A billion reasons never to buy IBM services - <AUTHOR> https://foliovision.com/2018/03/why-not-buy-ibm <comment><USER2> There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really IBM's fault at all.

The Canadian public service is really complex. There are multiple unions with multiple overlapping collective bargaining agreements, where the public service is allocated to different classes. These classes are paid specific rates, with retroactive pay being common for changing classes. The majority of the problems with Phoenix have been employees moving from their classes and being paid the correct amount. It has also adversely affected non-unionized positions.

My understanding is that the Harper government (Prime Minister until 2015), who was responsible for the negotiation and for laying out the requirements, was trying to save a money and not responibly create a pay system. Two major factors that jump out at me:

1) Requirements did not call for training. The system was implemented and IBM was not required to train any operators on how the system functions, which is important because all new staff were hired to run the system and,

2) Due to the need for cost saving measures (the government was trying _really hard_ to balance the budget, as the election was coming up), the previous payroll staff were _terminated_ and a new payroll centre was opened in Miramichi, which is a small town in the middle of nowhere.

So, on top of new software, the government lost all of its institutional knowledge regarding payroll and how things are supposed to work. It's actually hard to say how much of this is IBM's fault and how much is the governments, because the government _doesn 't know_ how to fix it. No one knows how Phoenix works and no one knows how it is supposed to work. It's just a big mess with no end in sight.

Could IBM have done a better job? Probably, but garbage in, garbage out.

For further reading, the Auditor-General's report: [http://www.oag- bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01...](http://www.oag- bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_01_e_42666.html)

<comment><USER3> > There's a dimension left out here on the Phoenix disaster: It wasn't really > IBM's fault at all.

I respectfully disagree. IBM management either knew what they were contracting was a recipe for disaster, or they were incompetent. In both cases, as they were supposed to be the billion-dollar expert on the matter, they bear great responsibility for this failure.

And at an industry level, companies that promise the impossible push out of the market more honest ones, and they deserve all the bad PR IBM is getting on this one.

<comment><USER4> you're both right, but you're a bit more right. IBM should have been pointing out that losing the institutional knowledge may cause problems. they possibly assumed some of their milestones and deliverables would be while working with existing staff. if the existing staff is let go, many of the assumptions in the original estimate are just wrong at that point.

<comment><USER5> The managers needed IBM to tell them about the concept of institutional knowledge? They need to be told that people with experience have learned their jobs? That new employees need training? This is like Management 101. Just how incompetent are these managers?

<comment><USER6> The competent managers likely had no say in the matter.

<comment><USER7> That's a trick question, there are no competent managers in government service for the most part. They either burn out from managing without the ability to recruit competent staff, or they moved elsewhere to make drastically more money.

I'm sitting with a 4x multiple on my old public service job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 12 years ago some guy had the courage to report this predatory activity in Kuro5hin

"How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions" [http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_9_27_95759_4240.html](http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_9_27_95759_4240.html) (cache)

I remember the guy was harassed by IBM lawyers and even lost his job.

<comment><USER9> Yep - this is IBM's standard scam. I guess their branding is strong enough to obscure their history of catastrophic failure, to the VP level exec, at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> These stories of failure, but skew the reader simply because there are very few companies that can bid on and attempt to manage projects of this scale. This article could easily be written to focus on the failure of sweeping, enormous, poorly-thought out projects that suffer changing visions and scope, rotating project managers, and evolving systems ... that IBM happens to bid on and execute poorly.

Small projects are better focused, cost less, are easier to understand, and therefore succeed more frequently (or fail more silently). It's big projects, frequently proposed and conceived by governments or enormous industrial conglomerates that are poorly thought-out, improperly managed, and suffer the worst of project management incompetence or hubris/excess. But who bids on that kind of project? Big companies like IBM. Let's be fair, they don't just bid on them, they also coax them into being, but my point stands: if you want to fail big, you've got to dream big. This isn't a defense of IBM, who deserves to own the shame of talking big but being unable to actually deliver. But it is a reminder that the project designers get equal blame for these sweeping, grandiose, visionary catastrophes.

<comment><USER11> Sure. It's both to blame. I know plenty of small companies in other industries that refuse to do work that they expect to fail because they don't want to hurt their reputations. Those guys all probably didn't bid or dropped out when they saw it would fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone who used to work in/on/underneath websphere. I can tell you I am loathe to even consider anything IBM. I was almost recruited by them and then I recalled how miserable I was on one particular project. The money was good but I said no. I recommend everyone I mean to stay away from IBM and Oracle as best I can. I just don't think the line between open source and enterprise is crystal clear anymore.

<comment><USER13> As a general rule, if a work task lands on your desk that involves working with a IBM/Oracle/SAP product, preemptively apologize to those regularly around you for your miserable attitude in the near future.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure why Oracle is in the list. The databases are very expensive but they work well.

<comment><USER15> When The Daily WTF was still maintained it reserved an entire section of the site for Oracle Database. It may rarely have catastrophic failures (although it's the second one I've seen most catastrophic failures, just after MySQL), but it is composed of one unreasonable choice after the other.

<comment><USER16> What makes you say The Daily WTF isn't maintained?

<comment><USER15> It is online, but it doesn't seem to get much more new content.

<comment><USER17> I get new items on RSS everyday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well, this news that came out last year is somewhat relevant. MD Anderson Cancer Center's IBM Watson project failed, with $62 million paid to IBM and PwC for essentially no results. However, I don't blame IBM, I blame people who dove in without clearly thinking it through. [https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson- cancer-...](https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer- centers-ibm-watson-project-fails-journalism-related/)

<comment><USER19> We have all seen a project go wonky with requirements. However, I haven't heard of a successful product that IBM built/managed in the last decade.

On the other hand, talking with friends in the government and government contracting, they argue that IBM and the major contractors have perfected the art of exploiting government into maximizing billable hours at the expense of results.

It's a bit like the metaphorical malicious genie interpreting your request. It isn't possible to write specifications that can't be interpreted malevolently.

<comment><USER20> IBM is likely the single largest government contractor in North America. Most governments at every level have contracted IBM for something, at some point. You don't hear about the successes because that's not news. That's just a government and contractor functioning as they should. Only large, expensive failures make the news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is an interesting narrative. However it cannot be the only one. Let us explore some alternatives and side notes.

Who was responsible for picking IBM? Are they still working for the CA gov? Have they passed the hot potato to someone else? How were their technical skills and soft skills evaluated? Did they receive any donations for the contract? Where are the safety clauses in the contract? Is IBM the only benefactor of this contract? Any political implications?

Remember that Gov. point person also bears a lot of the responsibility for shopping for IT services in a magazine or trough their business network.

If IBM has been so ineffective at delivering services there would be more cases like this and it would ultimately hurt their bottom line. If this was wide spread practice across their business units. Maybe their business as a whole is insulated by the other better performing parts of it's corporation.

It seems to me that these "Governments" should investigate anyone who touched these contracts.

To the widespread corruption present in Eastern Europe. It does exist. However this article goes to show that corruption is present at a larger scale in some of the "most" developed nations on earth.

<comment><USER22> Because government contracts have to be transparent, the award process tends to be overly bureaucratic and algorithmic. There's no real mechanism with which the Canadian government could bar IBM from bidding, and they're obliged to take the best bid. Usually this is lowest cost per rated point, scored against a large matrix of must-haves and nice-to-haves that are assigned weights.

<comment><USER21> Sounds like the system is set up in such a way as to deliver a under- performing product. Especially if it optimizes for "lowest cost per rated point". Quality things require significant investment.

