Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate - <AUTHOR> https://about.fb.com/news/2020/07/facebook-does-not-benefit-from-hate/ <comment><USER2> They benefit from engagement. Turns out hate is a large part of engagement. Writing an article to say it isn't so does not make it true.

<comment><USER3> > Turns out hate is a large part of engagement.

My personal experience makes me agree with you. I would even take it further. Hate, or "punching down" is the easiest way to drive engagement. Is anyone aware of any research that may confirm or deny this? My search skills have failed me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had to Google it to confirm but Nick Clegg is the same guy who was the Deputy Prime Minister of the UK under David Cameron. I'm super curious about how that came to be -- what skillsets and talents a former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK provides to a company like Facebook.

<comment><USER5> He's friends with a lot of people in the UK government and Facebook doesn't want to pay taxes there: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/08/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/08/facebook- uk-tax-bill-sales-margaret-hodge)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's been a number of stories of companies putting FB ad buys on hold on the front page recently[1], and a recurring HN response has invariably been "this will accomplish nothing". I'd like to point out that this is a 180 from Zuckerberg's "arbiter of truth" position from before the advertiser boycotts:

> they don't want to see hateful content, our advertisers don't want to see > it, and we don't want to see it. There is no incentive for us to do anything > but remove it.

[1] e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23646852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23646852)

<comment><USER7> Not really, a few sentences later he reiterates their commitment to leave hateful (but not hateful enough!) stuff up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tech social media confuses "free expression" with "amplified expression".

If you're going to leave hate-filled posts by a world leader up on your platform, but it's also okay to restrict amplification of those posts.

Twitter understands this and has begun restricting amplification in various ways. Will Facebook next do the same? This post suggests that they will not.

<comment><USER9> I think social media typically 'amplifies' the worst facets of people in general, and Facebook have built a business model around it. At least the public posts, widely shared or large groups. I'm sure most people in their small groups behave better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook doesn't even remove groups that people use to encourage and coordinate actual real-life murder: [https://popular.info/p/murder-exposes- facebooks-boogaloo](https://popular.info/p/murder-exposes-facebooks-boogaloo)

<comment><USER10> By my understanding, the boogaloo thing is mostly a meme used as a joke about prepping, like for "SHTF" ([https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=SHTF](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=SHTF)). For example, "I need [some flashy firearm] for the boog". There are some people/groups who have co-opted that branding and are actually intending violence, but those are in the minority. That's why the Facebook announcement specifically takes a nuanced approach in identifying only a subset of those groups as problematic. From [https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/banning-a- violent-network-...](https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/banning-a-violent- network-in-the-us/):

> This network uses the term boogaloo but is distinct from the broader and > loosely-affiliated boogaloo movement because it actively seeks to commit > violence.

This is also why a lot of the articles attacking Facebook for hosting boogaloo content are plain wrong. To many they come off as unhinged fake news simply because they don't see that the most common use of 'boogaloo' is as a joke.

<comment><USER11> The boogaloo crowd is the exact type of crowd to say "oh it's just a joke" just before committing acts of violence. They know as well as anyone that being ironic will attract those who have the same beliefs unironically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Facebook benefits from outrage. Outrage leads to engagement and virality. Hate correlates to outrage.

</comment><comment><USER13> Well if we were to believe they don't benefit from hate, we need proof. For that we need numbers. So unless they start implementing some filters for hate, we will not know the impact. In reality, we all know they do benefit from it. I would say its on them to prove they don't benefit, not using rhetoric but using numbers.

</comment><comment><USER14> In a way they don't benefit from hate. How many people here quit fb _because_ of politics and toxic communities?

</comment><comment><USER15> Unpopular opinion: FB is just the scapegoat.

First they claimed 100k$ worth of Russian ads made Trump win the election, when 1B$ from Bloomberg didn't move the needle.

In the age before social media, left- and rightwing could pretend the other side doesn't exist. This has changed, and things have gotten more divisive as a consequence.

</comment><comment><USER16> If hate keeps people using the site, they benefit from hate.

<comment><USER17> But why would people use a site makes them mad?

<comment><USER16> Why do people go on /r/asktrumpsupporters and ask the same questions for the past 5 years? It's cathartic. You get an adrenaline rush from arguing, and satisfaction if you feel you've proved yourself right. It is the same primal emotions from our childhood schoolyard argument days creeping back into adult life.

Very interesting psychologically how facebook is tuned to tap into these primal and tribalistic tendencies, but also very terrifying how wired we are for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps I am naive. It seems they do benefit from hate, in that negative emotions drive more engagement.

IF they truly didnt want to benefit from hate, they would find a way to not always rate negative engagement (arguing) as "engaging".

<comment><USER19> Official denials are actually confirmations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yes it does. People love to post rage and hate inducing posts because they get replies and likes, and Facebook serves more ads.

</comment><comment><USER21> And the News websites are claiming sensational headlines don't get them more clicks.

I would like Facebook to put the money where the mouth is and remove featured image, title from the shared URL and show an image of 'Summary' of the article from og:description tag i.e. forcing people at-least to read a bit about the content.

</comment><comment><USER22> Been wondering if FB and other socials could move away from engagement volume- based advertising.

Perhaps "low max # ads a day" kind of thing.

It would hurt revenues, to be sure, but seems that Facebook already has outsized revenues per employee count. And certainly, Zuck's share valuation is a bit on the high (and possibly unsustainable) end.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nope, they benefit from the systemic robbery of your time and attention while giving you almost no value in return.

</comment><comment><USER24> Facebook's userbase is a mirror of human society if you want to fix Facebook fix society first.

<comment><USER25> The problem is with how facebook amplifies messages. By showing you the posts you're most likely to engage with, Facebook encourages polarization. In normal society, if you hold a hateful, minority opinion like deeply racist beliefs, you're more likely to be presented the majority opinion. Facebook allows you to disappear into a world where you only are exposed to people that agree with you.

<comment><USER10> I agree that Facebook encourages you into echo chambers. I think that's even more true of Twitter. Reddit is also like that. In my experience YouTube is better in this regard than the others, but perhaps also problematic. The users of these platforms don't make this easy, however. As an example, if you try to cross the "party lines" and engage on a post in a Facebook group you may not be aligned with, you will be met with ridicule and vitriol, rather than neutral intellectual discussion. A flood of reactions will occur. Memes/gifs will be used. People will use phrases like "OK Boomer" or call you a "Karen" or accuse you of being a "Communist" or "White supremacist" or whatever else. It's not pleasant.

The other, bigger risk, is by engaging outside the echo chamber you also need to expose yourself to actions outside of Facebook. First, your social circle may observe your comments or what you like and that may have social consequences in a world where no one is allowed to harbor differing opinions. Worse, people do doxx others, try to shame them in 'real life', get them fired, and so on. This is a particularly common practice on the left side of the American political spectrum (see 'cancel culture', [https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/opinion/cancel- culture-682272](https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/opinion/cancel-culture-682272)). There is little psychological safety even on anonymous platforms like Reddit, so I think it would be much harder for anything but echo chambers to form on a platform that requires de-anonymization like Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Importantly, Facebook helped people to get accurate, authoritative health > information.

Surely the author experienced some form of cognitive dissonance while typing this out.

<comment><USER27> The Author is Nick Clegg, ex-leader of the Liberal Democrats in the U.K. - he's a career politician, so this is kinda second nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was hoping to see some kind of commitment to return any profits from ads which are later decided to be hate speech, or close to hate speech, to worthy causes.

In fact it doesn't really address the "Facebook profits from hate" point other than perhaps implying that they spend more money on preventing it than they gain from it.

</comment><comment><USER29> "This piece originally ran in AdAge."

So, this article is meant for advertisers. Profits over people.

<comment><USER30> Advertisers are people too, my friend.

<comment><USER31> No, advertisers are the only people. Everybody else is the product.

<comment><USER32> You are on fire with the analogies today!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> >Facebook does not profit from hate. Billions of people use Facebook and Instagram because they have good experiences

I'm fairly sure that the racists, Nazis, conspiracy theorists and pedofiles are have a great experience communicating with like minded people on Facebooks platforms.

More interestingly I very excited to see if companies like Coca Cola, Lego and Verizon will see any change in sales after boycotting Facebook for 30 days. If their sales remain largely unaffected it will change the whole premise for a large number of companies and challenge the existence many "online ad agencies", which do little more than manage social media accounts.

</comment><comment><USER34> Michael Jordan does not benefit from basketball.

<comment><USER35> Better example: 'Google does not benefit from stealing user data.' :P

Jordan doesn't even play ball anymore. :3

<comment><USER36> Facebook owns a website.

Jordan owns a basketball team.

