Don't blame Amazon for your lack of redundancy - <AUTHOR> http://cloudability.com/single-points-of-failure <comment><USER2> _But mostly it's because the cloud has been so darned reliable._

Or because the cloud has offered such a good value proposition for cheap and easy scaling with demand.

And anyway, it's unfair to rail on people who "should have had a redundancy plan" when the service they pay money for is one with a redundancy service included in it (availability zones) which has unexpectedly also failed.

 _Our point stands, for engineers to consider all likely scenarios when building redundancy and not assume anyone – even Amazon – can provide 100.0% uptime._

Your point appears to be "If you don't have 100% uptime then it's all your fault and you should have planned for it you lazy idiot, everyone should blame you. Also you can never have 100% uptime so people should stop blaming Amazon.". Do you have more of a point than that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our point is it's unfair to blame Amazon 100% when there were viable and affordable ways round this outage. Some of our customers were in US East and had off-site backups, scripted server deployments and were able to get back online pretty quickly.

<comment><USER2> How were they able to get back online? Deploying to another AWS site or to another cloud provider? Presumably they didn't own enough servers themselves?

At what point did they make the call that the outage was too serious and they would lose all data since the last backup and start migrating? Had they pre- planned for it, or was it ad-hoc? Will they stay where they are now and use Amazon US East as their failover or migrate back in due course? Or rearchitect to handle this in future?

(thanks, re: name).

Is it just luck that the problem which happened was one they prepared for instead of one they didn't?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cloud = Virtualization. Creating redundancy within the same virtual ecosystem is idiotic, as the article points out. Any hardware or virtualization software failure would throw your redundancy out the window. You need to have your virtual eggs in very different baskets, in different geographical locations, with different providers.

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 We agree.

<comment><USER4> There's an upvote button for that.

<comment><USER5> As the author of the article, I think they are allowed this type of replies...

<comment><USER6> Upvotes are literally a +/-1 of agreement. It's a bit of a tough crowd (probably related to the subject matter), but either way, comments are meant to add something to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Your own servers go down too. And not every site can afford triple redundancy. Sometimes you just stay down for a few hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 Sometimes it's not cost effective to do all the layers. One of our clients is going to lose $2500 to $3000 today, which is less than they would have spent on avoiding the issue in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> But do blame Amazon for Amazon's lack of redundancy.

<comment><USER9> i agree.

AZs - according to Amazon, "are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones."

that did not really seem to work.

if you're deployed in one zone and shit hit's the fan: "your fault". if you assume amazon does as advertised and live in several AZ and these go down apparently more or less at the same time: 'amazons fault'...

i read that amazon plans to post a 'postmortem' on this... i'd be really eager to know how AZs are actually designed/sperated. not to be able to point fingers (maybe just a little bit), but to just _know_ where i am deploying stuff to...

<comment><AUTHOR> This is fair comment, especially given that they actually emphasized this multi-AZ redundancy.

The genesis of the article was the press implying that to use the cloud your only choice was to trust AWS provided 100% up-time, and this is a position we disagree with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> All hosts are vulnerable to outages, be it in the cloud, typical shared hosting or self managed racks in a data center.

Shit is going to happen with your host. To say it's a problem with the cloud is unfair.

</comment><comment><USER11> The zeitgeist is that the cloud equals redundacy yet that's not necessarily the case. You still need to prep for contingencies...

<comment><USER12> It is redundant to a degree, but there are varying layers of redundancy.

In this case, it looks like most users of AWS are in need of more geographic redundancy, but in terms of localized data redundancy (term?), it appears AWS is a pretty solid solution.

<comment><USER11> That's totally right: it's a pretty solid solution and frankly, even with the outage, it's still better than the alternatives based on cost and difficulty of configuration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't the primary benefit in cloud servies reliability? If one of the largest cloud services has an Achilles heel, doesn't that defeat its purpose?

I was under the impression if one of the clusters were to be unavailable, the nearest mirror would resume responsibility. This should include distribution services as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> AWS is great for running a redundant cache or backup solution.</comment>


Unix filesystems: How mv can be dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://jstimpfle.de/fun/mv.html <comment><USER3> Once upon a time, mv was "a stupid system call interface to rename(2)". However, some users didn't like having to think about whether the source and destination were on the same mountpoint, so someone decided to make mv more complex[1]. The Unix designers lamented the growing complexity, but the great many naive users celebrated the change, and demanded that all mv implementations do that.

[1]: I believe GNU mv was the first to do that, but I could be mistaken.

Edit: As userbinator points out, this isn't totally true. I still believe it is true for moving directories, but for files, mv has copied them since at least Research UNIX V4 (1973), this being implemented by either Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie themselves.

<comment><USER4> > _However, some users didn 't like having to think about whether the source > and destination were on the same mountpoint_

That's actually a good thing, because it makes scripts more composable. Imagine you wrote a script that contains a buried _mv_ somewhere in it, then you'd have to document this restriction all the way up to the end users of your script. If the _mv_ command doesn't handle the mount-point-spanning case, then this functionality will have to be repeated in all scripts that use _mv_ (which would be a disaster).

> _the great many naive users celebrated the change_

That's a very arrogant, unwarranted thing to say.

<comment><USER3> I didn't say it was a bad change. But, even good changes should make one frown at the groing complexity.

<comment><USER4> > _frown at the groing complexity_

When I have the chance to remove replicated complexity from a myriad of places and to concentrate it on one central point (and make the interface simpler and more consistent in the process), I don't frown, I laugh with joy.

<comment><USER3> But for more than a decade, it was a bug that moving across devices screwed up ownership. So then you still have to to be aware of whether you are moving across devices, but now if you are but don't realize it, it automatically screws up your data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _not understanding that the (non-existing) target will be a subdirectory of the source._

 _mv first tries to rename( "/mnt", "/mnt/foo") and only after that fails with EXDEV it decides to mkdir("/mnt/foo")_

To me this looks like a bug: the order of the checks has been reversed. mv should never attempt to put a directory into itself, since there is no situation in which that ever makes sense. Only after that check passes should it decide if rename() is enough, or if it has to do a copy/delete.

The problem here is that the error conditions are not mutually exclusive - <USER2> is possible to have a rename cross devices _and_ attempt to move a directory into one of its descendants - but there's no specification in the standard[1] of which error should be returned in such a case. The priority of non- mutually-exclusive errors is seldom considered, yet this is a good example of why it's important.

In other words the "rename("/mnt", "/mnt/foo")" should have failed with EINVAL, not EXDEV. A look through the Linux source shows that at least there, cross-device has higher priority than parent-descendant: [http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/fs/namei.c#L4240](http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/fs/namei.c#L4240)

[1] [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/re...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/rename.html)

<comment><USER6> _since there is no situation in which that ever makes sense_

Actually, there is:

      mkdir foo bar
      ln -s ../foo bar/foo
      mv bar bar/foo

...so mv(1) leaves it up to the kernel to detect the error condition, as it should.

<comment><USER5> After resolving symbolic links that turns into "mv bar foo", which is perfectly acceptable since they are siblings. The checks for the destination being a descendant of the source should be performed after symlink resolution.

There's nothing in the standard about rename()'s error code priority (it could be EXDEV or EINVAL - they are not mutually exclusive), so I'd consider that a bug too.

<comment><USER6> The kernel has to resolve the symbolic link - /bin/mv should not try because it cannot do so without a race.

<comment><USER7> Presuming that you wouldn't invoke mv nanoseconds before creating the symlink, I think mv should resolve the symlink first and, if the move doesn't make sense, abort. It will still need to handle the case where it looks like the move makes sense, but the kernel returns EINVAL or whatever.

<comment><USER8> > Presuming that you wouldn't invoke mv nanoseconds before creating the > symlink

This kind of thinking has led to lots of security bugs around symlinks.

<comment> mh- indeed, and not just symlinks.

being vigilant about not creating unnecessary race conditions is important. doubly so when you're building a tool upon which others will compose their own programs/scripts/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't imagine how outrageously frustrating `mv` would be if it choked at moving files across mountpoints, especially these days when OSes have more of them than ever.

<comment><USER10> I think differently about this than you do. When copying across mountpoints, I often do something like

       tar cf - . | (cd target; tar xf -)

of course nowadays on OS X I prefer to use "ditto", but that's pretty much the same thing.