No wonder IBM has to go get developers outside of the US/CA/AU if they were the lowest bid.

Now it all fits together. Whenever i go to my states web services and they look odd. I now know why. That is changing though.

<comment><USER23> If you don't have an objective metric like that, these bureaucrats don't magically learn how to make good decisions. They just overpay their friends instead. These bidding systems are a symptom of bad decision makers, not their cause.

<comment><USER24> Governments used to build things in house as well ... I remember the first time I applied for federal student aid — in 1999 — it was a long complicated form but it was far more complex and functional than any web application I'd interacted with up to that date.

Built on in-house knowledge rather than subcontracted out to incompetents with zero stake in product quality or understanding of what they were trying to build ... (aka the outsource everything mentality of the gop that spread everywhere during bush era from which American government managed infrastructure on all levels has never recovered — and probably will never recover)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I you think this is an 'IBM' only problem, you're in for a surprise. I've worked on very large projects with other very large service companies, and the experience is very much alike.

From day one the client company gets swamped by an army of vendor analysts, the prime reason for this is to establish that it is the clients fault the project will fail as they couldn't respond to requests for information fast enough. Any information you manage to supply will be scrutinized for 'discovery' of 'change requests' to pad the meters and CYA.

Meanwhile, a 'technical specialist' room chock full of developers is installed to (a) put on extra time pressure and (b) start the billing engine in top gear. When you went into that room there were literally people sitting at desks watching the vendor's equivalent of CS 101 video courses.

Also, a team of lawyers is already preparing the documents for the 'settlement' in case of the (very likely) project failure.

All status information to the project's steering committee gets 'green shifted' until the supplier is ready to shift to litigation mode and then overnight the project's near unrecoverable disaster gets revealed alongside a proposed 'rescue' plan that is priced so ridiculously it makes the 'settlement' look cheap.

In the private sector these train-wrecks are often settled with non-publish clauses as making the press would make both parties look bad. In our case the supplier dropped a small percentage on the billing. The client was left with a room (literally) full of boxes of A4 'analysis' documents and 25M€ out of pocket. (this was in the financial industry, so it was basically pocket change)

All involved, both supplier side and customer side seem to have not suffered career wise from this disaster, moving swiftly to new clients and new projects.

P.S. Am I the only one that finds the author's sweeping generalizations of nationalities a bit in bad taste?

</comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone else remember the days when "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was true? You might pay a little extra, but it was never a total fail to use IBM products.

I'm not sure when that changed, but I feel like these days, IBM is closer to Oracle than AWS.

<comment><USER27> Clearly too many people remember. Shows the power of branding. IBM has largely moved out of the consumer space, and occasionally their research labs come out with some cool new tech (Watson and such). In the common consciousness they were the Apple of their day who then ascended out of the market to bigger, cooler things. As a result most people, including non-technical business execs who make purchasing decisions, don't have a good current frame of reference. IBM rode that facade for a while, it's only recently that their blunders have started hurting their reputation within the industry.

<comment><USER13> > some cool new tech (Watson and such)

I'm afraid Watson is very far from a "cool new tech", many companies have described their experience with Watson as a money gouging disaster.

<comment><USER28> Its appearance on Jeopardy! made it seem cool especially to non-technical people, who are most likely to remember and be impressed by it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seems like a baseless article that is pulling fake facts out of thin air to supplement a couple of real ones like the cost basis and failures of large government projects.

It's not uncommon for large government projects to fail with all the bureaucracy and politics that is in play. I am not saying IBM is great, but this article is just not worth it.

<comment><USER30> I've used two services from IBM: Notes and node DB2 package. Both of them were pretty low quality, the db2 package was so unstable that it constantly segfaulted the entire node process. It's not fixed for years since the issue was reported with reproducible code. Needless to say I wouldn't recommend IBM even to my enemies.

Can anyone share a good IBM experience? I'm honestly interested.

<comment><USER31> They bought SoftLayer a few years ago and haven't ruined it. Not sure if that really counts or not, but I was really worried. I've been there for quite a few years, and nothing went downhill after they got bought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> IBM is a horrible vendor, but the author is obviously clueless about the levels of incompetence, irresponsibility and indecisiveness of the stakeholders on client side for this kind of projects. All governmens should simply always pick the cheapest vendor because 90% of their projects fail regardless of who the implementers are

<comment><USER33> They did pick the cheapest. IBM was the only bidder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494387) (327 comments)

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm hesitant to just blame IBM and call it the day. What about the U.S. healthcare.gov website? Do we also blame CGI Federal and Accenture?

There's probably blame on both sides, but it seems nowadays that "it needs to be a roaring dumpster fire until we do things the right way". Unfortunately, either no one _in_ government seems competent to know that right way or be empowered enough to fight for it (maybe they've all left).

<comment><USER36> All things considered, healthcare.gov wasn't that bad. Having to scale to the size of the entire country on day one is a hard-to-impossible task and the managed to recover impressively quickly.

<comment><USER37> Didn't they recover by hiring a completely different team to rebuild the entire site from scratch?

 _" Here is the tl;dr version of their story: Marketplace Lite, or "MPL" as they came to be known, devoted months to rewriting Healthcare.gov functions in full, working as a startup within the government and replacing contractor-made apps with ones costing one-fiftieth of the price."_

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-s...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the- secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's not just IBM: any of the larger enterprise consultancies should, at best, be regarded with suspicion. I well remember the EDS/UK Inland Revenue fiasco of the late nineties/early noughties, and there are plenty of other examples involving other big players.

<comment><USER39> If you think that all big consultancies fail so equally, then doesn't that hint strongly that maybe, just maybe, the issues are on the other side?

<comment><USER38> Well, I'd be lying if I suggested I had an overabundance of respect for large consultancies, but actually I don't think it's so simple in either direction.

Consultancies mis-sell and misrepresent their services, whilst public service/government scopes the project poorly and is more than happy to buy into the fantasy. Every project is different so this is still an oversimplification.

Nevertheless, when an enterprise IT service provider is involved in a project it's often a red flag on successful delivery. Whether that's correlation or causation is up for debate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I really didn't understand this piece. Did anyone else struggle to follow it from sentence to sentence?

Did this article really compare FreshBooks to the payroll needs of the Government of Canada? Whatt??

<comment><USER41> Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users.

I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far less than a billion dollars.

IBM has not built a working payroll system (despite starting with Oracle's Peoplesoft for that money). I suspect my company (or some of our best competitors) could build a working payroll system for about $50 million based on our success on smaller projects. Our specialty however is in publishing systems and online video. I'm specifically recommending Freshbooks as McDerment has a background in creating accounting and billing systems and scaling them.

Additionally, as a Canadian, McDerment is already familiar with many of the variables to do with Canadian tax and employment legislation and geography. Any foreigner would need three to six months to assimilate Canada specific information.

I also don't suggest that IBM could not have built this payroll system satisfactorily. Based on failed projects in Canada, Australia, Pennsylvania and Slovenia, big promises, poor delivery, unlimited billing and zero liability on government projects appears to be strategic policy (links to each of those projects appear in a new preface to my article). Such behaviour has made Big Blue billions.

<comment><USER40> > Freshbooks has built from scratch two SAAS which have handled over $60 > billion worth of invoices and expenses for over 10 million users.

Right but those transactions have all been more or less the same type of vanilla invoicing. Unless something has really changed in Freshbooks, that's an app that handles very specific relatively simple needs. The government of Canada is a giant entity that is most seriously orders of mangnitude different and complex than any usecase for FreshBooks, and that's just the reality.