<comment><USER35> Did not know he owned a team, hehe! Just knew he wasn't playing anymore. Shows you how much I know about basketball. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Obviously, Facebook does not benefit much from "hate speech". The majority of content on Facebook and the associated advertising/revenues are from other types of content. The broad generalizations made by the Twitter mob and news media about Facebook being 'built' on hate or 'profiting' from hate is hyperbolic. That said, I think it is fair to say that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube all benefit from engagement. And engagement is often built on emotion, particularly negative emotions like outrage.

Personally, I wish Facebook would simply not give credence to complaints about 'hate' and only censor content that breaks the law. If someone doesn't like a certain page or group or whatever, they can just choose not to follow them. It is very simple. Therefore, what the anti-Facebook crowd is asking for is not about their own experience. It's that they want no one else to be able to harbor certain views or opinions or even to discuss them. That's dangerous, and the vague and ever-expanding label of "hate speech" disallows conversations that need to take place on controversial topics.

Given that there it is easy to curate one's own feed and experience on Facebook, the motivation of this activist mob is simply to stifle others' freedom of speech. The fact that they are doing it by pressuring a large private organization (instead of a public one) does not make it any better, even if it is legal. It is still unethical and immoral from my perspective, because freedom of speech is _that_ fundamental to our society. Today in the US, there is a ubiquity to attempts from mobs stifling speech using labels like "hate speech". This must be met with fierce opposition in all situations, big and small. If not, it will eventually bleed into more and more of our society. We're already seeing it in absurd situations like Stephen Hsu's resignation (see [https://www.thecollegefix.com/scholar-forced-to-resign- over-...](https://www.thecollegefix.com/scholar-forced-to-resign-over-study- that-found-police-shootings-not-biased-against-blacks/) or [https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the- campai...](https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the-campaign-to- thwart-free-inquiry/)).

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm not convinced hate speech is real and I'm certainly convinced that hate speech is not violence.

I fucking hate Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER38> > We're a pioneer in artificial intelligence technology to remove hateful > content at scale.

This is everything wrong with social media in a nutshell. This isn't a problem that can be solved with artificial intelligence. You need human beings enforcing human standards of decency.

Keep in mind, that Facebook's 'artifical intelligence' algorithms automatically created lots of white supremacy groups and promote white supremacy content, and allowed advertising targetted at white supremacists.

Throwing more AI at a problem created and exacerbated by ai isn't going to solve it.

<comment><USER39> And you think humans will do a good job at correctly assessing pieces of content on the sliding scale of "hate"? When one moment it's fine debating gender issues and a moment later it's hate speech? For 35,000 people?

This is an impossible problem, both for AI and humans. Any suggestion that this will be solved is pandering bullshit to the NYT crowd.

<comment><USER40> It's becoming increasingly clear that "hate" is a dog-whistle for "not explicitly left-wing". Which is unfortunate, because yet another useful word is being stripped of meaning.</comment></comment></comment>


Chef (programming language) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/chef.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

 _Chef is a programming language in which programs look like recipes._

I have no clue how serious they are.

<comment><USER2> Some very nice example programs, such as:

[http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/chef_fib.html](http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/chef_fib.html)</comment></comment>


The Myth About Women in Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/opinions/williams-ceci-women-in-science/index.html

<comment><USER2> I wish more articles were like this, a general-interest article written by academics, and linked to a published paper. From the article: [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.abst...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.abstract)</comment>


Why Distribution Still Matters in the Digital Age - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/how-one-startup-went-up-against-ben-thompsons-all-encompassing-aggregation-theory-130a4b7ab3d7 <comment><USER2> It ought to be staggeringly obvious that distribution matters when there is a physical good involved, and especially so in time-sensitive situations where customer pressure is strong.

There are a number good points made here, some with the author's own prose, and some via quotes first said by others; it packages them up fairly neat but sneaks in a wishful fantasy where some food delivery company abstracts away from "real" restaurants and serves first-party food instead.

Perhaps this may happen, given the long history of grocery store private brands, white label goods, or even "commoditized marketplaces" where hordes of customers hit up sellers who are highly rated on some 'authentic-seeming' metric local to that walled garden's universe (Amazon Star Rating, Hotwire "Recommended %", Uber rating, Facebook likes)... but this is due to customers' price sensitivity once differentiating factors have been removed, and leaves room for players who continue to offer a differentiated product or experience.

Fundamentally, this is where aggregators excel after all: you can get both your "one taco, any taco will do", and your fancy offering, and you're their customer regardless; meanwhile those who branch out into distribution or production will be able to preferentially plug their first-party product but at the cost of having to be responsible for an entire product lifecycle in the first place. Unless you have a huge warchest or that's your core competency, this is a risky call.

Perhaps the lesson is, if you already have a huge marketshare of customers, you can probably win additional people over with trying to lower prices on your offerings (perhaps by applying price pressure on your sellers, perhaps by making your own things), and the sellers you aggregate will be loath to leave because you still hold the crowds. That's network effects.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dinning out is about the experience.

Food Delivery is about crushing hunger, -fast-.

So, no. They are two different companies in two different markets.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not once sufficiently-advanced 3D printers are a household item and people can just manufacture what they want in their own homes.</comment>


EIEIO - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforce_In-order_Execution_of_I/O <comment><USER2> I remember when I was reading the chip datasheet and found this; I loled. I still tell people about this from time to time. It's been around a pretty long time now, 'cuz that was very early on in the PowerPC lifespan.

<comment><USER3> lfsux. Why? stfsux.

I was also fond of rlwinm, rlwimi, rldicr, etc. The idea that this was RISC was amusing.

<comment><USER2> RVISC (Reduced Vowel Instruction Set Computer).

I always thought it was more of a "reduced cognitive load" ISC rather than a lower number of instructions.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Ticket Titan - Fight Traffic Tickets - <AUTHOR> http://www.tickettitan.com <comment><USER2> Instead, I want to build a tool that constantly scans your plate number for tickets and auto-pays them as soon as they show up to avoid late fees. ...Because I deserved every ticket I've ever received.

<comment><AUTHOR> You would be going after the right market, 95% of people just pay their ticket ;)

However, by lowering the barrier to legal representation it is our goal that TicketTitan may increase the percentage of people who fight. For example, did you know that in most states by paying a ticket you admit guilt of the violation, which often results in points on your license and insurance increases? Fighting a ticket in Court, even without a lawful defense, may result in dismissal, no conviction, no points, no school, and/or reduced fines.

<comment><USER3> Or, as parent suggests, you could just take responsibility for your actions...

<comment><USER4> Not every traffic ticket is fairly given.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. See Chicago's photo red light debacle. And that's a case where otherwise I'd support the idea because running red lights kills and maims people with a much higher incidence than say speeding on the highway.

The two speeding tickets I've gotten: one was deserved, but I still fought it for a minimal (standard) plea bargain reduction. The other, the cop flat out lied twice. He said he used pace method, yet was never going the speed I was (he came upon me like a bullet and I wasn't speeding); but then the ticket had the radar box checked, and I said I wouldn't sign it until he corrected it. He said he wasn't going to change the ticket and if I didn't sign it he'd take me to jail. Small podunk town in Kansas just randomly pulling people over to make money. Modern day highwayman.

<comment><USER6> ... Did you win?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What were the reasons for using WordPress to power this? Not saying it's wrong by any means, but I'd be interested in hearing the table's discussion :)

Edit: please explain downvotes. I'm not sure why my curiosity that directly relates to the discussion of the OP would be anything but relevant, productive, and supportive.

</comment><comment><USER8> > What is a participating law firm?

> Participating law firms are the law firms which register an account, > advertise their fees, and may be hired through TicketTitan.com. Only > licensed attorneys in good standing with their state bar(s) may register to > be a participating law firm on TicketTitan.com. Law firms may register and > advertise their fees for free, paying a very small flat processing fee to > TicketTitan.com only when hired by a client.

> *Currently, TicketTitan.com only allows one law firm per county to advertise > their fees, but additional law firms may register and be placed on a waiting > list.

lol okay. So "firms" is really "first firm to register in your county".

It's an absolutely fantastic idea but this tool is worthless to me until that isn't the case. Why are you doing this?

Edit: Upon further reading, it's because one of the founders of OP's site runs a law firm named after this site which is conveniently one of the firms registered. What a racket!

<comment><AUTHOR> >It's an absolutely fantastic idea but this tool is worthless to me until that isn't the case. Why are you doing this?

Thanks, law is not an easy thing to scale. Not unlike most startups we are growing, eventually every jurisdiction be covered and by multiple law firms, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

>Edit: Upon further reading, it's because one of the founders of OP's site runs a law firm named after this site which is conveniently one of the firms registered. What a racket!

First, _no_ I am OP and I do not have a law firm that is on TicketTitan, but another founder does. Do you consider Orbitz a racket? Was AirBnB a racket when it first started with only 1 listing, a air mattress in the founders apartment? Orbitz connected travelers with flights (but Orbitz was owned by the airlines), AirBnB offered an air mattress to sleep on in SF but that air mattress was in the apartment of the founder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can we agree to only fight the tickets that we don't deserve?