Then I at least do something like "du -s" on source and target to see if they're more or less the same size. And I do some "ls" operations to see if things look OK. Or if it's important data I'll run SHA256 on all source and destination files and compare results.

Then, and only then, do I delete the source.

Remember, you're not paranoid if the computer really is out to get you. :)

Edit: if I'm rearranging files and directories on the same filesystem, I'll just use "mv". But years of bugs and glitches on NFS and such have left me with a good healthy paranoia about copying data in general.

<comment><USER11> Why not just rsync? That's exactly what it's for!

<comment><USER10> In my mind rsync is more complicated than the "tar | tar" idiom that I routinely typed.

For important data, the real secret is the _verification_ before deleting source data. I used to have some simple scripts that did (more or less) the following on source and destination:

       find ... -print0 | xargs -0 -x md5 | sort >md5list

I'd have high confidence my files were safely copied when I compared those checksum files.

Nowadays I mostly use canned solutions like ditto or Carbon Copy Cloner (which uses rsync under the hood!) and let them do their thing. But I then also verify by using my own python script that uses "os.walk" to traverse the directory trees and uses "hashlib.hash256" to create file checksums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's a good article about how it should be done. It does not just say "use move", but it also explains how to backup the old state, how to use traps to remove your workaround code etc.

[http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell- sc...](http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-scripts/)

<comment><AUTHOR> My article is not about how to write robust shell scripts. (Which is impossible in a very broad sense: for example, use a single pipeline A | B and include in your operational semantics that all processes can fail (SIGKILL). In shell, you can't access A's exit code)

It is about how given infelicities like multiple devices should sometimes not be abstracted away below an opaque layer. How a seemingly simple command can fail and eat your data in inrecoverable ways, even in the absence of data races (which many programs must ignore to be able to do useful things at all), resource starvation etc.

Notice that so far, the reason why mv went wrong wasn't identified: Is it the kernel API, is it the mv implementation? Maybe it's just not reasonably possible to avoid such kinds of going wrong...

<comment><USER12> I agree that it's good to understand why a tool is destructive. But in a complex system it's hard to do some things without being destructive. Knowing that "mv" can be destructive, isn't it a logical conclusion to learn how to handle such situations in your bash code? For me that's nearly as important as understanding why mv can be destructive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f=src/c...](http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f=src/copy.c;h=3af4295;hb=HEAD#l2341)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm far away from being an expert, but I also did a little digging (which might be surface for people with more knowledge). "man mv" on Ubuntu 15.04 starts off with "mv - move (rename) files" and the Description starts with "Rename SOURCE to DEST, or move SOURCE(s) to DIRECTORY".

This is pretty much the result of the blog post, right? So it's not really a surprise that it only renames in some cases. It's not really a frontend for rename(2), it's only using rename in some cases (which might be common) as optimization. Atomic file system changes are simply a nice side effect.

Or am I understanding the quoted two sentences incorrectly?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are different things that "move" can mean. rename(2) can "move" in a safe way, but not across devices.

> Atomic file system changes are simply a nice side effect.

Disagree.

Also, my article was to show how mv's task is so complex that it can fail and eat your data even if atomicity is not a requirement.

<comment><USER12> Okay, haven't got that so far. Maybe I'm missing some skillset to understand.

<comment><USER14> You've understood the general use description of mv (copy-rename-delete), but what OP demonstrates is a situation in which it does something unexpected (and inappropriate) when dealing with mounted directories.

See the part where he creates file 'bar' in mounted directory /mnt, attempts to move /mnt within itself to /mnt/foo, then asks to show the directories containing /mnt.

The result is that the mv fails (so it shouldn't do anything, right?), but still creates an additional directory (/mnt/foo) that now contains 'bar' and has (destructively) altered the fs hierarchy.

However, when he tries it again after unmounting /mnt, the behavior is completely normal for any other file-- mv fails, nothing happens, /mnt/bar hierarchy is preserved, no /mnt/foo created.

<comment><USER12> Thanks, now I understand what's going on! Great explanation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You could say the same for scripts, languages, etc when not using safety precautions.

I would look at the link from erikb's answer: [http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell- sc...](http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-scripts/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Would --no-target-directory help here?

Edit: I see the article does mention this GNU specific option ("-T") as a fix

<comment><USER3> That's not the issue that is being observed here, it's just a side-note.</comment></comment>


Diversity Should Be #1 for Good Reason - <AUTHOR> https://gothamgal.com/2019/02/diversity-should-be-1-for-good-reason/ <comment><USER2> _" If every investor would make it a non-negotiable term that the companies they invest in must make diversity a priority, the results would be huge. It might not be easy to do, but it can be done."_

That's pretty brutal. Don't investors have enough power in the relationship that they need to start dictating stuff like this and further filtering down who they will give money to?

 _" This is what I tell every woman founder I know who is in a relationship or married and who wants to have children: just do it and do it now."_

She is very wealthy and so is her husband (Fred Wilson). I think it's a bit tone deaf for her to just give such stark life advice as if it's that easy for 99% of the population.

<comment><USER3> > > "If every investor..."

This is already a thing, and it is starting to look like an incredibly bad idea. Well over a year ago I had lunch with my financial advisor and he tried to sell me on a portfolio balanced on some kind of social responsibility metric (female board member ratio, carbon credits, etc). At the time I thought it was just a new way to separate morons from their money, but now I'm starting to think that the US markets are setting themselves up for a fungibility attack. I remember, many years ago, the debate on bitcoin tainting - keeping a register of illegally obtained coins (and leaf transactions) and refusing to accept them. That is obviously an attack on the utility of the currency - a unit of value.

So what is the metric here, what is the new unit of value? The best case outcome is a Tower of Babel pandemonium, worst case is an irreversible further consolidation of kingmaking power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If diversity results in such a benefit, if it "financially works", then why is there a need for this artificial injection of diversity? And where's the data to support this?

If you created a renewable fuel source that cost half of what traditional fuel does, you'd own the market in a heartbeat. You wouldn't need campaigns to convince people to save 100 a month. So why do we need to convince people that diversity is a good idea? You can only blame the big bad white man for so much.

</comment><comment><USER5> The diversity efforts of business is all about the ego. To me it looks like insecurity. A fear that women are or appear inferior necessitates action to prove that isn't the case, even to the point of giving them an unusual benefit of the doubt to help increase their representation. No doubt, if 0 women are participating entrepreneurs, there is probably a lot of untapped potential. The idea should be to unblock women and not to throw them into the fire in order to get a metric up.

Any smart business will ignore diversity in an effort to maximize the bottom line, because skin color and genitals of the CEO do nothing for an ad agency or a customer trying to purchase a smart phone app.

</comment><comment><USER6> "We shouldn't be looking at changing the ratio of women entrepreneurs because it is a buzzword of this moment, or because it looks good—but because financially, it works." source needed

</comment><comment><USER7> I think judging peeps by their gender, skin colour, and sexual orientation is immoral and inefficient to boot. Should I send myself to the gulags now?

<comment><USER8> You're racist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another woman who only invest with other women, this is not diversity but #genderwars.

I thought people were enlightened enough to understand that discriminating against others is bad no matter how you do it, as in this case discriminating against men.

</comment><comment><USER10> Idk what it is but the NYU ITP program just cranks out some great technology thinkers. And lots of them are women.</comment>


Vue.js hunt for perfect modal - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/epicmaxco/vue-js-hunt-for-perfect-modal-5879f7d34c25 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys!

We're using vue.js daily. Now it's time to share some of our experience. Enjoy reading!</comment>


Introduction to Statistical Machine Translation - <AUTHOR> http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=577

<comment><USER2> I wonder how much of this can be applied to code - to fix bugs, for example.

<comment><USER3> If you have a training corpus that consists of code with bugs and the same code with the bug fixed, I imagine you can get rather far.

The biggest challenge with any statistical or machine learning techniques is getting a good data set. If all you have is a lot of code but the code with bugs in it is not annotated, then you need unsupervised techniques which require better algorithms and more data (as I understand it).

<comment><USER4> Well, you probably sort-of can do that with open source projects that integrate version control and bug tracking. In these repositories you will find lots of commits names "Fixes #42".

