The Secret History of Kim Jung Il -- written by one of his high school teachers - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2008/08/12/the_secret_history_of_kim_jong_il?hidecomments=yes&page=full <comment><USER2> "Even today, long after becoming the sole supreme leader of North Korea, Kim refuses to allow graduates of the Namsan School in his inner circle. After all, those who have known Kim Jong Il since youth are bound to see him as human -- not the center of a god-like cult of personality."

In the new Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson quotes Steve on why he didn't let his parents come to his school's campus: "I didn't want anyone to know I had parents. I wanted to be like an orphan who had bummed around the country on trains and just arrived out of nowhere, with no roots, no connections, no background."

Interesting how powerful people manipulate the story of how they got to be where they are. Speaking of which, I was raised by wolves.

<comment><USER3> > _I didn't want anyone to know I had parents._

As anyone who is the parents of teenagers can tell you: That describes pretty much describes a large fraction of that age group.

There is a psychological growth phase which involves separation, and that is one manifestation.

<comment><USER4> "There is a psychological growth phase which involves separation, and that is one manifestation."

I wonder if this phase is actually about teen social structures and hierarchies as they've developed in Western countries. I'm reminded of something pg wrote in "Why Nerds Are Unpopular:" <http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html> :

 _I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy._

So I wonder if a large fraction of the age group want to reject their parents because of the way they've been raised and schooled.

You obviously didn't argue that this phase is universal, but I still find the idea interesting.

<comment><USER5> Historically most people had "adult" responsibilities much earlier than they do today. At 13 or 14 many people were done with formal schooling and either working at farming, learning a trade or "seeking their fortune." They didn't have time to sit around wondering about the meaning of it all.

<comment><USER6> Partly due to lifespan expectancy ages ago, that was even when they were getting married.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I found the article to be an interesting read but I wish that someone could talk about the psychology, history behind why the country became that way instead of just finger pointing on how terrible the conditions were. While its difficult to feel any empathy towards a manipulative, despotic, authoritarian regime, I also think that most westerners misunderstand and underestimate the people and their situation.

The NK brand of communism is just a thin veil for the old dynastic feudal caste society that Korea traditionally was. This is just how the country was for over 2 millennia. The north, especially due to its easily defensible mountainous terrain, has always played a pivotal role in keeping larger more powerful threats from absorbing the whole. Considering its history it sheds some light into understanding their extreme xenophobia.

Westerners always raise the question, why don't the people rise up against the injustice? This is a culture steeped in confucianism, the patriarch is supreme and group cohesion and harmony is of higher importance than the needs of an individual. Even linguistically, social order is embedded into the language with many different levels of honorifics for different rank and class.

A little off-topic but just my 2 cents.

The Caste System: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Korean_caste_system>

<comment><USER8> _Westerners always raise the question, why don't the people rise up against the injustice?_

I think this is a fascinating question, but one that's not tied up in culture at all. It's not just the Koreans and Chinese that have succumbed to this, but also the Russians, Germans, Yugoslavs, and South Americans that I can't name.

In any case, your reference to linguistic differences probably doesn't hold up.

\- - - Quote [1]

Whorf presents a moving target, with most of his claims coming in both extreme and in more cautious forms. Debate continues about his considered views, but there is little doubt that his bolder claims, unimpeded by caveats or qualifications, were better suited to captivate his readers than more timid claims would have been.

When languages are similar, Whorf tells us, there is little likelihood of dramatic cognitive differences. But languages that differ markedly from English and other Western European languages (which Whorf calls, collectively, "Standard Average European" or SAE) often do lead their speakers to have very different worldviews.

\- - - End Quote

and also

\- - - Quote [2]

...the strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that language determines thought, is also thought to be incorrect. ...

Among the most frequently cited examples of linguistic determinism is Whorf's study of the language of the Inuit people, who were thought to have numerous words for snow. He argues that this modifies the world view of the Eskimo, creating a different mode of existence for them than, for instance, a speaker of English. The notion that Arctic people have an unusually large number of words for snow has been shown to be false by linguist Geoffrey Pullum; in an essay titled "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax", he tracks down the origin of the story, ultimately attributing it largely to Whorf and suggesting the triviality of Whorf's observations.

... A recent study by Peter Gordon examines the language of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil. According to Gordon, the language used by this tribe only contains three counting words: one, two and many. Gordon shows through a series of experiments that the people of the Pirahã tribe have difficulty recounting numbers higher than three (Gordon, 2004). However, the causal relationship of these events is not clear. Critics have argued that if the test subjects are unable to count numbers higher than three for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. Moreover, a more recent study suggests that the Pirahã have a basic understanding of geometry despite their language.

\- - - End Quote

[1] [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement2.htm...](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement2.html)

[2] <http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis>

<comment><USER9> > I think this is a fascinating question, but one that's not tied up in > culture at all. It's not just the Koreans and Chinese that have succumbed to > this, but also the Russians, Germans, Yugoslavs, and South Americans that I > can't name.

That's probably because you need to study more history.

Taking the past 200 years in Russia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_cri...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_crisis) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat_attempt) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_1905> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_II_of_Russia#Assassin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_II_of_Russia#Assassination_attempts) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decembrist_Revolt>

That's just the largest, most-well known events.

It would also help to know a bit about current events (NazBols/Other Russia protests, the Caucus wars going on for the past 10 years, etc.).

By Germans I assume you're referencing Nazis. Where was the Nazi injustice for the _Germans_? Given how much ordinary Germans profited ([http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Beneficiaries-Plunder- Racial-W...](http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Beneficiaries-Plunder-Racial- Welfare/dp/0805087265/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1324446434&sr=8-4)), it's surprising more of them didn't support the Nazi party.

<comment><USER8> > That's just the largest, most-well known events.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The fact is that all of those nations I listed have, at one point or another, knuckled under (collectively, if not in the case of every individual) to a despotic government. There's no question that the Russians were cowed to the point that they were afraid to protest, for fear of being ratted out by their neighbors.

Are you trying to say that because _some_ people protested, it's a different story? I that doesn't wash. For every one that stood up, countless people were ground down (e.g., accused of being "Kulaks"[1] or "wreckers" [2]), sent to the Gulags.

> Where was the Nazi injustice for the Germans?

It was positively rampant. If you didn't toe the party line, you were doomed. See, for example, _Defying Hitler_ , by Sebastian Haffner [3]. Quote regarding the latter [4]:

 _The book is carried forward by waves of contempt and disgust — for the Nazis; for the people who believed them; for those who didn't, yet failed to do anything to stop them; and for the German character itself — but reason is the source of its passion. ...

The question that always springs from accounts of Hitler's Germany is "Why didn't the Germans resist?" Some of the reasons have long been obvious. There is a natural human instinct for survival, however odious the forms it takes or the lengths it may go to.

...Haffner takes it for granted that Germans knew about the brutality of Nazi rule — brutality that, logically, would only increase as the state consolidated its power — and that they lacked the will to resist it.

...

If by now the incidents that follow are familiar — the intimidation, the erosion of press freedom, violence in the streets, people fleeing or attempting to flee — it's their novelty to Haffner that carries the book, the distorting mirror effect of the degradation of the ideas of freedom and individuality that should be the very stuff of everyday life. And at the book's end (Haffner never finished writing it), Haffner sees how easy it is to get swept up in the spirit that was taking over Germany.

It's announced that all law candidates (including Haffner) must, before taking their final exams, attend training camps for ideological indoctrination and to perform military exercises. Haffner goes off with trepidation, determined to keep to himself lest he reveal his true political beliefs..._

Perhaps we're having different conversations here...

EDIT: Added some citations. Upon re-reading the thread, I do think we're viewing this differently. I believe that your point is that _some_ people, maybe many people, did protest. My point, however, is that most people knuckled under. The questions "why did some people stand up for themselves?", and "why were most people cowed?" are both worthwhile, but distinct.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulaks>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_(Soviet_crime)>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Haffner>

[4] <http://www.salon.com/2002/09/03/haffner/>

<comment><USER9> Yes, we are viewing things very differently. You're pretending that huge groups of people spread out over vast distances in different circumstances all act the same, just because you can assign a convenient label to them ("Russians", "Germans" etc.) and do not know about the internal processes of the government. "The People vs The System". This is not how history works, and it is a mistake to view it as such. Manuel de Landa calls this historical fallacy "reifying generalities" (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZUotjDvJyM>)

To take an example from your reply, what is the "party line"? Forget about Rohm vs Hitler - Goring, Himmler, Speer, top Wehrmacht officers, etc., etc. - they all had different ideas that resulted in different policies in different times.

I don't understand your counter-argument re Germany. I said that most people had absolutely no motivation to go against the Nazis because they were benefiting from their rule. It makes no sense to say that they were afraid of defying Hitler, because defying Hitler is something that never occurred to them as a logical or possible course of action in the first place. Just like stabbing yourself in the eye with a fork doesn't occur to you over dinner.

