Applying Lean Startup Principles in Organizations of All Sizes - <AUTHOR> http://www.ondeckdaily.com/post/120 <comment><USER2> In a very similar vein, I've found the recently published book Sense & Respond to be worthwhile: [https://books.google.com/books/about/Sense_and_Respond.html?...](https://books.google.com/books/about/Sense_and_Respond.html?id=bEzXCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button)

</comment><comment><USER3> I see a lot of people going on about the lean startup, and read a bit of it. Most of it seems like fairly common sense. And at the end of the day his product seems a bit unknown compared to his book.

I guess I am just questioning why he is regarded so highly.

<comment><USER4> Somewhat agree. If you really want to understand lean principles, start with the masters of the topic and consider reading some books about Toyota. The first in the list below is a wonderful introduction to how lean manufacturing principles evolved at Toyota over decades. The others can provide more hands on experience on the topic and if you can mentally translate manufacturing principles to software construction techniques, everything will start to make sense.

The Machine that Changed the World

[https://www.amazon.com/Machine-That-Changed-World- Revolution...](https://www.amazon.com/Machine-That-Changed-World- Revolutionizing/dp/0743299795)

Toyota Production System Beyond Large Scale

[https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Production-System-Beyond- Large...](https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Production-System-Beyond-Large- Scale/dp/0915299143/ref=pd_sim_14_8)

The Toyota Way

[https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Management-Principles- Manu...](https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Management-Principles- Manufacturer/dp/0071392319)

Out of the Crisis

[https://www.amazon.com/Out-Crisis-W-Edwards- Deming/dp/091137...](https://www.amazon.com/Out-Crisis-W-Edwards- Deming/dp/0911379010/)

<comment><USER5> I'm glad someone points to this. Quite often, criticism of "lean" is about stating that with a MVP you cannot make a car (with illustrations of skateboards and bicycles…)

But really, I can't see a better example for Lean than what car makers do.

<comment><USER6> I have a pretty basic understanding of Lean Startup and Lean Manufacturing, and I don't think they have too much in common besides the name.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


RadioShack puts customer's personal data up for sale in bankruptcy auction - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/article/2901029/radioshack-puts-customers-personal-data-up-for-sale-in-bankruptcy-auction.html

<comment><USER2> While the title presented here ("RadioShack puts customer's personal data up for sale in bankruptcy auction") is the title at the source, it has an error in it compared to the actual content of the source. It should be "RadioShack puts customers' personal data up for sale in bankruptcy auction" (note the difference in the apostrophe). They aren't just selling _one_ customer's personal data.</comment>


A Modest Proposal to Address Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://blog.usejournal.com/a-modest-proposal-to-address-climate-change-4d82eea7b101 <comment><USER2> TLDR: Plant trees with drones.</comment>


For TechCrunch, Twitter = Traffic  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/for-techcrunch-twitter-traffic-a-statistical-breakdown/ <comment><USER2>
       Does the fact @TechCrunch is a suggested account mean
       you are more likely to report favourably about twitter?

       Isn't it a bit like accepting a free gift as a
       journalist? They send you lots of lovely free traffic
       for example.

this guy is onto something

<comment><USER3> I don't think it has anything to do with suggested accounts. TechCrunch figured out that when you write about Twitter, then Twitter users love it and talk about it. I think that's normal behavior (any story written by a major blog about HN would immediately get promoted and viewed here, for example).

The reason this doesn't work so much for other sites (writing articles about Facebook, for example) is because Facebook doesn't have the same meta-culture; Facebook users generally don't feel like there is anything special about their membership on the site. Also, sharing outside content/retweeting has not taken off on FB like it has on Twitter.

<comment><USER4> I wonder how that traffic breakdown would look if they only ever did pieces on actual news relating to twitter instead of pretty much daily news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For TC gossip, mudslinging, equals traffic, they don't care about startups or technology anymore.

I hope they die a slow and painful death.

OTOH, Venturebeat looks promising...</comment>


Former pirate who rowed across Pacific & Atlantic dies at 74 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/us/john-fairfax-who-rowed-across-oceans-dies-at-74.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1329643324-sRuyOhWBW1zQaMNKojfnOQ

<comment><USER2> I was just getting ready to post. What an adventurer!</comment>


High pollen counts are associated with lower crime rates - <AUTHOR> https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/allergies-crime-link/ <comment><USER2> High pollen counts implies green space, which means lower population or area where funds are available to maintain green spaces, which means the is probably just another proxy for income levels (regardless of any attempts to control for income, etc)

<comment><USER3> We should start sprinkling pollen in high crime areas to prevent crime!

<comment><USER4> Maybe people's allergies will be too bad for them to commit crimes. Mine just make me want to sleep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This just seems like a false correlation. Urban areas have more crime and less pollen, while suburban/rural areas have less people, less crime, and more pollen

</comment><comment><USER6> As usual, coincidences are more common than people like to think. But even if the correlation is consistent, both could stem from a common cause.

Heat waves are usually blamed for high crime rates. Do we get less pollen then too?

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. If A and B are significantly correlated, either A causes B, or B causes A or X causes both.

The article itself, citing the study, presents some possible mechanisms through which such a reduction could be explained.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't weather reports include pollen measurements? I wonder if there is just less people outside on those days. Criminals might also have pollen allergies?

</comment><comment><USER9> > _Not that increasing pollen or health shocks is a tool to fight crime..._

But it could be!</comment>


Show HN: Fselect – CLI tool to search files with SQL-like queries (made in Rust) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jhspetersson/fselect <comment><USER2> Oh, like this one. The only inconvenience I met with the tool is that when you are on Linux, it's better to conclude all parameters into one parameter string to prevent glob expansion and other side effects from the shell. Or use an alternative syntax.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and parentheses can be tricky as well. Shell is full of dangers.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you hate about finding a new job? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to learn about a candidate's perspective on recruiting.<p>+ What do you like and dislike about finding a new job? + What do you value when looking for a new job? + If you could change one thing about "job search", what would you change? <comment><USER2> The process for applying is laborious and sort of demoralizing. I mean, think of it like a blind date in a lot of ways without the payoff of a really great conversations that might lead to friendship. The best interviews often feel fine, but the process requires you to expend a lot emotionally and you don't really get that back most of the time even if you're offered the gig.

The salary comments are accurate, too. I don't expect a hard number, but want to know where the range is though I tend to do my own homework and look that stuff up because in my field it's usually findable.

I think the biggest deterrent is the application process. If I have to fill out the official application AND send a cover letter/resume, it's a lot less appealing and often times, I'm not going to do it. I totally get making it more onerous to limit the number of applications, but...I think you can just have shorter windows for hiring then rather than wasting a lot of time.

Lastly, being transparent about timeframes. Politics being what it is, I know you can't always nail down dates, but giving people a sense of what they're working with in terms of a week or three weeks to wait to hear something is really helpful, especially if they're truly considering the opportunity with you and not just using it as a hedge against the thing they really want.

<comment><USER3> I'm morally opposed to requiring or preferring custom cover letters tailored to the job being applied to.

I think people who demand this really are disconnected from the realities of a job seeker. It's simply a ridiculous burden in an age where you must apply for hundreds of jobs and almost all of them don't even make a single response to your application.

If I'm ever hiring, I will not require a cover letter. I also believe that candidates should be compensated for their time interviewing. As a graduate I once had a very small employer literally interview what seemed like 50% of my class for one single position. He spent over an hour talking to each of us, mostly just conversing and looking for ego stroking. This is abusive in my mind.

<comment><USER4> After sending out lots of resumes over the years, I noticed almost zero correlation with making a careful cover letter, and whether they follow up with an interview.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish more companies would be transparent about salary ranges in job postings (e.g. more like CyberCoders - [http://www.cybercoders.com/search/?searchterms=php&searchloc...](http://www.cybercoders.com/search/?searchterms=php&searchlocation=91367&newsearch=true&sorttype=salary)). It is a waste of time going through the process of applying and interviewing only to find out we are in different zip codes on compensation. There are a few job search sites that have thankfully addressed this issue, and working with a recruiter also helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> This makes a ton of sense. Role and salary should be discussed up front, so necessary conditions are established.

Follow up - what stops you, as a candidate, from discussing this upfront?

<comment><USER5> _Follow up - what stops you, as a candidate, from discussing this upfront?_

It makes you look greedy. I am greedy, but it's bad form to appear that way. In the same way you want sex on the first date, but you can't make that known before the waiter has even taken your drink orders. That's why I like working with recruiters (not the sex part)...the recruiter can get the ballpark for me (or already knows it if the company is a client) and we can decide whether to even pursue it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Probably the biggest thing that ticks me off is hiring managers who don't even know what they are looking for and as a result 'shop' thru candidates essentially wasting your time. I've seen this before when I was rejected for a position, and it got filled only to be reposted after 3 months. Go figure!

</comment><comment><USER7> Just went through a job hunt myself and here's what really stood out to me about the process.

1) The sheer latency. This is by far the biggest annoyance. From first contact, to phone interviews, to onsite, to decision...generally a month or more passes. It's awful.

2) No up-front salary expectations. Have had so many job interviews that went well and suddenly turned around when they were like "soooo...salary?" and they were looking to get a senior engineer on the cheap. What a waste of everyone's time. Compounded by the above bit about latency.