<comment><USER10> I suppose. But also can we agree to raise the ridiculous speed limits and actually enforce them? 55 and 65 mph is too low and nobody drives that slow. See [https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1npuah/til_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1npuah/til_that_in_2007_a_group_of_college_students/)

In my mind if you are doing 110 in a 65, sure, you get a ticket. But I distinctly remember being in a car driving through Virginia (speed limit 70 mph) in a large number of cars all following each other all doing 72-75. It was a straight bit of road, everyone was mostly in the right lane (sign said to keep right unless to pass). Out of nowhere a state trooper pulls up on the left, passes, gets in front of our car and pulls over the guy in front of us. I should mention that the car in front of us was from out of state. Now, it is possible that that guy was getting pulled over for something other than speeding, but as anyone that's driven through VA can tell you, the state troopers there are very eager to give out speeding tickets, so chances are it was for speeding. Why did that guy arbitrarily get pulled over instead of our car, or any of the two dozen around us, all doing the same speed? Probably because it was a nice car with an out of state license plate. 75 mph is not an unreasonable speed on a straight road during daytime with good visibility and weather. It's basically left to the police to determine what the real speed limit is, which seems wrong.

</rant>

<comment><USER11> Virginia is different than most states.

[http://jalopnik.com/what-every-driver-should-know-about- spee...](http://jalopnik.com/what-every-driver-should-know-about-speeding-in- virgini-1669902845)

<comment><USER10> Right. The real speed limit in VA is close to 80 mph (though you can get pulled over for doing less, presumably if "driving while black" [1]). So why aren't there signs that read "SPEED LIMIT 80"? Why is it up to the officer's discretion to decide if today it's 80, 78, 75, etc.? (I know why: federal government, funding, etc.)

I am in no way against speed limits being enforced, I just don't like the idea of them being set by the officer's mood and zeal on any given day. I'd rather know what the speed limit really is rather than trying to guess it.

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

<comment><USER12> Federal funding is no longer tied to speed enforcement. Highway speed limits are set artificially low because it's convenient and profitable for the police. (Given that statistics do not reliably support the usual contention that higher speed limits are more dangerous, the burden of proof falls on those who would argue otherwise.)

Maybe you're not speeding, but rest assured, there's some other attribute of your driving or your car's condition that will allow law enforcement to pull you over if they want. This isn't a coincidence. For better or worse, the police will tell you that they catch a lot of genuine bad actors this way.

It's not that they want to be able to stop everyone... it's that they want to be able to stop _anyone_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Only Florida shows up for states (for me at least)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Demo Video: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/uyk4ne4xb13y26i/tt.mp4?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/uyk4ne4xb13y26i/tt.mp4?dl=0)

</comment><comment><USER14> Let me start with some disclosure: We funded a company to do exactly this. I won't mention them here as a courtesy to you, but know that I will have some bias as I go through this.

When I advise startups about landing pages, I usually refer to some teachings from Call to Action.

[http://www.amazon.com/Call-Action-Formulas-Improve- Results/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Call-Action-Formulas-Improve- Results/dp/078521965X)

The examples in the book are fairly outdated, but the lessons are sound. The one I'll talk about here has to do with the questions visitors need to have answered before they'll proceed to clicking a call to action.

      - What is it?
      - Is this right for me?
      - Is it legit?
      - What's the catch? / How much does it cost?
      - Who else is using this?
      - Can I get help?

Different users have different configurations of those questions they need to have answered before they move forward down your conversion funnel. Great landing pages answer all of them efficiently.

You're missing a number of answers to those questions on your site. Some can be found on your FAQ, but I think you need to front load more of them. The number one problem for me and the reason why I'll use our portfolio startup's site over yours is that this doesn't look professional. When it comes to legal issues / fines, trusting you to get the job done and keeping me from getting into more trouble is what I need to feel to hand over my problem to you.

Part of it is the design and that's easily fixed with a nicer template at the least. Evidence of how many tickets you've successfully fought or won, or information that just fighting a ticket is worth doing because the courts don't want to dedicate resources to fighting a parking ticket would be helpful.

This FAQ question, however, made me cringe: [http://www.tickettitan.com/faq/#law](http://www.tickettitan.com/faq/#law)

There's marketing speak mixed in with some defensiveness and some confusing reference to what feels like a conflict of interest. Thinking through it, I don't think there is a conflict of interest, but the way you worded it makes me feel like there is. If it were me, I'd just remove the question. If you're the only firm that gets the ticket info, then I'd remove from the interface what looks like an assignment of a firm to a ticket. It just raises questions that are distracting.

This service should be an abstraction. Give us the ticket, we'll take care of it. X % gets removed. If not, we pay the ticket automatically for you. Either way, this is how you stop worrying about this piece of paper.

A lot of potential here, though. The name is great. It's memorable. Build a brand that it deserves. Start with copy and then move to the design.

Good luck and thanks for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the time and the resource. Funny enough all of your advice is still applicable, but note there are major differences in services between: a. Fighting a parking ticket (YC company), and b. Fighting a traffic ticket (us). For example the later requires a licensed attorney, some traffic tickets are mandatory court, etc...). I think some others in the comments equated the two, so I'll take that as there is room to improve our communication and convey our service more effectively.

You and Dang should definitely keep doing this for HN

Edit: I just viewed their website and I am taken aback, they did move on from parking to include other forms of tickets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> An easier and cheaper way to go is (a) stop texting and driving and (b) slow down, leadfoot.

<comment><USER16> Police officers are not infallible.

<comment><USER17> Which is why many people are installing their own dash cams.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who has the most leverage to affect climate change? - <AUTHOR> Whether it be governments, intergovernmental organisations, private companies, who is in the best position to make change?<p>Furthermore, who is _currently_ doing the most to reduce climate change? <comment><USER2> Donald Trump is clearly the person with the most power to affect climate change. US presidents generally are the most powerful regardless of the topic. That's why it is important for the American people to vote him out of office. It's our last chance to avoid catastrophic climate change.</comment>


Android Issue 5669: Android deleting all SMS threads (Dec 2009; 1100+ stars) - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI: Android deletes corrupt DBs (<http://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=756653>)

If you have an Android phone and care at all about your ever-growing message history, install SMS Backup+ by Jan Berkel or an equivalent ASAP. (<https://github.com/jberkel/sms-backup-plus>)</comment>


Study Says Internet Commenters Are a Bunch of Haters - <AUTHOR> http://www.daddymodern.com/study-says-internet-commenters-are-a-bunch-of-haters/

<comment><USER2> That story is stupid, and the authors are a pack of idiots.</comment>


Tim Ferris comments on his move from Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and/dq6va5f/ <comment><USER3> > 5) Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a > peculiar form of McCarthyism > ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism)) > masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I'm as socially liberal as you get, > and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply > out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley.

I experienced this first-hand last weekend. My friend throws dinner parties where we discuss a different philosophical topic each time. The topic of last dinner party was sexual harassment and sexual agency. One person stormed off at the beginning because she got offended at the topic and ostensibly some mild language my friend used in a hypothetical situation. He was later crucified on social media.

When I was growing up, it was the right that constrained discussion while the left pushed boundaries. Now more often the left constrains speech. Rather than air positions in the marketplace of ideas, they would rather bully, shame and act offended at things they disagree with.

<comment><USER4> If you care about your audience, present your ideas sensitively. If you don't care about your audience, then don't bother presenting any ideas because you aren't going to convince anyone. The point of discussion isn't to score points.

Perhaps the woman in your example was offended because she has been harrased or assualted personally. The fact that you felt the need to minimize it by saying the language was "mild" says a lot, who cares if it was mild? Go as hard as you want, free speech is absolute, contextless, consequence free. Anyone hurt by what you say is just trying to score political points by pretending to be offended. My advice would be to listen to the women on this topic before indulging them in your pure axiomatic philosophical opinions of what they have experienced.

The whole idea of someone being "crucified" or "bullied" on social media is cowardly coming from a supposed free speech proponent. Man up, own your opinions.

A marketplace of ideas is fine, but no one is going to give you a fair shake if you are intentionally tactless, and that is your failing not your audiences.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps we should just ask for clarification on what the person said at the dinner table before engaging in this sort of speculation.

<comment><USER6> Yes because we the internet mob need to judge the lives of others.

That is so healthy.

I don't believe you can both have an intellectually honest debate and judge at the same time.

I hope they don't share the actual quotes because that wasn't the argument. The argument was open debate is not possible anymore, because we get actively judged and harassed for opinions because the flesh mob (you, me, everyone) only allows for socially accepted top 40 opinions.

Freedom also means freedom from each other. Not just the state.

If you said something bad about a person you don't personally know in the last month, then my judgement on you (yeah hypocrisy) is that you are a horrible person and the world is better with you not consuming oxygen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For some reason I was expecting it to be fluff but it's actually a really poignant, self-aware breakdown about the cons of SF and the quest to pursue happiness.