"Most people" don't care about minorities like Haffner. Look at the immigration issue in the US today. In fact, people use the same logic as you have to question "why is nobody resisting Obama?"

<comment><USER8> _You're pretending that huge groups of people spread out over vast distances in different circumstances all act the same, just because you can assign a convenient label to them ("Russians", "Germans" etc.) and do not know about the internal processes of the government. "The People vs The System". This is not how history works, and it is a mistake to view it as such._

Not at all. I'm recognizing that huge groups of people spread out over vast distances in _similar_ circumstances, _forced upon them_ , each individually decides that surviving by going along is the correct decision. If you don't mind, I'd like to switch this part of the discussion from Germany to China, just because I know the details much better.

Of course the experience of every individual is different. Some are farmers, some are urban, some are wealthy and some are poor. Central to my point is the fact that at some point in time, despots have put the same shackles onto all of these people (other than their chosen supporters). If you were in China during the Cultural Revolution, it didn't make very much difference whether you lived in Shanghai or in the mountains somewhere. Every person in that vast nation (one made up of many different cultures, it's worth pointing out) was forced to submit to Party Rule.

That submission involved performing the actions that you were told (down to performing a ridiculous dance in honor of Mao), saying the things you were told to say. Above all, you needed to avoid any appearance that you were not another person struggling for Communist progress. Because others needed to prove their own allegiance, you always needed to take pains not to allow the slightest excuse to be denounced.

It's absolutely legitimate to generalize the experience of these people. I've concluded this not just from reading history books, but from intimate conversations with dozens of people who actually experienced it (and hence, no citations you can look up; sorry). So I can assure you that in at least the Chinese case, I'm not generalizing from crappy books: I'm getting the story directly from a diverse group of first-person observers.

It didn't matter that there was other politics going on with Jiang Qing, or that the movement itself was a maneuver to consolidate power over other officials like Deng Xiaoping. The fact that those other people in positions of power had their own interests was of absolutely no concern to the Chinese masses. There was, indeed, a single party line that everyone must follow.

Getting back to Germany...

I have less in the way of first-person reports from those fleeing Germany. Honestly, I can only think of one non-Jewish person (if you want to leave them out of the discussion for some reason) meeting the description. But in my conversations with him, he makes it clear that pre-war Germany was not a nice place to live.

So I don't think I'm guilty of reifying generalities, when so much of what I'm think is coming not from generalities, but from individual specifics delivered by the actual participants.

 _I don't understand your counter-argument re Germany. I said that most people had absolutely no motivation to go against the Nazis because they were benefiting from their rule._

This is simply false. In some ways the people did benefit from Nazi rule. The chaos of Weimar hyperinflation was checked, they had renewed nationalistic pride. But there are countless reasons for Germans to be motivated to oppose the Nazis. But, for example, the economic success came at the price of throwing women out of work, and requiring men to perform national service. Later in the '30s it became mandatory for Aryan young people to join the Hitler Youth. And, of course, there's the simple moral objection to seeing one's neighbors -- the Jews, Communists, homosexuals, etc. -- treated so badly. There were innumerable reasons for Germans to dislike Nazi rule.

 _"Most people" don't care about minorities like Haffner. Look at the immigration issue in the US today._

Are you saying that the widespread anti-immigration sentiment in the USA shows that people don't care about minorities? If so, I find that difficult to believe. I see little evidence that many people object to those racial minorities that already live and work with us here in America. The objection appears to me to be more related to (a) economic ignorance and the belief that immigrants steal jobs, etc.; (b) the opportunity for abuse of the welfare system; and (c) the incorrect belief that immigrants, not having achieved stability, are more likely to commit crimes.

To tell you the truth, I grudgingly half-agree with you that most people don't care about minorities, at least here today in the USA. While most people give lip service to ideas like universal human rights, that seems to be little more than hot air. If people really believed it, there would be much less grumbling about free trade, outsourcing jobs and manufacturing, etc.

 _In fact, people use the same logic as you have to question "why is nobody resisting Obama?"_

I'm having trouble reading this in the same context as your comments about immigration and minorities, since I don't see that Obama has done very much with the status quo in those areas.

Perhaps you mean that sentence to stand on its own, in which case I agree with you (and would also agree with you had you applied the same question to GWB). Indeed, a more generalized writing of that question is what I'm trying to ask. And I can provide generalities of an answer, regarding the relative values and risks to the individual's utility function overall. But I'm interested in more specifics, about where the lines between abstract values and material values get drawn.

<comment><USER9> > Are you saying that the widespread anti-immigration sentiment in the USA > shows that people don't care about minorities? If so, I find that difficult > to believe. I see little evidence that many people object to those racial > minorities that already live and work with us here in America. The objection > appears to me to be more related to (a) economic ignorance and the belief > that immigrants steal jobs, etc.; (b) the opportunity for abuse of the > welfare system; and (c) the incorrect belief that immigrants, not having > achieved stability, are more likely to commit crimes.

Let me put that into perspective for you:

Are you saying that the widespread anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany shows that people don't care about minorities? If so, I find that difficult to believe. I see little evidence that many people object to those French and Slavic minorities that already live and work with us here in Germany. The objection appears to me to be more related to (a) economic ignorance and the belief that Jews steal jobs, etc.; (b) the opportunity for abuse of the banking system; and (c) the incorrect belief that Jews, not having achieved stability, are more likely to commit crimes.

> I'm having trouble reading this in the same context as your comments about > immigration and minorities, since I don't see that Obama has done very much > with the status quo in those areas.

No, but a lot of freedom-loving concerned citizens still want their country black, errm, back: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkmxTIUq4L0> Cheers to them for standing up to oppression.

> But I'm interested in more specifics, about where the lines between abstract > values and material values get drawn.

Again, let's put things into perspective with a personal example. Why are you not at #OccupyWhatever right now? (check one or more):

* the current system works ok

* I'm too busy

* all the #Occupy people are stupid hippies

* it's not going to change anything

* don't want to get maced/arrested

* I have a job to go to/kids to feed

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you found this at all interesting, I would highly recommend watching the Vice Guide to North Korea - [http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to- travel/vice-guide-to-n...](http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice- guide-to-north-korea-1-of-3)

<comment><USER11> I would recommend _not_ watching the Vice Guide to North Korea. That series is more about Vice (which I've read and enjoyed for over a decade and otherwise recommend), using North Korea and their preconceptions to show themselves off, than about North Korea (though North Korea does show through). Yes, the place is weird, but Vice sensationalizes it out of proportion and shows themselves off. Great for Vice, but at the expense of understanding.

My bibliography -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-bibliography> \-- has many sources more valuable for learning about North Korea. I found the New Yorker pieces particularly valuable, as well as the work by Barbara Demick.

I blogged extensively on North Korea since my visit there -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/category/northkorea>. My goal is to promote understanding, not to sensationalize. I've gotten good reviews on

\- My series on North Korean strategy --<http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea- strategy-preview>

\- My series on playing in the first ever Ultimate Frisbee tournament and about sport in creating bonds -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/ultimate-frisbee- north-korea-part-1>

To Vice's credit, their recent series on exploring the North Korean logging camps in Siberia is more mature, though is outside North Korea.

<comment><USER12> That was a great bibliography + blog about NK.

<comment><USER11> Thanks!

Please also see [http://www.flickr.com/photos/josephferris76/sets/72157627450...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/josephferris76/sets/72157627450542765) for _stunning_ pictures of our trip there.

Joseph is an amazing photographer. We found by treating our guides well, we got great access (as opposed to Vice's condescension).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That guy strikes me as "Bridge on the River Kwai" - happens to be rarely well educated in a crippling environment and knows the "leader" is not a good person but to hell with that he is going to do his job as good as possible even if it means his own destruction and furtherment of the enemy standing right in front of him.

Evil dictators are evil - so are all the people that do their little part to help him because they cannot find anything wrong with doing their little job as best they can.

But so is a mindless military in ANY country who sign on to take directions to kill other people at the behest of a single leader that they aren't supposed to question.

</comment><comment><USER14> That's an interesting and a well-written story. But yet, I find his "I pray for Kim Jong", "I don't want him to meet a tragic end" et al. a bit strange.

I don't know, it seems like denial and rationalization. A dictator got his family killed(possibly tortured before killing them), there is nothing he can do about it, so he is trying to find solace by believing he doesn't want Kim Jong Il hurt; and to justify why he thinks so, he is imagining good and innocence, when none exists.

He is well aware of things Kim Jong Il did to his family and common masses, and yet he is trying to imagine good in him - I can't find a rational explanation for his line of reasoning.

<comment><USER15> Because in the end, him meeting a tragic end all to appease the author's anger does no good. While if Kim Jong can open up it would have a larger and more positive impact. Just a matter of trying to break the cycle of violence.

<comment><USER16> > Just a matter of trying to break the cycle of violence.