3) Literally any company that uses that horrible ICIMS system I will not even bother applying anymore. I saw a number of job adverts looking for remote engineers from Red Hat, Rackspace, Amazon (AWS division), and a few more. The only way from the advert to actually apply was through that ICIMS system. This _universally_ (not exaggerating) meant that I would submit my resume and it would sit in limbo for 2+ months (Red Hat was the fastest, with a turnaround time of 2 months). At this point, if a company wants me to apply through this system, I just won't even bother with them. They'll need to contact me first through a hiring manager, internal recruiter, or something similar so I can be guaranteed the process will actually be started at all.

4) This one's a little more specific but consulting agencies that want to put you on some of their contracts and never bother talking to you can go suck eggs. A specific one had an "urgent need" (exact words) for a certain type of engineer. I talked to the owner for a bit...I followed up for over _two months_ with me instigating the conversation every time. At the end of the two months I figured I would stop bothering and if they really needed an engineer like me so urgently, they could initiate conversation with me rather than having me constantly follow up with them to drag out details. Last I heard, they were still looking for someone to fill the contract.

5) Anyone who wants to make you do some kind of "homework" (generally writing a bunch of code) before you even get to a phone interview. Something that takes half an hour is okay. The ones I've seen always take multiple hours. No. Just, no.

6) This one is more of a general gripe but idiot startups think they can get senior talent for cheap salaries and nonexistent equity. This has been the case at every funding round (seed, series A, series B). It's practically a joke at this point and in the past month has been discussed on HN ad nauseam.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. This is helpful. Given choice, would you apply directly or through an internal referral?

<comment><USER7> Internal referral but only because it at least guarantees that my resume will actually be looked at and I'll get a response (see the ICIMS bullshit for the other side of that coin).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone currently on the job hunt I find it very frustrating to not even receive acknowledgement of your application.

Failing that a polite, "Sod off" would be much appreciated when your not successful as well!

<comment><USER9> Posting anon?

Treat them like they treat you.

You're just a bottleneck in the hiring managers process, so make companies a bottleneck in your job process.

There may be some "holy-grail" of working at FaceGooOrStartup where you can do "work you love", but after a while you realize that all work is balls and you'd much rather not work at all (or run your own shin-dig).

Apply the technique of a "smart" spray and spread your CV gently across a wide-enough net.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a hiring manager, working with other hiring managers, mainly on the interview side:

Job description: Write it out. Hopes and expectations. Be honest when certain experience doesn't really matter. Copy and paste general descriptions of the team's responsibilities are not enough. Be specific where specific skills are needed, and be general but guiding where job development paths are possible.

Speed: You're playing with people's lives. They depend on you for a job. Get your responses out quickly, and don't insist on interview upon interview. If you're not prepared enough in the initial interview to offer the candidate the position after interviewing all other candidates (within a week), make sure the second interview is for a well thought out alternate position. An organization that has 3rd or 4th placed interviews has no respect for a candidate, IMHO, or is poorly planned, or basically doesn't know what it is doing.

Don't make it a competition with 2 to X people in the same room, especially as some of who are in the room may know each other, or know of each other. You simply don't know the relationships of the people seemingly competing 'independently'. If you need to test team work with elementary school style tasks like how to a bridge out of 4 rolls of newspaper, and I don't think you do, do it with the existing team and the candidate, and analyze the team as much as the candidate.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just one thing? The whole process of the job search is tedious, painful and just downright frustrating, and employers make it harder and harder because reasons. Not to mention the whole dog and pony show that the candidate has to go through just to even get a chance to maybe plead their case with someone with hire/fire power.

Having been on both sides of the table, I don't like participating in either process. It's broken all around, and the only solution is to burn it down for the insurance money.

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't remember the last time I had a poor interview experience. I get to talk with nice people, maybe learn something, etc. Afterwards, I tell my friends that they should try to work there.

The pre-interview part of the job search for companies that don't use outside recruiters leaves something to be desired.

Advice for companies trying to hire:

1) Remember that you will probably be hiring again - don't piss off your future applicant pool because you don't need them for your _current_ position. Treat them how you would like to be treated i.e. communicate with them even if it is automated.

2) Post a salary range - If you want to know what range applicants are looking for "so we don't waste your time". Post a range, problem solved. Oh, posting a range will upset your current employees? Maybe you should pay your current developers at the market rate.

3) Do the work. I realize that making candidates jump through arbitrary hoops is an easy way to limit the number of resume's your hiring team has to look at but don't be surprised if the best candidates go to companies that actually put in the work (read the cover letters, look at the portfolios, talk to the candidates, etc).

I would love to know how long a position has been open. I've seen job ads running for months, possibly years. Obviously this wouldn't be in the interest of the hiring companies. For a job searcher it would be a way to weed out the companies that aren't going to hire anyone.

</comment><comment><USER13> 1\. Being asked to code things on a white board or shared online doc that the interviewer knows are hard just so they can watch you sweat. It's just testing how well you perform under pressure, not if you know how to program well or not. Candidates should have the option to code without someone breathing down their neck if they prefer.

2\. Not being up front about how many hours people actually work. In my experience, everyone lies about this. Companies claim they work 40 hour weeks but really work 60+ with time expected at home and on the weekends. And their "unlimited vacation" time really means "no vacation time". You shouldn't have to wait to start the job before finding out the answer to this question. That kind of bait and switch leads to resentment.

</comment><comment> alok-g What I dislike: Going through the typical interview processes where the outcome seldom correlates with the job performance that the interview process is there to predict. Far from predicting job performance from an interview, in most cases they cannot correctly estimate job performance even from the employee actually performing the job. While failing to understand true job performance of their own employees, they still trust them with conducting interviews which is a different skill altogether.

</comment><comment><USER4> Asking candidates to take a 1-10 hour test or assignment before you even talk with the hiring manager.

I already have a job and don't have the time to waste.

</comment><comment><USER14> To be honest, the thing I hate the most about recruiters, is they don't read my resume from beginning to end.

Next in line to that are hiring managers who don't believe I have any experience in a skill that I have a great deal of experience with, such as a Nike manager who thought I didn't know how to write Mac OS X applications, despite my having been an Apple developer since 1986.</comment>


Tesla issues its largest recall ever over faulty Model S steering - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17177888/tesla-recall-model-s-size-power-steering <comment><USER3> Unlike the quality issues with the Model 3 that continue, this is no big deal. It happens to other manufacturers all the time.

Seems like a quick fix.

</comment><comment><USER4> Tesla is 15 years old.

Tesla has produced 300K cars.

Tesla just recalled 123K cars.

<comment><USER5> Zero profit. This is good for bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nothing to see here. Stuff like this happens all the time, would not even be on HN if it did not have the world Tesla in it.

</comment><comment><USER7> While disappointing and costly for Tesla, thankfully a power steering failure isn't typically a big deal, safety-wise.

If you've never driven a vehicle without power steering: it's marginally harder to turn the wheel, which really only affects you in parking lots and making turns from a dead stop (as is mentioned in the article).

<comment><USER8> Try driving a car designed for power steering with a failed pump. It's much, much, much harder than a car that was designed from the beginning to be used without power assist. Moving or not it's a hand-over-hand struggle to turn the wheel.

<comment><USER9> It's not "you're going to die now" harder.

More like "this isn't comfortable, better pull over and see what's wrong" harder.

<comment><USER10> Depends on what is going on around you when it happens, how long it takes you to realize that something is wrong, and what to do about it. It wouldn't surprise me if many people would not even realize that they have power assist in the first place, and just assume that the wheel somehow got stuck and there is nothing they can do.

Although I would imagine that the most common failure case is the wheel slowly getting harder to turn over a period of days or weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Tesla said it has only seen this problem occur in "very cold climates" where road salts are commonly used."

Ah, the usual "designed in the Bay Area" issue...

<comment><USER12> Bay Area people are known to spend a lot of time in Tahoe when it's cold. So this is more, "Let's repeat that untrue joke about people in the Bay Area knowing nothing about winter."

<comment><USER13> hahaha average low in Lake Tahoe is -5 degrees C (23 F). When you think that's cold, then you truly do know nothing about winter.

<comment><USER12> Given that the flaw revolves around road salt, and not the absolute temperature, yeah, doesn't matter in this particular case.

<comment><USER14> Regardless of whether Tahoe winters are "real winter" or not, I don't think they use salt in CA because of the environmental effects downstream - <USER2> believe they use sand instead.

<comment><USER12> California has a variety of climate areas, and a little googling tells me that they use various kinds of salt in the high Sierras, including the Tahoe area. Also, half of Tahoe is in Nevada, which uses salt.

Sand only works when it's barely freezing. Which can be true at low elevations, but not at 10,000'.

<comment><USER13> they use sand and gravel in Edmonton. Which is below barely freezing.

<comment><USER15> Edmonton is barely below freezing in the winter?!?

<comment><USER13> Almost thought I screwed it up... "below barely freezing", not barely below freezing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To be specific "The automaker said 123,000 Model S vehicles built before April 2016"

<comment><USER17> That's quite a minor recall compared to almost any typical recalls in recent history is it not?

Although that's not to say it isn't still a serious issue for a smaller firm like Tesla.

<comment><USER18> There are literally 2 much bigger recalls happening right now.

Airbags! Multiple companies have recalled a specific airbag module that catches on fire. 1+ million cars

Ford recalled 1.3 million cars last week, the steering wheel can fall off. That "internal manufacturing expertise" in action.