This stands out:

> Even though Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of brilliant people > I've found anywhere in the world, it also has the highest concentration of > people who think they're brilliant. The former are often awesome, keenly > self-aware, and even self-deprecating (let's call that 15% of the > population), but the latter are often smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, and > intolerable (let's call that 60% of the population).

Which is why it's funny that people think trolls are an online phenomenon. They are simply a reflection of a real-world in which most people are (subjectively perhaps) those you neither want to talk nor listen to.

The difference is that online, the filter of proximity and permission that works so beautifully to delineate our offline relationships, is void.

</comment><comment><USER8> _3) Silicon Valley is often a culture of cortisol, of rushing, and of fear of missing out (FOMO). There is also a mono-conversation of tech that is near impossible to avoid (much like entertainment is some parts of LA), where every dinner has some discussion of rounds of funding, investing, and who is doing what with Uber, Amazon, or someone else. This can be dodged, but it takes very real and consistent effort. I don 't want to spend 20-30% of my daily mental calories on avoiding the mono-conversation._

Sydney has this problem, except the conversation topics are real estate, what high school you went to, and gym memberships.

<comment><USER9> Reminds me of when I meet new people in a "night out" type context and it feels like everyone vying to work in different forms of status signaling into the conversation.

<comment><USER10> Some cultures arent like this - I lived in the Netherlands for a while (and im sure some Dutch HN readers could comment too) but if you meet someone and ask them what they do straight away they are likely to answer you with "Why so you can judge me by it?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not very fond of Tim's product, but I agree with him in his perspectives on SF and the Bay Area in general. Too much of it feels toxic at this point, and it has felt that way (to me) since about 2011 or so. It pushed me further and further into a state of introversion. While I used to go out and talk to people, I got tired of people wanting to talk "the mono-conversation" as he called it. It's been great for professional development as I have a lot more time to tinker with things, but it certainly hasn't helped me too much socially. I don't really care about who's funding who, who paid for what, what shit that founder just bought in Hayes Valley, or who's sleeping with whomever. I just want to poke at things, find bugs, and make shit.

<comment><USER12> He doesn't have a very unique opinion about it.

<comment><USER13> He articulates it pretty well though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> He's so right about #5. See what's happened to Peter Thiel. People were calling for him to be fired because he supported a major party nominee. That's not a good sign for so many reasons.

<comment><USER15> Whereas I agree with you in principle, let's not normalize Trump by calling him a "major party nominee" as if that abdicates us of our responsibility to push back against dangerous political identities. We can point to many a "major party nominee" in history that people supported who also shouldn't be normalized...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I left too, but apparently actually enjoy the cortisol rush. I moved to NYC because I liked the ambition in SF but not the monoculture of having all that ambition in one industry.

For people who are wondering about the mono-culture, the question to be asking is "Does my job actually make a positive difference in the world?" Quite often the pay makes you feel like it does, but the actual work is meaningless or harmful to society.

Ignorance is bliss, so maybe don't ask yourself that question. But if you do care, it is an extremely hard question to get to the bottom of. I bet the founders of Twitter and Facebook really did think they had made the world a better place, but now that's much less clear.

In any case, it warms my hear to imagine Tim and his dog in Austin--truly a great American city. Love it there.

</comment><comment><USER17> Do any of us actually _want_ to live in the Bay Area?

If you like cities then New York is bigger, denser, more diverse, less poop, has a public transportation system that actually works, and yet somehow the rent is cheaper. If nature or beaches are your kinda thing there's Oregon and Hawaii not far away. Want urban sprawl and traffic? Los Angeles has San Menlo Alto beat (but not by much).

But, for those of us in tech, the opportunities here are unlike anywhere in the world. And, despite all the drawbacks of the Bay, there's just something inspiring about being here with the leaders and top experts in our field.

<comment><USER18> What if you want big city + nature nearby? I feel like SF is a pretty good compromise.

You've got the ocean/bay right there, various forests and mountains within a short drive, skiing and Yosemite a few hours away, etc.

<comment><USER19> Or Boston which has all the same things except it has seasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Golden Gate and tech are terrorist targets, and I don't like being close to > the bullseye.

This has been on the top of my mind more than I would like lately, what with the ramped up rhetoric coming out of the white house regarding North Korea -- to the point of considering actual plans for how to deal with such an event. Does anyone here have any thoughts on how to assess the risk of this, or is it just irrational?

<comment><USER21> It's irrational, really. Not to say that the Golden Gate bridge won't ever get attacked, it may well. But you're far more likely to get killed crossing the road every day, and I doubt you apply the same level of calculation to working out if every road is worth the risk of crossing.

Don't get me wrong, it's totally understandable. I hate to rely on "the terrorists won!" as an argument, but terror is only effective when we allow ourselves to be terrorised by it. If we/politicians/the media applied the same amount of attention to road safety that we do to terrorism we'd all be in self driving cars by now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a very interesting read. I wish it was longer so I could keep reading more on the topic. I really want to give Austin a visit.

</comment><comment><USER23> Tim Ferris talking about charlatans ruining Silicon Valley in search of fame and fortune is extraordinarily ironic.

</comment><comment><USER24> The comment about the intolerable 60% is so true.

</comment><comment><USER25> > The people are also -- in general -- much friendlier.

This is the biggest factor for me as someone who grew up in Texas and is now in Los Angeles

I feel like this happens in cities with a lot of transplants. Most people move to big cities because they are (or think they are) the best at what they do. That makes it difficult for me to know who to trust since I don't know off the bat if someone is talking to me because they are genuinely nice or because they want to see if I can be used to help them achieve their goals. It's a vicious cycle because it causes me to put my guard up and in turn be less friendly than I am with people I really know.

</comment><comment><USER26> But I agree 100% with Tim. You couldn't pay me to live in SF or California again. Liberal leftist gestapo run wild have destroyed the entire state. SF in particular.

</comment><comment><USER27> Go away. Austin is full.

;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Buy real estate before everyone moves there.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> He doesn't mention it but I am sure the reduction in state tax was an incentive.

</comment><comment><USER28> This dude is literally a scam artist.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, he's like the Dr. Phil of tech guru balogney peddlers.

<comment><USER30> He's the Billy bush of tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I lived in Austin for 2 years after being in Boston, NY, Hong Kong and LA. Have to say I was bored out of my mind in Austin. The "music scene" is typically a guy with a guitar hopping up on a stage somewhere at 11pm. The outdoors = one lake in the middle of town and a very few hiking trails. NO arts scene or galleries to speak of. The culture revolves mainly around drinking. It's a city for obnoxious Millennials and all the people who got sick of CA and and now bringing all that to Austin. Sorry, but many people I know who lived in Austin for years have left for Utah, Idaho, Colorado - <USER2> places like Nashville and Columbus. Hope Tim likes it more than I did!</comment>


Ask HN: Where did i screwup? - <AUTHOR> All,
I rcenty launched my side project https://backmail.io . I really thought my side project solved a painpoint in lot of people's live. There is no easy way to get a backup of your gmail content. Gmail takeout is very slow, and you cant have a regular backups using that. This tool also works for the Gsuite users, so when you have a componay provided email account in google cloud, you can easily take a backup when you leave the company without any hassle. Since there are very few users for this service, i had decided to shut down the service.
However i would like to know what i did wrong? Should i have done some market research before implementing this? There was some serious discussions in the HN about easier way to move away from gmail, or take a regular backups of the gmail, which i thought was an validation to the idea. Should i have done something more? If so, any pointers / advice would be very helpful? Should i have put more effort marketing??
Any advice would be really grateful!!
Thanks, P <comment><USER2> I can only speak for myself, but I'd never heard of this product until now.

Even if I had, I've never had a reason to move my email off Gmail.

Anything important enough to need a backup of I just manually save to my cloud drive that's synced to my local computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I had posted ShowHN couple of times, but it never came up in the front few pages! Do you have any suggestions, how i could have marketed it better, so you might have known it ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I only heard about this today. But I would not be a customer probably.

I think gmail is stable enough, I never thought of losing emails.

I have used gmail for a long time, it really documents my life. one day, if I lose my gmail account, I will feel sad. but those emails are less than 0.01 percent of all the emails in the account. it isn't worth signing up a service for that 0.01 percent I guess.

Overall, regarding the idea, I feel that it is like selling an insurance for a very specific rare disease.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedbac. Do you think you might have used this service, if it was providing email backup to other email service like fastmail, migadu etc ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Same as others, I have only heard about this today.

Did it work with Yahoo email? I have had my yahoo email far longer, and I would really like to migrate the data.

How long did you have the service up? I do not think you should quit now, just work on telling a better story. Things take far longer to bite than we imagine

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, this only works with Gmail. I will try to see if i can get it working for yahoo mail. Thanks for the constructive encouragement. I launched it around 60 days ago, but no pageviews after the first 3 weeks.