What "cycle of violence"? Hasn't North Korea been run brutally by the same family for 50+ years? _That_ is what needs to be broken, and it's far more likely to come to an end in a violent/tragic downfall than in a peaceful handover of power to his son.

<comment><USER17> In this case the 'cycle of violence' goes back thousands of years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a computer science student, I don't really have time to read as much material unrelated to Computer Science as I would like, so this was quite a treat. Thanks for bravely humanizing Kim Jung Il and North Korea, and reminding us why we need to change the world, Mr. Kim Hyun Sik (author).

<comment><USER19> "As a computer science student, I _don't really have time_ to read as much material unrelated to Computer Science as I would like..."

I was a CS student who had a very alike mindset and I regret that. In hindsight I wish I had not let the "being a CS student" mentality serve as an excuse in my lack of literacy in other important subjects.

<comment><USER18> It's more like having to take 19 credits a semester to graduate within my budget and working 20+ hours a week does not leave me much time for unassigned reading, but I will take that suggestion to heart whenever possible (hopefully during this winter break).

<comment><USER20> Take an hour a day to read some news, the articles are typically short enough that it's more "relaxation" than "work", and after a while you're caught up enough on the context to understand the significance of stories and to put on your critical thinking cap and notice agendas once in a while.

<comment><USER21> Read _good_ newspapers, critically. Seek out good writing of views you disagree with.

When you start asking questions the articles don't answer, shift time and attention into books in the core subject. Even the best journalism doesn't go anything like deep enough. Your understanding should reach a point where an hour a day in newspapers is like taking a long walk to train for a marathon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here is a (long) story about an American who lived in SK who got a chance to go to NK. It's an incredible read and well worth the time. His interactions with NK citizens and his gov't minder are really eye opening.

<http://www.1stopkorea.com/index.htm?nk-trip1.htm~mainframe>

I don't know about you guys, but reading his story is really sad. It's like a whole country, with limitless human potential, is developmentally frozen.

<comment><USER22> Probably one of this best parts of this story was when he visited a shrine to the Great Leader:

"The next room contained more gifts from the South, including a Hyundai Grandeur donated by the former chairman of Hyundai (whose family is originally from the North). Mr. Huk asked me if I had ever seen one of these cars during my time in the South. When I said, "sure, my neighbor has one just like it," he gave me another one of his 'you have to be lying' looks. How could such a great gift, a gift implying so much respect, belong to some normal person like my neighbor?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It boggles my mind how little anyone, inside or outside, has done to change North Korea.

Maybe i am just ignorant of how difficult it is or the attempts done.

<comment><USER24> It is easy to say that North Korea should change. What is difficult is articulating the type of change that one would like to see occur and how to implement it.

Should Kim Jong-Il have been ousted _a la_ Saddam Hussein in Iraq? How dangerous would that have been, considering that North Korea has nuclear arms? What to do in case of a conflict that spills over into neighboring countries? What would China's take on all of it be? Would they stand idly by or back up their Communist cousin?

Once the dictator is gone, what do you do? Let the military take over and potentially let it establish a junta government, Myanmar-style? Or do you try to install democracy forcibly? Would the right thing to do be to hand North Korea over to South Korea, integrating the two countries by shotgun wedding?

The complexities quickly exponentiate. Consider the cultural shock of the North Koreans once they're introduced to modern South Korean culture alone. If German re-unification is any indicator, putting together two halves of a country that have been split into Communism and western capitalism is not a trivial task.

Also consider the cult of personality built up around Kim Jong-Il. The situation in N. Korea could quickly become explosive once people realize the deceit they've been living in.

So it's difficult thing to do, just by itself. All the econo-political ramifications just make it that much harder.

<comment><USER25> Nuclear weapons barely change the equation. The best estimate is that North Korea could begin firing around 10,000 artillery shells per minute into densely populated suburbs areas around Seoul on a moment's notice. Even if through some masterful and historic level of effort we managed to shut down those artillery bombardments or evacuate the targeted areas in a mere half an hour that still leaves hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and huge numbers of homes and businesses destroyed. It would be a destruction on the scale of a natural disaster such as the earthquake off Japan earlier this year. Add in the very real possibility of North Korean nuclear weapons landing on Seoul, Tokyo, Taiwan or maybe even the US mainland and that starts focusing your thinking about how worthwhile it would have to be to depose the North Korean regime.

<comment><USER26> I remember hearing that because of this all large buildings in South Korea are required to have a shelter area able to withstand such attack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Touching story. But,author never mentioned why he changed so much and became ruthless...not even sparing his teachers family.

<comment><USER28> Yes it's more like a collection of anecdotes that have almost no bearing on the title.

<comment><USER29> It's interesting info. I don't think you're going to find anyone who is able to speak with the full story. Given how locked down that country is, and how many smart people were murdered for no reason.

<comment><USER28> Agreed; my response reads a bit dismissive, but I did enjoy the article. I would still love to read more about the process of a (presumably innocent) person becoming a dictator. Were they molded, and if so by what forces? How much of it was a natural process like what happened to the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment?

<comment><USER29> I think the article sort of gave a better reasoning for the madness of Kim Jong Il. Basically he became ruler _because_ he was so ruthless. His father selected the craziest out of the bunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I found this graphic novel by a French cartoonist who worked in North Korea to be fascinating:

[http://www.amazon.com/Pyongyang-Journey-North-Guy- Delisle/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Pyongyang-Journey-North-Guy- Delisle/dp/1897299214/1)

</comment><comment><USER24> This link is more browser friendly: [http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2008/08/12/the_secret_...](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2008/08/12/the_secret_history_of_kim_jong_il)

<comment><USER31> The first one is more human friendly though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Its a political post so my politically loaded question should be forgiven. Wouldn't it have been acceptable, if United States had liberated North Korea instead of Iraq?

<comment><USER33> At the time the Bush Administration got invasion-happy, it believed that Iraq _almost_ had nuclear weapons. (In retrospect it looks like they weren't that close, but let's assume the Administration believed its most pessimistic intelligence reports.)

North Korea, on the other hand, _already_ had nuclear weapons, not to mention a conventional arsenal that, as others on this thread point out, can lay waste to the South.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> little hint:

javascript:$('body').css('margin', '0 200px');

<comment><USER35> Hmm. How long has Chrome removed the 'javascript:' when you paste into a URL bar? I assume it's to prevent users from blindly running JS, but is there a way to disable it?

<comment><USER36> I actually rather like that 'remove on paste', default to educating/transparency instead of blindly running. Manually typing the prepended 'javascript:' works fine.

Don't see any settings to disable (even in chrome://flags).

Chrome's Javascript Console would also work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Could someone edit the link and remove the "print" query parameter? It's pretty annoying that the page pops up the print option on chrome upon loading.

</comment><comment><USER38> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr9x6yLb8BY>

</comment><comment><USER39> So, the dictator forbid people from his high school to join high ranks, but this former professor boast of a dozen former students that are now in high ranks from that same school?

pick one.

</comment><comment><USER40> You have to wonder. Millions of people living under the dictatorship of one man ( with the help of a few dozens leaders). I feel terrible for the young women, and kids. However the rest of the population can get up and fight. Hundreds of thousands will die, but someone has to be willing to die for the sake of the liberty of others.

<comment><USER25> North Korea is very much a totalitarian regime in every sense of the word. Everything flows from the state. Food. News. Entertainment. Education. Jobs. Everything. And it has been totalitarian for around 2/3rds of a century. It's very difficult to fight against something so ingrained and omni-present.

From without it's also difficult to imagine toppling the North Korean regime. To do so would almost inevitably result in quite literally hundreds of thousands of dead South Korean civilians in a matter of hours (through artillery). And perhaps just as many dead South Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, or American civilians dead through a nuclear attack. That sort of cold calculus makes it very hard to make the decision to end the DPRK regime.

<comment><USER11> Well put.

North Korea's military could easily be beaten -- if you don't mind possibly hundreds of thousands of South Korean and Japanese killed by their missiles. You'd win the war but lose a battle no one would consider worth losing.

You'd also have to negotiate with China first, so they know you'll stop invading well before their border. Last time the U.S. incurred too far into North Korea contributed to China entering the Korean War.

North Korea effectively holds South Korea and Japan hostage with its missiles. It acts belligerently to make credible its threats to use them.

Meanwhile, the people don't know things could be better. They aren't stupid or brainwashed. The state simply controls nearly all information entering the country. They believe they have nothing to envy from the rest of the world and that the U.S. is starving them. From their perspective they have no reason to revolt.

They have no internet or knowledge of revolutions elsewhere in the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Much as it's a fascinating story my BS alarm is flashing. Is there anyone at Georg Mason University who can confirm Professor Kim Hyun Sik actually exists?

<comment><USER42> I am finding a few things hard to believe as well. In the commonwealth games, the Indian Government rounded up beggars and sent them out of Delhi. In the Iraq war, GWB banned the media from covering body bags. Every state is guilty of this ,so unless the deliberate crippling part is true, it may just be another exercise in FUD, much like the weapons of mass destruction.

