New York Times Plans Cutbacks in Newsroom Staff [and Apps] - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/business/media/new-york-times-plans-cutbacks-in-newsroom-staff.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "But they also said they had decided to wind down NYT Opinion because it had not drawn a substantial audience. And while praising NYT Now, a new app aimed at younger readers, they said that as a lower-priced subscription offer, it had not proved as popular as they had hoped."</comment>


PayPal Hates Conferences – Especially OpenCamp - <AUTHOR> http://openca.mp/blog/paypal-hates-conferences-especially-opencamp/ <comment><USER2> I agree that PayPal is acting horribly in this situation, but it is worthwhile to look at the world from their perspective.

From reading many of these stories, it's clear that PayPal wants to cap their risk. For a brick-and-mortar business, their risk is the difference between sales that have been billed and product that has been received by the customer. That might account for a week or two worth of sales volume on a rolling basis, so a business doing $100k a year of PayPal transactions will typically only have $3k-$4k at risk, which is on par with what PayPal will earn by serving such an account over 18-24 months.

For a conference, however, there might be six months of revenue for pre- registration before the actual event takes place. If the event planner then absconds with the money, PayPal could be on the hook for the entire amount, which has long-since been withdrawn and spent. Take that same hypothetical $100k business for a conference, now all $100k of it is at risk, and PayPal only stands to make $2,500 or so off of that.

It's pretty clear that the credit card companies have PayPal by the short-and- curlies, in the sense that PayPal themselves will be on the hook for any chargebacks.

I call this the "wash my Ferrari" problem. If you do a good job, you make $10. If you scratch the paint, you're out $10,000. Not a good risk.

Open question to HN: how could PayPal do a better job of handling the situation?

<comment><USER3> >Open question to HN: how could PayPal do a better job of handling the situation?

By simply being up front about their terms. If they don't care about events then they should set a policy not to support them, it's that simple. Don't lure people in and then make their lives a pain in the ass once you're holding their money. They know better than anyone how they can make events work, if at all.

I agree, PayPal is often over criticized considering the spectacular international fraud resolution and prevention work they do that goes, mostly, unthanked. True, we should remember the alternative is processing the payments ourselves, but if you are going to offer a product, offer a good one or not at all. Especially when so much money is at stake.

<comment><USER4> _I agree, PayPal is often over criticized_

If what's described in the linked article is correct, they deserve the criticism. There's fraud prevention, and then there's organized harassment and extortion. The examples given are of the latter, and if it were me I'd just hire an attorney and file a lawsuit with enough zeroes in the damage claim to get wide press coverage and, thus, the attention of someone who's actually accountable.

<comment><USER3> The definition of quoting out of context...

As I mentioned, to criticize PayPal's inflexibility in situations like this as "harassment and extortion" is melodramatic and misunderstands both the work they really do, and the number of times you aren't saying this about the people on the other end of the transaction.

<comment><USER4> Step one of the process was repeated demands for verification, re-verification and re-re-verification, which in my book is harassment; there's a level of verification that's reasonable to protect against fraud, and there's a level of verification which adds nothing to the protection and serves only to frustrate.

Step two was "you don't want to play our game? Fine, we'll lock up your money". That's extortion, plain and simple. Given the reported background behind it, there is nothing reasonable about it. And no matter how much good work they may do in other cases, it provides no excuse for the conduct described in this case.

Or, more succinctly: there's a very good reason why Paypal has such an abysmal reputation, and it's not because they're portrayed unfairly in cases like this one.

<comment><USER3> >And no matter how much good work they may do in other cases, it provides no excuse for the conduct described in this case.

That's just not true. It completely disregards reality. In a fantasy world where life is totally fair you are correct. Back in the real world, failure rate is a VERY relevant stat, and is never expected to be 0. The system and processes in the company have been optimized to handle certain types of cases extremely well. They will fail on other cases (like this one).

My argument is that they should change their policy to simply not support the cases for which their system isn't perfected, but you are using a volvo and expecting a porsche. But just because this one case was a failure does not mean the system is failing in general. It's not, there is a reason PayPal is so successful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would like to know what EventBrite's take is on this (they are the ticket management agency this and most events seem to use, the facilitator of the payment to PayPal, and lead generator to PayPal).

The issues PayPal are raising (Events are risky, don't make PayPal much money) are the same for every one of EventBrite's customers.

On their own each event is powerless against the might of PayPal, but in aggregate EventBrite has some leverage against PayPal given the amount of business they send PayPal's way each year.

<comment><USER6> I am one of the co-founders of Guestlist. Wee are not event close to the same scale as Eventbrite, but I can give some insight.

Of all the events hundreds of events we have hosted we have only ever received one complaint from a purchaser. Somebody was apparently using our service to sell "power leveling" sessions for a game the he never received the service after he paid. The ticket price in this case was $20 I believe.

At the same time we have moved over $700,000 in the last 12 months all through PayPal. $20 is a very small percentage so I don't really see events as a high risk. Of course, EventBrite is much larger and they probably attract more scammers.

We exclusively use PayPal as our payment processor and have yet to run into them closing down somebody's account. Our main trouble with PayPal lies in their terrible interface and people being able to override the pingback url.

<comment><USER7> They shouldn't be able to override a pingback URL if you're using encrypted URLs. The issue I'm finding is that many shopping carts and libraries aren't using encrypted URLs. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem is that PP empowers bureaucrats (like the "Kathleen" identified in the OpenCamp story) to act capriciously, without reference to pre-established (and pre-published) standards and policies.

One commenter below the OC story describes how he has used the PP/EventBrite combination successfully and comfortably for a couple years. That's great for him (for now).

The problem is the _unpredictability_ of how PP may treat any customer in the future, without regard for their past performance/association with PP (as in the OC case).

Personally, given the number of (unresolved/unexplained) horror stories I have heard with PP, I would not advise anyone (ANYone) to risk any business connection with PP (beyond what they are perfectly happy to lose) - no more than I advise people to take their retirement funds to a casino.

</comment><comment><USER9> Perfect timing. I'm about to open early-bird registration for an event ( <http://www.mathsjam.com> ) and we're emailing people on our "registered interest" list to ask how they want to pay. We were going to offer PayPal, but this has convinced us otherwise.

We will now not offer PayPal as an option.

For reference, we will offer direct bank transfer and cheques in advance. We are also dealing with the venue, and they may offer CC facilities, but that's still being negotiated.

I understand PayPal's position, but I'm not going to run the risk of having them continue to accept money on my behalf, then not give it to me.

</comment><comment><USER10> How is the YC-funded competition doing? ( WePay, right? <http://wepay.com/> )

<comment><USER11> > Does WePay allow international (non-US) payments? Not right now, but we hope > to soon.

So, still very limiting.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, might as well use a merchant account. Not cheap but still...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> PayPal figured out awhile ago they have millions of users and that every customer is easily replaceable.

Anyone that thinks having an account for quite some time or is doing $xxxx in business per month is some kind of safety net is kidding themselves.

</comment><comment><USER14> What sensible alternatives are there for PayPal with international money transfers? Is a plain wire transfer too expensive? In Europe, I'd just do a BIC+IBAN transfer to another European country.

<comment><USER15> European banks have arrangements which make that economical, but transfers between e.g. Japan and the United States or the UK and the United States cost about $60. Also, American banks put consumers through a wringer to actually effect a transfer, since it is one of the highest fraud risk operations a bank is capable of _and_ typical American consumers do international wire transfers very seldom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> <http://www.amiando.com/> seems to be pretty popular among event organizers these days, there's a couple of other providers also specializing in the event ticketing market. In fact I think Amiando even did the Launch48 event which was sponsored and hosted by PayPal.

<comment><USER5> True, but don't confuse ticket management for payment gateway. They are two separate steps.

Honestly, EventBrite or Amiando should offer their own payments system as they easily have enough traffic to make it worthwhile I would have thought.

<comment><USER5> My bad. Both have moved on since I last reviewed their offerings (and ran an event).

Which then prompts me to ask... why is OpenCamp not using EventBrite's own gateway then? PayPal thus circumvented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting - I'm planning a conference soon and this makes me a bit nervous. Good luck with your fight!