The problem, I think, is that making a statistical n-gram model of a programming language doesn't look like it can produce encouraging results (think locally balanced-like, but globally unbalanced parenthesis, which should pop up often in ngrams for parentheses more than n tokens apart). The upper side is that you can get a tokenizer "for free" using the language's own grammar.

<comment><USER5> Maybe what you want is not a Markov model, but a stochastic context-free grammar:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_context-free_grammar>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's shocking that such a naive model produces such good results. I suspect it has to do with the languages they are translating: if they wanted to translate Japanese to German it would take more sophisticated methods.

<comment><USER6> One reason current machine translation looks pretty good is that over the years a lot of human translation has been remarkably bad. (I say this as a former member of the American Translators Association who made my living for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter.) Most clients of most translators can only check the accuracy of one of the translator's languages, which allows for a good bit of bluffing. I'm getting better and better satisfied since the 1990s with machine-translated texts I see on the Web, for example translations of my own personal homepage into other languages I know well enough to read.</comment></comment>


A mystery with memory leaks and a magic number - <AUTHOR> http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/02/21/malloc/ <comment><USER2> Coming from a firmware background with code running for a long time, limited memory protection, potential for memory corruption due to hardware bugs, I have learned a lot of defensive programming techniques like fencing structs with magic numbers, checksums, duplicated fields. Even unused bits of struct bitfields are set to magic values, all to help catch source of rare corruptions while debugging and hardening the code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing like taking raw data off of the network, unchecked, and passing it to malloc().

I used to work with a programmer who never wrote bounds checking or error checking code. You could pass his programs _anything_ and they'd do something. Something unexpected, to be sure... but they're do something, and never give a hint that things were going wrong.

In my opinion, GIGO is for idiots. If your program gets garbage in, it should complain loudly and refuse to do anything stupid.

<comment><USER4> Unless you're dealing with interfaces towards squishy components, in which case leniency reigns supreme. Last thing I want is my email program to discard what I wrote because there is a typo in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And not entirely unexpected, a google search for

[https://www.google.com/search?q=121348616](https://www.google.com/search?q=121348616)

finds people asking about all sorts of errors like

[Zookeeper-User] Packet len 1213486160 is out of range

ERROR USER_LOGGER (MasterClient.java:getUserId) - Frame size (1213486160) larger than max length (16384000)!

</comment><comment><USER6> I could read rachel's writing all day long.

</comment><comment><USER7> Debugging is often intuition. Great story.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's funny - I was analyzing a piece of malware a week or two ago that would have hit the exact same bug. I can't believe somebody would use a "protocol" like that in production code.

</comment><comment><USER9> I suspect malloc('HTTPS') failed due to a certificate problem so it fell back on malloc('HTTP'). That in itself would be a security issue.</comment>


Nobel prize for chemistry: Lindahl, Modrich and Sancar win for DNA research - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/oct/07/lindahl-modrich-and-sancar-win-nobel-chemistry-prize-for-dna-research <comment><USER2> Sigma Xi put up march madness style brackets [1] for the science prizes and the winners weren't even in the bracket for chem and medicine. If you look at the increasing time from work to the award of the prizes [2], and then the fact that chem bloggers handicapping the race aren't even familiar with the winners' work [3, comments] it becomes clear that science has just outgrown the 3 award areas. They should consider splitting the award into more sub- categories in most years.

[1] [https://www.sigmaxi.org/news/keyed-in/post/keyed- in/2015/09/...](https://www.sigmaxi.org/news/keyed-in/post/keyed- in/2015/09/29/october-madness-announcement-of-champions)

[2] [http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/n...](http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/PT.5.2012)

[3] [http://blog.chembark.com/2015/10/07/predictions-for- the-2015...](http://blog.chembark.com/2015/10/07/predictions-for- the-2015-nobel-prize-in-chemistry/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd really like to see a prize for biology established.

Then perhaps John Goodenough and M. Stanley Whittingham might finally get the chemistry prize, for developing Li-ion batteries.

<comment><USER3> Probibly won't happen since it's based on a will. I think part of the prize allure is that it is limited and non-predictable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tomas Lindahl, uncle of Erik Lindahl, head GROMACS honcho...

[http://www.gromacs.org/](http://www.gromacs.org/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's a nice discussion of this over at Derek Lowe's Pipeline blog:

[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/10/07/a-n...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/10/07/a-nobel- for-dna-repair)</comment>


Apple director says Steve Jobs told team not to ask "What would Steve do?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/20/apple_board_member_says_steve_jobs_told_team_not_to_ask_what_would_steve_do.html

<comment><USER2> "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition." -- Steve Jobs

<comment><USER3> Absolutely, including Steve's life!

Apple must plot a new "post-Steve" path and there is no reason it can't succeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Asking that question would lead to in-fighting since everybody would have a different take on Steve's opinion.

"What would _____ do?" is a great movie line but it hardly ever works in real life.

<comment><USER4> Best example is: "What Would Jesus Do?"

I'm sure there are wildly differing opinions on that.

<comment><USER5> Actually, that's very apt.

It's a way of justifying your preconceived notions without actually testing and (in)validating them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Given that asking "what would Steve Jobs do?" is probably what Steve Jobs wouldn't do if he was in their situation, would asking that question now be okay?

<comment><USER7> Are you sure? I've read that Margaret Thatcher would ask herself "What would Margaret Thatcher do?" because her public persona had outgrown her own actions. I think Steve Jobs may have been in that same situation where he sometimes felt he had to live up to his own legend.

<comment><USER8> That strikes me as extremely unlikely. Steve's superpower was never being intimidated by anyone, even in the early days when he had so much more to prove. It's hard to imagine his own image being something that could cast a shadow on him, especially as his successes multiplied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a bit unavoidable for people to think of how Steve would approach products and that's not a bad thing.

I think what Jobs is doing here though is pointing out that anyone saying "What Would Steve Do" is really just admitting they don't know what the fuck to do. Or saying "Steve wouldn't like X" is a cheap copout when you can't give more concrete reasons why X is bad.

Interestingly, in the recent big Scott Forstall profile it was said he often used the "Steve wouldn't like that" refrain.

<comment><USER10> I think Steve would say the better question is "What should Apple do?" He tried his best to infuse his vision into the DNA of the company, and I think that will live on with the whole Apple U thing they're starting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Some industry watchers suggested Apple should appoint an independent chairman from outside the company to take charge."

That's a sure way to Dell-ify the company.

</comment><comment><USER12> I believe the largest thing that Steve did in Apple was maintain an exceptionally high standard for himself and I think they should keep doing that.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a very real danger to people (employees) seeing Apple as Steve Jobs' legacy. What they need to realize is that, even if Apple crashes and burns in the next 6 months, Steve's legacy is what he did during his time there.

</comment><comment><USER13> John Siracusa mentioned this was the major risk for Apple post-Steve-Jobs. Unsurprisingly, Jobs himself was well aware of that and has probably done what he could to inoculate Apple against this disease.

</comment><comment><USER14> What Steve would do is ask not what Steve would do, but what the person thinking about what Steve would do, would do.

Got it.

Its such a pity he couldn't stick around another 5 years, after the Siri [r]evolution, which will probably result in the ability to digitize personality pretty soon ..

</comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't seem to be in line with this: <http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/blog/?p=11634> ...

<comment><USER8> Everything I've read about that suggests its focus is on case studies of Apple business decisions. The how and the why of Apple's successes — and failures, as well, perhaps. Not an indoctrination in Jobsian thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Steve wouldn't ask what Steve would do.</comment>


Filepicker.io (YC S12) lets content flow without worrying about bandwidth - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/how-filepicker-lets-content-flow-without-worrying-about-bandwidth/

<comment><USER2> After I signed up to this, I started getting an e-mail everyday. All e-mails are titled like "Do you need help?" "Let's get you started with filepicker" etc etc. WTF is this? What is this rush for? I just gave a try your app, that's it. It sounded useful at first but you are losing respect by spamming.

<comment><USER3> Hi there. We think it's super useful too and therefore really excited to help developers onboard.

We've learned quite a bit about how to email developers and still continuing to learn to to best serve you all.

For instance, we started out sending html email, like we've seen other companies do. It wasn't nearly as helpful as personally emailing our new signups in plain text.