<comment> cup-of-tea Glad you added the literally, otherwise I might think that 2 was an exaggeration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm actually mostly surprised there are 123k model S cars manufactured before 2016. Those cars are $70-80k each on average. That's a lot of revenue.

<comment><USER20> How did they get this many people: Number of employees 37,543 (2017)

[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.)]

<comment><USER19> Well, they do make a lot of what goes into the car in-house. And they design it in house, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How would a self driving car be impacted by a failure like this? Can the onboard computer still drive the car (and has a sense there's something wrong w/ the steering) or is it just dead in the water?

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this going to effect them trying to shift workers from the S line to the 3 assembly line? Or is this just a matter of maintenance services doing the replacement?

At the very least, this is the last kind of news they need, for sales, PR, and internal morale.

<comment><USER23> The fix will be done at local service centers. So I don't see how this will affect production at Nevada and Fremont.

<comment><USER24> Guessing from the article, the fix is replacing a few bolts with more corrosion resistant ones. The labor around that should mostly be about reaching the parts in question and maybe some minor recalibration on the steering column.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Getting a 404 not found. Perhaps dodgy reporting?

<comment><USER26> It's working for me, here's a mirror though: [https://outline.com/m8mpV4](https://outline.com/m8mpV4)

Here's some other sources:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/29/tesla- recalls-123000-model-s...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/29/tesla- recalls-123000-model-s-cars-over-potential-power-steering-failure- reports.html)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-recalls-123-000-model- s-c...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-recalls-123-000-model-s-cars-over- bolt-issue-1522361482)

[http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/29/technology/business/tesla- mo...](http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/29/technology/business/tesla-model-s- recall/index.html)</comment></comment>


Policy Based Memory Allocation - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/policy-based-memory-allocation/184402039

<comment><AUTHOR> There is also a framework on github:

[https://github.com/emeryberger/Heap- Layers](https://github.com/emeryberger/Heap-Layers)</comment>


π does not equal 4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.axiomaticdoubt.com/?p=504 <comment><USER2> Geometric convergence is tricky. Specifically, the issue here is that uniform convergence does not imply convergence in length or area or any other such measures. (see figure 6 here: [http://www.sci.utah.edu/~etiene/publications/verifiable- vis....](http://www.sci.utah.edu/~etiene/publications/verifiable-vis.pdf) . disclaimer - I'm a co-author)

Imagine a circle and its diameter. Now imagine two circles with half of the diameter, lined up so that the diameter lines align. Now split those two in four, etc. The circle becomes a snaking line whose total length doesn't change, and the snaking line converges uniformly to the line. Clearly, however, pi is not 1.

What you need is convergence in position _and_ angle. A curve that converges in position and angle _does_ converge in length: the reference I know which shows this is reference [9] on the above-mentioned paper. (edit: in case you don't want to download the gigantic file --- yay for publishing in graphicsy places --- the reference is: K. Hildebrandt, K. Polthier, and M. Wardetzky. On the convergence of metric and geometric properties of polyhedral surfaces. Geometriae Dediacata, (123):89–112, 2006.)

<comment><USER3> >>...uniform convergence does not imply convergence in length or area...

Under uniform convergence, the limit of the integrals is equal to the integral of the limit. So, this works fine for areas, or are you talking about something else?

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I should have been clearer.

I was trying to say that convergence in area for two-dimensional surfaces in R^3 requires convergence in normals in the same way that convergence in length for one-dimensional curves in R^2 requires convergence in normals.

For area in R^2, volume in R^3, and so on, you're definitely right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In a similar way, you can "prove" that sqrt(2) = 2 by approximating the diagonal of a unit square (length = sqrt(2)) by iteratively dividing two adjacent edges of the square (length = 2).

One interesting and useless law that this reveals is that the perimiter of any convex blob of pixels is equal to the perimiter of its bounding rectangle.

<comment><USER5> In fact, just a few days ago, I discovered this law while working on my master's thesis. I'm modelling cells in a Monte Carlo model on a square grid, and I needed the contact area with other cells. The contact area seemed to be to large on diagonal interfaces. After thinking about it a bit, I found the problem, and I started using a different measure for contact area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just because the conclusion is wrong it does not mean that there is no point here. What's described is exactly what one has to deal with in digital image analysis. Here is a write-up and a link to a paper: <http://inperc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Lengths_of_curves>. The paper proves essentially that there is no good way to approximate lengths of curves with any grid, even if the size of the mesh goes to 0.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice and fun, and brings into focus the definition of "distance" and how it interacts with the concept of a metric. Using the L1 metric gives a different value of pi than using the L2 metric. Obviously.

It's easy enough with arguments like this to show the "length" to be anything you choose. Such demonstrations are instructive.

EDIT: Changed lower-case ell to upper-case for clarity.

<comment><USER7> Your comment should be at the top.

Wikipedia has a nice short article about the _ℓ_ ₁ norm (also called "taxicab distance" or "Manhattan distance"): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry>

It explains,

> _"The use of Manhattan distance leads to a strange concept: when the > resolution of the Taxicab geometry is made larger, approaching infinity (the > size of division of the axis approaches 0), it seems intuitive that the > Manhattan distance would approach the Euclidean metric [...] but it does > not. This is essentially a consequence of being forced to adhere to single- > axis movement: when following the Manhattan metric, one cannot move > diagonally (in more than one axis simultaneously)."_

</comment></comment><comment> a-priori You can "disprove" the Pythagorean equation the same way, by taking the limit of the Manhattan distance between two points as the grid size approaches zero. It approaches d_x + d_y, not sqrt(d_x^2 + d_y^2).

</comment><comment><USER8> Why would anyone assume that because a shape converges, the arc length must also converge?

A troll can also prove that 2 == 1 by continuously folding the peaks of an equilateral triangle down to the baseline.

Another fun one:

$1 = 100¢

$.1 = 10¢

$.1^2 = 10¢ ^ 2

$.01 = 100¢

thus

$1 = 1¢

Trollface

<comment><USER9> Honoured Sir,

Understanding you to be a distinguished algebraist (that is, distinguished from other algebraists by different face, different height, etc.), I beg to submit to you a difficulty which distresses me much.

If x and y are each equal to 1, it is plain that

2 * (x^2 - y^2) = 0, and also that 5 * (x - y) = 0.

Hence 2 * (x^2 - y^2) = 5 * (x - y).

Now divide each side of this equation by (x - y).

Then 2 * (x + y) = 5.

But (x + y) = (1 + 1), i.e. = 2. So that 2 * 2 = 5.

Ever since this painful fact has been forced upon me, I have not slept more than 8 hours a night, and have not been able to eat more than 3 meals a day.

I trust you will pity me and will kindly explain the difficulty to Your obliged,

Lewis Carroll.

<comment><USER10> > Now divide each side of this equation by (x - y)

You can't divide by 0 you just get nonsense.

<comment><USER11> that's not really the point because we are dealing with algebra and not the numberical values. The error is the assumption that (x-y)^2 equals (x^2-y^2), which is not the case.

<comment><USER12> Hmm, no. Look again. It's using the fact that (x^2 - y^2) = (x - y)(x + y), which is the case, and a common enough identity ("the difference of two squares") that it's used without remark here.

The problem really is that you can't divide by zero, even in an algebraic expression.

A simpler example of this phenomenon (which blew my mind when I first encountered it) occurs with the equation x = x^2. If you divide by x, you get x = 1, which is a solution to the equation, but where did the other solution x = 0 go??

Whenever you divide an equation by an algebraic expression, you need to consider the possibility of that expression being zero and treat it as a special case. So in the case of x = x^2, you can reason as follows: maybe x = 0, in which case … what … ah yes, that's a solution! Or maybe x ≠ 0, in which case we can divide by it and get x = 1. That doesn't contradict the assumption x ≠ 0, so it's okay, and x = 1 is the other solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I first saw a "proof" like this, the explanation of its incorrectness was something like "limits don't preserve curve length". I wasn't satisfied with that answer until I took a first course in real analysis, which explained (some of) the reasons behind calculus.

Real analysis was very satisfying, in somewhat the same way that building low- level software or libraries is satisfying -- I got to understand the guts. It was also fun to learn about erroneous historical assumptions made due to insufficient rigor. IIRC, until at least the 1870s, it was believed that any continuous function must be differentiable almost everywhere, and that in fact this should be obvious. It turns out that one can construct continuous functions that are nowhere differentiable!

This was one of my favorite topics in the class:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_real_number...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_real_numbers)

<comment><USER14> What is even more tricky is that the set of functions differentiable in at least one point is first category, and thus nowhere differentiable continuous functions are dense in continuous functions space.

<comment><USER15> Not only are they dense, but they are "most" continuous functions! (For an appropriate interpretation of "most", of course)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Over at Everything2.com we discussed this 10 years ago: <http://everything2.com/title/2%255E.5+%253D+2>

<comment><USER17> mblase's explanation was a very clear way of explaining the problem, with the two parallel lines never quite touching because you can't get a line to zero length by cutting it in half repeatedly, no matter how many times you do it. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER18> I actually found mblase's explanation to be just as inaccurate as the one in the original story. "Infinity is not a number and you can never get there" is never a good defence in well-formed arguments about limits. It just sidesteps the question and says that it is meaningless, incidentally doing the same to all of mathematical analysis.