<comment><USER11> The control of information and people's lives in North Korea is incomparably more than the examples you gave. Respectfully, your comparisons are not close.

The difference is not merely quantitative.

North Korea's activity is well documented and overwhelming.

If you want independent corroboration, sources here -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-bibliography>, particularly in the human rights sections -- are a good place to start.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Home-made 8bit CPU from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vascofazza/8bit-cpu <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN,

As a Computer Scientist and an electronic passionate, I was always intrigued by the complexity of computer architectures and I always wondered if I could build a CPU myself from scratch. There are so many smart devices and constantly increasingly complex circuits and computing devices coming out every day that we are now used to consider this technology as a black box, impossible to replicate or even understand at a fine level.

This is the motivation behind my home-made 8bit CPU project I designed and built during the past weeks as the COVID-19 situation gave me a bunch of spare time. Moreover, this is also the first time I designed my own PCB so it was a double fun experience.

The peculiarity of this project is that it is entirely composed of simple logic circuits (74HCT ICs), with no microprocessors or complex parts.

The key feature of this CPU is that it is fully debuggable and shows you what's happening in the CPU at any time. You can input simple programs by hand and go through the execution step-by-step by manually pulsing the clock and see how the signals and data flow through the CPU to accomplish the given operation.

I think this is a quite powerful learning tool if you're interested in how computers and computation work, especially because it turned out to be way more complicated once you face the implications of dealing with impedance, the inductance of the circuit and other basic electronic problems that were not addressed by the initial schematic.

At the moment I built the version 1 of the CPU, I have already fixed up some little problems I encountered on the way and improved the design with version 2, already available on GitHub. There you can find all the schematics and PCB layout in KiCad format, as well as the code, a demo video and a bit of explanation.

Here you can find a demo of the CPU in action solving a variety of problems such as the Fibonacci sequence, finding prime numbers and sorting.

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

Please star the repository and follow me on GitHub and Twitter (@fscozzafava) to stay tuned with the updates on the V2.0!

<comment><USER2> First of all, thanks for posting this - it's very impressive! Do you have any resource to suggest for digging a bit more in this topic?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the questions, I would suggest you a couple of really good resources on YouTube that makes learning this kind of notions quite enjoyable and profitable.

If you already have some basics of electronics and you want to deepen the computational aspect, Ben Eater did an exceptional video series on how to build a Computer on a breadboard. You can check it out here:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565dvjafglHU)

and here: [https://eater.net/](https://eater.net/).

He goes through the definition of a logic gate, on how to build each module of the Computer, up to the meaning of computation and Turing completeness.

If you're more concerned on the electronic side you here are a couple of very good channels to start with:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi4UZoZM0Iw9_tTeRjZd_bA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi4UZoZM0Iw9_tTeRjZd_bA)

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCosnWgi3eorc1klEQ8pIgJQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCosnWgi3eorc1klEQ8pIgJQ)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the prompt response! Book-wise do you have any suggestions? I would be interested in acquiring some more knowledge on circuit prototyping and so on. As a side, was this your first design / iteration?

<comment><AUTHOR> A must-have book is "Computer Organization and Design" by Patterson. The board shown in the video is the very first iteration of the project. As you may see there are some patches and rewiring that I have fixed already. I also improved the design considerably in v2, the schematics and code on GitHub are up to date. This new version will include more general-purpose registers, improved stack pointer, and expansion bus, together with an LCD display interface.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Manhattan Resident Develops iPhone App to Track Homeless People - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelthomsen/2015/09/26/manhattan-resident-develops-iphone-app-to-track-homeless-people/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelthomsen/2015/09/26/manhat...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelthomsen/2015/09/26/manhattan- resident-develops-iphone-app-to-track-homeless-people/)</comment>


Amazon's electricity rate discounts have pushed up utility costs - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-20/amazon-isn-t-paying-its-electric-bills-you-might-be <comment><USER2> I feel like this is nothing new. Every few years, some major sportsball team threatens to leave their city unless the taxpayers fork over mega-billions for a new stadium. Despite any measurable economic benefits to having a stadium, the cities fall for it every time. It's the same thing, right? Amazon says "give us free electricity and we'll make jobs", and the politicians buy it even though it's very unlikely to be true.

Maybe someday we'll get an itemized tax bill, so you can see that you paid $4.12 for Amazon's electricity and $1.23 for a new sports arena, and can vote for someone else if that upsets you. Now that I think about it, that will never happen. And so, the cycle continues.

<comment><USER3> To be fair they don't pay for it every time... The chargers are now in LA, not SD

<comment><USER4> tbf, anyone saying "sportsball" isn't even going to know who the chargers are

<comment><USER5> I have heard term "sportsball" before. It seems that it is used mostly in context of making fun of people's addiction to their favorite teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that the regulations they're running up against were built to constrain the railroads, since this looks almost identical to the railroad rebates that Standard Oil and other gilded age trusts used to pump up their monopolies at the expense of smaller competitors and regular people. Basically, if you're a big enough customer, you can play service providers (railroads, power companies, municipal governments, etc.) against each other to get absurdly below-market rates and stick the bill to someone with less bargaining power. The railroad regulations were passed after a series of exposés of Standard Oil and other monopolists that took advantage of secret rebates.

More on Standard Oil, rebates, and the breakup of the trust: [https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer...](https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://duckduckgo.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1125&context=articles)

I also recommend Titan, the well-researched John D. Rockefeller, Sr. biography by Ron Chernow.

<comment><USER7> I am listening to Titan at the moment great book

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not suprised. This is what they do. When you think about it a lot of Amazon's business is partially subsidized by the tax payer. They pay less for the roads the drive on, they get huge tax breaks to open new wearhouses and headquarters and their workers' low wages are subsidized by welfare. The great deal you get and their ability to kill their competition is partially paid for by your taxes.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-not-paying-taxes- trump...](http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-not-paying-taxes-trump- bezos-2018-4)

[https://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2018/may...](https://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2018/may/03/bernie-s/amazon-paid-0-federal-income- taxes-2017/)

<comment><USER9> > They don't pay for the roads

They do pay taxes...

<comment><USER10> Which taxes?

[https://itep.org/amazon-inc-paid-zero-in-federal-taxes- in-20...](https://itep.org/amazon-inc-paid-zero-in-federal-taxes- in-2017-gets-789-million-windfall-from-new-tax-law/)

<comment><USER11> Presumably gas taxes, which in most states go towards funding road maintenance

<comment><USER10> Amazon pays for it's 3rd party (1099) workers gas? That's news to me... Amazon does not own any semi trucks.

'To be clear, Amazon purchased only the trailers and will use third-party companies for the actual truck cabs and drivers. The original source report did not make clear there was a distinction.'

[https://www.technobuffalo.com/2015/12/04/amazon-prime-now- ha...](https://www.technobuffalo.com/2015/12/04/amazon-prime-now-has-its-own- fleet-of-semi-trucks/)

<comment><USER12> They do, that's part of the pay.

You could make a (good) argument that they are underpaying their contract drivers, but nontheless -- everytime they pay a contract driver to drop a package off at your house, Amazon is paying for that gas in their pay to the delivery driver.

The same is true when they use a commercial delivery service at all -- the cost of fuel tax is bundled into the delivery price.

Whether Amazon owns any trucks of their own is immaterial, if they are contracting with Amazom, Amazon is ultimately paying for the fuel (including taxes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Deceptive [original] headline ["Amazon Isn't Paying Its Electric Bills. You Might Be "]: Amazon is surely paying all the bills it negotiated.

Economically-questionable conclusions: although individual secretive utilities might on occasion make dumb deals, they'll charge households whatever the market & regulators will allow, and then charge Amazon whatever the market & regulators allow.

And utilities would like Amazon as a customer because of the efficiencies of scale it'd provide. They'd not want Amazon at-a-loss, that then _requires_ making other customers to pay more – and if utilities already had the market- power or case-to-regulators to charge others more, they'd already be doing it.

<comment><USER14>
      Economically-questionable conclusions: although individual secretive utilities might on occasion make dumb deals,
      they'll charge households whatever the market & regulators will allow,
      and then charge Amazon whatever the market & regulators allow.

Because most utilities are monopolies that are allowed by regulators I'm not sure that the market's invisible hand has that much of an impact is this particular situation. The consumers who need electricity for their homes don't have much choice here.

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER15> most utilities are monopolies

That's interesting. In Norway and UK, etc., You can buy your electricity from any operator you like. The only monopoly is the power cable. So I get two bills, one for energy and the other for the transport of it.

<comment><USER16> > The only monopoly is the power cable.

That there, is enough, though. It's not as if you could choose _not_ to pay for that portion and pay only for the energy.

