How poverty changes your mindset - <AUTHOR> http://review.chicagobooth.edu/behavioral-science/2018/article/how-poverty-changes-your-mind-set <comment><USER2> I hate seeing people's comments on stories around this topic. I grew up in poverty and food stamps from time to time. My dad was a roughneck and when the oil bust happened in the 80's there was a time we lived out of our car -- my whole family. here was literally nothing to do in the oil patch during that bust. There was literally no work. But people don't understand true hopelessness. My dad did everything he could to find a job during that time... for three months time we hardly had any food I guess because it wasn't easy to get on the program fast back then. Those that come out of a dire situation think everyone else can.

The ramifications of that happening to my dad will probably last multiple generations. He went from a loving father to a loathsome troll of a creature working nights in a oil refinery (I thought at the time) finally. From that my mom and dad divorced. My wife doesn't understand why I have severe dentals problems now in life, or other health issues that doctors told me are from stress. She doesn't understand why I stress so much about money and stay up at night.

I don't know why I'm saying all this the solution is simple but the problem is hard to acknowledge. The poor and destitute simply need help. We live in a society though that thinks someone else is going to take care of the problems. When we do finally give help it's so conditional and shamed that the hole of guilt someone fell in is practically inescapable.

<comment><USER3> I grew up in poverty as well and my reaction to money is the total opposite. I never felt connected to it all. I want to be a good saver, but my understanding of the green stuff is nearly nil. It's just sort of there and I try not to think about it.

I think it's just the opposite problem. I simply don't know what to spend money on. I feel like I spend a lot of money, but somehow everyone is in deeper debt than I am. I just don't want to have all those expensive things. I grew up living out of a duffel bag and lost everything I owned in that multiple times in my life. I just don't want anything.

Buying furniture for the first time was the most stressful thing I ever went through. When I bought my first bed, I just laid on a bed in the shop and just stayed there having a mental breakdown. I walked out nearly in tears and slept on my floor for a full week before I finally called and ordered the bed. It was $700 and felt like I took a nose dive off a cliff.

The biggest effect is my appetite. No one understands why I'm so underweight. If you ever go a week without eating, believe me, your desire to eat food goes out the window. Those first bites of food makes you incredibly ill. I eat everyday now, but three meals is overkill.

<comment><USER4> During my childhood, my father's most of the income went into repaying loans. Luckily, we had our own house, so we didn't need to worry about getting homeless. But I remember I rarely got to spend money on any kind of "luxury". By luxury, I mean simple stuff like a icecream cone or a baloon.

The effect it had on me is quite wierd. On one hand, I always wish to earn more so as to not have to go through that phase again, while on the other hand, I never care about spending money. Even now that we have more money, I rarely spend on clothes, fancy food, gadgets or whatever that is not necessity. That phase of borderline poverty has made me frugal for life.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I totally get this. I have no idea why people want stuff. I have one computer, one phone, one guitar, and so on. If I could own just one set of clothing, I'd be happy with that.

It isn't frugality for me, it's just that I can't stand clutter and really, what I consider. I think I missed whatever the definition of having things means.

<comment><USER5> I guess it depends on you knowing what you want. I wouldn't drop money on a spanking new car even though I can afford to and all my peers drive Audis or whatever, but I feel just OK with my over 100k Civic just because I like not having a loan on my head. I didn't get the latest iPhone (still on the 5s) because a beautiful new phone means nothing to me; I'm just fine with a less expensive, smaller and slower model.

OTOH, If I see nice clothes or shoes I definitely do consider getting them if I don't have something similar already, or different enough from existing clothes to give a different look. I won't say no to a road trip, or a weekend trip with my gf/friends. Or to eating at a fancy restaurant occasionally.

<comment><USER6> :) and, to some extent, this is kind of funny, because where I live having a Civic is a sign that you do have a expensive car, and people treat it like "just more 10k bucks and you could be in an Audi".

<comment><USER7> Do you live somewhere where a car is not necessary/totally unaffordable? I think the OP is probably living in the US, and navigating most areas is almost impossible without a car. Wonder what the alternative to a cheap civic is other than no car :)

<comment><USER8> Maybe like a Chevy Spark or something? I actually just got one of those for my wife and it was only $7k with 50k miles on it.

<comment><USER7> Hah, I will not deny that it's probably very cost efficient, but 7k is only a cheap car relative to a new car. A cheap early 2000's late 1990's civic that runs is somewhere around 5 times less than that.