"Just because a series of curves tends to a limit curve doesn't mean that the series of lengths of those curves tends to the length of the limit curve" is the whole of the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For any given n, all the points of the "right angled fractal beast" lie within some distance epsilon(n) of the circle. As n increases, epsilon(n) approaches zero, so in the limit, you have a circle, and at every step along the way, the length is 4. It's just that the length of the resulting shape isn't the limit of the lengths of the sequence of shapes.

<comment><USER20> In the limit you do _not_ have a circle.

If we write down area and perimeter error e_A and e_P as a function of n, in the limit of infinite n e_A is proportional to 1/n. However, e_P is independent of n, since the perimeter does not change at any step. Thus, if the perimeter was unequal to begin (clear by inspection), it does not get closer through this approximation.

The mistake is in accepting that anything that looks like a circle must be a circle. The fractal beast has area arbitrarily close to that of a circle, but it's clear once we look at e_A and e_P that it is not an approximation of its perimeter.

<comment><USER6> I believe you are mistaken.

Pointwise, the limit is a circle. Every point on the enclosing shape gets mapped to a sequence of points. Each of these sequences has a limit, that limit is on the circle. The resulting implied mapping of the original square to the circle is a continuous bijection. By every sense that we usually talk of the convergence of lines, this enclosing shape does approach the circle in the limit.

The point is that the mapping involved is not a length-preserving mapping.

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't you only get a countably infinite number of points on the circle? N.B. I'm not a mathematician

<comment><USER6> Only countably many points "arrive" at their destination in a finite number of steps. There are uncountably many points that never "arrive," but whose limit is on the circle.

The usual picture given to non-mathematicians about sequences and limits can end up being strongly misleading in cases like this. Just because a sequence never "gets there," the limit is still the limit. This is the same kind of murky area that talks about 0.999... recurring never "getting to" 1. It doesn't have to "get to" 1 because it's never travelling.

It's also the kind of problems that arise when talking about proof by induction. Talking about dominoes falling down is, in the longer term, very misleading. We prove P(1), and we prove that P(n) => P(n+1), then they are all true. They don't become true one by one, they are simply all true - it is what it is.

I hope that helps.

I'm thinking of starting a blog to talk about things like this - it falls between the levels of the non-mathematician and true researcher.

<comment><USER21> I think I see what you're getting at, but I guess I still don't fully understand. Any thoughts on proving that the perimeter is pi without using the knowledge that the limiting shape is a circle? Does that question make sense? To me it seems strange that for any integer number N (number of times this chunking operation is applied), the perimeter is 4, but somehow in the limit the perimeter is not 4.

Edit: Nevermind, reading cousin_it's posting I think I've got a handle on it. My confusion was exactly the difference between a sequence of approximations, and the limit itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A simpler and a bit more elegant version - <http://i52.tinypic.com/2daesf4.png>

</comment><comment><USER23> troll math/physics are the only 4chan releated things that consistently make me crack up.

</comment><comment><USER24> What... ouch. This is not math, this is... I don't even.

Read the post closely. The author introduces a set S of squarey curves approximating a circle. This set has an obvious correspondence with the natural numbers: there is curve #1, curve #2, etc. Then the author defines a function f: S->S that takes curve #n to curve #n+1. Wait, that doesn't sound right! The function f has no interesting structure whatsoever, it's exactly equivalent to defining f(n)=n+1 on the naturals. Of course, taking the "limit" of a function f: S->S makes no sense at all.

What would make sense is taking the limit of a certain function N->C, where N is the naturals and C is the set of all curves on the plane. That is, the limit of a sequence of curves (not of a function from curves to curves as the OP tried to say). To talk about such limits, you need to define what it means for a sequence of curves to converge - a "topology" on C. There are many ways to do that, some more outlandish than others. One way is _pointwise_ convergence: assume a parameterization t->C_i(t) on each curves in the sequence, and require that C_i(t) converges co C_lim(t) for each t separately.

Now, pretty much any reasonable notion of "convergence" on the space of all curves has to _imply_ pointwise convergence. That is, pointwise convergence is a very "weak" notion of convergence: if we have a sequence of curves that has a limit in some reasonable sense, then it had better coincide with the pointwise limit, dontcha think?

And here we come to the second facepalm moment in the post. Under pointwise convergence, the sequence of squarey curves under discussion does _not_ converge to some "right angled fractal beast". It converges to the circle. As n grows, every point on S_n comes closer and closer to some point on the circle. Ain't nothing more to it.

Now the correct explanation for the original puzzle. Pointwise convergence of curves doesn't imply that their lengths converge to the limit's length. Hell, we don't even need 2-dimensional space to show that! A simple _straight line_ will do. Imagine a human traveling a straight road of 1km length in this fashion: he takes two steps forward, then one step back, then repeats. In the end he will have traveled about 3km instead of 1km. As we make the human and his steps tinier and tinier, his movement looks smoother and smoother to an external observer, but he still travels 3km in total instead of 1. Or maybe (going back to the 2D space) the human could take a step left, then forward, then right; this would make his path look like a fine comb that approximates the straight line more and more closely, but it's always 3x longer. Something like this is happening in the original puzzle.

Finishing touch: there _are_ notions of convergence where it's true that the length of the curves in the sequence always converges to the length of the limit. One such notion says that the _direction of travel_ (velocity vector) must also pointwise converge to the velocity vector of the limit curve. Under this definition of convergence, the original sequence of curves does not converge, because it makes too many sharp turns.

<comment><USER25> On a less trollish note, I had always been puzzled by the related question you discuss: why Manhattan Distance does not converge to the Euclidean distance.

I'm pretty uneducated about math, so please let me know what trap I'm falling into.

Your answer isn't yet helping me because you just note that Manhattan Distance remains the same no matter how many twists and turns there are. Yes, this is the premise of the question!

But turn up the twistiness to infinity. Now the Manhattan Distance line is identical to the hypotenuse. There is no point on the Manhattan distance line isn't also on the hypotenuse and vice versa. They both have an infinite number of points, of the same aleph-number, I think.

You mention a hypothetical path that doubled back on itself -- it is easy to see why that would result in a different answer. But the Manhattan Distance line is not doubling back on itself. Every point is a step towards the goal, and it doesn't cross itself. All of its deviations from the simple hypotenuse are infinitely small.

So why are the distances _still_ different?

<comment><USER26> The reason it won't converge is that a very large number of the points will ALWAYS lie off of the line. While you might be able to make something that looks like a line on a computer screen when you make it smaller and smaller segments of manhattan distance. it will in fact only ever be able to intersect the real line (they are infinitely thin remember) at N+1 points at most (where N is the number of turns you make when following it along the grid in manhattan distance). because of this you will always have a very large portion of your approximation lying off of the line.

<comment><USER25> > The reason it won't converge is that a very large number of the points will > ALWAYS lie off of the line.

No they won't. It moves zero distance horizontally and zero distance vertically. All the points of the infinitely zigzagging line are on the hypotenuse.

Of course, now we're back to Zeno; if it's not moving off the line, and it only makes progress when it's off the line, how can it get _anywhere_?

<comment><USER6> For every fractally-type enclosing shape, yes they will. And when you talk about the limit, then you have a circle.

You can't talk about moving "zero distance horizontally and zero distance vertically" becuase then, as you rightly say, we're back to Zeno. You don't have an infinitely zigzagging line. That way of trying to think about things is a dead end, and unhelpful.

Better answers are given elsewhere in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> You can also demonstrate this is incorrect by calculating the area of the parts of the square cut off, which is the sum of an infinite geometric series. You will find it doesn't equal the area of the unit square minus the area of the inscribed circle.

Here, let's try: the square is 1x1. Consider one quarter of the circle: radius of the circle is 1/2, half a diagonal of the square is sqrt(2) / 2, diagonal of the removed square is (rt(2) - 1) / 2. Area of the square removed is ((rt(2) - 1) / 2) ^ 2. (This is trivial via the pythagorean theorem, saving some math.)

Alright, that's the first square we accumulate. Now the magic happens: every step, we cut the square's side in half, but make two of them. Agree with me so far? Good. If we cut the side of a square in half, we cut its area to a quarter, but since we have two squares now the total area is 1/2 of the last square. Agree with me so far? Good. We can trivially sum infinite geometric series: t1 / (1 - r), where t1 is the first term and r is the fraction each term gets multiplied by. In this case, it turns out that in any one quadrant the sum of the series of squares removed is 2 * ((rt(2) - 1) / 2) ^ 2, or just (rt(2) - 1)^2 / 2.

Multiply by 4 to get the picture over all four quadrants, and we get 2 * (rt(2) - 1) ^ 2. A little simplification and we get 2 * (2 - 2 rt(2) + 1) = 6 - 4 rt(2)

So, we've got a unit square, so the area of the square is 1. If we subtract the area of the infinite series of squares, we get 4 rt(2) - 5 =~ .657. We expect the area of the circle to be pi / 4 =~ 0.7853975. Thus, the square minus and infinite series of squares doesn't approximate the known area of a circle at all.

<comment><USER28> This isn't quite right; when you divide up your problem, your "quarter circle" doesn't look the same after each iteration, and so the sizes of the squares cut off don't follow a geometric sequence. In fact, I'm sure that the area of the figure does approximate the area of a circle (because no point inside the circle is ever removed, yet every point outside of it will be removed eventually).