As such, the rate could go up without bound. (Well, bounded by competition from off-grid systems that are 2-6x as expensive in the long run and have a huge up-front cost).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Brace yourself for an updated version of this post:

"Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B"

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-16/happy- pri...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-16/happy-prime-day- jeff-amazon-ceo-s-net-worth-tops-150-billion)

</comment><comment><USER18> It's interesting how this sort of means that the cost of Amazon is in a way socialized (including all the tax breaks for building a new office somewhere), while it's impossible to socialize healthcare in the US.

<comment><USER8> The cost is socialized but the gains are not.

<comment><USER18> I can't say that I fully agree with that. The Amazon store and AWS have made a lot of stuff possible that otherwise might not have been possible. AWS for example gives out free services to startups, some of which might have major impact on many lives.

Sure, I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but in the end it's also really hard to define what is 'good spending' on tax dollars. For all we know, Amazon venturing into health care will end up being a great substitute for socialized health care. It could become Bezos' ultimate philanthropy. It could also be what gives him super villain-like power over the US.

<comment><USER19> >Sure, I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but in the end it's also really hard to define what is 'good spending' on tax dollars.

Most social services in developed European countries that allow people to be better off and not squeezed and abused by companies like Amazon? Healthcare, transportation, public housing, higher education? Literally almost anything besides what is spent on the USA's unwinnable, forever wars?

It's not hard as soon as you set aside American Exceptionalism as having any legitimacy.

<comment><USER20> What about America as a culture, economy or military is unexceptional. People all over the world wear blue jeans, trade on the NYSE, have iPhones and Androids and are protected by the United States. I don't think American Exceptionalism is not legitimate. Some countries may have more welfare but I don't think anyone in America is trying to claim otherwise

<comment><USER19> >Some countries may have more welfare but I don't think anyone in America is trying to claim otherwise

Actually, this is the party line of the right-wing in the US. It's not more, it's less, because...freedom?

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us- politic...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/fox- news-host-ridiculed-for-comparing-denmark-to-venezuela-a8495686.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When Bezos said "Your margin is my opportunity." he was talking to consumers and not completion. Amazon is killing off small business and forcing tax payers to take up the brunt of Amazons expansion.

<comment><USER22> What are examples of the small businesses that survived Walmart/Target but are now being killed by Amazon? Small hosting providers maybe.

<comment><USER23> Specialty brick and mortar. No need to drive to a store specializing in your quirky hobby when you can get any supplies you need in 2 days off Amazon. Not exactly a bad thing, but those stores tend to serve as knowledge centers/gathering spots for the hobby. So some groups make it a point to shop brick and mortar, the whole FLGS (friendly local game store) in the tabletop community thing comes to mind.

<comment><USER24> From what I see people tend to shop brick and mortar for things that they enjoy shopping for, and at places where the shopping experience is enjoyable. Going to the friendly local game store is an experience. The local store in my neighborhood hosts gaming nights, and scavenger hunts, and all sorts of nice things. These types of brick and mortar stores are still successful.

But buying toilet paper, towels, and other random supplies is not a fun or enjoyable experience. There is nothing fun about going to a big box store, walking down crowded aisles, loading up a rickety, squeaky cart, and pushing it to a checkout lane with a long line. No one likes going to the store to shop for boring stuff so Amazon delivery is a clear winner there.

But brick and mortar isn't going anywhere. It will always continue to be successful for sales that are actually fun and enjoyable things to buy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm empathetic to those impacted by preferential and redacted rate negotiations, but not to my fellow Virginian complaining about rate hikes.

The community wanted it buried at a higher cost? Well, Dominion has a right as a regulated utility to negotiate rates for the following year to match infrastructure and other costs. This is so they can recoup / respond to storms and other issues. It's a part of utilities regulation.

Now, if they get a sweetheart deal on top that's certainly a different story, but the infrastructure cost passed on to the consumer thing has been part of the deal for a long time. It would likely only be higher for that following year, and then rates would return higher but closer to normal as the buried pipe went into O&M mode.

</comment><comment><USER26> I know I am supposed to feel sorry for this person in the article, and this doesn't justify anything Amazon is doing, but,

> _She was already struggling to pay her monthly $170_

Her bill is 2x mine in the winter, and 5x it in the summer, and I pay 2x per kWh¹ more than she does. Am I unusual, or is this an absurdly high electric bill?

¹[https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/georgia/gainesville/](https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/georgia/gainesville/) ; Gainesville electric rates appear to be 11.6¢/kWh; I'm paying over 20¢/kWh

<comment><USER27> That links to the wrong Gainesville. Your looking for Gainesville, _Virginia_. The closest city to Gainesville is Haymarket, VA: [https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/virginia/haymarket/](https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/virginia/haymarket/)

<comment><USER16> And that page says the average for Virginia is... 11.64c/kWh. I'd say the OC's mistake ends up being incidental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Took something as big as Amazon to topple Walmart. It's going to take something even bigger to topple Amazon in the future. That should scare people. Scale begets scale.

<comment><USER29> Walmart isn't exactly on the ropes. Also the customer bases are fairly different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have always felt that these sorts of issues were behind the simple elegance of Google (another prodigious power user) creating a wholly owned subsidiary that was a registered power company. Sure it started as an argument between a local power company's onerous demands, but as a result Google just pays the inter-power company transfer rate, and the agreements are all private between power companies and not between a company and a "retail" user.

</comment><comment><USER31> But, this is not just Amazon specific. Even when discussing on renewable energies (e.g solar), this is the same argument that most conservative lawmakers and utilities make about applying a tax on residential solar. You have users of the grid that are not paying the same as others, but it's still utilizing the same grid as everyone else, therefore increasing the cost for everyone else that are not discounted, etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> To save you the time, it's talking about how Amazon negotiates cheaper rates with electric companies, effectively passing off utility costs to the general userbase.

It starts with a story about how Amazon wanted to get power lines through a data center, and the community forced it to expensively route around a historic site, and the user base ended up getting a rate hike to pay for it (despite most of them not needing that part of the grid).

<comment><USER33> It's only effectively passing costs off to other consumers if Amazon is paying less than the total cost in the first place. If they're paying something heavily discounted but still profitable for the electric company, nothing is being passed on to others.

<comment><USER32> True, but their story at the beginning, despite not following the general pattern, _would_ count as passing off costs, because everyone had to pay a rate hike that was only necessary for one user.

<comment><USER34> If people want to play this game, then I don't want to pay for rural and suburban electricity lines. They have higher cost to provide and I don't need that part of the grid.

<comment><USER32> I would agree that, in a sense, these are getting a subsidy too, but far less lop-sided than the Amazon example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem of transparency seems to be getting worse everywhere. Local authorities in the UK regularly refuse to reveal details on the ground that the information is confidential even when the deal has to be debated in public.

</comment><comment><USER35> Put "amazon tax abatements" in your favorite search engine and prepare to be surprised ...

</comment><comment><USER36> While it doesn't seem ethical or "good", in a certain way I kind of have to appreciate the way how Amazon pits different municipalities or companies against each, extracting maximum value for itself. They play from a clear power position, and by doing so remain in this position.

<comment><USER37> It should be illegal for municipalities to throw huge tax breaks at companies so they don't have to fight to the death for each and every scrap.

This should also apply to stadiums where, for reasons I cannot even fathom, small cities throw billions into a building that they don't own, that has an astonishingly short life-span, and for which they derive very little in the way of actual benefits.

<comment> coastal-fiesta What is the lifespan of a sports stadium?

<comment><USER37> For a major sports team it can be as little as twenty years. For the Olympics, two weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hopefully Facebook will die first, but maybe Amazon will be next...

</comment><comment><USER39> Kind of like what they've done to shipping costs!

</comment><comment><USER40> this is the exact same issue with bandwidth costs. when you have major companies using up to 90% of the world's bandwidth it squashes on the resources of the little guys. this is why net neutrality was, in some aspects, not that great.

</comment><comment><USER41> .

</comment><comment><USER42> This article is behind a computational* paywall. Paywall articles are against the general spirit of Hacker News. It should be replaced with a mirror of the text or removed.

* A computational paywall is one where you have to run arbitrary code from an untrusted source in order to access the content.

<comment><USER43> I... think you made up everything in your post.

You made up the term computational paywall, made up that paywall articles are against the spirit of HN (the "web" button specifically helps with getting cached versions of articles or bypass some paywalls through Google redirect. It's available on each thread).

A quick Google search shows you're are the only person who has used the term computational paywall.

<comment><USER42> I did make up the term. Times change and new words are needed to describe new practices. But it isn't the first time I've used it. I've done so 2 or 3 times on HN.

Paywalls are against the spirit of HN. They always get switched out with non- paywall sources if possible.

The 'web' button unfortunately does not help in this case. The only source is bloomberg.</comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk's secret fear: Artificial Intelligence will turn deadly in 5 years - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2014/11/17/elon-musk-singularity/

<comment><USER2> If he is really concerned, he should invest in AI and robotics, to develop protector robots to fight against deadly robots.