</comment><comment><USER17> Amazon Payments might be an option <https://payments.amazon.com/>

Seems like the market is there for a PayPal alternative. It would be an interesting start-up. I'm putting together a Wiki soon to spec out the project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Having recently talked with some people at Paypal, I would never want to deal with the regulatory challenges they have to deal with. The challenge is dealing with that and fraud. Square might be on to something with requiring credit checks, but then you're narrowing your market. Do you have some ideas for dealing with these considerable hurdles?

<comment><USER18> They chalk up more than $250 million in annual fraud losses as a cost of doing business - there's a network of fraud artists that have cut their teeth on the PayPal network.

Being the innovator, PayPal grew up with these fraudsters, building an in- house database of knowledge about how to handle them as they cropped up one by one.

If you're talking about building a PayPal competitor at this point, you're launching at a point when there isn't going to be as much investor interest in your startup combined with a mature fraud ecosystem prepared to shut it down.

And those are only the problems we know of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've read too many of these horror stories, and I've come to the conclusion that I will never, under any circumstances, use PayPal for anything other than small personal transactions. Even then, the fees are almost enough to make it not worthwhile at all.

</comment><comment><USER20> _But despite the long term and multi-account relationship we enjoy, they've gone so far as to force me to send them copies of my drivers license and social security card to some strange physical address_

after what kind of verification?

</comment><comment><USER21> Get a merchant account and take payments yourself. PayPal isn't worth it for anything more than selling your junk on eBay.

<comment><USER17> They seem to support "Power Sellers" very well, selling physical goods, and screw everyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Have a talk to a lawyer friend and see if it amounts to harassment/invasion of privacy? and if it does see if they will have a little talk to them about it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hate on PayPal all you like, but next time, try opening a merchant account to charge credit cards directly. You'll need...

1\. to incorporate and file an LLC agreement

2\. to go in person to open a corporate bank account

3\. display photo ID, in person

4\. show proof of residency

5\. show proof of business address

6\. get checks for that biz acct

7\. fax/paper mail all sorts of notarized stuff to ANOTHER company to open a merchant bank account

8\. rinse and repeat to open a credit card processing account, fax/paper mail

9\. talk with reps on the phone because something inevitably goes wrong

10\. Pay a total of about $1200 for all the above services,

11\. not to mention at least 2-3 hours of traveling around, even if you live in a city where it's all available nearby.

You will also likely be subject to a personal credit check since your business is brand-spankin-new.

So, yes, PayPal didn't treat you all that nicely... they treated you exactly like you'd be treated if you set up to open your own CC processing.

FTR, we've had no problems selling tickets to all _our_ events, but we didn't open a brand new PayPal account to do it - we used our longstanding one. Sounds like you opened a brand new PayPal account, right? I assume that since you mentioned that you had another, longstanding account. That's like saying "I have good credit, but my friend Joe doesn't, so we applied for the credit in Joe's name." It doesn't transfer.

Also, just in case you think you should use Google Checkout instead - if you think PayPal is bad, brace yourself, since Checkout is 100x worse:

[http://slash7.com/2009/03/26/google-is-evil-worse-than- paypa...](http://slash7.com/2009/03/26/google-is-evil-worse-than-paypal-don-t- use-google-checkout-for-your-business/)</comment>


Beijing-based Covid-19 activists said to be detained - <AUTHOR> https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1523048-20200427.htm?spTabChangeable=0 <comment><AUTHOR> "Given that both Chen and Cai were contributors to the Terminus2049 project, we suspect their disappearance was related and relevant to the project."</comment>


Artificial Intelligence Has a 'Sea of Dudes' Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-23/artificial-intelligence-has-a-sea-of-dudes-problem <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11980557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11980557)

</comment><comment><USER3> Really gets to the nature of what we mean by the term "intellgence". It's _gender_ specific. A lot of times in AI you'll hear people talk about a no gender robot thinking for itself. But we have no examples of genderless intellegent humans. intellgence implies gender.

<comment><AUTHOR> Intelligence is the ability to extract meaning from a mass of input -- but yeah, what makes it _meaningful_? By definition, it has to be meaningful to a person in some way.

While everyone wants good medical data and scientific breakthroughs...yeah, it seems like sooner or later you're going to reach a question which men and women view differently.</comment></comment>


Introduction to Computational Thinking - <AUTHOR> https://mitmath.github.io/18S191/Fall20/ <comment><AUTHOR> I really enjoyed the first week, and it has been a good motivation to start to learn Julia.

Grant Sanderson's (aka 3blue1brown) lesson on convolutions [1] was simply excellent. Can't wait to see upcoming lessons. Really amazing that MIT is publishing these in parallel to the live course.

[1] [https://mitmath.github.io/18S191/Fall20/lecture2/#segment_1_...](https://mitmath.github.io/18S191/Fall20/lecture2/#segment_1_convolutions_in_image_processing)

<comment><USER2> Note that the Pluto notebooks are not yet posted, but will be after the assignments are due.

<comment><USER3> Is there a site where you can run Pluto notebooks rather than running them locally?

<comment><USER2> Not that I am aware of. We are working towards that possibility on JuliaHub.com, but nothing soon. I should point out that installing Julia and Pluto locally should take at best a matter of minutes and no fuss.

<comment><USER3> Locally is often an iPad. That's why I asked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like this course is on the bleeding edge of high-quality education -- the use of Julia as the programming language of choice, Discord for communication, and most importantly 3Blue1Brown as an instructor. Good to see that innovation isn't dead in academia.

<comment><USER5> And Pluto notebooks are amazing in this educational context. With Jupyter notebooks I always wondered, why not just use the REPL? But Pluto's reactivity brings something new to the table. And being able to easily add UI elements like sliders bound to variables is something that you can't do in Jupyter.

<comment><USER6> You should buy an old mac from 1984 and put Mathematica 1.0 on it and your mind will really be blown :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Youtuber teaming up with MIT professors is dream come true when it comes to online learning. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad that courses like these are taught using Julia and not Python. I'll definitely have to go through this material.

<comment><USER9> Interesting, why is that?

I'm a big Python fan, and don't know anything about Julia really. So interested in your thinking.

<comment><USER10> One of the reasons is because you can write a fast and scalable simulation directly in Julia. Something like Python will inhibit the speed of loops, scalarized nonlinear functions (like in ODEs), and multithreading. You could try to run an introduction to computational thinking (which is essentially introduction to computational science and introduction to programming at the same time) in C++ + Python, but then you spend half of the course teaching students how to handle C++ and how to link all of their compilation tools, and all of that is time not spent on the actual topic of the course. At one point I did this in a numerical analysis course, and it just detracts from the main message.

But with Julia, the whole course is up and running on day one, and you can start with building bifurcation plots or agent-based models which then grow in complexity without having to rewrite for performance. Since these computational science courses always to try poke at studies of complexity, this is very essential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> MIT has been really pushing Julia. This is not their first course using it.

Exciting since MIT use to be one of the few notable universities using Python for some of their intro level courses -- back when Java and C++ had a monopoly. I think that much success of Python can be owed to MIT curriculum.

</comment><comment><USER12> Grant Sanderson? Ok im sold

<comment><USER13> I winded back and did a double take when he appeared. damn I love Grant. his Content is awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I didn't find an overview of what will be covered in the course and who the intended target audience is. Did anybody find some infos about this course?

<comment><USER2> The course is really for anyone who has a curiosity in applying computational science to solving problems. If you are motivated by Victor's essay on "What can a technologist do about Climate change" ([http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/](http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/)) or Alan Edelman's "A programming language to heal the planet" ([https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_edelman_a_programming_languag...](https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_edelman_a_programming_language_to_heal_the_planet_together_julia)), then you should follow this class.

It does many things differently than the traditional way of teaching such a course. Specifically the emphasis on applications that matter today (epidemiology, climate change, etc.) are a key part of the course, where a more traditional approach may have been to cover a series of numerical methods.

<comment><USER15> Just read "What can a technologist do about Climate change." Thank you for posting that. Has me wanting to change what I'm currently working on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For a beginner, would taking this course and CS50 concurrently be a good idea? Or would learning multiple different programming languages simultaneously be an unnecessary burden for a beginner?