<comment><USER8> Yeah but this car was three years old and was certified pre-owned, with low mileage. You're suggesting one that is pushing two decades of service. We looked at those kind of cars too and it was obviously a worse choice unless you love rust and frequent repairs.

<comment><USER7> I'm not suggesting either. I drive a car from 2001 that has spent most of its life in the US north-east. Rust can be an issue but you would be surprised how many cars don't have major rust problems. However, if I had an option of getting a more expensive car (7k was out of my budget) when I was looking for one, I would have gone with something more like what you mentioned. I'm just throwing out the idea that 7k isn't necessarily in the same price range as an old civic. It's definitely rolling the dice with an old car but I have only had to pay for one battery and one alternator (notice I said pay for... in all actuality I received a free battery and had to have an extra alternator replaced as the shop I went to was garbage but owned up to it).

<comment><USER8> Yeah, the competitors were about the same price but in sorry shape.

Anyway, the prices kind of scale together. If you bought a twenty-year-old Spark/Matiz it would be cheaper than the comparable Civic. Also, I don't know where the OP lives, but the US has pretty lax regulations that let people drive around old cars for longer than many countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A lot of great stories in this thread, a lot of them are quite disheartening US stories of poverty.

Mine was the opposite, really. Grew up as a welfare-kid in Western-Europe with a disabled dad and a sibling. The state provided for us, the three of us made do with about $1200 (roughly the $7.50 minimum wage in the US at a 40h 52w work schedule) or so in today's money, living in the capital city so rent and insurance ate up quite a bit of our budget. Still, we had a great childhood, went to university, always did sports, vacations, had books and computers at home. Everything was always a few generations old, everything was second hand, I still have clothes that are 15 years old. I always worked to buy my own clothes, phone, trips etc, such that my dad was 'only' paying rent/food from age 14, and eventually we chipped in there as well. I feel tremendously grateful for having been born here, socio-economic mobility is a lot higher here than elsewhere (the American dream irony). I've got a postgrad degree, steady job, traveled the world etc. I never wanted for anything, honestly. The government helped us out with tuition fees, insurance, rent, and I happily pay my fair share back in taxes. Most importantly perhaps, I never felt the damage of stress of being poor, we were never scared for our future, if anything, it looked bright. I don't feel any less than others, not ashamed or fearful. I owe a lot of this to the state and my fellow citizens.

<comment><USER10> Can I ask you which European state are you talking about?

<comment><USER11> I also want to know. Sounds like it could be Germany, Netherlands, (maybe not UK?), France, Belgium, Sweden/Denmark/Norway/Finland, a few others?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure how people deal with stress and difficult situations varies from person to person. My personal story and 2-cents:

When I was 17 I went through a period of near destitute. I was living on my own, my father had passed away, and I had dropped out of school. Yet, I found myself with some very good jobs, such as GE Capital, a big Oil and Gas companies IT department, etc.

Regardless of the opportunity, my arrogance, ambivalence, or immaturity (take your pick) cost me a series of good jobs in short order. The result was I had no money, no electricity, no gas for my car, and not much to do. Eating cold beans out of a can in the dark tends to force you to re-think your priorities.

In my case, I got very motivated very quickly and dug myself out of that hole after a few months. I think that's the point Orrin Hatch was trying to make. If I had a fallback, I would have, without a doubt, kept coasting along from job to job. I've never looked at work or money the same way since as I never want to find myself there again.

So long story short, being poor (by my own doing) didn't necessarily motivate me, but looking into oblivion sure as hell did.

<comment><USER13> 100% of society can't be brought out of poverty. Here's an example: If we motivated everyone to get a college education, we would have people flipping burgers who are college educated making min wage and living in poverty while struggling to put food on the table.

<comment><USER14> Not everyone needs college, there are trade schools and the like that can help you get a better job.

Why can't minimum wage be raised to provide a better standard of living?

<comment><USER15> Minimum wage only really encourages businesses to hire fewer people and train those fewer people to do more and be more productive, if not to raise prices. There are many small bookstores and mom-and-pop stores that are going to be closed when the minimum wage is raised because they literally can't raise prices any more or hire fewer people.

That's why in some other countries, instead of a minimum wage, which is the government forcing businesses to pay a certain wage, the government itself makes up the difference between the actual wage and a desired wage. So if the government decides that everyone should earn at least $15/h but the market price for flipping burgers is only $10/h, the government itself will provide the additional $5/h. This effectively raises the standard of living without pressuring businesses and also without the adverse effects like pushing up prices or creating more unemployment.