<comment><USER4> have you tried any content marketing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have you ever heard the phrase vitamin vs painkiller? Do a quick google.

> solved a painpoint in lot of people's live

Your product is a vitamin, it's a nice thing to have, not a need to have. Personal email backup is not a pain point—It's a nice to have and it's much harder to sell vitamins than it is to sell painkillers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thnaks for your feedback. Thinking about it, you were spot on. I wasnt sure it was a vitamin or a painkiller, hence i assumed it might be a painkiller for lot of people, where i was completely wrong. Thanks once again for your feedback.

<comment><USER5> You've likely learned a lot about gmail/imap/mail in general, see if you can leverage that instead of walking away completely. Do some brainstorming on how you can turn this into something that is closer to a painkiller, or has some kind of virality to get less expensive growth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1) I alrady have a hard time trusting Google/Microsoft/etc with my email let alone another third party.

2) For local backups, IMAP/POP works relatively well already.

I don't see how this would work as a standalone product. Maybe if it was a feature in something like Fastmail or a full-fledged office suite, it would be more appealing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a ton for your feedback. I understand that IMAP works fine for local backups. But doesnt that add another task to save the local email backup safely somewhere ? Would you have used this service, if i was providing an option to save it directly to dropbox ?

Also would you like a desktop app (windows/mac app) , which automatically saves the backup to your dropbox safely. That way your emails never get stored in any thirdpay servers, but only your local and the drobox!

Thanks once again for the service.

<comment><USER6> I like the idea of a desktop app. Or even a self-hosted server-side app.

I wish you all the best in this endeavor and thanks for sharing.</comment></comment></comment>


Dear Hedge Funds: Index Funds Didn't Eat Your Returns - <AUTHOR> http://www.pragcap.com/dear-hedge-funds-index-funds-didnt-eat-your-returns/ <comment><USER2> Index funds are by all evidence the better choice for the average individual, but they present something of a chicken and egg problem.

To set the price of the index, you need people buying and selling individual stocks. If everyone owned index funds, there would be no index. What is the percentage of the market owned/run by index funds where the premise of following an index starts to break down?

The article says we haven't reached it, and that at that point active management approaches will regain an upper hand. Still, I wonder if it's true and the broader question remains.

<comment><USER3> this is a somewhat obvious comment, but the notion of "an average individual" and "everyone" is very different.

some people can specialise in price discovery as their occupation, and some people can specialise in growing sweet potato, or teaching kids, or nursing, or what have you. the former person can spend their time and energy learning how to pick stocks by hand, and influence the market, and the latter people can spend their time and energy learning and doing other useful things, and they can invest in index funds.

Here's a completely different angle of attack:

suppose I believe that the market doesn't price things correctly, and that some countries/sectors/companies are over valued, and some are under valued. in general, for some arbitrary set of of unpopular beliefs, there isn't an index fund I can buy into that is a good approximation of my beliefs. Even worse, it probably isn't possible for me to build a portfolio by linearly combining different index funds to approximate my desired portfolio allocation.

For example, suppose I want to invest in countries A,B,C,D,E and sectors U,V,W,X,Y,Z subject to ethical constraints K and L.

It may be the case that for each of the countries I can buy an A-country-ETF, and a B-country-ETF, and a global-sector-U-ETF, and a global-ethical-K-ETF, and for large countries I may even be able to buy a country-C-sector-X-ETF, but I can't make a good approximation of my desired portfolio by adding linear combinations of these things together.

I don't really want to buy an canned portfolio in the form of an ETF, I want to buy a custom portfolio, or a custom portfolio factory, say.

But perhaps part of the success of ETFs for non-expert folk like me is that they'd prevent me from expressing my strange individual beliefs about the market (which will probably result in worse investment outcomes for me than if I just did something mainstream).

<comment><USER4> Assume that average individual represents people who have jobs unrelated to analysing companies/markets and therefore are managing their money in spare time only.

To me stock picking on the basis that you know better than the market is largely hubris. Most of the people I know who do it don't do any meaningful benchmarking so it's impossible to properly assess success. When the market goes up they made money (yaaay - I picked well) but when they lost money it's because the market went down (nothing I can do in the face of that).

There are a decent number of people manually investing their pension and I genuinely think some proper requirements on reporting would be valuable for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The rise of indexing parallels the cutthroat, winner-take -all nature of the post-2008 stock market and economy where winners like Google, Amazon, Visa, and Facebook, for example, are bid higher and higher to no end and companies that show slightest weakness are culled quickly. Even blue chips are not immune to this. Walmart stock crashed 30% in 2015 in an otherwise flat market due to some minor weakness in store sales. In the 80's and the 90's, large funds were more willing to put money in sub-par stocks & sectors, investing indiscriminately, but post-2008 capitalism has gotten much smarter and discriminating. That means lots of losing stocks and few winners, leaving investors with one of three choices: be lucky or skilled enough choose the handful of winning stocks, choose index funds, or choose active management, the latter which tries to beat the first two but almost always fails and has really high fees. The second choice is the most viable.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hedge fund Nevsky Capital called it quits about a month ago (and this is a fund with historically stellar performance). Their "goodbye letter" [1] does an excellent job at spelling out some of the reasons hedge funds are a less attractive proposition lately.

[1] [https://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/294654490/Nevsky- Newslette...](https://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/294654490/Nevsky- Newsletter-151231)

<comment><USER7> Interesting. Markets are totally broken but I hadn't seen any legitimate players acknowledge that yet, good find. While the main argument in favor of HFT is providing liquidity, there really isn't a situation where a 'real' investor needs liquidity at the microsecond level.

Solid private companies refuse to go public not on boarding the typical mix of innovators/new companies on an exchange.

Companies have much shorter lifespans.

and a massive amount of other factors, I can't do justice to on a 48hr sleep deficit. My personal thesis, we are in a huge bubble. Tech, while certainly overvalued, is possibly the _least_ out of whack with a true underlying value (to the degree that even exists).

Signs of this are everywhere. It isn't a terrible thing I don't think, but an average investor might not make much money in the market if they started putting money in now.

<comment><USER8> > Markets are totally broken but I hadn't seen any legitimate players > acknowledge that yet

That is one way to read the letter. Another way to see it is that technical innovation has provided much cheaper ways to capture the value the hedge fund previously provided. Between index funds that are a cheap way to capture macro gains and and algo funds as a cheap way to capture micro gains there just isn't a reason to pay a hedge fund manager his 2 & 20\. I for one am _glad_ about this, because that hedge fund managers profit came largely out of _my_ (or some aggregate person much like me) pocket.

> HFT is providing liquidity, there really isn't a situation where a 'real' > investor needs liquidity at the microsecond level

This is a common misstatement of the liquidity argument for HFT market makers. The correct way to frame it is that HFT market makers can provide liquidity cheaper for a variety of factors:

1) cheaper infrastructure as it is much cheaper to get a machine at an exchange than a person in a pit.

2) more efficient quoting as a computer can quote thousands of markets while a person can quote a half dozen.

3) less risk which is the crux of the argument for speed. To a market maker (HFT or otherwise) the risk they are trying mitigate is the risk presented by hedge funds and other large block orderers. Those large blocks will move the price of the market (that is in fact how the large block orderer captures profit, the information imbalance they have at the beginning of the order compared to the end). Historically some of that profit came out of the market makers pocket, so they had to price every trade higher to account for it. It has always been a cat and mouse game between market makers and hedge funds. Now HFT is better at recognizing and reacting to these large block orders meaning the market maker can price less risk into all of their quotes.

> an average investor might not make much money in the market if they started > putting money in now.

One of the very nice things about our markets is that they will actually reward you handsomely if you take that opinion and turn it into action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Matt Levine's take on Bill Ackman vs index funds: [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-27/bill- ackman...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-27/bill-ackman-runs- an-anti-index-fund)

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe Bill Ackman should not have invested such a high percent of his hedge fund into a un-ethical price-gouging pharmaceutical company (Valeant).

<comment><USER11> That's not a fair criticism. At the time they invested, Valeant posted impressive financials with strong growth potential. Investors had no clue about the fraud occurring within the company. It was very rational to invest at that time. I don't think it's fair to say it's his fault for believing someone else's fraud.

<comment><USER12> One of the things hedge funds do to justify their high management fees, is to research the companies they invest in very deeply, definitely deeper than looking at financials, often meeting with management.

<comment><USER13> A dozen or so years ago I got a call from what turned out to be Michael Dell's wealth managers. They wanted to interview me about my recent ex-employer.

Clearly their research goes much deeper than reading over the 10Q forms and annual reports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The solution would be larger indices referenced by ETF, so that passive investors would buy pretty much "the whole market" and not just a subset of stocks that would end up being overpurchased.