</comment><comment><USER3> Screenshot of his comment before it was deleted: [http://i.imgur.com/sL0uqqW.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/sL0uqqW.jpg)</comment>


My best SEO tactic so far - <AUTHOR> https://questinglog.com/my-best-seo-tactic-so-far/ <comment><USER2> Recap: Every time you have trouble searching for something, make a page with the information you find. It makes sense, but I'm just wondering what's the end goal since I imagine the frequency of such searches is very low and your site will have to be a blog or some kind of site with disparate content.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't discount backlinks. Google hasn't made much progress getting away from _" page rank"_. Once you have that credible page/content, do focus on non-spammy ways to share it. Including grey area stuff like calling in favors, sharing it on HN, posting on Medium, etc. In the least spammy, most objective way you can.

As a concrete example, I found a grey area way to get a somewhat popular hardware tinkerer interested in something I did. Maybe I even skirted the rules a bit by sending him a free sample of my cool toy and some rough code samples. He took it well beyond what I could. I didn't ask for anything. The investment paid off. Aside from his initial blog post, others took inspiration and posted their own variations.

Google now thinks I'm the bomb for something very niche, but reasonably profitable. Likely because my efforts, plus other's work, netted some interesting backlinks. and backlinks to their posts. And maybe I am a badass in this very narrow niche, but I doubt Google would know if I hadn't pushed the envelope a little.

<comment><USER4> > Google hasn't made much progress getting away from "page rank".

Is that so? I thought conventional wisdom is that they now have much stronger signals about how well results satisfy queries, from Google Analytics and Chrome.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, some variation of page rank is still the number one signal. That's why subdomain/subdirectory leasing at media companies is such a hot deal right now: you take completely unrelated content (e.g. coupons with affiliate links), throw them on a subdomain of a news site (e.g. CNN) and then just watch your content rank that would have never ranked on a "normal" domain.

That "buying links" is the only deadly sin next to cloaking is more strong evidence for Google primarily relying on it. You don't get penalized for abusing Microdata, stuffing Emjois into your Title + Description or writing barely readable keyword-stuffed SEO texts, but get links from a well-known link-selling-site and watch your -100 penalty wreck your traffic.

<comment><USER3> Good insight. My intuition tells me that "buying links" is still the fastest path to ranking well, provided you are stealthy enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I totally agree with the author. I've been frustrated finding the information I needed so many times, and when I eventually found it by putting together the pieces from different sources, I called it a day and moved on.

But then one day I figured that me wasting the time to find an answer might be something that's affecting other people as well, so I did a couple experiments. My entire blog is now mostly a bunch of solution posts to various issues I encountered (I know, not very sexy). The most popular one by far is [https://dragoshmocrii.com/ubuntu-20-04-stuttering- animations...](https://dragoshmocrii.com/ubuntu-20-04-stuttering-animations- video/) which brings in tens of people everyday (not that much, but still). Initially, I just posted the solution, but then I wanted to see what people actually thought about it, so I encouraged them to drop me a comment if the solution did help them. So people started to reply, and it's a great feeling to see I could save people time!

One might wonder, why not use a better place to post a solution, such as Stack Exchange websites. And the answer is why not keep it on my website and build some reputation for myself, who knows who stumbles upon my solution post, and invites me to apply for a great job! ;)

<comment><USER7> That's a good observation. Come to think of it, according to Google's Search Console[0], most frequently searched for / visited posts on my blog are a) some very specific stuff about numerical methods that I wrote during my university years, b) a decade-old post about fixing issues with Polish diacritics and Y/Z swap on Windows - i.e. explaining how to use CTRL+SHIFT/ALT+SHIFT to fix keyboard layout/language, and how to disable it entirely.

I might start doing it - instead of trying to think of large topics to write, just describe results of any research I needed to do where I had trouble finding reasonable answers. Not for fame or SEO - but as a service to random strangers. Judging by unending stream of searches for over 10 years, I suspect that this post about keyboard layouts/language switch is the single most useful thing I've done in my entire life.

(As context for non-Americans: language & keyboard layout switches are all too easy to hit by accident, and suddenly your keyboard "isn't typing" some characters, or swaps Z and Y, or whatnot. This doesn't go away on restart (or at least it didn't use to), and completely confuses regular people, making them think their computer is broken. Those non-tech-savvy people usually resort to manually copy-pasting problematic characters from a file or from a website whenever they want to type them. You can imagine the impact on productivity and sanity, particularly at work.)

(And I just can't fathom how this is still a problem in 2020. Microsoft, WTF?)

\--

[0] - I don't use Analytics or any other tracking script on my site. Search Console gives you access to data on performance of your site on Google's search engine, and includes the only two things I ever cared about wrt. any analytics - how do people end up on my site, and what posts do they visit.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a good example of this that I ran into recently: I was searching for software to display pictures as post/page content on my static Jekyll website with automatic handling of thumbnails, multiple type conversion (e.g. to WebP), and all that fun stuff. What I found was a fairly even split between people who call them "pictures", people who call them "photos", and people who call them "images", and in a way that seems like the three groups rarely cross-pollinate!

I ended up disliking all the software I found and wrote my own (as one does), but then when it came time for a README i made sure to use all those terms and even provide links to the other projects I found in case those links help somebody who ends up preferring one of them to mine: [https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD](https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD)

<comment> john-shaffer I've never thought about it before, but I've consistently used "image" ever since I learned about the <img> tag as a kid. It's very interesting that you can segment groups by which word they use.

<comment><USER8> I'm the same way, also thanks to [img] in BBCode. For what it's worth I was also a heavy ImageShack user and always avoided PhotoBucket. I wonder if there's any relation :p

The HTML5 <picture> tag makes that variation a lot more relevant. The "photo" people are also implicitly talking about art direction! Photos are almost always a "page content" thing, then I see people talk about generating "images" and "pictures" for their website's pixel-perfect UI/navigation/logo needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google Search Console is a great source to help you build on this technique. It's the most reliable source of data on what your site is appearing in the search results for - even if it doesn't get a click. You'll often find your site appearing for queries that you haven't directly addressed yet with content. Create an article that does address that query or question - and get more traffic. My tool [https://seotesting.com](https://seotesting.com) works off GSC data and has some predefined reports that help you find these types of queries - please give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think this is a great example of "scratch your own itch". Rarely are frustrations so specific that they don't impact multiple individuals. SEO aside, you're benefiting those who come after you asking the same questions.

About two years ago I started writing specific technical posts that I had to piece together from various sources. Although it's primarily for my own selfish reasons to reference later, I've seen quite a lot of traffic from folks who are trying to find the same solutions. Not too unsurprising, the key here seems to be the more niche a post, the better it performs compared to posts that cover broader topics.

<comment><AUTHOR> > you're benefiting those who come after you asking the same questions

Thanks! The idea of just being helpful on the internet is vastly undervalued.

Since this specific tactic is about avoiding competition, it does pretty much always lead to something very niche, very new—either in content or the audience/approach to the content.

Larger topics are often worth going after or necessary for a larger site, but then you have more authority and more resources to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The process of documenting something I couldn't find an answer to is effectively the current raison d'être for my personal website.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great article.

I guess the next question is, how does one create a way to reliably generate these kinds of "itch scratching" type queries on a regular basis?

My immediate guess would be to just be building something within your niche that you find interesting. And the ideas would come as a by-product of that.

So this definitely works best for builders. Those who are just focused on content creation and not building may have a pretty tough time using this strategy, due to lack of ideas.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure how the author found these queries, but looking at Google Search Console, I definitely see quite a few queries that I could write content around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't that just part of the long tail keyword strategy?

<comment><USER15> Yes indeed. "What's old is new again" truly applies here.

Something I enjoy about having been around since the beginning of the internet, is to watch the cyclical nature of information and how each new generation "discovers" bits and pieces from the past.

I could take the "get off my lawn" stance and just complain that "kids these days" don't understand logic gates or finite state machines, so what business do they have messing about with promises and javascript. But it's genuinely enlightening to see new approaches to old problems. Having an open mind was easy when I was young. Nowadays it can actually take effort to do so.

However, this one sits firmly in "duh! Wasn't it obvious?" territory with me. But I mean that in a nice way :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really enjoyed the section about working with the search engine and how we typically use search. Naturally, when we come across a problem we search to find solutions. When your problems are generic, it's easy to find an article that gives you an exact answer, but the deeper problems that you work on or the more specific they are, the less likely you'll find an article you can follow to fit your needs. That's where it's important to form models and sharpen tools for inference. It's more likely that you'll have to read a handful of articles and take segments from each article to formulate an answer.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Create what you hoped your search would find

This is the content is king mantra. Ideal SEO is the point that delivers the best results with the fewest consequences. That's a subjective rule, so it's hard to say creating content works for everyone.

Point of saying this is you should strive to appease search engines by creating useful content, but the real world is messy. Some industries need to bend the rules to survive.