> I'm suggesting that Mike McDerment could build and lead a team who would > successfully build a payroll system for the Government of Canada for far > less than a billion dollars.

Maybe, but probably not. The real problem is probably that the business needs of the government of Canada are not well defined and the bureaucrats cannot define them. The comparison to FreshBooks is just so off because it's totally upside down. FreshBooks was built and provides certain functionality. Building a payroll system for The government of Canada is an exercise in reverse engineering the Government of Canada. It's an exercise in squaring hundreds of not thousands of different circles and making them fit into a box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wife worked for them as sales something, sometimes I saw the tools she had been using, couple of presentations - real nightmare fuel.

I remember once talking about how they (big blue) see Atlassian as a competitor and how they have to try harder to convince companies to use IBM products... the very moment someone replaced Jira with some IBM shit or Gmail Business or even Outlook with Lotus Notes I would quit.

<comment><USER43> Not trying to defend IBM here, but as a one time Lotus Notes dev, I can assure you that LN is not just an email program, but a whole platform that enables you to build workflow apps very very quickly. Not unlike sharepoint, but the catch being that it worked best from the LN client rather than the browser.

When I worked for IBM Global Business Service div as a dev, most of our payroll, billing, travel approvals and what not were done on LN. IIRC email was just another app on the platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> All of the big consultancy firms are bodyshops in some sense. But in my experience IBM is truly one of the worst. And people still keep falling for it.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's not just IBM. Dutch government IT projects also have a tendency to fail big, and those are handled by other companies. It seems governments are easy marks for mediocre IT companies.

<comment><USER46> From my experience it's mainly that governments don't have a lot of experts on staff so a lot of decision making gets outsourced too. I worked on a gov contract a long time ago and it was pretty obvious that there were several higher ups in government who added their own conflicting requirements to the list. Everybody in the trenches saw that they made things incredibly complex for no good reason but nobody pushed back. The main contractor was happy to sell many, many more hours and inside government there was nobody who had the ability to screen requirements for consistency and feasibility before giving them to the contractor.

It's like dealing with any other service business like contracts, lawyers, wedding photographers or others. If you don't give them clear guidance the result will most likely be an expensive disaster.

<comment><USER45> Another problem with governments is that they're made up of dozens or hundreds of different organisations, and they all make these mistakes on their own. Even if one organisation gets it right, other parts of the government don't benefit from that expertise.

I think governments should have a special organisation that just maintains the expertise for handling these sort of big projects all across the government.

<comment><USER36> You'd think so but then you just have one more organization that doesn't share anything with anyone else.

<comment><USER45> That organisation would have as its only job to make sure all other government organisations get this right. It should be able to work when that's their only responsibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I get why IT contracts can balloon in some cases, but I can't even fathom $1B for setting up PeopleSoft.

<comment><USER28> Then again, it's Oracle. I'm sure their licensing department is attempting to track how many neurons in the brain are actively engaged when using their products and billing the customer accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Can anyone explain what's so complex about a "payroll system"?

Presumably you just have a table with people with salary, and every month you wire the money and record information about the wire or otherwise have a way to record when the person has taken cash.

You might want to have more complex rules for determining schedule and amount of salaries, and support for contractors, unpaid leave, taxes, etc. but that doesn't seem particulary complex either.

How can this possibly take more than 100 person-years (i.e. < $30 million) to make even a truly extravagant version of?

Not to mention that presumably such software already exists and could be used instead of writing a new one.

[obviously my explanation would be corruption, but I wonder if I miss something]

<comment><USER49> Remembering and tracking all the agreements made with workers and unions going back decades _and_ handling the cases where workers change jobs and union designations (or even move from one union to another).

There are thousands of byzantine rules in the contracts and agreements, some mutually contradictory.

The old code likely contained a lot of business logic that represented an institutional memory of how to handle all these corner cases.

Anyone wishing to reimplement a system like that will have to rediscover these corner cases one at a time in production, while thousands of people complain that their paycheque is short.

Then there are also pensions to keep track of etc...

<comment><USER50> That why you should start small but cover most common cases first. Then gradually work on policies to simplify byzantine rules. Retrain some people and keep internal dev team.

IBM promised a big bang that would be finished before the election. What could possibly go wrong?

I think that there is a positive aspect. Other governments will learn from mistakes when ordering expensive projects like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> If you've never worked for a team responding to RFPs/RFIs for large projects then it's difficult to know what's mismanagement and what's "normal".

Generally you respond with a proposal that on the surface ticks ALL the boxes. Later you show the proposed product and state that all the missing parts will be implemented or altered during implementation.

You get a bunch of senior people or architects to estimate the work +/\- 1000% (mostly for the time estimates). The difference between what is charged to the customer and the actual cost of the work is swallowed by the bidder with the idea that it will be gouged back during additional work that wasn't in the initial scope.

Then you present your proposal and if you win the bid you then try everything to make it profitable from that point on.

ps. None of this is compatible with agile.

</comment><comment><USER52> Oh, but the con-census is that they did such a brilliant job in Australia!

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay- over-$30m-i...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-in- compensation-for-census-fail/8057240)

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off- and...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and-on-could- have-prevented-census-outage/7963916)

<comment><USER37> Indeed, some Australian states actually have a ban on government agencies contracting out to IBM:

[https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives- on-...](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-420969)

The quote from Queensland's Premier at the time of the ban:

"I don't want companies that have this sort of culture doing work for the people of this state."

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> "IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a working solution. Then IBM failed to successfully implement while taking payment all the way along."

So they outsourced the work to Oracle which is known to churn out garbage. Also just a lot of blame shifting between garbage-quality companies.

</comment><comment><USER54> Global American consultancies are paying 25-40k USD annually in post-Communist EU countries. The teams are run as little dictatures by the "directors" who are facing the outside world. What are you expecting to extract from such arrangement? BTW There is no place for IBM in Germany, they have their own three-letter named IT moloch.

</comment><comment><USER55> It's sad that a lot of blame comes to the low skilled programmers in India. It may be true, but it's sad.

</comment><comment><USER56> > IBM instead sold the Canadian government someone else's software (Oracle's > Peoplesoft) on a sweetheart contract which did not require delivery of a > working solution.

Okay, so Canada signed a bad contract and didn't make IBM promise to delivery the goods.

> In cases like this in the past, the Canadian Government would just be able > to tell IBM to deliver the goods as promised or IBM would be banned from > doing business in Canada - effectively frozen.

But you just got done telling us that IBM _didn 't_ promise to deliver the goods.

> Under NAFTA and similar trade pacts, governments have lost all leverage and > these sweetheart deals continue to be pushed through.

NAFTA and similar trade agreements neither require governments to sign contracts that don't require delivery of working solutions, not require governments to not sue to enforce contract terms once signed. If IBM broke the contract terms, Canada can sue. But if Canada signed a really dumb contract, there's a number of remedies here, but violating the contract terms and just demanding other parties do things they have no obligation to do to make up for your mistake doesn't seem like a good choice. You know, "rule of law" and all that?

> Why should the Canadian taxpayer foot the bills for corrupt contracts with > devious suppliers? The

They shouldn't. But, well, _was_ it corrupt? Prove it in court, and the contract can be voided. NAFTA won't stop that either. If you can't prove it in court, they maybe it was just dumb (and not bribery), in which case yes, the taxpayers should foot the bill. If they don't like it, they can vote in a better government. That's democracy.

</comment><comment><USER57> There are very similar stories from Australia, with IBM being sued for being late on major (billion dollar) government projects and releasing products that just don't work.