We've also experimented with newsletters like AWS does and targeted emails based on weekly actives and other metrics. In this, we're finding that the most effective emails match the relationship. If you are a current user, a short personal email works well. If you signed up a long time ago, a newsletter is relatively effective at getting someone to poke at it again, but also easy for them to ignore.

As you have discovered, we're also playing with frequency. I'd have to look it up in our db to be sure, but it looks like you happened to be in a small a/b test group that we've termed "eager". That in combination with being sent the monthly newsletter means you may have been emailed many times. I apologize for that.

We aren't big fans of spammy emails and we've been careful to watch the number of "spam reports" and been proud that it has been so low. However, it's good to hear this feedback from you so we can continue to learn.

I'm always happy to talk with customers; my email is email@example.com.

<comment><USER4> Here's the email I just received when signing up (which I did right before Googling "Filepicker.io Hackernews" to find out more about HN's take on this service):

Hey - just wanted to reach out and thank you for signing up for Filepicker.io. I'm the developer assigned to help you get integrated, so let me know if you are having any trouble, want to know more, or just to say hi. It's always fun to hear from our users. -Brett van Zuiden

Simple. To the point. No pressure.

Now that I know that this was sent out manually by Brett instead of just another spammy auto-responder I like it even more.

I'd rather have a developer contact me and really want a reply rather than some HTML newsletter with tons of information and sales tactics on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can't recommend Filepicker enough. If your product involves any sort of document/photo access, you should try them out! I've been using it for a few months and have been pleased with the integration friendliness for a web-first developer like myself, the enthusiastic support (of course, small team, we'll how it scales), and variety of services connected. I especially like the "filter services by mime type" feature. The "save to" is massively useful from a consumer perspective as well.

Edit: A bit more context more my enthusiasm.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the concept of filepicker.io: a standardized widget for providing files that handles local files, remote URLs, and services people use. However, every time I read the phrase "by inserting a few lines into their source code", I think 'yeah, and one of those is a script tag pointing at a third-party server'. And sure enough, looking at the documentation, I see exactly that.

I really wish web services would start providing instructions for self-hosting all scripts.

<comment><AUTHOR> We currently try to push people towards pointing the script tag to us so that we can more rapidly iterate on the product.

<comment><USER6> I understand the motivation; that doesn't make it acceptable for all sites, especially sites that care about minimizing their vulnerability surface. And since browsers don't currently have any security model for third-party scripts other than "full capabilities of the site that loads them", third-party scripts significantly increase the vulnerability surface of a site.

If browsers had a way to let third-party scripts run in a sandbox separate from the site, so that (for instance) filepicker.io can help with file uploads without having the full permissions of the logged-in users on every site that uses it, I'd have much less objection to third-party scripts.

<comment><USER7> You can run their scripts in an iframe, e.g.:

[http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-08-13-tarsnap-credit- ca...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-08-13-tarsnap-credit-cards.html)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I normally do that when dealing with APIs that want to use third-party scripts. I'd just like to see more APIs that support running with local versions of the scripts, to avoid the need for a separate untrusted domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I first heard of filepicker.io I thought it was a stupid idea. File uploads aren't hard to do, after all, so why pay a third party service for it? However, used Filepicker at the NY eCommerce Hackathon recently because we needed to implement file uploads in a hurry and was very impressed with it.

Took about 5 minutes to get image uploads enabled in our web app, including allowing people to take pictures directly from a webcam. No screwing around with file POSTs, sanitizing, storage, CDNs etc.

Looking forward to using it in a real project.

<comment><USER9> > ... in a hurry

But that's exactly it - if you are in a hurry, you'd be more willing to create a dependency on 3rd party and take on the risks that you can avoid otherwise. I'm sure there is a market for filepicker-like webapp component services, I just suspect that their user base is going to be highly transient ( _edit_ \- or hard to monetize on).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Getting customer data into your system is harder than it looks. Flash uploaders are pretty crappy, but you need them for IE users and direct to S3. Flash is broken for mobile, of course, as is the whole 'upload from computer' concept. Box, DropBox, Google Drive, flickr, and everything else is extremely popular, so if you start implementing all those yourself it adds significant development time and code to maintain. Filepicker has been a huge win for us at PlanGrid.

<comment><USER11> Just FYI, for xhr to S3 you can set up a proxy which fakes the CORS headers. You might have already been aware of that.

Filepicker looks neat. I wish it had been around when we were building our service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That explains why nearly every Filepicker blog post makes it to the front page! :)</comment>


The Internet? Bah (from 1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1995/02/26/the-internet-bah.html

<comment><USER2> I remember reading that back then. Clifford Stoll was a respected sociotechnical writer (along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell), so the content wasn't easily dismissed. Sure, we laugh at how darn near every Luddite prediction he made therein came wrong; of note is how the truth kept slapping him upside the head, but he didn't recognize the significance of " _my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, 'Too many connections, try again later_'" \- the demand was exceeding the supply, and supply tends to catch up with demand.

Fitting juxtaposition at the bottom of the reprint: _GET NEWSWEEK ON YOUR TABLET_</comment>


Delta Debugging - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Debugging <comment><USER2> "git bisect" is one of the most useful and overlooked debugging tools.

[http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git- bisect.h...](http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-bisect.html)

<comment><USER3> I was so happy the first time I traced down a bug with bisect, it seemed like magic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use a hacked/extended version of:

<http://delta.tigris.org/>

For all kinds of reductions, mainly code which causes compiler failures.

It is easy to burn a huge amount of CPU time with reductions (large C++ testcases can take a couple of days), it is just important to remember you are saving brain-time, and resist the urge to try to "help" it along.

</comment><comment><USER5> Chapter 28 in Beautiful Code ([http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading- Programmers-Pra...](http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers- Practice/dp/0596510047)) talks about delta debugging, how it was invented and developed. its really a great chapter in a great book. i can't recommend it enough.

<comment><USER6> This chapter actually has a much cooler implementation of delta debugging that what has been discussed here. We're generally thinking of delta debugging in which we take the changes to the source as the search space and use some form of binary search to find the offending change (for which git bisect is great). The chapter in beautiful code begins with this but then moves on to runtime delta debugging in which the techniques are used to compare the memory in use by two instances of the program (one buggy and one not) until a specific piece of the programs state can be isolated as the cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a fascinating technique -- lots of applications. Andreas Zeller has been doing this for almost a decade now so I'm very surprised it hasn't caught on more.

Is anybody looking at combining delta debugging with Optimizely?

</comment><comment><USER8> The following page (indirectly linked to from the Wikipedia page) has more in- depth information:

<http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/dd/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Smalltalk's Change Log is great for this. You can actually just take the list of changes and _run binary search_ for the error, and this will lead you directly to the bug 4 times out of 5. (You can do this with StORE as well.)</comment>


EU Telecoms deal: Mobile roaming charges ban in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.eu/article/telecoms-single-market-connected-continent-deal-reached/ <comment><USER2> Relevant Part:

       Roaming will be banned in 2017, and from April 30, 2016, surcharges for
       roaming will be capped at a maximum of €0.05 per minute for calls, €0.02 for
       SMSs and €0.05 per megabyte for data.

<comment><USER3> So in fact €1 = 20MB, or assuming a typical instagram image is 250KB, 80 instagram images. That's still pricey in my book. Background app updates... 200MB please, that's going to be €10.

<comment><USER4> You're aware that data roaming in Asia (Thailand, for example) can hit you with 20$ _per MB_ and no. That's not a spelling error.

<comment><USER5> The fact the roaming in other countries is more expensive doesn't make it any cheaper

<comment><USER6> The point is that international roaming is generally expensive right now, the EU is now mandating a transitioning plan to free roaming with an intermediate rate cap which is most likely an improvement over existing EEA rates (my ISP's lowest EEA rate at the moment is 0.06€/MB)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What should be mentioned is the single market where using a SIM card from another EU country could turn out cheaper than using a domestic one.

<comment><USER8> Three [1] exists in both the UK and Ireland, and has an "all you can eat" bundle [2] in Ireland, for €20/month, but their closest deal in the UK is £17.00/month on a 12 month contract. They also provide a "Like Home" service, where your bundles apply outside your home country, so I can use my UK mobile data/text/call allowance in Ireland and Vice versa. Despite not having roaming rates, It's still cheaper for me to use my UK sim here and have a separate one for home, as calling the UK from Ireland or vice versa on a phone incurs costs that aren't part of the standard bundles.