<comment><USER17> No. It would be a bad idea.

This course looks good. CS50 is overhyped dogshit.

The CS50 lecturer is an egoist, very good at selling you on it being THE GREATEST COURSE EVER, and convincing you that you're learning REALLY HARD THINGS. Oh, and you're truly brilliant for learning it, and he's truly brilliant for teaching it so well that you can understand it. Come join his cult! And all that time, he's doing a random, disjointed hodgepodge of very basic stuff.

You can totally do two programming languages simultaneously, but you might as well go with a good curriculum. Khan Academy is surprisingly excellent. MIT 6.001/SICP will run you over with a steam train, but boy will you learn a lot. Coursekata will teach you data science in R. There are a whole bunch of really excellent Python courses, web dev bootcamps, and, well, just really quite a lot of really good stuff out there.

The hard piece for a beginner is sorting out the wheat from the chaff. But I just gave you a bunch of pointers. Pick one. Pick five. Run with them. Or ask someone who is a serious computer scientist to help point you if none of those match your interests. Just don't ask a person straight out of a CS50 brainwashing; it takes a bit of expertise to be able to look back and see what's good and what's bad.

(CS50 cult members: Please downvote! And bring your friends.)

<comment><USER18> Very rude and unkind. It's not as if your paying for any of that material. It's super beginner friendly.

<comment><USER17> 1\. Free doesn't excuse harming students.

2\. And it's not all that free. It's a growing business founded on hype and freemium. CS50 peddles it's wares on edX for $180 per "program," and it's being monetized quite a few other places.

3\. Beginner-attractive isn't the same as beginner-friendly. Ice cream is beginner-attractive to kids first learning to eat, but vegetables are beginner-friendly. With CS50, you'll waste a ton of time to, ultimately, learn very little and be convinced you've learned a lot. You'll definitely learn the slogan "This is CS50" with an impressive video montage, though, and that you're part of an elite crowd which managed to master Scratch.

This is the bane of self-driven online education. People shop based on novice perception.

Or, guessing from your one-comment account, you're a David Malan cult member who signed up just to post this one comment. In which case, good job! You got out of CS50 what David was trying to teach you. Carry on. Bring your friends!

If you're not, have an objective look inside. Tell me it doesn't look like a "free" Scientology audit.

<comment><USER18> Look, Personally I have only seen first 4 videos. They were kinda good, but they were too slow! however I am thankful for those first few videos, they were quite helpful if providing a bird view of programming world. They might have been sillier at times. But that's just how it is, it's supposed to easy for others to jump in. This was way back when it was initially launched. Don't criticize content providers personally, you disagree with content however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't understand why people choose niche programming languages for such courses. Why not choose a language that most people know and fluent with.

Now in addition to learning the course material I have to learn a programming language I will never use again, great

<comment><USER20> It's not really a random choice in this case, Julia was created on MIT, and this is an MIT course. It's also free and open-source unlike it's competitor Matlab. It's also a very appropriated language for the theme considered it was designed by and for mathematicians and physicists (even if it targets beyond those areas). And it's not like it's going very deep on the language.

But most importantly, it's a good idea to learn many programming languages even if you think you're not going to work with them. Each language teach new concepts (immutability, OOP, monads, ownership, macros and in Julia's case multiple dispatch in particular) that not only increase your repertoire of abstractions and ways to understand and solve a problem, but they also allow you to quickly move between languages when needed (for example if you find a nice job that happens to use one of those "niche programming language", which was my case with Elixir).

<comment><USER19> Python is a very well established programming language with plenty of support for scientific computing. If the course authors would like to make the course accessible to as much people as possible, there are very few reasons to choose languages which are not widely adopted.

<comment><USER20> I answered above on a general sense, but this course is Introduction to Computational Thinking. First it's an introduction course, so it's not required experience with any language (you have lessons explaining arrays for example). Second it's a theoretical course (computational thinking, not something like applied data science), not a practical one, so that support is not important here since things are being written from scratch (the second lesson is about convolution, and the exercise is writing the convolution function). You can probably agree that simply using numpy.convolve wouldn't teach as much as writing your own, and writing in Python would end up too slow for the larger images used unless you use Numba/PyPy/Cython (or make less pseudo-code version by vectorizing everything in numpy), all stuff that is not very introductory level.

And Julia does have features besides speed that makes the course better for beginners, for example native multidimensional arrays. Images are just matrices of RGB pixels that you can freely manipulate like you would Python arrays (without the need to learn a library like numpy or any kind of conversion). And Pluto.jl reactive nature allows you to have immediate feedback of everything you change.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Slack was down - <AUTHOR> https://status.slack.com/ <comment><USER2> I hope they change the status page from "Incident" to "Outage". Too often lately have I seen status pages (mainly Github) reporting incidents when a feature or site is down completely. Seems like their SLAs are influencing the reporting of their uptime...

<comment><USER3> SLAs and maybe even company politics. Incidents are politicized at a lot of companies. Even if the official rhetoric says "when it comes to incidents we don't blame people and there are no politics" the reality is often the complete opposite.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps an "outage" label causes the incident to trigger a more widely attended post-mortem meeting and so they are careful not to over-use it.

<comment> blaser-waffle "Incident" could mean several things.

Outages mean down, badly, and require RFOs. In my experience working at an ISP we only did any sort of "blame-game" if customers demanded an RFO. We still did post-mortems but usually in a more gentle, roundtable way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heh. Slack isn't _down_ per se -- on their status page they do say there are only problems with 2 / 10 components.

Messaging and Connections.

<comment><USER6> That means down. What the f' else do they do?

<comment><USER5> Quite.

Perhaps I should have been less subtle than opening with a 'Heh', and made it clear the claim that _only_ the messaging & connection parts were failing was tongue-in-cheek.

This page's title is "Slack is down" but Slack's status page at the time was modestly conceding that "Something's not quite right".

<comment><USER7> It's interesting because the sarcasm came through for me and only because you said "they do say" rather than "they say" \- a subtle difference that is probably odd to convey to non-English speakers.

<comment><USER8> Oh, that _is_ interesting. I understood the sarcasm there as well but it's difficult to say why it is present. I guess because "do" implies a second, unsaid category "do not". I wonder if there's a Language Log entry on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since no one can connect there are no messages to deliver and therefor no message errors therefor everything but connections is up and working. /s (The Slack Status Page)

</comment><comment><USER10> how do people at Slack communicate to fix an outage when Slack is down?

<comment><USER11> Ideally your DR and emergency response systems should be not hosted on your infra and have circular dependencies . i.e.Amazon should not be hosting status page assets on S3 as they were.

At the very least they should be hosted isolated of your production service components at all layers, so both don't go down at the same time.

For slack my guess is their internal slack is not hosted on slack prod and hopefully also does not share components below L4 as well ( DNS, IP , domain, routing etc )

<comment><USER12> If the disaster involves your connectivity from within your infra to without, it could be advantageous to have backup communications hosted internally. For e.g. an internal IRC for panic situations. The advantages of this might vary depending on whether your response happens from the office, home, or wherever. Pandemic might have changed the equation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From what I have seen on [https://downdetector.com](https://downdetector.com) today, I suspect this will prove to at least partly be on the AWS end.

<comment><USER14> XBox Live and YouTube probably don't run on AWS, but also experienced a peak. This is a neat site, thanks for sharing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks like it's back up, at least partially. They're making progress...

It's crazy how easy it is to depend on Slack. Email collaboration feels downright archaic. What a great product!

<comment><USER16> Seriously, I just realized how much it's apart of my workflow as an engineer with the different integrations we've setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If anyone is curious about their deployment process [https://slack.engineering/deploys-at-slack- cd0d28c61701?gi=e...](https://slack.engineering/deploys-at-slack- cd0d28c61701?gi=efefc4866bb1) Seems hard for a new deployment to cause a global outage since they do a phased deploy. Could be some network glitch causing this issue. We never know until they come up with an update.

<comment><USER18> Everywhere I've worked has done phased deployments. Shit still goes wrong all the time. Also, I would wager that most outages are not due to code deployments, but live config changes.

<comment><USER17> Makes sense. I recollect some of the postmortem reports I read where live config changes triggered cascading outages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reminder: have a secondary form of real-time communication for your team (e.g. Telegram).