The problem lies not with the area, but the perimeter; the figure's area turns out to be unrelated for this problem.

<comment><USER27> Hmh. Its 1 AM here. Give me some time to sleep and think over that. You might be right: I can't remember why I thought the squares would go geometric. I thought I had a better reason than "It looks that way on the picture, kinda...", but it eludes me.

<comment><USER14> If A_n is a sequence of sets bounded by these square like curves, then m(A_n) -> pi, where m is a Lebesgue measure. Each set is clearly measurable, since it is closed in Euclidean topology, and thus Borel. You can prove this sequence converges by seeing that each A_n is enclosed in some circle of diameter 1+e for some e, and, as n -> \infty, e -> 0.

Thus, argumentation from area will not work here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is similar to Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenos_paradoxes#Achilles_and_th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenos_paradoxes#Achilles_and_the_tortoise)

The paradox lies in "infinity" and "never". Achilles will overtake the tortoise when he's one atom away from the tortoise, and similarly at one point your corner removal will reach the atom level, where you can no longer reduce it and maintain a square shape.

At atom level, when your squares consist of three atoms in a L pattern, you can't reduce it further without distorting the squares

Assuming, of course, that atoms are the smallest particles.

<comment><USER30> There is no smallest nonzero distance in Euclidean geometry.

<comment><USER29> My comment was regarding physics in general, not a subset of math/geometry. Are you saying my comparison to the Zeno paradox is wrong?

<comment><USER31> I think the analogy is flawed. Using limits we can resolve Zeno's arrow paradox. For the situation described here limits cannot solve the problem because it turns out that it is not an accurate model of a circle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Because in Infinity you can't predict things with sight. Actually, it seems like the rectangles have become a lined curve, but in reality they aren't. They are just too small to be noticeable.

4 - π will be that small, tiny difference.

<comment><USER33> Er, it's about 0.85 - not all that tiny.

<comment><USER32> Oh, sorry

I meant that difference that you no longer see (when you go to infinite), not 0,85.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The easiest way to informally prove that the demonstration is false is to imagine starting with a circle in a triangle instead of a circle in a square. Or with any other weird shape around the circle and follow the same "cutting" algorithm to infinity. This way you can prove that pi is equal to anything greater than pi.

</comment><comment><USER35> Same issue as with fractals. What's the length of Britain's coast ? Infinity ?

</comment><comment><USER36> try to find the perimeter of australia.. depending on the zoom level you find a different perimeter. :) if the 'troll' from the article adds smoothing to his 'ad infinitum' squarish circle then he finds pi.

</comment><comment><USER37> Obvously, the science is not settled™.

</comment><comment><USER38> There... are... FOUR... lights!

<comment><USER39> Is this a Star Trek TNG reference? Did you just leave that here because, hey, there's the number four?</comment></comment>


Aaron Swartz: What Happens in The Dark Knight - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdk <comment><USER2> > The Joker scares the city onto its two ferries. Once the ferries are in the > middle of the water, he cuts their power and gives them both a button to > blow up the other ferry, thereby constructing a prisoner's dilemma (one boat > is filled with real prisoners). The passengers discuss and vote. One of the > prisoners makes a Ulysses pact and credibly commits by tossing the detonator > overboard.

This isn't actually a prisoner's dilemma. In a PD, both players decide simultaneously, and your payoff depends on both choices. In this, your payoff simply depends on who defects first, with the caveat (which turns out to be false) that if nobody defects you both die.

(If you assume both boats decide simultaneously whether to defect or not, it still isn't a PD. The payoff matrix looks like 1,1 / 1,0 / 0,1 / 0,0 if nobody dies when they both cooperate: it's not a PD because defecting doesn't increase your score. If everyone dies when you both cooperate, the payoff matrix is 0,0 / 1,0 / 0,1 / 0,0: utility is not maximised by both players cooperating.)

Nor is tossing the detonator a credible commitment, in game theory terms, unless the other boat sees it.

<comment><USER3> It's actually more complicated than that. You value saving the lives of people on the other boat (albeit much less than you value your own), there are "third options" with risks but interesting payoffs that are worth considering (disabling the bomb, stealthily jumping into the water...), and the longer you delay, the more likely it is that a deus ex machina (Batman, a stealth bomb disposal specialist...) will show up and offer you maximum payoff on a silver platter. Indeed that's what ends up happening in the movie.

(Of course this isn't a practical approach, since the problem is likely to solve itself long before I'm done formalizing it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> >it never stops to notice that the Joker is actually the hero. [...] his various games only have one innocent casualty

Blowing up a major hospital (even an evacuated one - at very short notice I might add) or having firefights in the streets does cause casualties, even if none are shown on-screen.

For that matter, the joker WANTED more casualties, as outright stated in the ferries incident. A failed mass murderer is not a better role model than a successful one.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it's no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide." :`(

[Edit to note that this is his final blog post, per <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047440> .]

<comment><USER5> I noticed that too. That seemed to be a recurring concept in Aaron's work. It must have been weighing heavily on his mind for a long time.

Rest in peace, brother. Your efforts will not have been in vain.

<comment><USER4> After following Aaron's career for a decade, I just interacted with him directly for the first time four days ago, in what seems to have been his last day on Twitter. :`(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I was miserable. I couldn't stand San Francisco. I couldn't stand office life. I couldn't stand Wired. I took a long Christmas vacation. I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign."

From <https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget>

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if I should admire Nolan or Swartz after reading this.

<comment><USER8> Did you see The Dark Knight Rises? You should definitely admire Swartz, not Nolan.

<comment> brown9-2 care to elaborate on that?

<comment><USER8> It seems like Nolan used to make interesting movies that, while not always great film, at least had something unusual and interesting about them. _Memento_ , for example, wasn't the most amazing masterpiece in the history of cinema, but it was solid, and the backwards-chronology as a narrative device was compelling.

But increasingly, Nolan's films are trending towards the dumbed down, using shallow and boring twists in place of actually interesting writing and direction. It seems to be a profitable strategy, and I can't blame the guy for liking money, but it's also sad to watch.

<comment><USER9> Oh please.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Null Values in SQL Queries - <AUTHOR> https://mitchum.blog/null-values-in-sql-queries/ <comment><USER2> >For example, Oracle database won't allow you to have an empty string. Anytime Oracle database sees an empty string, it automatically converts the empty string into a NULL value.

Damn. This is how you do enterprise.

I might be the only person who likes SQL nulls. If you learn how they work up front, they're useful and not really that confusing. But if I ran into weird behaviors like this, I might hate them too.

<comment><USER3> No I am tired of this WHERE (a = b) or (a IS NULL AND b IS NULL)

Null should equal null like in every other programming language even SQL group by do null equals null which is even more inconsistent.

<comment><USER4> Something to petition ANSI about.

(Microsoft's SQL Server still defaults to the non-ANSI NULL behavior where a = b when both are NULL, and that's something that still pings on checklists of SQL Server if it follows ANSI standards. SQL Server is kind enough to let you enable/disable the behavior, and likely that would persist even after the default switches to meet the standard as the docs assure will happen "in some future version".)

<comment><USER5> Actually I find this a very practical behavior. It allows me to have NULLs in columns participating in UNIQUE indexes. At least with indexes, it's very intuitive and useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Null values and inequality are extremely counterintuitive (in postgres at least). If you run the query:

      SELECT * FROM my_table WHERE my_column != 5

You would expect it to return rows that have a null value for my_column, since null is not 5. However that is not the case.

<comment><USER7> I think the issue here is that SQL should have more "NULL variants" to express why there is no concrete value.

A NULL value technically means it's unknown. An unknown value might be 5, hence why it's not in the result set. Some abuse NULL to mean "value doesn't exist". But a value that doesn't exist can't be 3, or 42, or any other value that's different from 5, so in that regard shouldn't be part of the result set either.

Others again abuse NULL to mean "doesn't apply". And in that case I think it makes sense to include the row in the result set. For example, if I write a query to get all people who's middle name is not "William", I'd most likely want people without middle names included.

Maybe we should have introduced NEX (non-existing) and NAP (non-applicable) as possible values in addition to NULL?

<comment><USER8> Re: _I think the issue here is that SQL should have more "NULL variants" to express why there is no concrete value._

No, that would muddy things in my opinion, like it did to JavaScript. Instead, have more operations/functions for dealing with them in a more "normal" way, so that we can say "WHERE x <> 5" and get results one expects. I'm not sure the syntax, and my drafts would take a lot of time to explain. To give a taste, maybe have something like "WHERE ~x <> 5" in which the tilde converts x's value to the type's default, such as a blank in the case of strings.

If the different reasons for "emptiness" matter, then usually it suggests the need for a "status" column of some kind so that queries can be done on the reasons. I'd need to study domain specifics to recommend something specific.

<comment><USER7> But that would mean you need to be aware that the column can have this property, no?

Continuing with my middle name example. Say I and everyone I knew had middle names, so I write a database including a required middle name column. Later I discover not everyone has middle names, and so I need to relax the restriction.

In your case, I would change the column to accept NULLs, and I'd have to remember to go over my query to add the ~ operator.

In my case, I'd change the column to accept NAPs (or whatever) and since a NAP value would behave differently to a NULL for <> (and other operators), I wouldn't need to change my query.

