the oscars?

</comment><comment><USER15> Does this article contain the name of the paper?</comment>