What is everyone using?

<comment><USER20> Disagree. You will spread out the communication and cause problems. People will use their preferred client instead of the one that everybody should be using as the primary. You also have to manage accounts and permissions for both. Unless you like people sending information around to their personal accounts, which I'm sure a lot of places do.

E-Mail is good enough to let people know that something like Slack is down. It's close enough to real-time to be used as a backup for something like this, and everybody already has an e-mail address.

My company already has Slack, HipChat and Teams, and it's a communications nightmare. People are constantly confused and asking for which chat client one manager uses, while others don't know where to go for the support channels.

Maybe this sounds like old-school IT, but the new-school "set everything up ad-hoc using your personal shit" just sets you up for disaster down the road.

<comment><USER21> You couldn't do this with Telegram, but if you were using Hipchat or Teams or Mattermost or Discord as your backup, you could just keep the instance locked down most of the time. Open up permissions when Slack is down.

<comment><USER22> You can do that with Telegram if you have a bunch of centrally-managed groups; simply mute them until you need them. Admins can unmute them as necessary.

That being said, I don't think I'd want Telegram to be my failover. They have a tendency to experience regional issues with great frequency, and if you're in a lot of active chats, things start to get buggy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> slack.com returning 503 Service Unavailable.

See [https://status.slack.com/2020-05/87ad1d12e36fcf0c](https://status.slack.com/2020-05/87ad1d12e36fcf0c) for incident details:

> [May 12, 4:53 PM PDT] Users have reported general performance issues such > message sending failures and timeouts. We're working to get things back to > normal as quickly as possible and will provide an update shortly.

</comment><comment><USER23> Freenode is up. FYI.

<comment><USER24> so is matrix.org, wait a second — you could have your own matrix server or even multiple ones! Centralized connections are destined to fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just a reminder, SLA doesn't apply to you if you are a free user. Folks, stop complaining about their downtime if you didn't even pay for the service. It's just like free food, don't complain about the taste if you get it for free.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a big problem, for teams using Slack for their own DevOps- monitoring and ChatOps. DR plans have to start thinking how to get all the integrations working with multiple communication providers to handle this type of scenario

</comment><comment><USER26> Now might be a good time to add new custom emoji, because that service doesn't appear to be down.

[https://cultofthepartyparrot.com/](https://cultofthepartyparrot.com/)

<comment><USER27> I love how one horny kakapo became a legend, never change Internet. (His lovelorn antics also raised a bunch of donations to kakapo conservation when it went viral, ka pai, Sirocco)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd appreciate a thorough postmortem on this one to satisfy my curiosity.

</comment><comment><USER6> Had to email the team to use Zoom. Ugh! Will anyone turn up I wonder :-)

</comment><comment><USER29> When I first got a 503, the status site was all green. I checked back for at least 4 minutes and it was still green. Finally it started to change. Is that sort of lag normal?

<comment><USER30> It is manually updated, by humans. Humans have high latency. It is not "agile" or "modern" or "hip" to have automated status testing/reporting. A human had to go and change that status page.

<comment><USER31> When you're a public company the risk of your automated system saying something that invokes more fear than is necessary gets a lot higher.

<comment><USER32> Yep. I would be surprised to learn of non-infrastructure companies that wired their public outage notice directly to automated monitors with no human confirmation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does IRC still exist?

<comment><USER33> Freenode, here I come.

<comment><USER34> You should try matrix, on riot.im

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's a cogent network issue...

<comment><USER36> Hm, I don't see anything on [https://ecogent.cogentco.com/network- status](https://ecogent.cogentco.com/network-status)

<comment><USER35> Our cogent support rep said there's an outage.

"We are currently experiencing an outage on our network. We are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Please check [http://status.cogentco.com](http://status.cogentco.com) for updates on this event."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> No one on my team can send messages at all. Anyone else having any success?

</comment><comment><USER38> having trouble sending messages, some aren't making it through

</comment><comment><USER22> Any chance we'll get a post mortem on this? I've got a bet to win.

</comment><comment><USER30> api.slack.com is returning 503s

503 Service Unavailable No server is available to handle this request.

And thanks to the electron-ness of the app, on the mac you cannot even drag the window - the titlebar is drawn by javascript and without it, it cannot be dragged

<comment><USER39> I can drag it just fine with 503 screen. I'm on macOS Catalina slack 4.5.0

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Oh dear: [https://imgur.com/a/5aQkRvv](https://imgur.com/a/5aQkRvv)</comment>


The world's most toxic value system (2001) - <AUTHOR> https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TOXICVAL.HTM <comment><USER3> > Created 19 November 2001, Last Update 30 August 2011

Looks like this was created right after 9/11\. It's understandable why he wrote this.

> It's considered bad form in many circles to criticize another culture's > values. In addition, the social science literature contains a number of > rationalizations for the "honor" mentality. One is that every value system > makes sense to the people that hold it. Another is that every value system > exists for a reason. Well, of course. The problem is that you can make these > assertions about any value system whatsoever. Rape and genocide and > embezzlement also exist for a reason, and make sense to people who think a > certain way. That doesn't tell us whether the values are morally acceptable > or even whether they are beneficial to those who adhere to them...So I > regard it as trivially obvious that the "honor" mentality exists for a > reason and makes perfect sense to the people that adhere to it. I don't > doubt it for a moment. I merely claim that these values debilitate the > societies that hold them.

Something this author believes that most people (in our coastal bubbles) don't: that some cultures are better than others. It's astonishing how controversial this position is even 16 years later; however, I think when this article was written it was even more politically incorrect to say than it is now.

<comment><USER4> It's illogical to make value judgements about cultures, there is no objective way to do it. What makes one culture "better" than another? Survival? Virality? Honor? Piousness? Lawfulness? Every culture values these things differently.

Calling it politically correct shows your own failing to comprehend something outside of your own cultural frame of reference.

Notably I could make the same point about morality as the author makes about honor, as it is just another social construct.

Morality holds individuals back from getting what they want, instead they go around accumulating morality points even when no one powerful is watching. Clearly anyone who respects morality as a cultural value is PC wuss.

<comment><USER5> What you're gesturing at is that it's illogical to make value judgements, period, without a standard that your object of interest is being judged against. This fact, which is blatantly obvious once pointed out, is obscured by the shortcomings of our language.

Usually the standard is implicit, but obvious from context, for instance if we were talking about racing, we could say that a Mclaren is better than a Volkwagen, and elide that we mean "better at moving quickly around a racetrack".

It certainly makes sense to judge cultures, as long as you remember to have a standard in mind. For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s.

The fact that different cultures value different things shouldn't be a problem for discourse, as long as your interlocutors have values in common. Lack of objective truth about values shouldn't prevent one from working towards the values that they personally hold.

Relativism isn't (or at least shouldn't be) "there's no objective truth about values, so therefore every value system should be treated as equally valid". That would be an objective normative claim, and making it would be inconsistent with relativism. Relativism is just "there's no objective truth about values", and it stops there. Nothing about that prevents you from preferring your own values to those of others.

<comment><USER4> > For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, > it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American > culture of the 1850s.

But it might be hard to convince a 1850s white American to adopt that standard.

It's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter.

Any culture that isn't similar your culture is by definition inferior when held to your cultural standards, so there is no reason to do so.

All you need to decide is if the other culture is similar enough to tolerate it.

<comment><USER6> > _It 's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans > culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter_

Which definition would that be?

<comment><USER4> I can't respond to your other question, but the particular value we were discussing was this:

> For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, > it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American > culture of the 1850s.

Shouldn't really be controversial, but America is going through a regression right now so who knows..

<comment><USER6> Being Scandinavian, I do not really partake of whichever American regressions you may be thinking of.

I most certainly admire and find inspirational a lot of the values that built the US from the ground up. Hard work, frugality, dedication, diligence, and self-reliance, to name a few of the qualities that not least Northern Europeans brought to the expanding frontier.

Nor did they particularly hold with the slavery ways of the South.

Also, you may recall, there was a war fought over that issue.

<comment><USER4> How is that relevant to what was being discussed earlier in the thread? It was merely an example.