<comment><USER16> > Minimum wage only really encourages

No, it also means those people are paid a liveable wage, as opposed to a pittance.

<comment><USER17> Depends on one's definition of "livable wage." Minimum wage and "decent standard of living" are often conflated but minimum wage was not imposed and has never been intended to provide that. It's always been a wage that was at or slightly above the federal poverty line.

The lowest minimum wage I remember hearing about as a kid was $1.50/hr. I thought that sounded like a lot of money at the time, but I probably was not even 10 years old.

That would have been in the first half of the 1970's when the federal poverty line was around $2,500. So working full time, you'd make $3,000 or about 120% of the poverty level.

Today, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and the poverty level (2016) is $12,200. So still, a full-time minimum wage worker earns nearly 120% of the poverty level.

Source: Table 1, [https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time- series/demo/income-p...](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time- series/demo/income-p..).

<comment><USER18> True, but minimum wage work typically isn't full-time. That link didn't work for me, but are those numbers inflation-adjusted?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love how when this comes up, it's people either saying "Here was my experience when I was poor in the past." or "Here is what I think about economics or the wording of this article."

Don't get me wrong, I know what website I'm on.

But in all seriousness, is there room for currently poor people in this discussion?

<comment><USER20> I was homeless for nearly 6 years. I got off the street last September. I am still quite poor. In fact, my bank account currently has zero in it and I don't get paid again until the 1st.

I fairly frequently give my opinions on HN about poverty, homelessness, housing, women's issues and the negative impact being female has on my earned income.

I try to be judicious and not do it too often. Testifying from firsthand experience often turns into a pile on of people pretending to care and pretending to want to help while mostly virtue signaling, doing nothing for me and dragging my name through the mud by insinuating that I somehow must have made poor choices and it must be all my fault, never mind the larger societal forces under discussion.

I often worry that if I speak up too much, I will eventually be banned for disruptive behavior, never mind that I feel that a lot of the problem behaviors are due to how other people choose to react to me. When enough people pile on with problematic replies I can eventually get frustrated and lose my cool and then I feel like that will all be blamed on me and an excuse to say I am just badly behaved. I get a lot of downvotes and flags when I finally lose my cool. This tends to not happen to people talking at me like I am not really a victim of circumstances, I just am stupid, incompetent and not trying hard enough.

I try to then give it a rest for a while and avoid such topics because I would prefer to not wind up rate limited, banned or otherwise penalized for daring to be the token poor person giving my two cents. Privileged people tend to have no idea how to help me. They tend to say really shitty things to me. They often want me to shut up because I make them uncomfortable.

I am pretty thick skinned, well educated and come from a much more privileged background than I realized for most of my life. Most poor people are not going to stick their neck out like that. They are too vulnerable and can't afford more trouble and are very well aware that expecting rich people to be genuinely respectful and caring towards them is simply a bridge too far.

It generally works better overall for the formerly poor to try to cast a little light on such subjects. It is much less of a shitshow.

<comment><USER21> Thank you for sharing your views on poverty. While HN is primarily about programming / tech, there is room for talk about society, etc. I don't agree with your points about being rate limited / banned, all views are valued here if they're inherently non-inflamatory.

Edit: Your Karma given your account is only 3 days old is quite contradicting of your views of HN

<comment><USER20> It's 3 months old, not 3 days.

I have been here 8.5 years. I just recently changed my name cuz reasons.

Overall, I get pretty well received. That doesn't mean I don't stress about it, etc. I am at times characterized by commenters as just having a chip on my shoulder about one thing or another and simply harping on it. So it isn't just me being paranoid. My concerns are based on observations of how others perceive me at times.

To be clear, it is not a criticism of the mods. They have been incredible. But I have been thrown off (or run off) of other sites. It would just be easier to remove me than to tell everyone else they need to figure out how to behave better towards me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > That's the correct financial decision, according to traditional economics—to > drive the extra distance no matter the original cost. Saving $50 is the same > regardless of the amount of the item in question. But wealthier participants > saw the savings in relative terms, noticing the percentage savings. By > contrast, poorer participants thought in absolute terms. To them, $50 saved > was $50 to spend on groceries or the electric bill.

Then traditional economics is a fool. Rich people value their time and their headspace. I've seen this again and again with someone close to me: they assign the same priority to tiny financial decisions as to big ones. They do make very optimized decisions but it is within a very small context. In the meantime they don't realise the world of opportunity they are not seeing because of their obsessive focus on small items.