But a smaller index has one important benefit, which as an ETF investor is key to me. I do not believe in the ability of a randomly picked asset manager to outperform the market (and I have no way to pick one any other way). An index selects stocks by just one criteria: the market capitalisation. So it will be selling stocks that are on the way down and buying stocks on the way up (as they become big/small enough to enter/exit the index).

Very simple investment rule and good enough in my opinion. This strategy comes with a "tax": hedge funds are watching stocks about to get in or out of an index and front-run the expected flow of ETF buyers and sellers, which means I leave some money on the table. That's the tax I pay for being a lazy investor.</comment>


The Legend of Mark Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/the-legend-of-mark-zucker_b_732625.html <comment><USER2> Greenspan -- You need to "let go" of your Zuckerberg fixation.

I get it -- I think we all get it -- you think you deserve some or more credit for your role as a catalyst for Facebook. But you didn't invent Facebook, Zuck did. Zuck gets the credit. Sorry. :-(

Time to move on and invent something great. Leave his shadow (and don't name your products Face or Book).

 _As an aside, having read a lot of your writing -- you are way too verbose. It's really distracting from the point you are trying to convey and only detracts. Brevity, my man._

<comment><USER3> Right on. Seriously, i had some respect for the guy until I read the article. 'invented The Facebook'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you peel back the bitterness from the article, there is still an important point that has been discussed elsewhere, but not all that widely, that Mark Zuckerberg is really an unknown variable with past behavior that suggests his values are not really in line with the public good. It's a simple message, and perhaps widely recognized in tech circles, but many more people need to understand why at least some caution is warranted when putting their lives online, particularly through facebook.

<comment><USER5> Anyone considering going into business with Facebook would also do well to sift the important from the bitter here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aaron Greenspan, the author of the article, from his HuffPo bio: <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan>

_"Aaron invented The Facebook while attending Harvard College in September 2003 and graduated with an A.B. in Economics in 2004."_

Wait, what? I have heard of this guy and knew that he made some claim about Facebook - but 'invented', no way! From 'The Facebook Effect':

 _"Zuckerberg also had a little involvement with houseSYSTEM creator Greenspan. The two met for dinner in early January in the Kirkland dining room. At the meeting, Zuckerberg invited Greenspan to partner with him to create his new project, which he didn't describe in detail. But the older student demurred. In a 333-page self-published, self-justifying autobiography he writes, "I didn't like the idea of working for someone who had just been disciplined for ignoring privacy rights on a massive scale."_

The count of the number of people claiming to be a Facebook inventor, founder or co-founder must be around 10. Success certainly has many fathers.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this guy going to define his entire life around this imaginary theft? How sad for him.

</comment><comment><USER8> Even now, Greenspan, if you GOT credit: it would be worthless. Nobody would care. It would be completely anticlimactic, or worse -- people would look down on you for simply mooching your credit off something you did long ago that is pretty inconsequential now.

You had the idea, he had the execution. You lost. Tough luck.

</comment><comment><USER9> Certainly the only time I've cited a movie trailer quote in this context:

"If you were the ones who invented facebook, _you would've invented facebook_."

</comment><comment><USER10> Society rewards people who contribute to society with dollars.

Society, with its money, is voting that it doesn't really care about Zuck's slight immorality. It actually prefers that he sacrifices his friendships and breaks a few laws in order to provide them with what they want.

The price of perfect rigid morality is several billion dollars.

<comment><USER11> You do realise that's exactly his point?

<comment><USER10> Yes - but I'm phrasing it differently. Aaron Greenspan sees Mark's immorality as a negative. Society sees it as positive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Greenspan's very first post to HN over three years ago was a shorter version of this same lament:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24742>

It makes no more sense today.

<comment><USER13> From that same thread, someone was downvotted to oblivion for saying Facebook would overtake Yahoo in 5 years. I think that prediction came true within 2 :-)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24616>

<comment><USER12> Here's my own contribution to the downvoted-but-prescient competition:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=488341>

(It hasn't come to pass quite yet, but both Google and Facebook are destined to face antitrust scrutiny.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Things I have learned from this and past articles (only slightly exaggerated):

1\. Greenspan is unlucky and unhappy. If you have even a remote chance of success, make sure you never even have a conversation with him. If you do, you might suffer his wrath (including possible lawsuits, and your conversations being made public).

2\. Losing the opportunity to be part of Facebook is the greatest loss anyone can have. Everything else is trivial in comparison.

3\. If he did get the opportunity to co-found Facebook, he would have provided no value anyway: "maintaining even a weak friendship with me would have cost Mark a few billion dollars in future paper earnings"

</comment><comment><USER15> "With the exception of social networking features that I intentionally left out to avoid a second privacy firestorm..."

I think that about sums it up. It's very common to see many implementations of the same idea, with some being more successful than others. We all understand that MZ may have borrowed too liberally for his "adaptation" of the idea, however, his adaptation was actually popular. For all I know the dude really is a sociopath ready to destroy the online reputations of every facebook user, but that's beside the point, at least in regards to Greenspan's core argument.

</comment><comment><USER16> A little wave was upset at being so tiny and turned to a bigger wave to complain about his plight. "It just isn't fair that other waves are so much bigger than me, I want to be a tsunami!"

The bigger wave, feeling sorry for his smaller companion replied: "Why does your size matter? Don't you realize that we are all a part of the same ocean?"

</comment><comment><USER17> "His talk, like most of his talks, was read from concealed tele-prompters and delivered in that somewhat annoying, tinny manner of his that both advertised Microsoft more than necessary and slightly exaggerated his own accomplishments."

...what an oddly negative read on the man's tone of voice. Strikes me as rather paranoid.

<comment><USER11> Sounds more like a proxy jab against Zuckerberg: the other usual suspects are rather confident in public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I will take a contrarian position here in thanking Aaron for his write up. Maybe he should not have posted it here to a community that might be very familiar with the details that Aaron describes. The piece in the HuffPost is targeted to an audience that probably is less familiar with Aaron's story and timed to coincide with the release of the film abt FB's early days. What society may value is less important than what society should value. Aaron thanks for exposing your story and helping us to keep a focus on behaviors that we should value. Maybe you should try to propogate a case study for use in ethics training in business schools.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article made me realize that by Facebook making news countering certain negative portrayals in the movie, they distract everyone from considering worse allegations that aren't in the movie. Is there a PR term for that?

</comment><comment><USER19> John Henry is a legend. Bigfoot is a legend. Mark Zuckerberg...not so much.

</comment><comment><USER20> One took risks - the other didn't. One located his competition and used him to his own ends - the other took moral high ground. One wasn't afraid of taking advantage of clients personal information for advancing his business goals. One is filthy (even if only paper) rich - the other is still struggling with his little business and playing with rubber duckies, while dreaming of yachts and camels.

Seems like MZ was the one with more business sense. And Greenspan is a sorry looser of type that accuses his adversary of using "unfair" tactics. Its a lot like when playing computer games and some people downright deny themselves the most efficient tactics on pretense of "playing fair" - only to accuse their adversaries who had sense to use every tool at their disposal.

And I dislike Facebook and its founder (hell I don't even own a FB account - since its intentions are too transparent to me). But I do admire its founders boldness and competitiveness.</comment>


With Undefined Behavior, Anything Is Possible - <AUTHOR> https://raphlinus.github.io/programming/rust/2018/08/17/undefined-behavior.html <comment><USER2> Nice article! From the outside, it seems so obvious that the fix for C is to reduce the scope of undefined behavior, either by simply defining it or making it "implementation defined". But it seems equally obvious that this is not going to happen.

 _The standards committee invented the concept of "undefined behavior" to capture this range of behavior. Essentially, it's a license for the implementation to do anything it wants. And that's reasonable; it's hard to imagine nailing down the behavior any further without compromising performance or the fundamental nature of the problem. But given this hammer, the committee applied it far more broadly._

 _However, compiler authors got bolder over time, feeling that everything allowed in the standard was fair game, at the same time getting more sophisticated in what optimizations could be done with stronger assumptions._

Are "compiler authors" and the "standards committee" really two distinct groups? I've presumed that the expansion of "undefined behavior" in C is an example of "regulatory capture". That is, the specifications of the language are being decided by those who see "undefined" as yet another opportunity for optimization, as opposed to the users of compilers who tend to be more worried about broken programs.

<comment><USER3> I think the "compiler authors" and "standards committee" are in fact two mostly distinct groups. Now, there is some overlap, but more importantly feedback certainly flows both ways between the standards group group and compiler authors, and the standards committee is usually well aware of the concerns of the compiler authors. If it were any other way, it probably wouldn't work since it would be easy to ask for a feature that couldn't be implemented efficiently.

Said another way, the committee doesn't just come up with useful features, and then leave it to the compiler authors to implement them: the accepted features usually have already a specific high level implementation in mind, and you'll sometimes find various restrictions and quirks in the feature definition that is specifically an accommodation for how compilers are going to implement it. There are lots of examples, but one that comes to mind: RTTI simply doesn't work for objects without a virtual method. Since there is no obvious link between the two it seems like an arbitrary restriction, but it is a reflection of the fact that compilers mostly all want to implement RTTI as a special entry in the vtable, so allowing RTTI on objects w/o a virtual method would require a vtable in every object or some other expensive mechanism. So you get the RTTI you can practically implement.