That you share some values with a historical culture is hardly important information, if you look hard enough you can probably find something you like in all cultures, historical and present day.

<comment><USER6> > _It 's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans > culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter_

Weak tautology, then. And a squishy definition. 1850s white Americans' culture by and large is not distasteful to me.

You may of course invoke 'modern' and a No True Scotsman line of argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is interesting. At the risk of being lambasted for this view, I've often felt that this is the issue with a lot of places within the United States.

For instance, I've always considered personal interactions in the South to be largely dictated by honor. I do not think it is coincidental that the poorest and least-educated areas of the country are the same area.

I think a similar problem is at play in inner-city violence. I live in Chicago, and murders seem to be almost entirely honor-related at this point.

While I do think that honor-based societies are indicative of a lack of pragmatism, I think that they make sense in a certain light as well. Honor is something that has no (outright) monetary cost, and so you can have honor when you have nothing else. If you have nothing but your honor, and don't defend your honor when someone besmirches it, you will be left with nothing at all. This alone makes it fairly easy to see why people will kill to maintain their honor.

<comment><USER8> I read it, and think it is a so so writing. The author piles too many things together.

martythemaniak gets more of what it is to it.

There are no such thing as an honour based society, and the author is imagining things.

Popular explanation: what seems as an "honour" things to people in the west are often just egregious displays of social status. It is hard for Americans to naturally arrive to the way of thought of this sort. I'll drop few examples for you:

Men killing their wives who were raped - it is not them any much recovering that "honour," but to show everyone that these men do not let the enemy to assert dominance over them, non-verbally stating "hey look, the enemy has no power over me, he will not diminish my status by forcing me to sleep with a woman raped by him"

Same for the extreme sensitivity to insult marty mentions - it is to show everyone "No one is allowed to place themselves above me"

Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing - is the thing from the same opera. It is to show that you do not let the assailant to assume social status above you. If you can't retaliate and kill, you show your weakness/inferiority/impotence.

Americans, you are fortunate enough to not to live in a society where ones social status is not determined by a principle of "the ones who have higher status than I am are the ones I can't kill"

<comment><USER9> I don't understand what you're trying to express here. You agree that all of the things the author describes do happen, and pretty much for the same reasons the author describes, but you...still think he's wrong, somehow? Possibly because you don't like him using the word "honor," even though he went to great lengths to _not_ do that?

<comment><USER8> He picked word Thar, but even that semantic loading that he devised, reinvents the bicycle. He want to put that to "wage feud" as he puts is different from simple fight over social status, while it is, and later he effectively says that.

<comment><USER9> Most people don't kill over social status. If we're going to communicate about this effectively, we need to find a word that means "social status except you're willing to kill over it." Which he did. Is there a word you would have preferred?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure why the author lumps together so many of the attributes he does, and when he does acknowledge exceptions, rather than learn from them and understand why they exist, he simply waves his hands an says Japan wasn't honor-bound enough or not in the right way or whatever else.

His examples are cherry-picked and similar examples exist in the countries he holds up as exemplars. Saudi Arabia viewed cleaning as women's work, sure, just like nearly every country in Europe 100 years ago. Again, sexism is inexplicably considered to be part of this horoscope-level cultural complex of traits, as is apparently poor people excessively taking possessions from deceased relatives.

He blazes by picking one bad thing that happened in a given culture, offering no further analysis other than to gawk at how much better our culture is, then moves on to an entirely different society where he happens to know one bad thing about them and repeats the process.

The article appears to me to be little more than a post-hoc justification of the author's prejudices, with a few glib references and citations which give a glib appearance of being well-researched and substantive.

<comment><USER11> The weirdest thing was the drive by defense of the Confederate flag. That tipping of the hand was downright parkinsonian.

<comment><USER12> There are historical views stating that the American Civil War was in fact a secessionist war against an increasingly powerful federal government and that slavery was just used as one cause, obviously the most "despicable" from today's view, in an effort to legitimize an otherwise illegitimate war against secessionist states.

You can see this partly in quotes from Lincoln, in constitutional law of the states (some explicitly reserved the right to leave the union) and the fact that equality before the law was not achieved until hundred years later (assuming the view point that it was achieved at all).

This view results in two things:

1\. The confederate flag is not a racist symbol _per se_ (it is used as one though as is the Swastika)

2\. The war was just another war about power and money, such as pretty much every other war. Just ask yourself what was the last humanitarian war you witnessed?

Sources:

\- Google for "Abraham Lincoln Racist". It is a very much divided topic.

\- 2nd paragraph here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War)

\- There was a fantastic seminar on this topic (with downloadable Audio files) by Walter Block (a Libertarian) but I cant seem to find it.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure I follow. It may well be that the north had ulterior motives beyond humanitarianism but that doesn't take away from the fact that the explicit reason that a number of states gave for seceding was to preserve slavery.

I'm not sure I get your point about the flag either. Of course, it's not racist per se, it's abstract. But it's almost exclusively flown as a symbol of pride in the confederate institutions that it represents. Those institutions were explicitly racist. As you say, it has direct parallels with the swastika.

> what was the last humanitarian war you witnessed?

And finally, this really doesn't take into account the period. It was not at all unusual, in the mid 19C, for countries to use military action for social aims. Now, I happen to think that an awful lot of it was on behalf of evangelism of "superior" values rather than humanitarianism. This was rife in British establishment thinking at the time and was prevalent in the northern states too.

In other words, I think it's justified to believe that these actions were driven by feelings of moral superiority rather than human equality. But to suggest that they can all be understood as power plays simply doesn't fit the facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are a lot of works on the relative impact of honor or shame cultures. I was first exposed to that concept by some of the works of Roland Muller ([http://www.rmuller.com/](http://www.rmuller.com/)). The thesis that is favored by Christian theology is that Jesus taught forgiveness as the word of God rather than retribution (eye for an eye) which has been the prevailing response, and in so doing changed cultures that had been stagnant for hundreds if not thousands of years into something that could approach enlightenment.

While I cannot say with any sort of authority if one culture is better than another, I can say that my exposure to "honor" cultures in the South and South Central LA did not seem to help the adherents be better people or move forward in their lives. It had the opposite effect of compelling them into behaviors that were self destructive in order to satisfy their person concept of honor.

<comment><USER15> If you are interested in the role of "honor" in American culture, and up for lengthy academic treatise filled with incredible tidbits of knowledge, David Hackett Fischer's book "Albion's Seed" is delightful. For example, here's an excerpt that stuck with me regarding President Andrew Jackson's approach to marriage:

 _The border custom of bridal abduction was introduced to the American backcountry. In North and South Carolina during the eighteenth century, petitioners complained to authorities that "their wives and daughters were carried captives" by rival clans._

 _Even future President of the United States Andrew Jackson took his wife by an act of voluntary abduction. Rachel Donelson Robards was unhappily married to another man at the time. A series of complex quarrels followed, in which Rachel Robards made her own preferences clear, and Andrew Jackson threatened her husband Lewis Robards that he would "cut his ears out of his head." Jackson was promptly arrested. But before the case came to trial the suitor turned on the husband, butcher knife in hand, and chased him into the canebreak. Afterward, the complaint was dismissed because of the absence of the plaintiff—who was in fact running for his life from the defendant. Andrew Jackson thereupon took Rachel Robards for his own, claiming that she had been abandoned. She went with Jackson willingly enough; this was a clear case of voluntary abduction. But her departure caused a feud that continued for years._

 _For a cultural historian, the responses to this event were more important than the act itself. In later years, Jackson's methods of courtship became a campaign issue, and caused moral outrage in other parts of the republic; but in the backcountry he was not condemned at the time. Historian Robert Remini writes, "One thing is certain. Whatever Rachel and Andrew did, and whenever they did it, their actions did not outrage the community."_

<comment><USER16> I think breaking up a failing marriage by Jackson mightily pales to his personal role in fulfilling his contemporary American's desires in the Trail of Tears which incidentally also helped open up more land for slave owners in the South.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Moral Tribes, by Joshua Greene [0] has a more in-depth analysis of honor and other cultural attributes. You can find large geographical differences in the importance of honor within the US.