<comment><USER8> Re: _I 'd have to remember to go over my query to add the ~ operator._

I'd almost always use it no matter what. In fact if starting SQL over via a DeLorean, I'd reverse it to require "~" to make it null-sensitive.

It's analogous to case-sensitive comparing. The vast majority of the time you don't want case-sensitive comparisons such that case-insensitive should be the DEFAULT, and you only add extra specifiers/functions if and when you need to do case-based comparing.

If not, then you either end up with SQL full of "toUpperCase(x)", or problems keep popping up if somebody typed stuff wrong or the UI coders messed up.

Similarly, if your SQL is full of NVL() or DENULL() or whatnot, it means the language was poorly factored for your domain, or even most domains. It flunked D.R.Y. in design, such as comparisons having the wrong default behavior.

<comment><USER7> Yeah that'd be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure what big deal is. You learn somewhere along the way that you check for null values with "is" vs "=". Done, write it on a sticky note if you need, and move on.

"Why isn't it consistent??" - well a lot of systems have a lot of bat shit crazy inconsistencies, some times there for good reason. You learn to keep them straight and get your shit done.

If you want to learn the "why" every time you encounter a system design quirk, be my guest but you may be going down a time intensive rabbit hole with little pay off for yourself.

<comment><USER10> Sometimes it's easier to remember the why than the what. Then it does make sense to learn about it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Null values are so important in representing data. But they cause so much confusion in a) unexpected behaviors in queries and b) inconsistent handling across various engines... I sometimes wish <whisper> that they hadn't been included in the spec at all </whisper>. But then I come to my senses again, and go fix yet another bugged query for an analyst who didn't account for nulls in the data.

<comment><USER12> Does it make sense to coalesce them away in a view? I thought most analysts are given star schemas implemented by views or ETL'd data anyway.

<comment><USER11> Depends on the level of sophistication of the analyst, and if nulls have a meaning or value to the result.

Also, at a certain point, knowing that nulls are present gives you yet another measure of dq: not knowing if they are present and hidden vs. visible and countable can be the difference between a wrong answer vs. just an uncertain one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A pet peeve of mine is concatenating null strings. It's like a poison pill that nulls the whole result. 99.99% of the time that's NOT what one wants domain-wise. Maybe the standard should make another concatenation operator that treats null strings as zero length strings. Sure, one can de-null each string in the expression, but that's ugly anti-DRY code. Please fix it, I haaate that.

<comment><USER12> Agreed that it makes the pipe concat operator a lot less useful. Now PostgreSQL and MySQL both have CONCAT_WS which does replace NULLs with empty strings. It's also nice when you do need a common separator between all elements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Now here's a blast from the past! 20 years ago this was common knowledge. Now it's making headline news on HN. SQL is back with the vengeance!

</comment><comment><USER14> We recently moved from Oracle to Postgres. We had thousands of queries written based on the way Oracle handles NULLs and empty strings. It took us the better part of a year to rewrite all of them to the Postgres way. I am so glad to be off of Oracle.

</comment><comment><USER15> I miss my past Oracle career, I've diagnosed this "= NULL" rather than "IS NULL" in so many broken queries, slow queries because of the way Oracle indexing handles NULL.

There is a lot of discussion in this thread about whether this implementation of null checking in Oracle is appropriate, analysing it, but the current implementation is just fine, it has been tested by time.

The internet does tend to rehash the same arguments over and over!!! The internet forgets. I remember these arguments 20 years ago.

<comment><USER16> [Ignore this comment. It was posted by mistake. I'm only leaving it here for the historical record.]

> the current implementation is just fine, it has been tested by time.

No, it isn't "just fine". It is broken. Just because something has been broken for a very long time and has spawned an entire industry devoted to dealing with the fact that it is broken does not change the fact that it is broken.

<comment><USER15> Do you have substantial experience with Oracle? or are you just blindly going on what everyone else says?

There is no mention of outer joins in this thread, no mentions of the ability to minus results of one query from another which are _basic_ constructs which handle many of the issues that are discussed here. It says that the people here are inexperienced with Oracle. Everyone here trying to resolve issues using inner joins. Inexperience.

If people here had experience, not only would these topics have been discussed, but the real issues with NULL would have been discussed, one of which I mention in my previous post.

<comment><USER16> Sorry, I made a mistake: I thought I was responding to a different comment. (I'm currently on a very slow internet connection.) The "broken" thing I meant to refer to was Oracle's conflation of null and the empty string. But I think I hit the wrong "reply" link. Sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another one is MIN and MAX ignore NULL values, which make for some interesting rollback scenarios.

I also swear I have seen a gotcha involving UPDATE WHERE IN and not throwing an error where it should have, which is why I always quadruple check my update statements, but I wasn't able to reproduce it and couldn't find any information online. I haven't seen the issue in so long I forgot what it was, but it would update all rows in your table even if your WHERE clause was proper.

<comment><USER18> Also OR/AND can return non-null results even if NULL is one side of the operator:

        (NULL AND 0) gives 0
        (0 AND NULL) gives 0
        (NULL AND 1) gives NULL
        (1 AND NULL) gives NULL
        (NULL AND NULL) gives NULL
        (NULL OR 0) gives NULL
        (0 OR NULL) gives NULL
        (NULL OR 1) gives 1
        (1 OR NULL) gives 1
        (NULL OR NULL) gives NULL

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Theoretically NULL means "unknown" value. As it happens, most business applications do not have any requirement to deal with "unknown" values. These applications are only interested in acting on requests where all the required data are provided by the person responsible for entering the data. For example, when I transfer money from one bank account to another, the amount of the transfer can't be "unknown", the sending account can't be "unknown", and the receiving account can't be "unknown".

These same applications do have requirements to deal with empty values. Sometimes an empty value means "I haven't yet entered this value in the to the UI". But in that case the UI won't let you submit the form until you have supplied a valid value.

In other cases an empty value is a valid value. For example, "who is your spouse?" and the answer is "I'm not married".

Sometimes NULL represents "irrelevant", like for "who is your spouse?", where some of the records in the table represent people who can have spouses, and some of the records represent other person-like entities that aren't actually people and therefore they can't have spouses.

Given that NULL is _not_ being used to represent "unknown" values, and there is a requirement to represent empty values, and you don't want to have a whole extra column just to represent "emptiness", the most straightforward way to implement empty values is to use NULL. So that is what happens.

And you have to remember to use "is" instead of "=" when you want to test your empty NULL values for equality with other empty NULL values - because your SQL database is pretending that NULL really means "unknown", and it doesn't want to say that one unknown value is equal to another unknown value, because that would be theoretically incorrect.

</comment><comment><USER20> there is something "missing". The SQL spec specifies `null = null` to be "unknown", where i sometimes expect "true". For MSSQL this can be configured using `SET ANSI_NULLS { ON | OFF }`. AFAIK MySQL can't be configured. Don't know about Postgres.

<comment><USER21> For what its worth, don't do this - pretty much all db code and practitioners expect three valued logic, not two.

<comment><USER20> until you have to work with a database created by an insane guy. Never needed it outside of that one project. (edit: small hint: composite primary key where parts can be null)

<comment><USER21> I have nothing to say to this but simply "I am so sorry."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> NULLs in subselects do bite me with distressing regularity: Writing

      SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE blah NOT IN (SELECT foo FROM bar);

getting no hits until I slap my forehead and add WHERE foo IS NOT NULL to the subselect.

</comment><comment><USER23> DynamoDB, which is NoSql, also doesn't accept empty strings. But at least, Oracle automatically converts the empty string into NULL, comparing with DynamoDB which would actually fail the query.

</comment><comment><USER12> With some columnar databases NULLs are 'free' because they are a default, absent state or compressed away. Can be another reason to prefer them with very large datasets.

</comment><comment><USER24> In MySQL, NULL values are useful when using CONCAT_WS (concatenation with separator) or GROUP_CONCAT because NULL values will be ignored - so you don't get e.g., "one,,two".

</comment><comment><USER25> I was dealing with NULLs whole day on MySQL workbench. It wasn't considering int as NULL value. Needed to make all empty cells 0 to be able to import data properly.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you benefit from a GitHub like survey tool? - <AUTHOR>

I like survey tools from some reason, Typeform and sruveymonkey. It helps in collecting data on a wide range of tasks from market research to planning trips. What is lacking in these tools is its "closedness", there is a lot of data out there that could be useful to many but with a limited view. I want to therefore build a tool that is completely based on the sharing model. Your suggestions as always are valuable. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if I understand what "closedness" means for you. Basically, you would like to build a platform for creating surveys/forms and then all the surveys/forms would share the data between them, creating data that is open for everyone?

Would this be a completely open project or something you're planning to monetize?

Quick disclaimer, I work at Typeform

<comment><AUTHOR> @diggan, hello. Apologies for the english. I'm not sure what you mean by "sharing data between them". What I really meant was survey whose results are accessible to everyone, I understand that some surveys like HR surveys are meant to be private, but for many other people would like to know what other people have answered in certain surveys like market research.

I have not even begun sketching this project yet, but I would have to consider both options for the kind of path this project would take.

Since you work at Typeform, I would like to ask a few questions(If you are willing). I'm not a heavy typeform user so some points might not be relevant.