IBM produced a $1.2 billion payroll project for Queensland heath that just never worked.

<comment><USER58> This is mentioned in the article.

NZ also had a disastrous police database project fail that was managed by IBM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> With the recent demise of their stock, I wonder if we've finally reached an era where "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" will no longer be true.

</comment><comment><USER60> "Nobody who could ever get fired would buy IBM."

</comment><comment><USER61> If you're struggling to read the text like I am, setting the `font-weight` to 400 (instead of 300) makes the page infinitely more readable.

<comment><USER41> Thanks for the input. Personally my own bugbear in terms of web readability is contrast ratios in "modern" web design. I didn't realise that font-weight could give people such issues. I'll think about changing font-weight soon as good design is about making information more readable and not less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'd imagine this is common with all large IT consultancy services. I had bad experiences with IBM as well as TCS.

</comment><comment><USER63> If even 50% of this article is true, I feel less concerned about job security.

</comment><comment><USER64> Is there a breakdown of where the $780M went? As in, how much to engineer salaries, how much for hardware, operational support, etc?

I have a really hard time wrapping my mind around a project that expensive

</comment><comment><USER65> Shhhh!

Many of us work in these kinds of industries.

</comment><comment><USER66> IBM: I've Been Mugged

</comment><comment><USER67> _Historically Slovakia gets lumped with Eastern Europe in popular perception - Slovakia is nothing like Romania, the Ukraine, Albania or even Poland in turning out petty criminals or promiscuous online fraudsters. Not to forget Western Europe, France has a far more unhealthy work culture and fraud at work and as a way of living is far more acceptable than in Slovakia. Germany and Austria tend to value probity far more highly than the Mediterranean countries. Hundreds of years of late Roman Empire corruption left an undying footprint._

This attitude is shot through the whole piece (essentializing not just Europeans but also Indians), and it's weird and creepy.

<comment><USER68> Thanks for calling this out.

I think we should do more of it on HN (and everywhere else). People should try harder to decouple their biases from facts especially in their public writing.

<comment><USER69> I'll play devil's advocate here: I actually greatly prefer when people expose their biases early on rather than try to hide them through weaselly or bland language. I think immediate total aversion to nationally biased language is a specifically American trait (and left-coast American at that) - as the result of contemporary cultural conditioning and general lack of exposure to international identities. Europeans are more comfortable with it as it happens more there, there is much more international exchange, and as a result, people can be given the benefit of the doubt by default, in the sense that "oh, I know that when the author says Slovakian culture, he obviously doesn't mean every single individual Slovakian person, but rather his perception of the traits of their culture as a whole."

<comment><USER70> If Europeans are more exposed than Americans to folks of different nationalities, wouldn't they be _less_ inclined to broadly generalize them?

No one would accuse the author of meaning to judge "every single individual Slovakian person". It's ironic that you state your dislike of "weaselly or bland language", and then go on to describe the author as having a _" perception of the traits of their culture as a whole"_. Most people would describe that as simply having _stereotypes_.

<comment><USER69> > If Europeans are more exposed than Americans to folks of different > nationalities, wouldn't they be less inclined to broadly generalize them?

Why would it? It's just more data to pattern-match on, and that can mean confirming bias and prejudice as well. It might also shock you to find out that people who work in retail or food service also develop prejudices as well. It's not a good thing but it happens.

I'm not saying that stereotypes are good (or I suppose, that they are always bad), I'm just saying I don't need to clutch my pearls about it every time I see it. I can just read it and think "Okay, this guy is obviously using stereotypes about other countries here" and then keep reading without it necessarily immediately invalidating else that's been written. This is particularly so when Europeans talk about other European countries, as in this particular case. It is, I think, actually a form of comradery. (We might hate the Germans, but they're _our_ Germans, and we won't have any yanks slagging them off!)

I am sharing my perspective here as a European who immigrated to the United States who has observed the response to this in both cultures.

<comment><USER70> OK I won't get into an argument of whether stereotypes or prejudices are good/bad and I'm sorry if I implied that. I can't speak for the GP (u/alexk), but I interpreted his assertion of _" People should try harder to decouple their biases from facts especially in their public writing"_ as saying that using stereotypes as factual evidence leads to weak writing.

For example, this graf:

> _Yet if these people or their friends were the only ones who had contact > with your data, no issues at all. Slovaks, particularly in the service > industry, are astonishingly honesty._

> _[the next section is about how technical work is outsourced from Slovakia]_

The author apparently thinks IBM's off-shoring would be fine (indeed, _" no issues at all"_) if the work outsourced to Slovakia stayed in Slovakia (rather than be outsourced to India), and his supporting argument is that "Slovaks are astonishingly honest". Take away the stereotype, and we see how flimsy the author's assertion is. It's not the stereotype that's wrong, necessarily, it's how the author uses it as evidence.

Yes, I suppose I agree with you that people being explicit about their biases makes it easier to identify weak essays. But it's also worth arguing that no matter your biases, your writing is stronger when you rely on empirical evidence, rather than using generalizations/stereotypes that you assume the audience will agree are true.

<comment><USER69> > The author apparently thinks IBM's off-shoring would be fine (indeed, "no > issues at all") if the work outsourced to Slovakia stayed in Slovakia > (rather than be outsourced to India)

Yeah. It's a blog post from a Slovakian offshoring company. Of course he does.

I don't expect that this Slovakian blog post about why Slovakian offerings are better than Indian offerings will be free of bias, and in fact I think it's unreasonable to ask for that.

Mostly, I find it a bit annoying that people (almost always Californians - stereotype!) are tripping over themselves trying to point out - "Hey! This guy might be biased! Let me tell everybody, and congratulate everybody else on that awesome 'call out!' We need more of that here!" \- with total contextual and cultural blindness.

I think, no, we need more critical thinking, more benefit of the doubt and less US-centrism.

<comment><USER71> Well, Identifying the bias behind a viewpoint is thinking critically about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Is there any proof that the technical work for IBM is sent out to Indian boiler rooms with very high turnover? Or is this just based on some belief that any software in India must automatically be shitty?

<comment><USER73> I work for a global US company with offices throughout the world. They outsourced IT to IBM recently. Haven't had contact to anyone not from India.

They were forced to put some IT guys in our office. Those are 2 kids working as cheap freelancers for a local subcontractor hired by IBM.

Service is horrible. Tickets stacking up and being deleted regularly. Project relevant IT not working, people leaving because of it. It's a mess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> The article criticizes the quality of some Indian coders. Expect to be downvoted into oblivion.

<comment><USER75> The footer about Slovakia / France / Germany is a lot more disturbing. Low- rent Indian coding shops being bad isn't news or racist.

<comment><USER70> Yeah, I don't know much about Slovakia but the author's broad, unsupported generalizations of the country ( _Slovaks are very talented at mid-level service jobs: responsible and polite if not particularly fast-moving... Slovaks, particularly in the service industry, are astonishingly honest_ ) don't inspire a lot of confidence. I was also surprised to see the author's use of " _the Ukraine_ ". I still remember someone at my college newspaper using that archaic phrase in an otherwise innocuous article and getting a very angry letter-to-the-editor about the history/politics of Russia and Ukraine, and that was more than a decade ago.

<comment><USER75> Given the current situation re: Russia that's practically a dogwhistle.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Freeman Dyson takes on the climate establishment (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment <comment><USER2> All models are wrong. Some are useful approximations for understanding and others for forecasting. In Econ for example, DSGE models are useful for asking counterfactuals but not great for forecasting. Lots of models are particularly susceptible to assumptions that can be tuned in an Upton Sinclair like way. Climate modeling appears to be one of these areas where the black box can be filled with all sorts of debatable assumptions, yet questioning what's in the black box carries great reputational risk.