Cooperation also varies greatly around the world. Scores in a cooperation game (where you both win by cooperating) vary by an order of magnitude between countries. They are somewhat related, in that getting hosed by the other player in a cooperation game is merely annoying for a non-honor-oriented person, but humiliating for an honor-oriented person, so they're more likely to defect immediately. The article doesn't mention it, but that seems like the obvious mechanism for how thar causes poverty.

[0] [http://www.joshua-greene.net/moral-tribes](http://www.joshua- greene.net/moral-tribes)

</comment><comment><USER18> The central thesis (thar as a toxic value) seems plausible, but his examples are all crazy, and his deduction about economic prosperity is questionable at best.

Look at the UK as an example of somewhere with extreme classism and heredity of employment for hundreds of years, the bit in between the "honourable knights" and the industrial revolution (which happened in the midst of astonishing inequality of wealth and opportunity). If you don't think the Royal carriages plastered with gaudy decoration are about external honour then what are they about exactly?

Also, the idea that the successful societies succeeded because they weren't sexist is proposterous, since the key points in their development happened long before the (start of the) recovery from that awful vice, which still isn't over as the news from Hollywood and Westminster in the last months neatly illustrates.

As others have said, this looks like a post-hoc justification of prejudice, which sadly ruins an interesting idea.

<comment><USER19> Sure, women were treated unequally in Western societies, but even in the 18th century, girls of the U.S. were educated in the same local schools. Contrast that with some societies where women can't even drive... Which economy's future would you bet on?

<comment><USER20> >Which economy's future would you bet on?

This isn't a good metric. Countries with slavery, for example, can easily have a stronger economy than free ones. The amount of material goods a society produces is at best tangential to notions of morality or justice.

<comment><USER21> Are there any countries with slavery which are outperforming similarly- situated countries without slavery? AFAIK slavery is only useful in Civilization 4 (whip it! whip it good!) and IRL it is no substitute for citizenship.

<comment><USER20> The success of the United States economy was almost entirely built on slave labor. Dubai and Qatar, some of the most economically successful countries in their region, are essentially entirely built on slave labor. It is making a comeback in the US because of how efficient it is in the form of mass incarceration combined with prison labor. The inference 'economic success' -> 'morally good' is, well, horrifying. Slavery is a good counterexample but old since it's so abhorrent countries have mostly abolished it. Sweatshops are another good example.

<comment><USER22> > Dubai and Qatar, some of the most economically successful countries in their > region, are essentially entirely built on slave labor.

Exactly. These massive oil reserves have nothing to do with it. /s

<comment><USER20> Exactly, you've clearly stated my original point -- economic success in countries has nothing to do with the morality of their society or culture or government. Economic success is more often than not luck of the draw and can happen to brutal slave dictatorships as much as free market democracies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Just imagine the PLO ever accepting an order to recognize the right of > Israel to exist.

PLO first recognized Israel in 1988: [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo- acce...](http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo-accepted- israel.html) Then again in 1993 during the Oslo Accords: [http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/P...](http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/Pages/107%20Israel- PLO%20Mutual%20Recognition-%20Letters%20and%20Spe.aspx) The Palestinian Authority now in control of parts of the West Bank has also done it on several occasions and even Hamas has de facto recognized Israel: [https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its- charte...](https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its-charter- hamas-has-given-de-facto-recognition-to-the-state-of-israel/)

Meanwhile, Israel has not once recognized the right of Palestine to exist.

Why discuss this detail of his essay? Because details are important and if you are ignorant about them, like this author is, you reach the wrong conclusions. The ignorance forms preconceptions that are not true in the slightest. In this conflict, we have one side who is occupying the other and refusing to let go of territory it has conquered. Resisting that is justified and obviously based on nationalism, not the Thar concept the author writes about.

You can't just claim that all those Middle Easterners are driven by Thar, and we Westerners are always the rational ones. It's not so easy.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's just not historically true that "northern European culture has been relatively free of the thar mentality." We weren't magically spared these traits. In fact few hundred years ago duels were the mainstay of the _official_ justice system in England. These duels were, literally, trials. I wish I knew more about how we got away from all that.

<comment><USER25> I think that prosperity through the pursuit of opportunity leads to such changes.

The author derides the continent of Africa, yet ignores enormous economic and public health improvement among most countries there in the last 30 years. Attitudes and "honor" culture have changed as well; nowadays commerce and transactions are the norm in cities, rather than violence based.

<comment><USER26> The article was originally written 16 years ago and last updated 6 years ago. How much of the improvement in the last 30 years has been over that time? How much of the improvement in the last 30 years has filtered its way into the popular perception of Africa? Or into how Africa looks from a statistical perspective? I am not surprised that the article gives a picture of Africa that is 20-30 years out of date.

<comment><USER25> At that time, various countries in Africa were struggling and at a nadir: Sierra Leone, Guinea, Burundi; others flourished: Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia. Many others didn't change materially: Egypt, Tunisia, South Africa.

It is as meaningful to lump all African countries together as it is to group all countries in Asia. There are more commonalities between North Africa and the Middle East than similarities with southern and central Africa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Without a working and well-funded criminal justice system, "Don't ____with me or my clan EVER " may be the best you can do, alas. As mentioned in another comment, if you're living in a U.S. inner city where talking to the police is taboo, similar conditions can develop.

"Irrationally" disproportionate responses to small problems ("display" in ape terms) may prevent worse problems and greater violence. It's not ideal, it's a fallback.

<comment><USER27> Optimization to a local maximum pitfall, it is very much acknowledged in the article that the systems criticised make sense to those inside.

<comment><USER24> But to the individual, it's not a local maximum; they are trapped in a first mover's dilemma (later called Nash Equilibrium), and everybody simultaneously moving to very different norms is statistically unlikely.

<comment><USER27> That only addresses the depth of the hole (even deeper), not the fact that the hole is a trap.

The whole discussion here was surprisingly devoid of how to get out (individually or as a society) and so was the article. From a solution- oriented crowd such as this I take that as a sign that it is indeed difficult. Even acknowledging it as a problem seems to be a struggle with an open outcome.

<comment><USER24> Again, let's please be precise, not return to imprecision. For the individual, it is a local maximum. For the population, it isn't, it's a trap/local maximum. However moving whole groups to new behavior is insanely tough for a simple reason: culture-retainment (cognitive herding) is high in the list of what humans do best, for good reason. Ironically perhaps, the history of colonization provides the best evidence of how to initiate change. Building a new prestigious culture within the old one does work. Maybe not in a delightful direction, but it has been demonstrated to be effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me of a passage I read from "Hillbilly Elegy" by JD Vance, where he talks about growing up in the Scots-Irish parts of West Virginia, and the almost pathological devotion to family honor.

One anecdote (the details of which I'm mis-remembering slightly) involves an incident he witnessed in a Walmart or Kmart or some such store, where a mother whose out-of-control kids were scolded by an employee for their behavior. The mother proceeded to physically threaten the employee for the perceived affront against her family's honor.

The canonical example of "vendetta" behavior among Scots-Irish is the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, which I believe Vance also mentions.

Throughout the book, the author intertwines anecdotes of self-limiting (or even anti-social) behavior like the above with descriptions of the worsening economic climate that the region's residents find themselves in. He makes a great case (sometimes subtly and sometimes bluntly) for the idea that the two reinforce each other.

It's amazing what kind of mental gymnastics people will go through to convince themselves that they're "honorable", especially when that honor is the only asset they think they have left.

<comment><USER29> That book should be the required reading for this article. I love how he talked about the effect of Honor culture even in elementary school fights, and how difficult it has been to detach himself from that culture as an individual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The author's Japanophilia masquerading as social insight is laughable. His cute anecdote illustrating the self aware remorse of the Japanese is of _one_ doctor who has a shrine in his living room. I wonder if in his extensive travels he's ever visited Yasukuni shrine.

<comment><USER31> More laughable is that he assumes that there is not one person in the variety of cultures he collectively calls thar who has done something similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This article, while interesting, is incredibly presumptive and totally non- scientific. As such, I consider it pablum.

Surely no one culture is universally "better" than another. Pick some metric(s), some cultures will be better, some worse.