I think that's all fine and reasonable: a total disconnect between implementation just wouldn't work here (this is true even in higher level languages, but there is arguably more wiggle room there because the performance baseline is different).

> is an example of "regulatory capture". That is, the specifications of the > language are being decided by those who see "undefined" as yet another > opportunity for optimization, as opposed to the users of compilers who tend > to be more worried about broken programs.

My view is different. At least most of the classic examples of "annoying" or "unexpected" undefined behavior seem to quite old and have underlying reasons based on the hardware of the day:

1) signed overflow being weird due to non 2s complement machines 2) signed shifts being weird for the same reason 3) aliasing rules due to all sorts of interesting concerns about storing objects in different memory spaces, segmentation, different pointer representations, alignment (this one is the most iffy) 4) pointer arithmetic rules same as (3) but less iffy 5) reading uninit memory: hardware with trap representations, etc

The list goes on, but most of those have been with us for a while. The most aggressive use of most of these things, that we hear about now as some kind of terrible abuse of the rules by the compiler authors has mostly occurred many years after the rules were in place.

Certainly there is probably resistance to changing some of these rules to become defined, from the compiler authors - but I don't think it explains (mostly) their existence in the first place. Some of the rules are kind of papering over things that could actually be done more efficiently if higher level semantics were available. For example many of the "signed overflow allows loops to be optimized/vectorized more efficiently" would not be needed if there were some built-in way to iterate over things like arrays (arrays largely don't even exist in C as you mostly end carrying around a decayed pointer and size). Another example is the aliasing system: with stronger rules about aliasing memory areas, or better support for first-class arrays, or even just earlier introduction of restrict into the language, you'd wouldn't need to lean on the aliasing rules as heavily to get the effect through the strict aliasing "backdoor".

I see the most of the problems with UB in C and C++ as stemming from three main factors:

1) C is more than 40 years old, and C++ is more than 30. Many of the UB rules have been with us, formally or informally for a long time, and a long time ago there was both more weird hardware in actual use, and more uncertainty about what type of hardware would dominate in the future.

So a lot of the things that were left as UB, as well as lots of implementation defined things like the sizes of all the various primitive types, may have made actually made sense decades ago as a strategy for wide adoption and future trends.

More recent languages have the advantage in a dramatic stabilization in hardware: everyone has really settled on 2's complement, and non-weird word sizes, etc. It is very hard (I think) for C to roll back, practically and ego- wise, to roll back of the very old decisions which may have made sense when they were made.

2) C and C++ are both designed by committee. The committee is full of representatives from various hardware and software companies. These representatives are obviously going to "talk their own book" and make sure the language works well on their hardware. This is why we have all sorts of concessions to Itanium in the standard - do you think the committee could have said "no" to what seemed like the future architecture at the time? Itanium failed but we are left with its legacy in the standards. Similarly we have the "consume" stuff in the C++11 (and C11?) memory model. Probably have of the complexity in the entire memory model is just related to this concept. The model is _much_ more difficult to understand and many different concepts that wouldn't have existed needed to be introduced to support it. Not only that it affected all sorts of stuff outside of the memory model such as the whole concept of "carries dependency" which needs to be pervasive in the language spec.

That's _all_ there to support the POWER memory model in some scenarios. It seems like a shame to me. If you consider the amount of code in the world, on a cycle-weighted basis, that is running on power and would be affected by leaving this out it must be a small faction of 1%, but how can the committe say "Sorry IBM, you just aren't important enough anymore, you'll have to live without this crazy consume stuff?". It's just not going to happen. As some kind of consensus based body, rather than say a private, profit driven business, a weakness it that it's hard to say "no" and everyone's little idea or weakness gets accommodated.

3) C and C++ were very reluctant to make things "implementation defined" and almost always favored performance over complexity. I think there is some method to that madness: implementation defined is kind of ugly. How do you ensure compilers really define it? Will they use the same kind of precise language as the standard? What happens to portability in a language with many impl-defined aspects? Every compiler would essentially define their own sub- language.

Still I think it was worth trying to lean on this a bit more. For one, you could define some "default" way of doing things, like 2s complement arithmetic or pointers-that-are-just-integers-and-otherwise-work-like-you-think and have some standard macro you can check to see if that's the case. Almost like C did with `__STDC_IEC_559__`: if you define that you are using standard IEEE 754 floats (it didn't work out that well because some deviations from the large IEEE standard means that many compilers don't define it).

Given that, you could simply write programs that check the expected macros and error out if not supported and still have "portable" code as long as the target architecture is non-weird. You could just up-front check that you aren't running on a deathstation 9000.

If you wanted, you could also have conditional compilation: do the fast/normal thing if the hardware worked as expected (e.g., sign-extending shifts), and then fall back to some slower hack if not.

<comment><USER4> > C and C++ were very reluctant to make things "implementation defined" and > almost always favored performance over complexity. I think there is some > method to that madness: implementation defined is kind of ugly. How do you > ensure compilers really define it? Will they use the same kind of precise > language as the standard? What happens to portability in a language with > many impl-defined aspects? Every compiler would essentially define their own > sub-language.

Personally I think this was a mistake. A lot of things could be left as implementation-defined instead of undefined: most arithmetic operations, for example. The issue with undefined behavior is that you can't have it in your program, period. And if you do, your entire program is technically invalid, and the compiler could do unexpected things to it without warning. However, with implementation defined behavior, you can use language constructs (e.g. #ifdef) to choose the correct implementation.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't the better solution be having compiler support for rejecting compilation of constructs that have UB?

<comment><USER6>
      int add(int a, int b)
      {
        return a + b;
      }

Do you want the compiler to reject this because (assuming it has external linkage) there's no guarantee that there is no call with arguments such that the addition would overflow?

<comment><USER7> This discussion came up recently, but my stance still is that if you _know for sure_ at compile time that some code _always_ results in UB or is just non- conforming, you should not fuck around and just remove a big chunk of code because the standard allows you so, but either simply refuse compilation (my preference) or at least still just emit code representing what was written (effectively the implementation defined behavior route).

<comment><USER3> Sure, and compilers do now sometimes emit warnings like "shift amount is always out of range".

Overall though, this isn't how compilers work: they aren't "fucking around" with code they know for sure is broken and will be executed. They are just applying a large series of optimization passes which includes passes like removing unreachable code, and that interacts with an analysis of paths that cannot be take for various reasons (including that end in UB) to remove "big chunks of code".

The same passes that screw you over in any of these famous examples are the ones that help code generation in the 99% of remaining cases including many "obvious" optimizations that you'd want the compiler to perform.

I know the situation with undefined behavior is distressing and the examples make it look like the compiler writers are out to get you, but that's not really the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could one write a C compiler that intentionally caused noisy havoc in every situation left undefined by the language spec? As opposed to trying to do something reasonable. Then at least you'd know that you were on shaky ground?

<comment><USER9> That is more or less what the sanitizers do, and it's a reasonable approach to trying to discover UB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's something I was wondering about:

Suppose I've got some nasty DSP algos that depend on undefined behavior of type-punning in C. To address this I use the union member access trick which is supported by a gcc extension.

If my _only_ target is web assembly, then what are the reason that I should care that my binary is actually a gcc dialect of c and not standard c?

<comment><USER9> That puts you pretty firmly in what I call the "semi-portable" category (I would say "unportable" but wasm is very likely going to have flavors, such as a 64 bit pointer variant).

But if you're being careful, you can do type-punning. The "modern" way is generally with memcpy, but union can be valid if done carefully. The clearest statement I was able to find of this is [1]. I find it frustrating that it's so hard to get a clear read on this. For example, if as Regehr says union- based punning is reliable, then what was the concern that the linked Linux kernel patch trying to address? I haven't dug into it in super detail.

[1] [https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1307#comment-18418](https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1307#comment-18418)

<comment><USER4> IMO it's pretty iffy and you should steer clear of it, since the rules around it seem to be murky. I think the actual rule is that it's illegal in C++, and valid in C99 and C11 but only because it was included in a footer note as an afterthought in the standard.

<comment><USER10> So what is the well-defined and performant way to fetch the exponent and mantissa of a double in standard C?

<comment><USER4> Use frexp from <math.h>.

<comment><USER10> The implementation for frexp uses type-punning.

Also, it adds a denormal and inf check which I don't need in this particular hot loop.

<comment><USER4> Does it? On my computer it's a builtin (__builtin_frexp). But even if it _did_ use type-punning, that doesn't make it legal for your program to do it. I don't believe there's any requirements on the C standard library to follow the standard themselves.