[1] [http://www.three.co.uk/](http://www.three.co.uk/) [http://www.three.ie/](http://www.three.ie/) [2] [http://www.three.ie/eshop/sim-only-plans/prepay-sim- only/](http://www.three.ie/eshop/sim-only-plans/prepay-sim-only/)

<comment><USER9> The contract you mention is also available on a 30 day contract at £20/month. I picked one up this week for my upcoming trip to the states.

<comment><USER10> Good luck when you decide to cancel it though, Three is a pain in the ass to leave with their hour-long questionnaire and legalese. I really liked their service but it was so annoying to leave I don't think I'll ever use them again. I'm a giffgaff-ian, by the way.

<comment><USER11> Ive been with giffgaff for a few years now and recruited family and friends to it as well. £10 pm with practically free calls it has been great. But with giffgaff's odd venture into payday loans as well it does not seem like a community driven company any more, hence why I might move to Three's PAYG (as I hate commiting to subscriptions) [https://www.giffgaff.com/money/loans](https://www.giffgaff.com/money/loans)

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure how much community drive there ever was. GiffGaff is a subsidiary of O₂, with some clever marketing.

O₂ would far rather 'lose' customers to Giffgaff than any other budget MVNO.

<comment><USER10> Interesting, I didn't know giffgaff was actually directly related to O2 besided using their network. Out of curiosity, I tried to find some information on Three and got a little surprise: "In January 2015, Li Ka-shing entered into talks with Telefónica to buy its British mobile division O2 for around $15.4 billion. In March 2015, Li Ka-shing confirmed it will be purchasing Telefónica's UK mobile division for £10.25bn subject to regulatory approval by competition regulator, Ofcom." So it seems Three is going to own both O2 and giffgaff by buying Telefónica?

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutchison_Whampoa#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutchison_Whampoa#History)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can anyone shed some light what happened to alternative roaming providers? [0] Seems like they are the perfect solution to affordable EU wide roaming, but nobody is doing it. Is there something I don't know that prevents companies from offering this service?

0: [http://www.slideshare.net/Computaris/eu-roaming- regulations](http://www.slideshare.net/Computaris/eu-roaming-regulations)

<comment><USER14> My Danish phone company 3 (which does business in a lot of different countries as well) offers a service called 3LikeHome.

3LikeHome lets you roam in 18 different countries, the data used is taken from your allowance, and you can call home for normal price.

I am a dane living in London, and even though they say it isn't for longer stays abroad, I have been using my danish number in the UK for over a year without any issues.

I guess there is no reasons for alternative roaming provides when regular phone companies makes these changes themselves.

<comment><USER15> Also a dane living in London using 3. It works great. Only downside is calling UK numbers at billed as if I was calling from Denmark.

<comment><USER12> Did 3 work well in Denmark?

I'm emigrating in August, and my experience with Three.co.uk in London was terrible (congested network, impossible to load a map or email when I most needed it).

<comment><USER14> 3 works great in Copenhagen and other bigger cities, I have had no issues at all, but I think it depends on where you ware going to stay.

I had issues in Varde (close to Esbjerg) a few years ago, where the connection was bad, but that might have been fixed.

They have a map here: [http://22.214.171.124/coverageportal_dk](http://22.214.171.124/coverageportal_dk) (sorry the shady link, that is what they provide)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Finally. Pre-iPhone, I was always able to use my GPRS/3G phones in various countries for free using data roaming. It would just use my normal (unlimited) megabytes. I could even tether unofficially.

Then the iPhone came out, and an "unlimited international data" plan was an additional $60/month, I believe. Basically doubling the monthly cost, and that didn't have tethering.

THEN, they got rid of that altogether, and ever since it's been a scramble in every country to buy a SIM card just to pay local rates and not get ripped off. It's all the same internet… if you're not at home and roaming agreements exist, the carriers should just be forced to pay each other fair rates.

<comment><USER17> The downside is that a majority will have to pay higher overall fees for the benefit of a minority (those travelling regularly aboard)

Rather unfair.

<comment><USER18> >The downside is that a majority will have to pay higher overall fees for the benefit of a minority (those travelling regularly aboard)

I am 99% sure that for most of the phone companies a call in a home country and outside of it costs the same. Especially, for companies with subsidiaries all over the world such as vodafone and tmobile

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For what I'm concerned this is water down the bridge. The many years of excessive roaming fees have conditioned me to either switch of data altogether - relying on wifi instead - or use a local SIM when going abroad. As this still is a lot more affordable and I still fail to see the grounds for _any_ extra fees when using a network owned by the same company which happens to lie on the other side of an arbitrary border I don't see any reason to change my habits.

</comment><comment><USER20> (Crosspost from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9803815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9803815))

The problem with these sorts of legislature as I've experienced is that while the theory seems quite appealing it never really works as you would expect.

Canada did a similar thing a couple years ago. The CRTC imposed a law where an individual could only incur a maximum of $50 in data overage charges locally, and $100 when roaming. I was ecstatic when this was announced. And then one month I went over on data by $50. And then my data was cut off until I bought a "pack".

So yes, your phone bill will be unsurprising at the end of the month, but now your carrier will expect you to purchase a bucket of "roaming data" in the form of an add-on or package to your regular phone plan so that you can post your selfies with the Eiffel Tower in real time.

</comment><comment><USER21> This will bring consequences, since, for example, package for uncapped unthrottled unlimited data+calls+messages is 19.94€ (Latvia), which is much cheaper than same packages in other countries.

From what I've understood operators will reintroduce wholsesale roaming prices, which means that home operator will still pay for traffic while their clients are roaming.

This will bring us cheaper roaming but we will most likely have two separate packages - for domestic use and capped ones while roaming.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is a step in the right direction. The initial intent of GSM was to have a phone you could take anywhere in the world - and it would just work. Instead, companies and countries erected huge hurdles to true roaming with high voice and data costs. This will work - very similarly to how T-Mobile in the US has made data roaming "free" in a 100+ countries..

</comment><comment><USER23> Bad that it is delayed by 5 months, a year ago it was planned to happen since mid January 2017. Good that they also introduced another intermediate tariff reduction since April 2016, which gets calls cheaper by at least 4x. After this, personally i will no longer care about what it costs, it is cheap enough.

</comment><comment><USER24> And for this we gave net neutrality legislation away.

<comment><USER25> If you read the factsheet - [http://europa.eu/!hB73fv](http://europa.eu/!hB73fv) \- it has reasonably strong NN protection.

<comment><USER26> BS. There's no "reasonably strong" Net Neutrality, just like there isn't "a little bit pregnant".

This is not net neutrality, this is a sham. It's full of deliberate vagaries and loopholes, and is specifically designed to kill the real net neutrality as it exists in my country, the Netherlands.

The new telecom law is specifically anti-Net Neutrality, designed to stop any more member states from adopting it, and overrule those that already have.

The Netherlands will vote against (government already announced that), but it won't matter. We'll be overruled. Once again we'll lose yet another bit of freedom to the corrupt EU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice idea in politics, in practice it will take much longer to be fully implemented. The mobile grid system in Europe is so scattered and non integrated, that technically this is not simple to achieve within a year.

To be honest i cant back this up with arguments and/or data. But this is what i heard from telecom specialists in the field.

<comment><USER28> This has been in the works for years, so telecoms have had plenty of time to get ready. They've also been offering much better roaming rates the past few years within Europe.

<comment><USER27> I think the main problem is that the prices telecom providers have to pay for roaming data will be higher, than the selling price to customers, resulting in losses for telecom providers. The only way to counter that is increasing domestic prices.

Brussels makes rules, but doesnt understand the market and industry.

<comment><USER29> > I think the main problem is that the prices telecom providers have to pay > for roaming data will be higher, than the selling price to customers

Most of the telecoms won't be paying at all, except as an independent exercise; they're nearly all owned by one of about five companies (or else are MVNOs who are already accustomed to paying for data etc for their customers).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don't fit their worldview - <AUTHOR> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/the-fact-checkers-dilemma-humans-are-hardwired-to-dismiss-facts-that-dont-fit-their-worldview/ <comment><USER2> Twice I have been through interviews that use hours of psychology assessments to filter candidates. One of those was a large hedge fund. Through that I have learned that objectivity is a measurable and identifable personality trait that is astonishingly rare.