What's left unstated and undefended in this article is the metric for comparing the "goodness" of cultures. With that, at least we would have some quantitative things to compare -- then one could respectfully disagree on the metric, or offer alternate evidence for calculating the metric, or offer other metrics to consider.

</comment><comment><USER33> I would describe the "honor" system as like treating the world like a big MMORPG where the only goal in life is to accumulate "honor" points. The whole point of life is to grind away everyday to gain more honor points. Someone insults you = lose honor points. Revenge on the insulter = gain honor points. Wife cheats on you = lose honor points. Revenge on wife = gain honor points. Someone cheats you out of 10 cents = lose honor points, etc. The points are an end in themselves. The whole purpose of life is to get them and he who dies with the most points wins. The truth is unimportant. The benefit to society as a whole is unimportant. More money means you can humiliate people and have people kiss ass which means more honor points!

<comment><USER34> You could replace "honor" by any other kind of value system and you could still interpret is as a points system. That's because of the Von Neumann- Morgenstern theorem [1], which basically says that any kind of well-behaved (i.e., not self-contradictory) preferences can be modeled as a points system (called _utility function_ ).

Heaven points. Money points. Sex points. Altruism points. Whatever you are trying to achieve in life, it can be reduced to a points system.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem)

<comment><USER33> Well let's say that someone criticizes a "honor" system person for being violent. Someone interested in the truth would not react violently to that criticism because they would acknowledge that as a contradiction and that doing so would prove their critic correct. Someone only interested in "honor" points would react violently toward the critic because that's how you get "honor" points, by getting revenge for insults. The person interested in the truth can recognize a flaw in their fitness function. The person only interested in "honor" points never questions the rules. Their is no procedure to question the rules in the "honor" points system just as a computer is unable to question its programming.

<comment><USER34> > Someone interested in the truth would not react violently to that criticism > because they would acknowledge that as a contradiction and that doing so > would prove their critic correct.

But wouldn't proving their critic correct give them "truth" points?

Presumably, you actually mean "someone I'd call a reasonable person, who can recognize the truth; but who has other aims beyond making things true". That person's actions will still follow some kind of points system, although it might be slightly more complicated. But "honor" points can be complicated as well, since they need to encode which actions are "honorable".

Ultimately, the only difference is that you agree with one kind of behavior over the other. But what you think is a flaw in someone's utility function, they'll think is a flaw in _yours_. That doesn't mean all value systems are equally good, just that their relative ranking depends on the person doing the evaluation.

<comment><USER33> The fundamental aspect of the truth system is that the person remains flexible as to the way to achieve their goal, but not necessarily the goal itself.

The methods of the "honor" points system never changes in response to any empirical feedback. The "honor" points are the way and the end in themselves. They are not subject to backpropagation in the "honor" points system. They were burned into ROM and the "honor" automotaun faithfully executes the program until it dies. The "honor" system does not evolve. The truth system does not know what it will be in several decades, but it will seek truth and incorporate feedback. It is fundamentally incomplete and will remain so. The "honor" points system is complete -- forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> At last, a rational argument for the moral superiority of Northern European societies! That was about time!

It's pitty this is such an old article, I'd love to hear the author's rationalist defense of the moral superiority of diverse historical phenomena originating in Northern Europe, like anthropogenic global warming, WWI and WWII, separately the Holocaust, Stalin and, well, why not? Colonialism.

Yeah, it's a rhetorical request. It's my attempt at a reminder of the real reason why educated people don't criticise others cultures so easily. Because they know where _they themselves_ come from.

<comment><USER29> "The White Man's Burden" is to Colonialism, as "The World's Most Toxic Value System" is to ___Now?_____

Fuck... I'm sure that's not right. I sucked at this part of the SAT's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This takes a strange detour towards the end.

> Even more disturbing is a rise in a mean-spirited resistance to any kind of > honors for Confederate soldiers.

Seems a bit contradictory to insist that we honor immoral people for the sake of... I'm actually not sure how the author got here. Especially after the bit about not accepting responsibility.

The Confederacy was a moral failing, and the best way to take responsibility for it is to disown it.

<comment><USER37> While the reasons behind the war and its intended results can certainly be called immoral, I don't think we can apply the same label to enlisted / conscripted soldiers. Most of those guys didn't join up to protect slavery but rather their homes; and many didn't have a choice about fighting at all.

Agree that slavery was a moral failing; but the cause of the war was economic — the main reason people were pro-slavery was because they owned assets that would lose ownership of or they worked in the slave trade. Yes, that reasoning is morally abhorrent, but morality often gets tossed out the window when money is involved. It wouldn't have been a war without the money.

<comment><USER16> Most confederate soldiers _volunteered_ , and most had no benefit from slaves as property, though half had some household connection to slave owners.

Obviously since The Atlantic was founded by abolitionists it might tend to favour one side, but I feel pretty confident in the righteousness of their cause. :) - [https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/small-t...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/small- truth-papering-over-a-big-lie/61136/)

Protecting their homes is different from fighting for slavery in what way - <USER2> am having trouble understanding what protecting their homes means in this case. It seems like an after the war mytho to fit Shermans march to the sea burning everything as the army went or the Union army seizing Lee's homestead for what became roughly Arlington National Cemetary (and for which Lee's son was later compensated).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Off topic, the web site is truly content-centered and looks clean and clear with no unnecessary information. Font size for each level is very good, too. For me, that's how good design should look like.

<comment><USER39> This design is probably a product of the page being written in 2001. Back then, the web was (text) content-centered because browsers couldn't do much other than text and layout. I might even be old enough to say those were "the good ol' days" :)

<comment><USER27> Those good old days were much earlier, that article is from the heyday of Macromedia Flash. The page is as bare and content centric as it is not because of age but because it is on .edu, the majority of which was already delightfully retro back in 2001.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> \- Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult

\- Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing

\- Obsessive male dominance

\- Paranoia over female sexual infidelity

\- Primacy of family rights over individual rights

And who do these values remind you of? It is especially funnysad to read this 16 year old American writing today.

<comment><USER41> who are you trying to allude to? these traits apply to almost every traditional patriarchal culture on the planet, they're the historical norms for huge swathes of humanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> While the author has every right to hold those opinions, he doesn't seem to be an anthropologist, sociologist or historian, as his entire analysis is completely devoid of context and the desire to understand. Value systems, while also a result of arbitrary progress, mostly arise to fit the conditions of the society that creates them. A face-to-face society is very different from a strangers' society. Europe in the middle ages was not much different from those cultures the author derides. Part of the reason why some cultures still maintain face-to-face values is because Europe, largely due to chance, progressed technologically before other cultures (after learning algebra from the Arabs), and travel and communication technologies are what create a strangers' society with its own, very different values. Then, Europe harmfully interfered with the progress of other societies.

Also, it is a little funny to call other culture's value "toxic" and your own "superior", considering that the European culture of rationality has been the deadly, violent and exploitative (of both people and nature) to a far larger scale than any other.

</comment><comment><USER43> I super hard agree with the primary point of this article. Honor culture is unbelievably toxic. However, i'd like to quibble with this:

> When a concept has a label that is diametrically opposed to the normal sense > of the term, it's the wrong label. This has nothing to do with value > judgment (although my value judgment is clearly stated), it is simply a > matter of using words accurately. If you translate a foreign word as "red," > and notice that people always use it when describing grass, it's obvious > that your translation is faulty. If you translate a foreign word as "honor" > and find it often used to describe dishonorable acts, it's equally obvious > that your translation is faulty.

The author doesn't seem to understand abstraction. The fact that the _instances_ of 'honorable acts' in a given culture differ does not negate the shared meaning. The thing 'honor' refers to is not the definition of the particular acts, but the role this abstract concept fulfills in a society. Honor is the thing that, once impugned, requires retribution to regain. Honor is the thing that bleeds down a family tree for generations. Honor is the thing without which there is shame. Which acts credit and discredit this thing called honor are irrelevant to the definition of the term.

In certain street gangs in the US it is honorable to wear certain colors and not others. In certain sects of Islam it is dishonorable for your wife's face to be seen by other men. These two seemingly unrelated acts fulfill recognizably similar roles in their respective cultures. To not allow language to recognize this shared heritage is to discredit the very notion of abstraction, and to deny the genuine intellectual and social roots of the very concept the author is quite nicely articulating.