<comment><USER3> Climate modeling is one of those areas where debatable assumptions are relatively small.

Existing climate models are really good. They are used with little modification to correctly model climate of Mars, Venus, tidal locked exoplanet and previous historical eras on Earth. You just set the parameters and they pretty much produce the climate that exists on those planets or time periods. Yet constant shade thrown at them.

<comment><USER4> > They are used with little modification to correctly model climate of Mars, > Venus, tidal locked exoplanet and previous historical eras on Earth. You > just set the parameters and they pretty much produce the climate that exists > o

why are they wrong all the time then ?

<comment><USER5> They are not. They are very accurately tracking the current changes in climate.

<comment><USER6> However they are not able to accurately forecast solar activity & climate into the future, making them need to frequently readjust their models to fit the data of the past & present. i.e. Curve Fitting.

<comment><USER5> Their entire job is to forecast climate into the future, and they do that well. Solar activity is an input, and is obviously not predicted. Your comment is gibberish.

<comment><USER6> > Solar activity is an input, and is obviously not predicted. Your comment is > gibberish.

If you can't predict certain known inputs, and theres unknown unknowns, how can your model have predictive accuracy? If you believe that the model is accurate, what makes the model falsifiable? One of the indicators of a pseudoscience is nonfalsifiability.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience)

<comment><USER7> A model that can't predict inputs can provide a mapping from any given inputs to a predicted value. We can then, after the fact, demonstrate whether the actual value is equal to the predicted value (i.e. within expected error bars). Repeated failure to predict at the expected probability of your error bars would falsify the model. (i.e. commit to what your model is, then run it with now known inputs after the fact)

It's possible some of these inputs may be of the form "the Gulf Stream continues to operate within historically observed parameters", i.e. we make no attempt to claim accuracy for the model outside of its studied conditions. That's fine: there are a large number of accurate models which are known to have breakdown conditions.

It is literally impossible for any model to be robust to unknown unknowns. All we can do is endeavour to drag them into the light and become known unknowns, then attempt to quantify them as known knowns. Sadly, our ability to experiment repeatedly in the same conditions with the environment is deeply limited, in a way much akin to astronomy.

<comment><USER6> > Repeated failure to predict at the expected probability of your error bars > would falsify the model. (i.e. commit to what your model is, then run it > with now known inputs after the fact)

That doesn't help if you are not gathering the correct proxy data to represent the actual physical system. For example, CMIP6 includes particle forcing while CMIP5 & before did not. The global & solar electric circuits are not considered. Are xrays, which have a large variance with solar cycles, included in CMIP6? I don't think the Birkeland Current is considered.

What also doesn't help is adjusting historical measurements such as temperature. It's like changing the rules mid-game, which indicates that past observations are mutable to fit the models. Also note the incomplete data, as modern satellite observations span a tiny window compared to Earth's lifespan. The solar system travels through different parts of the Galaxy, crossing the Galactic Current Sheet at times, passing through ionized dust, among other phenomena.

> Sadly, our ability to experiment repeatedly in the same conditions with the > environment is deeply limited, in a way much akin to astronomy.

We can experiment with ions, plasma, & high voltages applied to plasma. Note the Birkeland Current between Sun & the Earth, ions being ejected from the Sun, XRay emission varying wildly with solar activity, cosmic rays, etc. There's also a Birkeland current sheet in the solar system & a galactic current sheet.

One of the major issues is that the standard model does not consider plasma & electricity, in light of recent observations of the prevalence of Plasma in space, effectively blinding large parts of the astronomical theory to it's impact. This led to a legacy of ad hoc, non-observable (thus non-falsifiable) inventions such as "dark matter", "dark energy", "black holes", "neutron stars", "the big bang", "space/time", "magnetic line snapping", "parallel universes", "11 dimension space" & whatever other mathematical patches are used to fit the observations. Note inconsistencies with the assertion that redshift equals distance with observations such as examples of a Quasar with a high redshift being connected to a Galaxy with a low redshift.

Point is climate science is built on a tower of assumptions built on assumptions where some of the foundational pieces are called into question. Ad hoc tweaking of observational data & ad hoc tweaking of models to fit the transformed observed measurements makes it easy to doubt the accuracy, predictive ability, & knowledge of applicable boundary conditions of the model. It sounds like a tough job to get it right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > e360: Are there people who are knowledgeable about this topic who could do > the job of pointing out what you see as the flaws?

> Dyson: I am sure there are. But I don't know who they are.

> I have a lot of friends who think the same way I do. But I am sorry to say > that most of them are old, and most of them are not experts. My views are > very widely shared.

One plausible explanation is that as people become knowledgeable, they no longer share his view.

<comment><USER9> Another plausible explanation is those who share his view won't admit it publicly to not destroy their career.

<comment><USER10> It's not helpful when scientists share their views outside their specialty and get things wrong. As much as I appreciate and respect Freeman Dyson, I wish he would have kept his views to himself on this particular issue, as he was remarkably ill-informed and stubbornly so. But that said, there's a difference between sharing your view and going on a crusade, which he didn't really seem to do. Now, if he had gone on a crusade, that'd be a different matter.

<comment><USER11> If you have a group of people with Sacred Knowledge™ who are the only capable of judging on things and you have to literally believe them (and dare you not!) as their proofs lie in the realm of sketchy models in which they ignore billions of variable, it's not science, it's at least scientism. But there is more. They have a whole set of signs of a pseudo-religion. Their own Original Sin, apocalypse, Messiah.

Judging by the consequences for those public figures who made a mistake of doubting these believes, it's a whole totalitarian sect.

<comment><USER10> Except these people (Scientists(tm)) have to _show their work_ and anyone can follow along and participate, provided they aren't so afraid of their own ignorance and terrified of feeling stupid that they strike out with disbelief and denial.

Sure, scientists make mistakes. Their models need adjustment. They ignore variables because they don't have the computational power to model every electron in the universe. Yeah, imprecise models make imprecise predictions. No one has accuracy of 100%. Sometimes it's 90%, sometimes it's 50%. Sometimes it's 99.9%. It's rarely, rarely ever 0%. People just don't publish scientific results that are 100% wrong with no checking whatsoever.

But that's not the level of conversation we are having. We usually aren't talking about adjusting and tinkering or adding sub-models for systems that aren't fully understood yet. We aren't asking what we missed, we aren't examining the assumptions from the outset, trying to get to something that works. We aren't talking details of climate models or pointing to something in the inner guts of their computer simulations that we can fix up, remove, replace, etc. All of that is really complicated and hard! And we aren't doing that specifically because you frame that stuff as "Sacred Knowledge" which you reflexively and categorically reject--it's a shortcut thinking that doesn't require you to understand math, code, or read a goddamn paper. It's a shortcut that allows you to keep reasoning in a vacuum and go about your daily life because you actually hate the idea of being an (xyz) scientist.

As such, we end up in a situation where you are forced to argue a position that results from all-or-nothing thinking, and have to start accusing them of being a religion, a totalitarian sect, usually because one of them got pissed off at some really outrageously stupid disinformation spread deliberately by politicians. But you are forced there because you either can't or don't want to cede _any_ rhetorical ground of being fully and utterly more right than "they" are, because you have no idea what will happen if you cede any ground at all. So instead the othering intensifies. Reject everything they say! We must throw them out! It's a religion! Look, one of them got pissed off one day! They were wrong that one time! I don't trust a word they say!