</comment><comment><USER18> Thank you Mark, that helped trigger some cascades. I went ahead and did just that [1], let us see what shape it takes.

[1]: [https://notgpt.com/2020/08/15/life-is-like-a- blockchain/](https://notgpt.com/2020/08/15/life-is-like-a-blockchain/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I think SEO is improving search rank given specific content. Creating content given specific search results is something entirely different. It's like someone hired you to promote their car parts shop and you added boobies page to it, Alexa rank to the moon!

</comment><comment><USER20> My own strategy has been answering questions in Stack Overflow and related sites.

I guess yours is more profitable.

<comment><USER21> Your strategy is definitely profitable for StackOverflow (and StackExchange).

But all these approaches end up helping others, regardless of who gets to make some money out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://www.google.com/search?q=my+best+SEO+tactic+so+far&oq...](https://www.google.com/search?q=my+best+SEO+tactic+so+far&oq=my+best+SEO+tactic+so+far)

Looks like his tactic worked ;)

<comment><USER23> Yep! It is interesting though that the top 3 results for this totally not specially crafted /s query are the article (expected), this comments page (fairly expected), and then an outdated 5 year old article (not so expected).

I wonder if the overall quality of Google search would improve significantly if, for some topics where timeliness is important, they ranked things more heavily by date, emphasizing recent results. This would probably have a decent impact on some technical searches, but I wonder how wide the applicability would be.

<comment><USER24> Google actually does heavily index by date. It has caused a lot of problems for trying to find good older stuff in evergreen niches.

The issue with this search is no one would normally search for " _my_ best seo tactic"

<comment><USER25> Good point. "best seo tactic" doesn't show any of this on the front page (and there's a half page of ads before you see any real content).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's a lot of words to say "write stuff that you wish existed but doesn't".

It's the strategy used by literally ever beginner blogger I've come across. Not saying it's bad but I'm not sure why there's a whole article about it.

<comment> site-packages1 More nuanced than that, I think. Brainstorming things you wish existed and writing about them doesn't completely overlap with taking searches you've actually done and have ended up difficult to complete because of a lack or disparity of information and writing the solution.

</comment></comment><comment> zupa-hu I guess this works as long as you are clueless about your profession so you search a lot the same way your customers do.

I suspect this is rare.</comment>


Performance of Javascript (Binary) Byte Arrays in Modern Browsers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.n01se.net/?p=248 <comment><USER2> This is interesting because I've been working on a project that uses ArrayBuffers and I noticed an odd behavior while doing random read with Firefox 4 on Linux (issues does not occur on OSX).

I hope more information and testing will come out but it's quite sad to see these new array type perform so badly. But then again they are so new and most of the speedup work focus was probably on the old javascript array type.

<comment><USER3> He sees the poor random read performance in FF 4 on all array types (and better performance in 3.6) so I don't think it is a lack of optimization but rather just a bug that has been introduced.

<comment><USER4> Looks like Mozilla is tracking it down: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650939></comment></comment></comment>


WebKit will delete all local storage after 7 days - <AUTHOR> https://ar.al/2020/03/25/apple-just-killed-offline-web-apps-while-purporting-to-protect-your-privacy-why-thats-a-bad-thing-and-why-you-should-care/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602) which is currently the active thread.</comment>


Stripe Atlas for LLCs - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/atlas-llc <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16960172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16960172) (except patio11's because the other thread has already got one and it's very nice).

</comment><comment><USER3> Hideho folks. I worked with the team on this, and am happy to answer any questions you have.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you recover after a bad PR review or implementation? - <AUTHOR> Hi, sorry if this is wrong to put here.
I'd been working on a feature for my team and today, I got a few more PR comments and feedback about it than you might want (like 20+ comments on PR).
It was a feature that touched a bit of everywhere in the codebase, relatively large. I'm a feeling down about making a bit of a mess of it, afraid I'm not very good at my job.
I have 3.5 years experience. I started in this role about 6 months ago and haven't gotten bad feedback from my manager, no performance issues or anything like that,just some feedback that I should speak up more in discussions.
The team is spread across 3 six person pods and everyone is on each pull request. It's awesome because I get many PoV's and great feedback, but sometimes the PR comments can pile up. It's such an arbitrary source to base my worth on but I'm afraid that people will take a poor PR like this one and see me as deadweight. My quality can dip up and down. Sometimes a feature goes really well and other times It doesn't go quite as well.
I'm always eager to learn and take on feedback - one of the leads said I was taking on knowledge a lot faster than he expected - but I see all of the areas I don't know as well in the project, I see the people who've been on the project longer than me and think "wow, I'm awful compared to this developer/because I don't know this". I'm afraid of being the weak link on the team.
It doesn't help that 3 months in I got pulled onto another project (alongside 5 other people from the aforementioned project), so my knowledge base about this system has gotten rusty. This is my first feature back on the original team.
I'm young(25) and I've had confidence issues and anxiety since being a teen.
I would love to discuss and hear your thoughts and experiences on the topic. How did you bounce back? Am I being a little sensitive? Have you ever felt this way too? Have you ever seen someone else go through this, how did it go?? <comment><USER2> I actually just wrote a blog post the other week about this exact feeling: [https://alexanderell.is/posts/me-and-my- work/](https://alexanderell.is/posts/me-and-my-work/)

I think it's very important to separate your work from your worth and to view review comments as reviews of your code, not of your ability to write code.

<comment><AUTHOR> you know, this blog post is the sort of response and thinking I was looking for - it's the reaction I'm striving to have.

Thank you very much for writing it.

The review isn't a review of me; it's just reviews of code I've submitted.</comment></comment>


Intel significantly speeds up graphics under Linux (X.org) - <AUTHOR> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=bcef98af561939aa48d9236b2dfa2c5626adf4cb

<comment><USER2> The title is a bit misleading, it sounds like its a general improvement, when actually its a patch for the intel driver, so it only affects those that use intel cards and this driver, or did I missed something ?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct. It looks like the patch affects only Intel graphics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is great. Now if only the newer Intel drivers didn't make X segfault!

This seems to be a common problem. I had to downgrade to 2.14.0; some bug introduced in 2.14.903 and still present in 2.15.0 break it thoroughly. Fast is nice, but stable is better.

<comment><USER4> > Fast is nice, but stable is better.

I agree. The graphics system is basically the only part where I'm envious of windows users. As far as I know, since vista the graphics driver can crash without tearing down the rest of the graphical system, i. e. no data loss.

<comment><USER5> Well, on the other hand, nVidias drivers were responsible for 30% of Vista crashes..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, as a Debian User, I can have use of this in 5 years.

<comment><USER7> Or run Debian Sid, as you ought to on the desktop ;).

<comment><USER8> Still more stable than half the other distributions out there

<comment><USER9> [citation needed] generally people who say this haven't actually tried sid or "other distributions"

<comment><USER10> I know that the plural of anecdotes is not data, but I currently run Sid, and I have been for several years. It hasn't been problem free, but I don't recall a system-killing update. The most common problem is some missing or broken dependencies for a package forcing me to hold off installing a package or updating my system for a few days.

In the mean time, back when I used to live with someone who used Ubuntu as his main system, and when I used to run Ubuntu on my laptop, I had to fix system- crippling bugs at least 3 times.

So, anecdotally, I've had less system-killing problems with Sid than Ubuntu's stable releases.

<comment><USER11> When it comes to system-killing bugs, it also matters whether you update daily or less often; system-killing bugs often get reported right after a mirror pulse and fixed one or two mirror pulses later (less than a day).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm struggling to understand what this means from the description, anyone mind decoding for me?

<comment><USER13> It's nice to see Intel cares about their X support now.

I suspect some of this is a side effect of the popularity of GPGPU computing. If they don't want their lunch eaten by NVidia and ATI/AMD on certain computational benchmarks, they're going to have to provide a professional implementation of OpenCL on Linux. I suspect (am hoping) that the OpenGL acceleration and plain X11 improvements come as part of the package.

People don't use Windows-only hardware in their supercomputers. NVidia was the first to realize this and this is one reason they have much of the GPGPU mindshare.

<comment><USER14> I am skeptical of this, for two reasons. First, the GPGPU thing really hasn't affected Intel, who still sells more units than either AMD or nVidia, and will probably continue to have a stranglehold on their current markets. GPGPU really doesn't matter to most people.

Second, the guy that wrote this code, Chris Wilson, is one of the big guys behind Cairo and had an experiment, cairo-drm, where he plugged Cairo directly to an Intel graphics chipset by talking directly to the kernel and bypassing the Intel X drivers. His results were probably the foundation of this new work, as far as I can guess.

<comment><USER13> Intel has been trying to get into the GPGPU business for years. The problem for them, of course, is you have to have a credible GPU before you can GP with it. Here's where they tried to glue together a bunch of existing cores (yes P54C Pentiums) and call it a GPU: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_%28microarchitecture%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_%28microarchitecture%29) Like early experiments in aviation, it didn't fly.