<comment><USER44> > These two seemingly unrelated acts fulfill recognizably similar roles in > their respective cultures

How? Are street gangs demonstrating the obedience of their clothes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> See also the Albanian tradition of Kanun [1,2] for an example of what happens when a society gets trapped in this kind of moral tar pit.

[1] [http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania- da...](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-dark-shadow- tradition-blood-feuds-160318033023140.html)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_(Albania)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_\(Albania\))

</comment><comment><USER46> I was reminded of Chapter 6 of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The chapter is called "Harlan, Kentucky," and discusses the feuds that took place there. He makes an attempt to blame it on genetic heritability, tracing it back to Scotland and forebears who herded sheep and practiced honor culture, with mention of a psych study showing Southern students responded differently to insults. Higher testosterone levels? I can't remember. I think it's unsettled that genetics plays a role, but why not?

</comment><comment><USER47> A lot of societies are extremely similar as they progress in stages to some kind of 'modernity' \- defined as access to basic resources, education opportunities, scientific advancement and some degree of prosperity.

You can easily see this by comparing pre-technology societies from 1 to 1600AD and the structures are essentially feudal and quite similar.

Post colonial european society managed to proceed at a far faster rate by bringing far more people into opportunity and wealth than previously because you now needed many more people and new systems to manage this expansion than the existing feudal power structures. This kicked off a technology scientific revolution and itself caused far reaching fundamental internal structural changes in these societies.

That's 400 years of near constant wealth, science and change others have not had and who now exist in a weird middle ground with access to some of the consequences of modernism but not the wealth, culture and history that made it possible because that cannot be replicated unless you want to kick off a new wave of colonialism.

</comment><comment><USER48> I don't understand author's position. Vendetta is obviously bad. Genocide and religiois fanaticism is incompatible with western sosiety. This is obvious too.

Other than that, well, sometimes it is perfectly rational to act agressively or overreact to show your seriousness or be impolite in response to some sort of behavior. It depends.

<comment><USER49> > Vendetta is obviously bad.

That depends on the value system. When human life is worth less than retaining honour, then killing by vendetta is obviously desirable and good for thar society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I feel most of these 'cultural prognosis' are generally just old racial prejudices being justified to fit whatever one sees.

You can see how the author extricates Japan from his 'analysis', but not so for other Asian nations; in fact much of this can be said to be true of China and India (amongst others), but many here and elsewhere will somehow extricate China, but not India for obvious fiscal reasons. This trend is striking if you're old enough to have followed the reporting on a topic for many years.

Yet, little of the culture and the way of doing things have 'changed' in a significant way.

It's kind of like ML, you have some terribly useless set of features, and you use it to fit some dataset. The thing with ML is that you know this is stupid, and you have a test set to tell you it's stupid.

Not so, sadly, with our 'intellectuals'.

<comment><USER51> > I feel most of these 'cultural prognosis' are generally just old racial > prejudices being justified to fit whatever one sees.

I think there's an element of truth to your statement. One key sentence in the essay that lends itself to your conclusion is this one:

" A thar-dominated society will never achieve equality, regardless how prosperous it becomes, because prosperity for the masses is a direct affront to the status of the elite. "

But we know that our very own Anglo-Saxon society was very much a "thar- dominated" one until quite recently and although we've not reached ideal levels of equality, we have significantly cut inequality.

<comment><USER52> > But we know that our very own Anglo-Saxon society was very much a "thar- > dominated" one until quite recently and although we've not reached ideal > levels of equality, we have significantly cut inequality.

In other words, a "thar-dominated" society won't achieve equality, because the west typically isn't one anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The Ralph Peters article he cites can be found online at [http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/98spr...](http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/98spring/peters.htm)

</comment><comment><USER54> Minor nitpick - he mentions the concept of Shame Cultures vs. Guilt Cultures and mentions the Japanese as a Guilt Culture, along with the European cultures. But this concept was first popularized in a book by Ruth Benedict called the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, where she claims that Japanese culture is a Shame (haji) culture where social norms are primarily enforced by fear of ostracism ("Nobody will be your friend/help you if you act like that!") versus internalized fears in a Guilt culture ("God will punish you if you act like that!"). It was written in the late 40's and it's been criticized by Japanese and others, but that's where the idea comes from.

</comment><comment><USER55> Ahistorical, generalizing, self-serving and definitely not within the author's stated expertise (earth science, physical sciences, astronomy).

However an extremely interesting and brief summation of a very widely held world-view.

To me what makes it obviously wrong is the simple fact of the holocaust and of Stalin's purges. No honor culture required there. My view is that our cultures and indeed characters are like water balloons - squeeze em tight in one place and watch em pop out elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER56> Maybe he has confused cause and effect? When you're poor these honor systems may be all you have.

<comment><USER51> > When you're poor these honor systems may be all you have

I think you're on to something there. I recall something from Steven Pinker's book on violence.

" if I do something stupid when I'm driving, and someone gives me the finger and calls me an asshole, it's not the end of the world: I think to myself, I'm a tenured professor at Harvard. On the other hand, if status among men in the street was my only source of worth in life, I might have road rage and pull out a gun. "

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This whole thing read like sickening sanctimonious bullshit. So there are no instances of revenge, based on personal honor, anywhere in Japan or the western world?

Then he goes on to say:

>People infected with this attitude will be utterly incapable of recognizing wrongdoing by their own society, utterly incapable of taking criticism or recognizing the need for correction.

This is a prime example of the "only a sith deals in absolutes" meme.

What is more pathetic is that I am so underemployed right now that I had the time to read this whole garbage article in the first place. I guess it's time to move on.

</comment><comment><USER58> > I will use the Arabic word thar, "blood vengeance," for this value system

Do I see a strawman there?

<comment><USER41> he's referring to an existing set of conventions and criticizing them. he isn't constructing them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I almost missed the /PSEUDOSC/ in the URL.

</comment><comment><USER60> When you've been a professor that long, it happens to you. The students aren't going to challenge you, and the classroom becomes a feedback amplifier for your own bullshit.</comment>


Musk Gave His Assistant 2week Test When She Asked for a Big Raise - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/08/10/elon-musk-assistant-work/ <comment><USER2> This story is false according to Musk, which was widely reported when this first hit back around August

[http://mashable.com/2017/08/11/elon-musk-fired-assistant- ane...](http://mashable.com/2017/08/11/elon-musk-fired-assistant-anecdote/)

According to Musk, "Mary Beth was an amazing assistant for over 10 yrs, but as company complexity grew, the role required several specialists vs one generalist." She was given, Musk claims, 52 weeks of salary and stock for her contribution & left to join a small firm, once again as a generalist.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for pointing out that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The story is false, yada yada. The lesson isn't the one they're pushing. The real lesson for not being replaced and increasing remuneration is:

"Know where the bodies are buried"

</comment><comment><USER4> Musk: "[Author of story] never actually ran this story by me or my assistant. It is total nonsense." \- [http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-responds- assistant-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-responds-assistant- story-mary-beth-brown-2-week-test-2017-8)</comment>


Show HN: I wrote a simple serverless platform for Ruby developers - <AUTHOR> https://faastruby.io <comment><USER2> It looks like you've got a broken link in your documentation:

> email@example.com:USER/my-functions.git

Note the ".com.com".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out! Fixed.</comment></comment>


Simple and succinct guide to CSS Layouts - <AUTHOR> http://learnlayout.com/#

<comment><USER2> Nice work! I am gonna recommend this to my kid brother. Looking forward to more examples and intermediate/advanced topics.</comment>


CNN's 50 Best Places to Launch a Business 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/smallbusiness/best_places_launch/2009/snapshot/241.html

<comment><USER2> Magazines looooove to publish lists like this. They might as well make "best places to do anything" lists. Starting a small business is such a general and broad term. If you're doing technology, silicon valley is probably the "best" place. By best, I mean where there is the most opportunity and available resources to help your specific small business. If it's finance, NYC might be best. Entertainment? LA might be best. Biotech? New Jersey is actually pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes - "Business" is too generic. Would you start a tech business in Pittsburgh?</comment>