And you only frame things this way because that's how _you_ think--in terms of religion and power. Moreover, it's how you think _they_ think.

No. I absolutely and unequivocally reject the framing of your comment. It's lazy and it's a lie.

There is no "Sacred Knowledge." Go dig. Scientists welcome it. But _don 't be a denialist moron_. There are too many of those. Denialist morons reject even the basics of what scientists do. Sometimes they couch it in more-scientific- than-thou-art framing like yours, sometimes they don't. But they come out in anger and denial. You know what? That pisses off anybody. To have your work shat on, you better believe that pisses people off. We end up circling back over and over and over again to the same basics and it's just exhausting, because people aren't motivated by a desire for the truth, they are motivated by their tribal instincts which underpin your framing, whether you recognize it or not.

<comment><USER12> "Denialist morons" \-- what justifies this sort of name-calling?

You do nothing to help your argument by resorting to this type of language.

<comment><USER10> > what justifies this sort of name-calling?

terse catharsis.

<comment><USER9> > terse catharsis

Doesn't sound healthy, or wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's an interview of Freeman Dyson in 2015 re: APW & faith in models of complex nonlinear systems.

Also goes into solar activity (electric, magnetic, & ion ejections) as a driver of climate change. Note that CMIP6 includes particle forcing to its model. CMIP5 & earlier versions did not include particle forcing.

[https://youtu.be/BiKfWdXXfIs](https://youtu.be/BiKfWdXXfIs)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a pretty decent article with a misleading headline. Dyson himself doesn't claim to be the representative of any counter-movement, he simply raises some (admittedly interesting) questions. I don't know enough about climate science to verify his claims, but pointing out that more people die from the cold than heatwaves (and thus warming will result in less deaths) was something that I hadn't considered. That's assuming his data is correct, of course.

<comment><USER14> Also assumes that higher temps don't have secondary effects cascading into more extreme weather or disrupted ecologies with attendant resource issues.

<comment><USER15> We can solve all that be having the central banks print more money. That's what we've been doing since the RTOI of oil and gas fell off a cliff in the early 2000's. Working so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dyson (re Oak Ridge experiments): _So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that's so typical of the things they ignore._

'Different'. 'Ignore'. Not Dyson's best day. Oak Ridge was hardly a climate lab. Many studies have followed. This two year-old SA article, _Ask the Experts: Does Rising CO2 Benefit Plants?_ [0]starts with this summary: "Climate change's negative effects on plants will likely outweigh any gains from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels"

[0] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the- experts-d...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does- rising-co2-benefit-plants1/)

</comment><comment><USER17> It was strange to see on reddit that his death was celebrated as another climate change denier gone. I mean it never ouccured me people don't respect him or anything. Maybe I'm just too naive.

<comment><USER18> When your political power comes from the ability to regulate every aspect of life due to a supposed existential threat that comes from all economic activity, an educated, informed, and well-spoken critic of the supposed existential threat is dangerous.

<comment><USER19> This works both ways. There is a very strong incentive to create plausible scientific models that show climate change is not a problem if that is in fact the case. Even Dyson says he doesn't know any informed people who disagree with the mainstream climate change theories. This interview shows that he accepts the key premise that there is likely to be significant warming.

Realistically, the bigger problem is that massive changes to society are required to mitigate the risks of climate change. However as Dyson says, some people will likely benefit from climate change, or at least will be in a position where their personal costs of doing something about it are much more than what they stand to gain.

This is the political problem: overall richer people are the greatest contributors to climate change, and they stand to lose the least from the bad effects of climate change.

Trump and Scott Morrison come closer to admitting this than most, and politically it seems to have worked in their favour.

<comment><USER18> If anybody were to produce such a model, they would be utterly destroyed.

If anybody were to even attempt to apply for grants to do that work, they would be expelled from the university community, and their professional reputation immediately destroyed.

There is no incentive to even look to see if you can find a flaw in the orthodoxy.

<comment><USER20> Paranoid drivel. Why on Earth would these brave maverick scientists of yours _choose_ to remain part of scientific and university communities that are so corrupt? Surely if they've any principles they'd be first out the door!

It's not like they need to fight for academic grant money when they can go tap Big Oil any time they like. Also plenty of governments who'd like to hear everything's fine, nothing to see, business as usual.

Heck, even climate scientists, being purely pragmatic, would like to be wrong. After all, they live on this rock too, so it's not like they _want_ this for their kids.

Nobody _wants_ climate change. Nobody _likes_ climate change. But the best science says that's what's happening, so deal. Or ignore it; your choice. But don't _lie_ about it; because, honestly, you're absolutely rubbish at it and fooling no-one but yourself.

<comment><USER21> Nobody wants climate change, it's true. But do you really believe that the scientists who have become public advocates for climate change mitigation, that have contributed building the international climate research organism that was awarded a Nobel prize, and whose research ends up regularly on the front page of international newspapers and shapes the decisions of world politicians in economic matters- do you really think these people are putting all their daily effort in proving themselves wrong? They're human beings like everyone else, they become invested in their own ideas. And the stronger the message, the harder it is to be completely dispassionate about it.

This is not to say they're wrong. But I strongly doubt that many of them would be looking for signs that climate change is not that bad after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [2009]

<comment><USER23> Added. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> >Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess.

You can just stop reading right there. Not only do we not have the ability to do that, even if we had such a tree, we would destroy the biosphere by cutting down all the world's trees to replace them with our magical carbon capture trees.

<comment><USER25> Your point about genetic engineering capability is true (source: spent two years working in an advanced plant science lab).

The latter one I'm not sure about, it's complicated.

The downvoting of this comment seems a little strange to me.

Edit: Thanks for explaining, I get it now, I shouldn't have mentioned it anyway, I was just interested in the scientific substance of parent comment and wondered why others seemed not to be (I get it now, it wasn't the scientific aspect of the comment which was against HN guidelines).

<comment><USER23> I imagine it was downvoted because of "You can just stop reading right there", which is an internet trope (-> repetitive -> bad for HN) and also needlessly aggressive. The comment would be just fine without that bit—well, plus the snarky "magical". Snark is deprecated on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

<comment><USER26> Can you add sarcasm next to snark in the guidelines? I've never seen sarcasm improve a conversation and it inflames passions unnecessarily. Thanks for considering this, whatever you decide.

<comment><USER23> How would you define the difference?

<comment><USER26> It's not to signify a difference, but to expand coverage. I wouldn't want to argue with someone saying "I was sarcastic, but not snarky".

There are many comments ending with /s to signify sarcasm or even /sarcasm or such. It's easier to point out a transgression when the user has agreed in his mind or his words that he was in fact being sarcastic.

<comment><USER23> I think we'd just reply that they're close enough to count as the same thing for HN purposes. "Don't be snarky" is nice and short.

<comment><USER26> It's not so much for you as it is for me. I often quote the rules, this would make it easier for me.

<comment><USER23> Ah I see. If it comes up, you can point to this subthread, or you can always ping us at email@example.com. Thanks for quoting the rules and helping to preserve this place!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Climate change is a red herring, air pollution is a clear and present danger. India and China have ignored this in the past and now they are making some efforts to correct course because people are dying from it.

<comment><USER28> Air pollution is a big problem. The biggest problem IMO is water and soil pollution. We're putting far worse chemicals into our food and water (and in household products we absorb) than what we're putting into the air (in the developed world, anyway).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > I have been to Greenland a year ago and saw it for myself. And that's where > the warming is most extreme. And it's spectacular, no doubt about it. And > glaciers are shrinking and so on.