Most humans are hardwired to seek mutual security, which means banding together as a stress coping mechanism. That incidentally means some natural revulsion of originality, objectivity, individuality, and even honesty. More important are group conformance, mutual reassurance, and perceptions of social security.

This is readily observable when you take a group of people who have never worked together and are generally unfamiliar with the outdoors and drop them into an outdoor military training exercise, such as college ROTC junior classmen. Naturally they congregate really closely together and wait for somebody to tell them what to do with minimal or no initiative, all of which is a bad idea in modern military training.

<comment><USER3> Re: _I have learned that objectivity...is astonishingly rare._

As somebody who has been in many political debates, I have to agree. A good many are addicted to authority figures to tell them how to think.

Another frustrating aspect of human nature is that most people don't know how to be _logical_. I strive to be logical as a personal goal, but it's often not valued in the work-place, or anywhere.

Keep in mind "logical" is not necessarily the same as "being right", at least not my working definition. Being logical is being able to back up your viewpoint and claims using a clear chain of logic. I define any assumptions I make as givens, and my conclusion can be formed directly from those givens. I don't necessarily write it out in formal logic, but if one questions a specific informally-written step, I can and do formalize/clarify it.

Most don't return the favor. "My guts have proven accurate and I'd rather trust my gut feelings" is a common response. Screw Guts, I want logic, damn humans! Human guts have proven dumb.

<comment><USER4> It's not always logic vs guts. Logic is great when you are dealing with theoretical problems that are well defined and you know the variables involved etc. In real life problems, often there are way too many variables, are time bound, things aren't as well defined. It's in those cases that people resort to gut..

<comment><USER5> I've found the lack of an ability to use basic logic to be extremely widespread down to simple conversational matters. It severely impedes and distracts conversations (online and off). I wish it were primarily a problem when dealing with theoreticals, as I find it's a problem just about any time you converse where there are many people. Emotionalism is rampant.

I have yet to find a forum - in ~25 years of near daily discussions on forums online - where incredibly obvious logic failures don't happen persistently. And I'm only talking about the basics, nothing complex.

The worst and most common, I believe, is: because you said X, therefore you must believe / endorse / be implying Y. It's some kind of emotional transitive property of logic failure.

Example concepts:

I say: Bush did X. Response: Yeah but Obama did a thing, he's worse, how can you support him?!? (Obama isn't part of the conversation at all, there was no statement endorsing Obama whatsoever)

I say: the US did X. Response: Yeah but Russia (or China etc) is evil and did a thing, they're even worse because of a thing! (the other countries aren't part of the conversation at all, I never suggested the other countries are good or bad or did or didn't do a thing).

I say: I'm in favor of an immigration system like Canada or Australia. Response: how can you support internment camps and murdering children at the border? Or more calmly: why are you against immigration? (there was no mention of being against immigration at all, Canada allows plenty of immigration via their approach)

Some of it is obviously an emotional attempt at diversion, an irrational reflex to change the conversation away from what it's pointing at for one reason or another. Logic is in part about self-control and my observation is that it's a rare quality.

I've yet to find a forum where this doesn't happen constantly, basically in every large thread. You spend half your effort on forums either trying to pre- empt very primitive logic failure responses via how you structure what you write so you don't have to waste your time later correcting people, or you have to waste time responding after the fact and noting that no, in fact you didn't endorse x y z.

<comment><USER6> I suppose this is a fundamental flaw of 'online communication' having low bandwidth when it comes to conveying information.

We humans spent most of our history interacting with people in a more direct way, and having out 'gut' conclude things about another person based on what they say, do, how they look, how they sound, and so on, was and is important to our survival.

If I meet a person face to face who says 'Bush did x', I might also notice the tone of voice, that the have a Southern drawl, that they're wearing camo and a red hat with MAGA on it. In this situation I'm not likely to conclude that they're pro-Obama despite their critical statement wrt Bush.

I've noticed this flaw in myself as well, and it's frustrating and takes effort to counter. When I see a politically loaded comment on HN, I really have to make an effort to not jump to conclusions.

All that said, I have a little plugin that allows me to tag users and while plenty of commenters surprise me, I find that most are almost shockingly consistent when it comes to which 'bucket' I put them in (right, alt-right, conservative, liberal, socialist, libertarian, evangelical, etc.). So perhaps it's not so strange or inaccurate that many of us jump to conclusions based on very limited information.

(not that I think it's a good thing to do so. I do agree with your comment.)

<comment><USER2> > If I meet a person face to face who says 'Bush did x', I might also notice > the tone of voice, that the have a Southern drawl, that they're wearing camo > and a red hat with MAGA on it. In this situation I'm not likely to conclude > that they're pro-Obama despite their critical statement wrt Bush.

Stereotypes are convenient when you need to make decision in a pinch, but they are horribly ignorant and misguided when talking to people. You can easily dispel your ignorant bias by asking a single pointed question.

As far as politically loaded hyperbole and labeled stereotype buckets I find Bush and Obama far more in common than Trump and that Trump and Clinton have far more in common. When I look at these people I don't care what their politics are or how charming they are. I am trying to examine their motivations and how they interact with people. I am not sure which labeled bucket that would put me in and I don't really care because I despise political labels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't that obvious? Think of the human brain as a byzantine fault tolerant distributed system. You are collaborating with other "nodes" that may be malicious, manipulitative or omit critical information. Therefore every message you receive has to be validated but since there is no objective criteria that can be used to form global consensus the only way to validate messages is by drawing upon your existing knowledge. When you are young you are more receptive to messages because you haven't gathered enough knowledge. Your "worldview" is being developed and then once it has matured you can use it to validate further messages.

Lock-in happens when you build a whole network of beliefs that are fully dependent on each other. Admitting A can mean that B is no longer valid but you are fully convinced C must be true and if C is true then B is true as well. Therefore denying A is the only way to maintain your worldview.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I'm still looking at the headline and I'm thinking "and why is that a bad thing?"

I mean, the problem mainstream commentary are really talking about is the accumulation of irrational, garbage world views. But mainstream is hampered in its ability to describe this in particular.

Essentially, the view of journalism, in America especially, has presented itself as a "non-world view", "just the facts" but really having a secular, pro-science, pro-capitalist, etc position. A variety of viewpoints could considered but not an infinite variety. And the endorse variety was the "unbiased", supposedly willing to considered anything. And it seemed plausible for a bit.

Moreover, this mainstream view certainly wanted some things to be taken fully on authority while other things could have their validity debated. Especially, schools and newspapers can't come out and say religious is bunk, they have to couch things as religion is a fine thing but shouldn't impinge on the domain of science or the state. And when talking a world view that is, in my secular world view, screamingly irrational, that's leaving a big hole in your position.

My personal biased view is that the rise of an educated populace in the 1960s lead to that populace questioning a lot and the elites then being happy to gut education. Which lead to a uneducated populace more ready to embrace idiocy. Researchers saying "maybe people should have tools to sort facts from trash" but how did the situation start anyway? Sure, the Internet accelerated this kindling but you had problems with the rationality of the citizenry beforehand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > This approach succeeds most of the time when the issue is, say, the atomic > weight of hydrogen.

The article is interesting but I think misses one critical point. Most "facts" aren't as clear cut as the weight of hydrogen. Most answers to questions will differ according to conditions. As an example not all people will respond the same to a treatment regimen. Low carb doesn't work for everyone for different reasons so most "facts" on low carb will likely be disputed.

<comment><USER10> Aren't Southern history books still teaching the War of Northern Aggression?

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/26/c...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/26/civil- war-still-being-fought-in-schools/e86c19b9-eedd-46dd-91d1-3f1f00e2f2f1/)

<comment><USER11> Anecdotal, but I'm from the south and learned it as the Civil War. However, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many schools teach it as the "War of Northern Aggression" given how it's viewed in rural areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Remarkable how these debates reveal how many have a "scientific" attitude. Generally very few.

There is no such thing as "done science". Science is about hypotheses that are questioned and challenged to come up with a better hypothesis.