I didn't know about Wilson. I'd somehow gotten the impression that this work had been supported by Intel. Oh well. If they didn't, they shoulda. :-)

<comment><USER14> Intel hired Chris a couple years ago, and he has been doing awesome things ever since. Like this SNA thing. :3

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I probably didn't follow correctly, but doesn't this only affect Sandy Bridge processors?

<comment><USER16> Nope:

 _we can take advantage of additional efficiencies, such as relative relocations, that have been incorporated into recent hardware advances. However, even older hardware performs better from avoiding the implicit context switches and from the batching efficiency of the 3D pipeline..._

<comment><USER17> and from the results of the benchmarks listed, the best speed improvements aren't even on sandybridge (gen6).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My current laptop is a Dell C510 running Arch Linux, rocking a massive 384MB of RAM and LXDE. It's relatively (surprisingly) snappy as is, but any improvement is going to make a huge difference. Great work.

<comment><USER18> Scratch that, apparently I've got an ATI Radeon Mobility in this thing. Regardless, still an excellent update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> could someone point to a source identifying the different generations of chipset referred to in the test? (gen3, gen4, etc.)

<comment><USER17> [http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6...](http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.c;h=0defd42705943e1776b3e9447a770048142d1a73;hb=HEAD#l85)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this link working for other people? I just get a "No repositories found"

<comment><USER21> Works for me. But the patch is huge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like the size of this commit! Makes bisecting all so easy!

<comment><USER23> The arguments against large commit size do not hold in this case. If you look at it, the patch consists of a few changes to Makefile.am, configure.ac, man/intel.man, src/Makefile.am, and src/intel_module.c, which contain no significant logic, and completely new files in the directories src/sna/ and test/. It's one new feature that is practically self-contained, so I don't see any sense in splitting it up into smaller commits.

<comment><USER22> Sounds reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any way to get this in Ubuntu soon?

<comment><USER24> For anyone interested add these PPAs:

<https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa> <https://launchpad.net/~sarvatt/+archive/intel-sna>

This is not considered stable but works OK for me. Read the pages first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Link broken? update: working now?

</comment><comment><USER26> It'd be more useful if it had a list of hardware expected to improve with this patch.

</comment><comment><USER27> The link's now broken?

<comment><USER2> looks like it happened just now, I refreshed the page and the patch was gone.

EDIT: and its back again. lol.

<comment><USER25> ...and it seems to be working now...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For non-X people (IOW, everybody except me and Josh):

This commit speeds up general desktop rendering, in both general and pathological cases, for nearly all Intel graphics chipsets, causing everything to feel snappier and more responsive. It's a universally Good Thing.</comment>


Yale Covers for Rapists - <AUTHOR> http://jezebel.com/yale-officially-declares-nonconsensual-sex-not-that-b-988475927

<comment><USER2> Lifted from comments at Jezebel:

FrothingLiberalUKatie J.M. Baker41L How dare Yale not give delicate little snowflakes the unilateral ability to expel any male student with a false rape claim!

Although if a student were actually raped, she might want to consider something called "the police"

\</comment><comment>

I'll note that rape claims may also be made by men against women, or alternatively oriented relationships.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reposted with original link.

This is jaw-droppingly offensive and contributes to an unmistakable pattern of deception and avoidance that makes it damn near impossible for me to conclude that Yale today is anything but a vilely misogynistic, self-regarding institution utterly lacking in moral compass. If the Yale community wishes to restore the good name of a once great American institution, it should demand the immediate resignation of the current leadership. It has been on their watch (as well as that of their immediate predecessors) that rape and sexual assault have been so thoroughly trivialized, so it is high time they are held to account.

</comment><comment><USER3> As I don't expect even-handed coverage from Jezbel, can anybody answer whether

a) this applies to someone convicted in court of rape? b) what are standard university policies about other felonies (ie does someone get expelled for being convicted of assault?)</comment>


Academia.edu Lets Researchers Share Their Raw Data - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/06/academia-edu-raw-data/

<comment><USER2> Why should people put their data here rather than Dryad (<http://www.datadryad.org/>), which assigns DOIs and doesn't require registration to download data sets, and is a non-profit organization, governed by a board including PLoS and Science and powered by completely open source software?

<comment><AUTHOR> If your papers are already on Academia.edu, and that is where you share your research output, it's useful to be able to share your data-sets and code too.

Of course that doesn't prevent you from uploading data to other places on the web, such as the site you mention...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Simply providing the ability to upload data only solves a small part of the problem. We run the CRAWDAD wireless network data archive (<http://crawdad.org/>) and the hardest parts are: convincing people to share data; ensuring that the data can be shared (much of the time this is not possible due to consent, data protection, etc); sanitising the data; and finally (and most time-consumingly) creating appropriate metadata so that the data are meaningful to other researchers.

The Research Data Alliance (<http://rd-alliance.org/>) is trying to solve many of these problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. There are many aspects to changing the scientific ecosystem in such a way that sharing data-sets is the default, not the exception.

My sense is that the most critical aspect here is the incentives aspect. I think if sharing data-sets can enhance a scientist's reputation, and make it easier for them to demonstrate to grant committees that they have had an impact on the field, scientists will put in the work to curate and share data- sets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Graduate student myself: This a cry for business that will fall on deaf ears in academia. Nobody would ever publish half-baked code that 'does the job', for the fear of getting judged. And none of us have time to prettify the code.

Academia.edu started with a lot of promise but is frankly a useless placeholder of your name and Email ID now. ResearchGate has surpassed them long ahead in useful features and Mendeley is already very good. They are just making some money from the academic jobs ads and I frankly don't see a future for them if they are happy being almost the exact same product for the past 3 years I have used them.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right to focus on rewards. The rewards have to be there for academics to share their data-sets and code. The feedback loop needs to be closed, so that if you share your data, and that data has an impact, that impact is reflected back on you. You can then take that impact and show it to your tenure/grant committee, who can reward you for it. There are a bunch of startups, Academia.edu being one of them, that are very focused on closing that feedback loop.

Mendeley and ResearchGate are both great companies, but if you look at Quantcast/Compete/Alexa, you'll see that Academia.edu is noticeably larger than them in traffic. Academia.edu also has more users. I'm sorry to hear that Academia.edu doesn't satisfy your use-case though....

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another dimension to sharing data-sets along with papers is that papers with data-sets attached get more citations [http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal....](http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000308)

Readers prefer papers with data-sets attached to them, because you can check the data and see how the conclusions of the paper stand up. That preference may be part of what drives the higher citation rates.

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool! It is necessary to have second opinions as the recent Excel blooper shows (see [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/24/i...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/24/inside- the-offbeat-economics-department-that-debunked-reinhart-rogoff/))

I heard that <http://bohr.launchrock.com/> is working on something similar.

</comment><comment><USER6> I ... thought the internet already did that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently 75% of the world's scientific data isn't shared. [http://codata2012.tw/news/75-of-research-data-is-never- made-...](http://codata2012.tw/news/75-of-research-data-is-never-made-openly- available)

The main reason for that is that there is an established reputation system for papers, namely journals, but there isn't one for content formats that aren't papers - data-sets, code, videos, images etc.

Part of what Academia.edu is doing is building a new reputation system in science based on audience metrics: how many people have read your papers, from which countries; how many followers you have etc. We are then attaching various kinds of scientific media to that reputation system in order to accelerate sharing.

The idea is that if you can build your reputation by sharing your data-sets, you're likely to consider doing it.

<comment> no-opinion This could potentially be an interesting thing to incorporate with Wikipedia.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean having a reputation system on Wikipedia, or the ability to put data-sets on Wikipedia?

<comment> no-opinion Both I suppose, I think it would be interesting to browse Wikipedia and have access to actual peer reviewed science (with all the accompanying data). I am aware the wiki articles are supposed to be sourced, but that can be hit and miss.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Make an April Fool's card for someone with my latest app - <AUTHOR> http://allpurposecard.com/ Have fun! <comment><USER2> Looks like you may need a bit more testing on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had an error that killed the site a few minutes ago, was that what you saw? What errors have you found?</comment></comment>


Paper denying HIV–AIDS link secures publication - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/paper-denying-hiv-aids-link-secures-publication-1.9737?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20120110

<comment><USER2> It could be controversial and the conclusions could be somewhat crackpot, but if the methods and reasoning is sound so it's of good quality otherwise I don't see why it shouldn't be published. If it can be demonstrated to be flawed by others, that's an easy win for other academics.

Clever people can come to totally different conclusions based on the same data, science is supposed to help us with that. I find it more worrying that so much focus is put on keeping it out of the literature is made, if it's so bad then it should be easy to debunk.

This is what upsets me with science and politics gets mixed, it turns into a political game about who gets into the special club of peer reviewed literature, instead of about scientific merit.</comment>