> But, there are all sorts of things that are not said, which decreases my > feeling of alarm. First of all, the people in Greenland love it. They tell > you it's made their lives a lot easier. They hope it continues. I am not > saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning > whether they are harmful.

His arguments on the topic are bizarrely anecdotal and unscientific. He suggests that the happiness of locals over the past few years of warming is sufficient reason to doubt that it could get worse for Greenland in the future? Making dramatic changes to human environments is not good, people react poorly and things like resource wars can start / have started.

Super weird to see such anecdotal experiences extrapolated to "locals love it, so what's the problem?" while dismissing decades of intensive scientific research (not even including modals) that suggest a global chaotic event is happening presently.

Also, this:

> There's been a very strong warming, in fact, ever since the Little Ice Age, > which was most intense in the 17th century. That certainly was not due to > human activity.

What does this mean? I went to wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age) and it lists multiple possible / probable causes of the little ice age that are directly human-related. He dismisses yet another field of scientific research as "certainly not due to human activity" without any evidence to back that up. He makes stuff up, dismisses decades of real science, and claims that major problems aren't real simply because local people don't understand large- scale chaotic events are are 'happy' with warming local climates for now. Bizarre.

<comment><USER30> I also went to that Wikipedia page. The "multiple possible / probable causes" listed are:

"orbital cycles; decreased solar activity; increased volcanic activity; altered ocean current flows; fluctuations in the human population in different parts of the world causing reforestation, or deforestation; and the inherent variability of global climate change"

Only one of those is human related. Bizarre.</comment></comment>


The Chapter In The Bible That Appears Twice - <AUTHOR> http://larrycheng.com/2010/02/04/the-chapter-in-the-bible-that-appears-twice/ <comment><USER3> I'm always surprised at reactions from modern readers who seem to think that these sorts of observations are new. It's a particular type of blindness to history. People aren't more intelligent now than three thousand years ago.

Note that we have sources that commented on duplicates by around the 8th century, according to Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soferim_(Talmud)> see the summary comment about Chap viii.

The Talmud describes all kinds of things that you might think are "modern" - ironing clothes (albeit by a different method), rain gutters, complicated financial arrangements (e.g. a contract with a managing partner and a silent partner, the silent partner putting up all the money, but half as a loan to the other partner and half as an investment), fertilizer, complicated property rights (e.g. when have I established a right to prevent someone from blocking my light or building a structure that lets them overlook my private property), methods of fraud detection in written contracts, and so on.

People knew about these duplicates since ancient times and weren't troubled by them. They have had explanations that aren't particularly far-fetched, e.g. that Ps. xviii. and II Sam. xxii are duplicates because one's a historical record of what King David said, and the other is the version he later edited for Psalms. Perhaps modern readers have different explanations, but the mere modernity doesn't automatically make them any better.

<comment><USER4> _People aren't more intelligent now than three thousand years ago._

While I agree that there's a lot to be learned from our ancestors, there's some question about how the average intelligence may have changed over historical times. The Flynn effect suggests that rather large changes can take place across entire populations.

<comment><USER3> The Flynn effect is too short a timescale. Maybe it was just recent malnutrition from industrialization.

Aside from the fact that cranial capacity has been pretty stable, it's just impossible to believe that intelligence is substantially different if you spend time studying the Talmud, or for that matter Greek philosophers. The Greek philosophers throw people off, because everyone remembers all the science they got wrong.

For instance, in the Talmud, in that kind of transaction I mentioned - <USER2> half-loan half-investment deal, where one guy puts up the money and one guy puts up the work, the Talmud notes that the guy doing the work a) received a loan, and b) is working to manage the other guy's investment. Putting two and two together, he's working for the other guy for free, just because he got a loan. I.e., he's paying interest, and therefore this is forbidden under the prohibition against usury unless the investor pays the worker for his time. You can't begin to wrap your head around that kind of stuff unless you have more or less modern intelligence.

<comment><USER4> _The Flynn effect is too short a timescale._

I don't really disagree, mainly because the idea that our ancestors were mostly very unintelligent compared to today's average seems absurd given their known accomplishments. However, I do wonder from time to time if that could be explained almost entirely by selection effects. The short timescale of the Flynn effect could possibly be attributed to the lack of reliable tests for g prior to the 20th century, for example...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Side-by-side view of the 2 psalms in a diff viewer: <http://i.imgur.com/ipaPW.png>

<comment><USER6> Nice work. However, given that the Christian Bible has been translated into English (probabaly many times over during the last thousand+ years), wouldn't it make more sense to diff the original Hebrew version?

I'm assuming there's a website where you can retrieve this ...

<comment><USER7> FWIW, I did a diff of [one version of] the Hebrew: <http://blog.purepistos.net/psalm-14-53-hebrew-diff.html>

I took the text from here:

<http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/hebrewbible/Psalms_14.html> <http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/hebrewbible/Psalms_53.html>

and split it (more or less) into one word per line.

You'll notice that, in some cases, even when lines or sections are technically different (characters do not exactly match), there is a similarity of words (same roots).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't suppose it has occurred to anyone here that the reason certain passages appear twice is because they merited repeating? The Bible is meant to be read by people, and people often times take a while for a message to sink in once they're exposed to it. So it is worth including more important points several times to make them harder to miss. In rhetoric and writing, such repetition is not only taught but considered necessary for good speeches and writings.

<comment><USER9> It also merits noting that hyperlinks did not exist at the time. Repetition and duplication accomplished this function instead.

<comment><USER10> Hyperlinked Bible made me laugh. "And God spake unto them, follow this bit.ly link to be reminded of what I did unto the town of Sodom."

Of course, then we'd have comments fields, and someone would have tagged Psalm 51 as "Dupe"... probably Adam, who would also be responsible for writing "FIrST!!" on every Genesis update.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You know the Bible has two creation stories as well: <http://www.skepticfiles.org/atheist/bible3do.htm> / <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_according_to_Genesis>

<comment><USER12> And three versions of the "ten" commandments: Exodus 20, Exodus 34 and Deuteronomy 5.

<comment><USER13> There are also different versions of the ten commandments across religions. (The Catholics had a problem with the ban on graven images, especially given how many of those they had been erecting).

I don't know how this works, given that anyone can pick up a Bible and find the ten commandments. Maybe the Catholics print their own modified version of the Bible?

<comment><USER14> Interestingly, the catholic church had HUGE problems with the orthodox church during its inception for just that. If you get the chance, you should give "Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire" ([http://www.amazon.ca/Byzantium-Surprising-Life-Medieval- Empi...](http://www.amazon.ca/Byzantium-Surprising-Life-Medieval- Empire/dp/0691143692/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265300527&sr=8-1)) a read. Its a fascinating glimpse into not only the early church, but the rise, and fall, of an empire.

<comment><USER15> It started with the Bogomils, I believe it was on some doctrine about whehter we were born in sin, or not. I haven't check wikipedia, trying to type what I remmember from school, but the orthodox church believes that you are born in sin, while the catholic does not. Off course there are other differences.

Atheist myself, I got married in a orthodox church to make my family happy (grandmothers especially). I carry my wedding ring on the right hand (orthodox rules).

But, I wonder what's the point? Such simple differences, and off course others were the cause of wars (real, and cold) between the sects (to be objective, they are all sects) of the christian church.