I understand that Typeform is mostly centered towards the UX, but could it be beneficial to add feature for a markdown like syntax as an alternative to WYSIWYG, partly because I'm a power user and otherwise the interface is too laggy.

As far as reporting/analytics goes, Typeform is not very useful. I would love to see something like cross-tabs where you can cross multiple metrics to derive data. Yes writing a generic solution would be hard for this problem I think! it would be great to see something like this. As otherwise it is difficult to derive answers for questions like, what is the % of people who like trekking and would love to go to the moon?

This would be another benefit of using textual syntax, as users can point out with the DSL what metrics can be crossed and what cannot be.

This is just my feedback! I have a some other points, I would be happy to answer any queries you have and would love to hear what you have to say.

Have a great day.

<comment><USER2> No worries about the language, at this point, I think I understand what you're out after...

We have a API that is currently in MVP stage (very early) that you can access to create typeforms by POSTing JSON to our endpoint. You can get access to it today by going here: [http://typeform.io/landing/](http://typeform.io/landing/)

We think that by leveraging the creation of typeforms and collection of results via API, you can build your own, customized backend on top of Typeform I/O and you'll be able to do all the things you're looking for.

Shoot me an email at email@example.com if you have any questions you'd like to discuss privately. Otherwise, I hope I answered your questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think that makes sense. I should definitely check this out.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: REF10 – Earn Money for Referring Successful Job Candidates - <AUTHOR> https://ref10.com/home <comment><USER2> Please don't use sockpuppets for voting and commenting. We ban those accounts and the main one if it continues.

<comment><AUTHOR> what happens when you hand such task to 'growth hackers' :). would have appreciated if this was communicated directly via email so we stop it right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> do referrers get paid by ref10 or by the recruiter/company? how do you ensure a recruiter/company pays and communicates that a candidate was hired?

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for your questions!

referrers get paid by REF10. we ask hiring companies to sign a legal agreement that is somehow similar to the one recruiting agencies do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> how do we get paid?

<comment><AUTHOR> via PayPal or bank transfer

<comment><USER4> but you don't ask for payment information

<comment><AUTHOR> for now, we get in touch with successful referrers and process their payments manually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> how do you pay referrers?

<comment><AUTHOR> PayPal or bank transfer</comment></comment>


How Steve Jobs would change today's healthcare system - <AUTHOR> http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/how-steve-jobs-would-change-today-s-healthcare-system.html <comment><USER2> Is this the same Steve Jobs who rejected his doctors' advice and traditional treatment options for the better part of a year, in favor of dubious remedies and flat-out quackery?

Because I wouldn't want _that_ Steve Jobs anywhere near a system that I or my family would have to rely upon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or the same one who gamed the system to jump the line in obtaining his liver?</comment>


Ask HN: Zealous community member wants to help - <AUTHOR>

A member of my site's community has been asking for a greater role.  He wants to write the homepage announcements, send out our email updates, and help liason with bloggers and such.
Considering that we love getting help with the outreach (so we can spend more time on coding), I'm really happy to accept the help.  However, I'm worried about what he expects to get out of this, and I'm also worried that he'll be offended if I just come straight out and ask about his motivations.
Anyone have any horror stories or words of warning in this area?  What warning signs should I be on the lookout for?  Any tips on how to proceed? <comment><USER2> I had someone like this a few years ago but they were asking for other little things they could help with. I found them some low-level yet important things they could do for us, made sure to thank them publicly in several places, and it was win-win. At no point did I give them user/pass somewhere nor did they receive elevated privileges anywhere; just something free for their time/effort.

His motivation, had I asked him, was probably that he thought we were really small, really bright, and that he could save money with a creative solution to our problems. He was right and it worked out great.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> As a first approximation, I'd say your safest choice is to create an official "power user" or "moderator"-type user class, with explicitly defined responsibilities and privileges, and make him the first member of that class.

<comment><USER4> Second that. And be very clear about what he is _not_ allowed to do as well.

Power users running amok is the last thing you want.

And make a trial period where you check stuff he does before it goes out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We had two of those volunteers when I ran a rather large website. And it was a realy positive experience. We gave them admin rights to subsections of the site (message board, etc.) and they did a really great job. So no horror stories from me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some people just like to feel helpful/needed and like to spend their time working on stuff they believe in. If no money is exchanging hands, your best currency is to make them feel respected and appreciated. But, as others have suggested, don't give access to something that might lead to regrets. And start small and let the role grow. It's much better to do that than to give too much to the person, have a bad experience on both ends, and try to curb it back.</comment>


The Beauty Of SVG Fractals - <AUTHOR> http://www.mecxpert.de/svg/fractals.html <comment><USER2> You should include the following attributes into to the svg tag, otherwise it will not render correctly in browsers.

xmlns="<http://www.w3.org/2000/svg> xmlns:xlink="<http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink> version="1.2"

<comment><USER3> Most recent browsers support HTML5, which allows SVG with implicit SVG and XLink namespaces. Not that I suggest you don't use namespaces in standalone SVG, as that is still required.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Current methods/libraries for implementing handwriting OCR? - <AUTHOR> What are some current methods for implementing OCR on handwriting?
This is what I have so far:
* Pre-process with some image filters, try combinations of: Black and white, Greyscale, edge detection(Canny?), line detection(Hough?)
* Try kNN (k nearest neighbor) algorithm first. This should be fast and work on easy stuff, but its more of a math equation and not really deep learning.
* Try a CNN (convolutional neural network). Probably use either the Keras or mxnet libraries
STILL tripping me up:
* Is there another machine learning technique I should try to apply to this other than the kNN and CNN strategies??
* Are there libraries that are more specifically geared towards handwriting OCR than Keras or mxnet? RNNLIB (too old?), ocropy?
* Lastly, I haven't come across many methods to isolate characters and words from an image full of handwritten text. Figured I'd try to pull characters out and send them through the kNN algorithm, and pull characters and words out before putting them through the CNN engine. <comment><USER2> I've tried a few OCR solutions. Ultimately, the best was Google Vision, by a long shot.

It works great with unusual fonts/handwritten allcaps, and it's the absolute best when it comes to working with low-resolution images.

I have no experience using it with hard-to-read handwriting, but it might be worth checking it out if you don't know it already.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just checked out google vision and it is the only online demo I was able to get to read handwritten text. Had maybe a 60-70% success rate for poorly written handwriting. And more like 85%-90% with good handwriting. Really cool.

<comment><USER2> Yes, it's really awesome.

Pretty cheap, too.</comment></comment></comment>


No, Spooning Isn't Sexist. The Internet Is Just Broken - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/04/no-spooning-isn-t-sexist-the-internet-is-just-broken.html <comment><USER2> There is a (probably not entirely legal) consumer solution: [http://unvis.it](http://unvis.it)

"What the tool does is to try to capture the content of an article or blog post without passing on your visit as a pageview. Effectively this means that you're not paying with your attention, so you can read and share the idiocy that it contains."

<comment><USER3> Isn't this just pushing the problem away from us? The problem being: Why do I still click on an article even if I know it will not be worth my time, attention and energy in any way.

"Effectively this means that you're not paying with your attention". I don't see how this is true. The owner of the website might just _think_ I don't pay with my attention. But I did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is hardly new. Slate's entire brand is built on these sort of contrarian, antagonistic viewpoints. A large portion of their content can simply be boiled down to "you're doing it wrong" or "something you like is terrible." They've followed this model for most of their 20-year existence.

This goes back well before Slate, though: The term "yellow journalism" was coined in the late 1800's.

<comment><USER5> And for a more modern take, just look at the magazines in the supermarket checkout line at any time in the past several decades. You've got the more "classic" tabloids with the equivalent of clickbait headlines about actors and entertainers. You've got the women's and men's mags telling you why you're not screwing enough or dressing/exercising/eating the right way. Then you have the more self-aware stuff like Weekly World News and The Enquirer with their UFOs and CIA abductions and Elvis sightings.

I find these "clickbait" stories to be the natural evolution of the same type of sensationalism that's been used to sell papers and magazines or get you to stick around for the full story at 11.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Other articles trending on The Daily Beast:

> "The Alabama Granny Murder-For-Hire Plot" > "Attack Of The Kate Upton > Clones" > "The Internet Is Just Broken"

...oh wait, that last one... It's not an issue with the internet, Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster style intriguing/bizarre stories have always been popular. Hyperbole brings people in, and it's not just about clicks – people will read stupid stories in The Sun or The Mirror depending on their political leanings, and feel entertained. Because they're fun, silly stories. I'd hate to write one myself but that's a personality trait I have, and not necessarily a positive one.

Also:

> Advertisers have wised up a little bit. There are now party tricks like > branded content—wherein advertisers pay for stories that are sort of about > their product, but are also about, say, travel or sports—and advertisers > sometimes take into account unique visitors within specific demographics, > based on age, race, and location.

> Tony Haile, the CEO of Chartbeat—the kings of metrics on the Web—tried to > warn us about this last year.

I'm inclined to think this is a Daily Beast writer and Chartbeat being a bit cheeky! Hiding in plain sight. Not that I would begrudge them at all. It was a fun read. Although I disagree with the central premise behind writing it, most of the actual ideas seemed fine. Time on site is hardly a new concept though, and engagement in general has been somewhere on the priority list for (for example) Google for quite a while now.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ironic that a story about clickbait is clickbait. As you get to the third or fourth paragraph it turns in to a plug for Chartbeat and simultaneously a hit piece for Vox.