To answer the second part of your response, the correct way to do this yourself would be to memcpy the double and then inspect the result directly. Any compiler worth its salt will end up generating the assembly code you want (namely, no call to memcpy, just a couple of arithmetic shifts and masks).

<comment><USER10> > To answer the second part of your response, the correct way to do this > yourself would be to memcpy the double and then inspect the result directly. > Any compiler worth its salt will end up generating the assembly code you > want (namely, no call to memcpy, just a couple of arithmetic shifts and > masks).

What does a compiler "worth its salt" do with the memcpy at "-O0"?

<comment><USER4> See for yourself: [https://godbolt.org/z/nsg9nt](https://godbolt.org/z/nsg9nt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's curious that this 30-year old thing continues to be such a big problem but there are no fixes in sight, while most C code continues to have UB bugs. And many programmers have attitudes along the lines of "that's just your opinion, man". (Eg the Linus vs signed overflow rants)

The T-shirt is good though :)</comment>


Why Most Amazon Reader Reviews Are Worthless - <AUTHOR> http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/71891-why-most-amazon-reader-reviews-are-worthless.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=aad5fde6eb-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-aad5fde6eb-305331585 <comment><USER2> "For instance, if you have ever, at any time, become a friend of an author on Facebook or Goodreads, your honest review will be expunged."

That sounds pretty strange and extreme. So Amazon is checking up on who's friends with who on Facebook?

There are so many 1-star reviews which are obvious that the reader did not read the book; I do not get why they cannot remove those. It's not just people promoting one book, they also have many cases where someone sabotages a book.

In one case I saw a programming book had a first review which was 1-star that said: "code examples didn't work". I still purchased he the book, and it was an awesome book with no errors that I found over 500 pages. I am sure that review killed the author's sales though as his book is rated 4-stars currently... three 5-star reviews, and one 1-star review.

<comment><USER3> >That sounds pretty strange and extreme. So Amazon is checking up on who's friends with who on Facebook?

That portion of the article was unclear. The sentence from Amazon he's referencing says "Our data shows elements of your Amazon account match elements of other Amazon accounts reviewing the same products. In these cases, we remove the review to maintain trust in our customer reviews and avoid any perception of bias."

That doesn't imply GoodReads or Facebook to me. That sounds like they're trying to stop people from creating multiple Amazon accounts in order to review the same products multiple times.

>It's not just people promoting one book, they also have many cases where someone sabotages a book.

I'd always assumed the fake one star reviews were mostly political books being panned by ideological enemies and such, but I read a blog post in which a published author claimed competing authors do this because a book is more likely to be recommended if it's rated highly relative to others in the same category. So it's just the flip side of creating a bunch of accounts to give your own books good reviews.</comment></comment>


Utility Ghost: Gamified redistricting with partisan symmetry - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07377 <comment> dane-pgp It occurred to me that rather than trying to fix the gerrymandering problem at the map-drawing stage, it might be simpler to solve it at the election stage, where the imbalance is more obvious.

My proposal, which I call "merrymandering", involves comparing the number of seats won by each party in a state after an election, with the aggregate percentage of votes won by each party in that election. If there is an imbalance, then the over-represented party has one of their seats assigned to the next-most-over-represented party, and so on until any seat change would result in a more disproportionate result.

The choice of which seat gets reassigned could be chosen based on how close the other party came to winning that seat, to make it deterministic, or a random process could be used, to avoid safe seats.

In practice, what I think would happen is that with this system in place, there would be no advantage to partisan redistricting, so the merrymandering ruleset would never actually be applied, and no seats would flip. Nevertheless, I have some confidence that the system would survive a legal challenge, since it only changes election results to make them strictly more compliant with the "one person one vote" principle.

<comment><USER2> From the perspective of voters, this is a terrible system. If a district votes one way and gets their result flipped because of this system, then they're unambiguously not being represented by someone they want.

<comment> dane-pgp From the perspective of voters, the current system is also terrible, as districts are deliberately being designed so that one party cannot win them, despite that party having a majority across the whole state.

I would hope that the majority of voters would see that they are getting better (proportional) representation under this system (even if that representation wouldn't always be as local as it would be for the lucky few districts that aren't gerrymandered into irrelevance in the current system).

In any case, by changing the game theory (removing any incentive to gerrymander districts), my expectation is that in practice no results would get flipped, so no one would experience any bad effect attributed to this system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not convinced how we elect representatives is a problem. Gerrymandering seems an annoying an unfair way to elevate certain people, sure, but I don't think fixing this is the panacea to toxic politics that everyone thinks it is. You simply have to look internationally at other systems to see they also have problems...different problems from ours, sure, but not exactly _better_.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Supreme Court has already stated that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, we just don't have a mechanism to systematically detect it after the fact. That's why it's so hard to fight in the courts. If possible, I think it's a good idea to prevent unconstitutional gerrymandering, even if it doesn't solve all of our problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So effectively, both parties take turns choosing what "atoms" (counties, districts, etc) belong in which districts. They must be contiguous. I'd like to see how this relates to the efficiency gap that was heavily used around gerrymandering in Wisconsin. It's mentioned, but they don't go back to analyze how it would be---at least I didn't see it from a simple search.

<comment><USER5> The efficiency gap is just one measure of partisan bias that can be used to assess the utility/efficacy of any redistricting plan. The game the authors propose is (basically) an algorithm to draw good districts between two players. So, there's no real or expected relationship between the two... partisan control (the objective the authors cite) isn't necessarily related to the efficiency of that control measured by the efficiency gap. The problem is that so many different measures of fairness exist, have validity, and can be used in different legal or jurisprudential contexts, we're always talking past each other on the meaning of these measures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The abstract describes a system for achieving shoddy Proportional Representation through bipartisan (or multi-partisan) gerrymandering. If you want Proportional Representation, then just do that and don't try to gerrymander districts to achieve it. I think this country is too stuck on the notion of districts and needs to think outside the box and paint outside the lines (nyuks intended). I think we keep describing what we want as some sort of identity/ideology based representation and those things are now much more important to us than geography and _where_ a person lives. So we should have at-large PR or large multi-member districts (8 or more reps per district).

<comment><AUTHOR> A switch to PR would require a change to federal law. Meanwhile, in the absence of PR, any state is free to adopt its own redistricting policy. The latter approach seems much more feasible.

<comment><USER6> A State changing how it runs its State Legislature is a change to the State Constitution either way, whether taking away the map drawing authority from the Legislature itself or changing the structure of the Legislature to be non- districted or multi-member districted.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is more likely, a change to federal law, or the existence of one of 50 states that changes state law?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: As an experienced dev,how hard is to become great at designing great UIs - <AUTHOR> As an experienced dev , how hard is to become good at designing great UIs (both from in term aesthetic and usability) ? i have an idea for an app (android) and i am trying to decide if i should subcontract the UI design or just learn to do it myself.<p>Any resource on UI desi gn would also be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> I don't think you could ever really compete with a senior UI/UX designer unless you were committed to it full-time.

However, I do think that you can hack something together that would be sufficient. I second that you should look at designs that you like & try to imitate them.

This is a good reference, particularly for Android: [http://pttrns.com/](http://pttrns.com/)

Also, Material Design: [http://www.google.com/design/spec/material- design/introducti...](http://www.google.com/design/spec/material- design/introduction.html) [https://dribbble.com/search?q=material+design](https://dribbble.com/search?q=material+design)

</comment><comment><USER3> As others here have pointed out, you're not going to be as good as a top-notch designer, any more than a noob at coding is going to produce great code.

BUT there's a top notch designer I know who recently had this advice for coders who can't afford him: Follow the Material Design guidelines and it will look as good as it can without a designer working on it.

</comment><comment><USER4> The poster is asking how hard it is. If you don't know what you're doing, very. Lots of details and thought and reasonings are involved.

But it really depends; if its just your side project, and your UI won't matter much, then do it yourself. If you need to nail the UI in order for your app to be successful, subcontract it out.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't say I'm good at great UIs, but my approach has been that of a bowerbird - find things you love using, and copy them.

Over time, you'll gradually pick up approaches that you like and refine them, and combine them. Though I imagine a quick course in HCI, UI design, UX wouldn't hurt either.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a pretty good design series that breaks down the fundamentals of design for non designers: [https://hackdesign.org/](https://hackdesign.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> You should have asked it in the Ask HN section.

For that, you can change your title like this, "Ask HN : <Your Current Title>"

</comment><comment><USER8> Have you gone to design school and/or spent the requisite 10,000 hours practicing design (programming UIs doesn't count)?

You can become great at anything if you put the time into it, but you might have to take time away from striving to be a great dev to being a great designer, which is a completely different career track...few master both.</comment>


EU clamps down on Bitcoin, anonymous payments to curb terrorism funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/19/us-france-shoooting-eu-terrorism-funding-idUSKCN0T81BW20151119 <comment><USER2> It's the archer, not the arrows. Bitcoin is just an arrow.</comment>