Ok, so some fights might've been okay - for example our Bulgarian church (orthodox) "fought" against the Greek (also orthodox) to have the sermons told in bulgarian, not greek, because... people did not understood greek. Or to have the bible written in bulgarian.

But now the bulgarian church is fighting within itself, for stupid things like - whether the black monks (I think those are strict monastic monks), can get married vs. the one carrying white. Again, not going to bother checkin the wikipedia on this one. It's just stupid :) Allow them to get married, and continue...

<comment><USER16> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxo81Ok9Urk>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's nothing. There is a huge passage in II Kings 19 which is a verbatim copy of Isaiah 36-38:

II Kings 19: [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%2018-2...](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%2018-20&version=NIV);

Isaiah 36-38: [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2036-38:8...](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2036-38:8&version=NIV);

</comment><comment><USER18> [Psalm 53] is almost identical to Psalm 14, and the two psalms were probably alternate versions of the same hymn before they were included in the Psalter. The two hymns serve the same function, namely, to mourn the fact that mankind does not seek after God and thus treats God's people cruelly. \-- Source: ESV Study Bible (<http://www.esvstudybible.org/search?q=psalm+14%2C+53>)

</comment><comment><USER19> I believe Psalm 14 is considered a "song" while Psalm 53 is thought to be an "instructional" sermon. So they very well could be the same message/theme, just modified for singing vs. teaching.

<comment><USER20> An additional explanation (by Rashi) is that the first one is about the destruction of the first temple, and the second one about the second temple.

I don't know why it was left out of the translation, but 53 starts: For the conductor, on the machalath [a kind of music instrument].

And 14 starts with just: For the conductor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Like a duplicated gene, the two seem to have evolved in different directions over time.

I've read that Torah scrolls have the same kind of transcription errors "inherited" from one copy to the next so the origin of a scroll can be traced back.

<comment><USER22> Wow. I didn't know copy protection was that old. Map makers do the same thing, by introducing intentional errors.

<comment><USER23> This isn't copy protection, or even watermarking to identify who's "leaking the source".

Hand-copying text is error-prone, and copies are often made from copies, so there's the chance to reconstruct a "family tree" even after knowledge of what copied from what is lost.

See, for example, this: [http://ahds.ac.uk/archaeology/creating/case- studies/canterbu...](http://ahds.ac.uk/archaeology/creating/case- studies/canterbury/index.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The Psalms are a collection of songs/poems collected orally at several geographic regions in Israel. Most scholars recognize in the neighborhood of five different independent sections.

Thus it should not come as any surprise that a given psalm appears twice with some differences--it was recorded as it was known in two different regions.

</comment><comment><USER25> I thought this would be about the duplicate passage that constitutes 2 Kings 18:13 - 20:11 and Isaiah 36 - 38:8, although of course for that passage neither occurrence is marked off as an exact "chapter" in the much later numbering scheme for the Bible.

[http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%2018-2...](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%2018-20&version=NIV);

[http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2036-38:8...](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2036-38:8&version=NIV);

</comment><comment><USER26> Perhaps more interesting is the case of the book of Deutronomy, the fifth book of the pentateuch, which repeats the same stories appearing in earlier books (often from a slight different perspective).

<comment><USER27> I've heard (don't know if it is true) that the first sections of the bible were only oral history. Most of it only got written up during the exile in Babylon.

I don't know if it is true or not, but I think it should be taken into account that such things might happen.

It is pretty impressive though that Jews have a 3000? year history - which is pretty unique. My people were still clobbering Romans over the head with blunt instruments 1500 years back.

Also pretty impressive that they have a history that is 3000 years old - yet I can't seem to find 12 year old Geocity pages...

\offtopic

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The Bible is a collection of texts that has at times been revised and updated by committees. This kind of artefact is unremarkable.

</comment><comment><USER29> This isn't really the first time something has happened twice.

Forty Days, Forty Nights. A white bird (dove), a black bird (raven), two of each animal. ect. ect. Two stories- combined into one. At least a theory</comment>


Financial wellness chatbot - <AUTHOR> https://www.momentum.co.uk/financial-wellness/get-your-financial-wellness-score/#/?fw_referrer=staff&fw_uid=TomHicks <comment><AUTHOR> My colleagues built this and it's pretty neat.

But it raises the question, do we have a new law on our hands (if it hasn't already been made):

"Anything that can be implemented in a chatbot interface will be implemented in a chatbot interface."

</comment><comment><USER2> Well Done. This is the type of employee education platform that many US based corporations are looking for. Do you have insight to any similar applications targeted toward the US economy. Thank you for sharing.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage social media? - <AUTHOR> It has occurred to me that almost every programmer has a presence on Twitter. I've tried using Twitter, and I just find it as a time sink (not unlike browsing Hacker News). How do people manage to engage their followers on Twitter while working a full-time job and contributing to dozens of open source projects and having a family and, and...?<p>I always want to spend most of my spare time either programming or reading, and I still feel like I don't have enough time for those things. <comment><USER2> I had a twitter account from they launched SXSW. It was useful then to find out where friends where and what bands they were recommending.

After SXSW, it just went quiet. I had no use for it. Didn't really get it.

Last year I found out that a few colleagues that don't use Facebook but swear by Twitter, so I gave it a shot.

I started following my colleagues, and saw how they were reposting articles, I started following those posters, etc etc. It is now part of my media consumption. I get different content and ideas than I do through HN and FB.

That's been my experience, and now I find myself tweeting a bit more. Just my 2cents.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is a twitter something a programmer needs to do?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not saying it is or it isn't, I just see a lot of programmers using it, especially ones who maintain open source projects (they post updates about it on Twitter)</comment></comment>


Show HN: We're simplifying personal cloud storage for apps - <AUTHOR> http://stashkit.co/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, Peter from StashKit here. We're working really hard to make it as simple to use personal clouds as it is to use the S3 style data silos everyone has now. I'd be happy to answer any questions. We'd love to get feedback from the HN community.

</comment><comment><USER2> I like the idea of removing costs (file storage in this case) from services by having consumers pay for them elsewhere. It seems like it could allow people to build some more interesting business models.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! We had been kicking around this idea of building a version of Snapchat where all of the photos are stored in your personal cloud storage. Could we build a Twitter or Facebook that way? The problem we ran up against is how you'd choose a single storage provider to support. We came to the conclusion that you'd want some kind of transport layer to make that easy. StashKit is that transport layer combined with some widgets to make integration a breeze for devs and users.

I'm working on a little blogpost about the cool new app architectures these personal clouds suggest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Although I'm sure I'm in the minority, I would love to see something like this go straight through to S3.

Services on top of services on top of...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we'd love to do that too after the big consumer players are covered. With all of the security certificates and such, any ideas on what an implementation would look like? You can't just oauth with S3 ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like what <http://mover.io> is doing, but with a dash of <http://filepicker.io>

<comment><AUTHOR> While it does integrate with the same services as your app, I really don't see any other similarities. We've definitely looked at filepicker.io but we have a slightly different approach to the user experience and a more scalable client architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This could prove to be very useful tool.

<comment><USER5> When do you expect we can get an invite?

<comment><AUTHOR> Invites will roll out within the next couple months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would love to see OpenStack/Ceph there.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds cool. How does it work exactly?

<comment><AUTHOR> Top secret! Just kidding. We basically wrap first party cloud service API's into a consistent StashKit API and provide widgets similar to the ones Dropbox gives for picking files and doing authentication. Of course, unlike the dropbox widget, ours works with all of the providers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this the fog gem?

</comment><comment><USER9> Love this idea!

</comment><comment><USER10> Great idea!</comment>