<comment><USER8> Vox don't need hit pieces, they do it themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The next evolution from clickbait lists is intentionally provocative stories like the one discussed here.

What alternative model can work aside from measuring pure clicks though? Even "the time on site" solution they mention here (if it were even workable) has problems, just because I spend a few minutes reading something doesn't mean it's high quality. Equally high quality content need not necessarily take a long time to consume.

<comment><USER9> > just because I spend a few minutes reading something doesn't mean it's high > quality

Precisely. Attraction to spectacle results in not only clicks on that "Outrageous Statement X", but also so one can firmly applaud/smugly disdain it.

And I'm not just pretending its only other people who do this; I'm not proud but I've fallen into that hole myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Comments from earlier discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10514599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10514599)

</comment><comment><USER11> Other way to read the first part: no matter how ridiculous the point, chances are high that a huge number of people will read and believe it.

Just look at Donald Trump.

</comment><comment><USER12> I do not feel this belongs on Hacker News?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I thought it might generate some interesting discussion on what alternative revenue models might work.

<comment><USER13> The interesting question then is why do we have to find another model? Why are people so hell bent on creating content online? If the business apparently does not work, why not trying to make and sell flowerpots instead?

<comment><USER14> The business - using click bait headlines and outrage porn to generate ad revenue - does (or can, at least) work. TFA is complaining that this business model incentivises shitty content that makes people cross.

Incidentally, this is not a new or unexpected phenomenon, 'traditional' media marketing bods have understood the principle for decades - the noisier a channel gets the louder/shriller you have to shout to get people's attention.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Obama and the N.S.A.: Why He Can't Be Trusted - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2014/01/obama-and-the-nsa-why-he-cant-be-trusted.html <comment><USER2> The Founding Fathers of the USA were concerned about writing a Bill Of Rights because any natural right not enumerated therein might be construed as not being a right at all. This is where we are with pervasive surveillance: being incapable of imagining/comprehending a surveillance system of this scale, it never dawned in them to protect anything more than "persons, papers and effects". At a time when just overhearing a conversation was hard enough to require concerted effort, they could not dream of a day when a significant percentage of every conversation among 300,000,000 people could be monitored and catalogued automatically at a not-prohibitive cost. Methinks: had they known, they would have not hesitated to prohibit it as explicitly as they did infringement of arms possession. Alas, the courts adhere only to the letter of the Constitution, not its spirit.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, our education system does not teach us that the Constitution is a framework setting form constraints upon the government, but as a framework establishing and itemizing a list of freedoms citizens are allowed.

So, we have an entire population that assumes if it is not enumerated in the Constitution, you do not have that right. For example "hey, the Constitution doesn't say privacy is a right". Well, no. It doesn't need to. You already have that right, without a piece of paper declaring it.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid that this understanding of the Constitution has become so pervasive that it can not be changed, thereby completely reversing the entire intention of the founding fathers in constructing it. Thereby giving the government _all the rights_ and citizens _only_ the rights specifically declared in it (and, these days, not even that).

It's kind of stomach-turning to see that reversal.

<comment><USER4> Though this is slightly unrelated, today I tried to buy some Antibiotic eye droplets for my dog. It's not possible without a prescription. For a DOG! I love my dog, he is awesome. But legally, he is my property. I can kill him if I want to, sell him to a research center to be experimented on, or just let him go blind from the eye infection he picked up. But I can not buy meds for him without first taking him to an undereducated, glorified nurse (vet). So I had to go to a vet, pay $50 so he can poke my dog around with his finger, and then write me a prescription for the exact fucking drug I was trying to buy in the first place!

The point is, like you mentioned, the constitution enumerates the Power of the federal government, not JUST the limitations on the said government! This means, if it's NOT in the constitution, then the government does NOT have that power, and I DO. The constitution says nothing about regulation of drugs, mass surveillance, or privacy. This means I HAVE those rights and the government has NO right to infringe my rights. Pretty soon I'll have to consult with a "licensed professional" to take a shit, and the NSA will have a camera at the bottom of my toilet, thus completing their constitutionally prescribed mission of crawling up the ass of every American, to make sure that no terrorists hide there, of course.

<comment><USER5> The restriction on antibiotics is for the protection of everyone, it's not just to screw you out of $50.

If people are allowed to throw antibiotics at any problem they think might be cured with them, then they eventually lose their effectiveness (as is becoming the case already). It doesn't matter that they were for your dog either, the same antibiotics are often used to treat human and animals, so misuse in one group can still cause problems for the other.

<comment><USER4> The overprescription of antibiotics is indeed a problem. But notice, it's still a problem, even though you can only get antibiotics with prescription. This is mostly due to the fact that many doctors, and most veterinarians I have ever had the displeasure of meeting are woefully incompetent. I am 30, and used antibiotics twice in my life, and needed it twice for my dog (because he has a genetic condition that effects his eyes). How about just educating people about the dangers of antibiotics, and letting them make up their own mind. The situation couldn't get any worse than it already is. Right now doctors give out steroids and antibiotics as if they were candy, especially in large hospitals. But now we are getting off topic, sorry for the rant, it was just a touchy subject today.

<comment><USER6> "How about just educating people about the dangers of [thing], and letting them make up their own mind."

Most of us are stupid, not by birth but by training and experience. It's not our fault. Most of us don't do anything for a living that requires us to be more than stupid.

Staking your future and safety on the actual abilities of the actual population is pretty damn risky, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Obama just got to much trust in advance. Everybody seemed to think, because his predecessor was such a catastrophe, Obama must be some kind of savior.

But he isn't. He even got the peace noble price just for his announcements. Nothing more. Still his announcement is there, that he will close Guantanamo. It is announced but nothing done. He is the savior of announcements.

Also people thought, that he would finish up with the bad ruling of his predecessor. But even the known cases of torture in Iraq did not have any consequences (besides those of letting some stupid low level soldiers be the escape goats). One of the first doings of Obama was a big amnesty for any wrongdoings of intelligence people. That already showed a foreshadow what we could expect of Obama.

I guess, either Obama is a Wolfe in savior-skin, or he is a sheep in a wolfs- skin and so much under pressure from some side, that he has to obey and shut up, no matter what he really wanted in the first place ...

I also guess, that we should internalize the thought, that the really mighty in this world are not on the cover pages of the newspapers and those on the cover pages are less mighty as we shall think.

<comment><USER8> _There was a mood of immense excitement thrilling through all of them. Together and between them they had gone to and beyond the furthest limits of physical laws, restructured the fundamental fabric of matter, strained, twisted and broken the laws of possibility and impossibility, but still the greatest excitement of all seemed to be to meet a man with an orange sash round his neck. (An orange sash was what the President of the Galaxy traditionally wore.) It might not even have made much difference to them if they 'd known exactly how much power the President of the Galaxy actually wielded: none at all. Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it._

 _Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job._

<comment><USER7> Fits very much. Thank you!

<comment><USER8> The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy has a lot of good social satire in it. They cut far too much of that from the film.

<comment><USER7> I think, that's the reason, they cut it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's another possibility. The NSA has blackmailed Obama into protecting their interests. If Obama makes substantial changes to the NSA and then is outed for something that the NSA would have known about, he may have been blackmailed.

<comment><USER10> Well discussed in this related topic sub-thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7070045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7070045)

I and many others simply don't buy that premise in our modern no shame culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Quite a few people didn't trust him enough to vote for him during the last two presidential elections ... since he can't run for another term, I'm guessing he doesn't care if the people that did vote for him trust him anymore.

</comment><comment><USER12> In the NYT article it mentioned something about him trusting himself not to go too far. I guess it's this feeling of enlightened ruler that always goes too far.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, so many citizens feel this way, too. It never occurs to them that the government never gives power back. Look at the Patriot Act. It just keeps going and going and going.

It never occurs to them that when you give a president some obscene unchecked powers (and especially when you have a legislative branch that abandons their responsibility to be a check and balance and becomes a bunch of bi-partisan yes-men, you are giving that power to _every_ president that comes afterward. Including the next Nixon. Which I guess is what we have today, when you think about it.

We like to blame "the government", but I'd blame most of our current situation on an entire population that we have failed to educate on civics and how government works. They don't even know the basics and they give up or dismiss so much, because they don't know better.

<comment><USER10> " _Including the next Nixon. Which I guess is what we have today, when you think about it._ "

Not just "think"; my political awareness begins with Nixon's first term, and Obama "feels" a lot like him, certainly a lot more than any following president. Check around, many other of us older types have noticed this.

Just look at the analogous IRS situations, only in Nixon's days they mostly ignored his requests.

<comment><USER3> That's why I said it is what we have today. Right down to spying on dissidents and political adversaries and blackmailing and extorting them for personal, political, and economic gain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't mean to sound conspiratorial but I get the impression that when someone becomes president their is a manner by which the intelligence community implicitly says "Ok , you're the president now...here's how the world really fucking works".

The end result being a host of very convincing cultural assumptions that are hard to argue with if you're on the inside and driving the wheel.

<comment><USER10> Actually, as a candidate, at some point they start getting read in on national security matters, so this "indoctrination" begins even before the election.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is very hard to trust _anyone_ over pervasive suveillance. That is partly why it is so poisonous. Public political figures are obvious intelligence targets, if only for budget protection.</comment>