I'm astonished how this simple thing is not evident in much of the debate.

</comment><comment><USER13> You have to be aware that part of human nature comes with greed, dishonesty, and countless of other nasty things. Maybe what we call "gut" is another checking point to guard ourselves of the real monster inside each of us.

Take GMOs, I am still skeptical of the science behind its safety, especially knowing that corporations fund these starving scientists. There is for example, a hidden MIT (unpublished, maybe due to retaliation fears) study that found 10 correlations of diseases to the rise of GMOs. Feel free to fact- check, HN is great at this (study below): [https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/NancySwanson....](https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/NancySwanson.pdf)

You can accuse the less-educated or talented on their bias all you want, but ultimately the smartest elite lie more often for personal gain than the humble and innocent rest (99%)...Perhaps we should be pointing fingers at our own society that glorifies lies and hides truth. Ex: "relative truth and morality" was invented by this culture.

Perhaps there is something in our human nature that still strives for truth after all, but it is very hidden among all the lies and the rest of our majority evil nature. Some people call it "the moral law". There is still a sliver of hope...

</comment><comment><USER14> Fun fact: whether you agree or disagree with this premise, will prove this point right.

<comment><USER15> Nicely done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does the research cited distinguish between hardwired vs culturally (or developmentally) entrenched behaviour? I haven't followed all the links so I'm asking, not answering, but if the research doesn't make that distinction, then the 'hardwired' aspect is unwarranted, and the title should have been something like "Contemporary humans tend to dismiss ...".

In general, most social psychology research is still conducted on WEIRDS (and if the current Euro-American 'global' culture continues to spread, this is going to become an increasingly harder problem to tease out). Richard Nisbett & others claim to have shown that many cognitive behavioural regularities merely assumed to be 'hardwired' turn out not to be universal, therefore not hardwired at all.

</comment><comment><USER17> And next to that is a link to [https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488) "Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: Real World Preasymptotics, Epistemology, and Applications" by Nassim Taleb which states "Many "biases" found in psychology become entirely rational under more sophisticated probability distributions".

May be "hardwiredness" is not all that hard wired. Or, put it other way, the hardwiredness is not in humans under study but in humans who study them.

I don't think that humans would achieve what we have today being hardwired to dismiss facts that don't fit their worldview.

</comment><comment><USER18> Obviously, we aren't absolutely unable to consider other views. If we couldn't, people would never change their views and yet they do. Furthermore, evidence isn't the same thing as a self-sufficient body of premises. We interpret evidence in light of prior beliefs. There are disagreements where those prior beliefs are concerned. The truth is often difficult to know and even when you have it, convincing others is still going to take a lot of work. Don't trivialize that difficulty.

What this article is really circling are not these things, which are natural and with which there is nothing wrong per se, but about cultivated prejudice. Cultivated prejudice can be overcome, but it requires humility, that is, an openness to considering other views to see if what they claim is plausible, likely, necessary, or whatever. Should you change your mind, it may also require courage to state your change of beliefs to your milieu, but it is possible, even if risky in some circumstances.

I would caution against the opposite errors of relativism and intolerance toward others' opinions. What has happened of late (a matter of decades) is that quotidian political squabbling has turned into a full-scale war because of the Left's vicious and total attack on Western tradition and the very foundations of Western culture (in most cases, in profound ignorance of the depths of that culture). In turn, many on the Right have overcompensated by moving away from the cautious, principled pragmatism of conservatism. If you want a more measured atmosphere, where exchanges of views can take place without the strident nonsense that dominates today, then the Left has to stop its total, emotionalist, destructive, oikophobic siege on "the West", especially as it offers no better alternatives. Nature abhors a vacuum and it will be filled with all manner of demons far exceeding the boogeymen haunting the Left's imagination.

</comment><comment><USER19> This article fails to provide facts to support the use of the term hardwired.

</comment><comment><USER20> >dismiss facts that don't fit their worldview

I find this disconnect from reality especially fascinating in the software field, where nature's answers are just at our fingertips, and where we just have to open an editor or launch our program to be able to verify our expectations.

I once told one of our architects that we were creating a lot of (Java) garbage, and he stared at me incredulously before saying: "but... no, we are using factories!" (the code was bloated with factories indeed, but no object was ever returned to them since noone knew when instances could be released)

In the less verifiable and more nebulous matters of human psyche and philosophy, all hell breaks loose, which is unfortunate since they are also the most essential. I remember my philosophy professor in college, telling us, as we were leaving him for math class: "Ah, now serious stuffs!".

</comment><comment><USER21> Accurate, but fundamentally it is a type of laziness.

Changing your worldview takes a serious amount of effort. Most people don't use their new years resolution one year gym memberships after the second week of January -- and rewiring your beliefs in the face of evidence and reason makes gymming look like sitting on your couch in your undies.

This is why it's fundamentally an education issue. People's false beliefs and weak work ethics are usually baked in back at school.

If school was improved, this problem would be diminished.

</comment><comment><USER22> This could be a side effect of how intelligence works. Intelligence is at least largely about making parsimonious models, and that involves a lot of throwing away of noise. So this is sort of a failure mode of that system. Sometimes contrarian but otherwise good information gets misidentified as noise.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is hardly new. Leon Festinger was talking about this in the 60s with a theory called cognitive dissonance.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm enjoying the amount of pushback this is getting here on HN, given that we all probably think we're not victim to this, and are actively exposing ourselves to be.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Within the conservative political blogosphere, global warming is either a > hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic > or online communities, vaccines, fluoridated water and genetically modified > foods are known to be dangerous. Right-wing media outlets paint a detailed > picture of how Donald Trump is the victim of a fabricated conspiracy.

To this day you'll find most well off (and extreme) democrats avoiding GMO foods, protesting vaccines as well as avoiding fluoride in water. I don't think that's a republican issue. Especially in portland that consistently votes democratic but also NO to GMO, Flouride and Vaccines.

Reading that middle sentence maybe it's a little unclear if they are tying that to conservatism, but it's definitely surrounded by it.

<comment><USER26> I'm supposed to be avoiding politics here, but:

I thought vaccines were kind of a 'fringes of both sides' issue until our Republican rep here in Bend, Oregon got the rug pulled out from under her by her own party:

[https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2019/05/vaccination- boosti...](https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2019/05/vaccination-boosting- bill-passes-oregon-house.html)

I was surprised, I didn't think it'd go down that way.

The sheer vitriol that our rep gets on her social media because of that one thing is quite something to behold.

<comment><USER27> The unifying thread for anti-vaxxers is a fear of authority. You can find that anywhere. Left, right and center.

<comment><USER26> Yep. I did not expect the voting to be so partisan, though.

<comment><USER27> A lot of people believe their side is smarter. Try to prove them wrong and they'll take it as a personal attack etc etc see the original article

<comment><USER26> Well that's not what I'm saying: I thought that it would be more centrists of all stripes vs fringes on both sides.

I did not think it was a 'sides' issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _Right-wing media outlets paint a detailed picture of how Donald Trump is the victim of a fabricated conspiracy...None of that is correct_

Day 1 after the election. On Day 1 after that guy was elected the media--95 percent of it, in lockstep--said the following: "Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia, etc, etc, etc." For _years_.

And then they dropped it when the shit didn't stick as planned.

So, yes, the title of the article is correct.

<comment><USER29> >So, yes, the title of the article is correct.

I take conspiracy to be an active process where folks get together and agree on something. I think what has happened is folks who have different goals without communicating.

The Democrats want to prevent re-election/gain removal, the media wants ratings/profit and activists want attention/change. I don't think they all got together, met, planned things out and ran a conspiracy.

<comment><USER30> The most popular news network by far is Fox News due to a few of its hosts that support the political right. If profit were the primary concern of the other networks, they would hire some conservative journalists to steal Fox's market share. Instead, they have dozens of shows with the same political perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What the header says sounds very obvious to me. And it is also encouraged everywhere. Does post downvoting ring any bell?

</comment><comment><USER32> "Everything we hear is opinion, not fact; everything we see is perspective, not the truth" \- Marcus Aurelius

</comment><comment><USER33> In the book Superforecasting, one of the top scorers in a prediction contest wrote a program to display him news sites with differing biases from what he had viewed in the past. Social news, including HN, does the opposite.

<comment><USER34> HN doesn't show different results to different people, does it? Though I suppose things that the majority disagree with are less likely to be upvoted.

<comment><USER35> The only way it does (that I know of) is whether you have "showdead" turned on or not.

<comment><USER36> The headlines are shown to only a subset of people: those who choose to visit the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Inability to understand reality will lead to the species' extinction. I guess that's indeed how it's supposed to work.

</comment><comment><USER38> Although the author was clearly trying for fair "equivalence" claims, I found that his best effort at this fell short:

> As researcher Dan Kahan has demonstrated, liberals are less likely to accept > expert consensus on the possibility of safe storage of nuclear waste or on > the effects of concealed-carry gun laws.

There's the very big question of what "less likely to accept" really means. Presented with good evidence of the above two points, I (believe) I would say "well, I accept X, Y and Z, but my objections to this were not limited to those points, and I still object to expanding these because <orthogonal reasons>".

That's quite different from saying "that's fake news! it's all a bunch of crap! i'm not listening to any of that!"

Studies that fail to differentiate between these two responses to "facts that don't fit their worldview" are somewhat pointless.

</comment><comment><USER39> Hardwired and perhaps trained as well. If you ever develop serious skill at debugging logic problems it will be because you have no choice but to accept facts that don't fit into your world view, or maybe it is because you stop having a rigid world view because of how many times you eventually realize you weren't seeing the bigger picture.

<comment><USER35> A number of times, I've had to debug something where the impossible was happening. The question then became "Which thing that I think is impossible is actually possible? And how do I find out?"

<comment><USER40> I like to think of it as "it is impossible at this layer", which then can point to a failure at another abstraction layer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's a good filter to cut through distracting BS that would otherwise bog you down.

If you're surviving and thriving, your worldview is not so bad.

A worldview is a paradigm of reality constructed over decades. It makes sense to require higher standards of evidence for apparent exceptions to the hard won rules eked out from decades of observation and insight.

<comment><USER42> I'm increasingly convinced that worldviews / mental models are not simply modeling devices, but _information rejection tools._

Borrowing from Clay Shirkey's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", _the world is a surprisingly information-rich space_ , and humans (or any other information-processing system, biological or otherwise) simply aren't equipped to deal with more than a minuscule fraction of it.

We aim for a _useful_ fraction. It paints an incomplete, but useful picture.

Even a _bad_ model has utility _if it rejects information cheaply_ : without conscious effort, without physical effort, and without lingering concerns or apprehensions. It's a no-FOMO mechanism.

Usually, what happens is that we apply our bad models to a given scenario, act, process the _new_ resulting scenario, and notice that _that_ is obviously not favourable, and take appropriate actions to correct the new circumstance. Net loss: one round of interaction. Net gain: not succumbing to analysis paralysis _or_ having to hunt for a new and improved worldview (especially: a new _concensus_ worldview shared with numerous others, creating a large coordination problem).

Sometimes that _doesn 't_ work out and people (or companies, or governments, or cultures) get stuck in a nonproductive rut, often characterised by "doing the one thing we know how to do, only harder".

The big problem comes when there's a recognition that a former large-scale world model no longer applies. I'm leaning strongly to the notion that this is behind many psychological conditions: Grief, denial, meloncholia, depression, PTSD. Possibly burnout and ADHD.[1]

Classic grief is triggered by the loss of a loved one, or in the "five stages of grief" study, news of the _subject 's_ own impending mortality (a fatal disease prognosis). That triggered denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

It's a pattern once recognised that one sees repeated across numerous scenarios -- almost any disaster, epidemics, global catastrophic risks, wartime attacks, business failures, relationship breakups, and on.

What's curious to me is what the _threshold_ for grief or denial is. There are some surprises which _don 't_ elicit this response: almost all humour is based on the principle of surprise, and horror films and thrill rides are based on the premise of surprise or extreme experience, but rarely result in a traumatic response. We go through our daily lives experiencing small and medium-sized suprises and disappointments all the time. The grief/denial response seems to be triggered only above a magnitude or repetition threshold. (Though that can differ markedly between individuals.)

________________________________

Notes:

1\. I'm _not_ claiming that all PTSD, burnout, and ADHD are greif responses, but rather that there are at least strong similarities. Early psychologists linked grief and melancholia (itself then considered a much stronger longing, to the point of mental illness). The mechanisms for overload might be internal -- chemical, physical, illness, injury, or genetic in origin -- or external. But there's a common thread that seems to run through these conditions, ultimately an inability to cope with a level of change.

<comment><USER40> Heh, you've hit a point I thought of years ago. That is, the brain isn't so much of a learning device, but instead on of the most powerful filtering devices ever created.

<comment><USER42> Both, probably more.

It filters incoming information, but also determines relationships, matches patterns, and makes predictions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> _> If it's part of your ideological community's worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack._

There's nothing unnatural about genetic manipulation. Nature modifies genes at every level from base pairs to whole chromosome-sets, far more promiscuously than us humans.

You learn all about this if you study biology in college. Arguably, you learn nothing but.

<comment><USER43> Because I took Biology in college, I can't be skeptical of GMOs?

<comment><USER27> You can be skeptical of almost anything you want. One thing that surprised me was how tolerant scientists are of dissent. Your views can run from the unorthodox to the downright eccentric and, so long as you pay attention to data and argue politely (and maybe even not so politely), people will listen to you. You can't be a scientist without being humble, and humble people listen even to the weird arguments.

But if you believe GM foods have adverse health effects, and you design a study to look for them, and try to get it funded you'll be turned down. Literally thousands of scientists have had the same idea and done the same thing, and they all found nothing. Scientists listen to data, so if you wanted to go on looking for health effects, you would probably start with very subtle ones that haven't been looked for yet. If it were me, I would start by trying to find ways genetically modified protein gets past the digestive system, which destroys genetic information by breaking all protein down down into its constituent amino acids. Not an easy problem, but better than some of the others.

If you don't want to work on the problem scientifically, you also have the option of thinking about it non-scientifically. A non-scientific opinion can be whatever you want, but holding one means lumping yourself in with a lot of people who object to genetic engineering without knowing the central dogma or even what a gene is.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods- sa...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods-safe.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Crypto Billionaire Sued by Sequoia After Funding Deal Goes Awry - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-25/crypto-billionaire-sued-by-sequoia-after-funding-deal-goes-awry <comment><USER2> Matt Levine wrote in his column today, also on Bloomberg:

`"at issue is whether Zhao's talks with IDG Capital violated his exclusivity agreements with Sequoia." I have to say, even if they did, it's hard to blame him: If you strike a deal to sell some of your crypto exchange at an $80 million valuation, you can't really wait around for months to finalize it. Crypto valuations seem like they'd be good for a day or two, tops.'

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-25/what- if-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-25/what-if- hypothetically-yahoo-had-been-hacked)</comment>


Fraise : Powerful Lightweight [Text] Editor for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://www.fraiseapp.com/index.php

<comment><USER2> Seems like maybe the website could be a bit more clear that it was based on the Smultron editor. I know it's a bit obvious to anyone who's familiar with Smultron, but it feels a bit disingenuous when it isn't mentioned anywhere (that I can see, anyway).

<comment><USER3> Thanks for writing! Saved me a download.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice start. More intelligent syntax awareness would be nice (auto indenting in HTML, auto completing " < ', highlighting CSS within HTML, etc).</comment>


Diaspora* Project on Pivotal Tracker - <AUTHOR> https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/61641

<comment><USER2> Weird. I can access the provided link, but when I click the homepage, I need an account.</comment>


What happened to the chess community after computers became stronger players? - <AUTHOR> https://np.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/49x24h/what_happened_to_the_chess_community_after/d0vndt3 <comment><USER2> I used to meet at a coffee shop in a Barnes and Noble for a chess club meeting. Called We're Just Pawns. I had a chess set and a timer.

Chess websites changed that to play against other humans and smart phone apps to play chess against another human or an AI.

I used to play the Chessmaster series game and at one time National Lampoons Chess Manic 5 billion and 1. Even Battlechess. The AI gets harder to beat with each new version. The Fritz engine for example can use a book library of moves and figure out your openings and counter them.</comment>