<comment><USER23> You're misunderstanding the question they've posed people.

In either situation, the question is "is half an hour of transit worth $50 to you." Whether it's $50 saved on a $300 item or a $1000 item has no impact on the $ saved per minute.

<comment><USER24> Most people think about a dollar as a dollar.

They don't realise it's not worth focusing on saving a dollar here and there, if they then move ahead and overpay for a house or a car (e.g. by not negotiating).

Half the battle is getting a good (or great) deal on expensive, one off purchases, if possible (say everything above $2k). Don't worry about the rest. As with everything: 20% of the "work" gets you 80% of the way there.

You can then not worry about the smaller expenses -- the ones that are generally time consuming and annoying to track -- that tend to make your life miserable.

Yes, Starbucks is expensive, but you're not going to go bankrupt drinking their coffee. You're also not going to get rich by not drinking it.

<comment><USER25> > "Yes, Starbucks is expensive, but you're not going to go bankrupt drinking > their coffee."

I observed people spending 5$ both morning and lunch/day, but for arguments sake stick to 1/day. thats roughly 1300$/year. now imagine living paycheck to paycheck and spending that (very common). they end up taking on dept @20% interest.

in a 5 year window, just that spending on starbucks is effectively costing them nearly 10,000$.

edit: keep in mind, i heard the average 401k savings is ~5k

<comment><USER26> Starbucks could offer a 401k that comes with a free daily cup of coffee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> not only do the poor make affected decisions we also know that the poor (1) have a restricted set of feasible solutions (2) face higher uncertainty in outcomes due to the impaired ability to execute solutions (3) have limited ability to mitigate the consequences of a failed solution.

in addition, public policy tends to strip the poor of their agency, not to mention dignity: (1) their choices are dictated without the context of their situation (2) the actual risks they face are ignored or treated as if a wealthier person were to face these risks (3) their actual utility curve is discarded in place of the utility curve of the policymaker or the general public... and then should the poor continue to fail to make full use of these programs that are not only difficult for the target group to take up, but also humiliating and undermining confidence in helping themselves, they are chided for continuing to make poor decisions.

the article offers a few examples that overcame some problems affecting these people. but the story is very different between communities in which members are equally affected by limited resources and unequal communities. the separation of classes of people within a community with elevated inequality blinds the group to the myriad problems the poor face and leads to a caricature of the poor as incompetent - and it is this warped public perception and conversation that is holding back effective poverty programs.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's not poverty. It's stress. Poverty is very stressful. Any kind of stress stops people from acting the way they normally would be inclined to act. It takes a lot of conditioning and practice to deal with stress without having it impact you and your performance.

Take a little stress off your staff, and instantly everyone starts making better decisions, their work seems more focused. As a manager, the best thing I can do for my team is try and shield them from scope creep, angry clients, and unreasonable deadlines. And make sure everyone has time off when they need it.

Take care of your team, team will take care of the work.

<comment><USER29> It's also mental. When I was poor and finally got a "student" class credit card, i knew paying off the month's bill was the best option economically, i still could not get around the idea of giving up all my "cash" (money in the bank) to pay off the debt. Even though i could have simply paid off and then should something come up, use the zero balance credit card. No, i still wanted cash available. Knowing this was not the logical option.

<comment><USER30> The value of cash liquidity seems deep within much economic activity.

It's what, essentially, Adam Smith railed against in _Wealth of Nations_ , arguing that wealth was not gold and silver (liquidity) but real produce and labour capacity. And yet much present economic theory and practice is only so much neomerchantilism.

This makes me suspect a real foundation, at least psychologically, to the behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> See also Scalzi's "Being Poor" (2005): [https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being- poor/](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/)

An essay to drive home some aspects of living in poverty.

Sample: "Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

Being poor is knowing you can't leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.

Being poor is hoping your kids don't have a growth spurt."

</comment><comment><USER32> "Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor." - James Baldwin

</comment><comment><USER33> Trade is not a zero-sum game, in sum we gain. Cooperation leads to synergy. The sick and poor cost money. Having that in mind, I cannot understand why a country wouldn't give food and money and shelter to the poor. Without shelter, you get sick and can barely work. Without money, you are stressed and get sick. Without food, you get sick and can't work. It's obvious that even the hard working people have a better life when society helps the less fortunates ones. So, why on earth wouldn't a country do it? That would be unethical, irrational and economical madness.

</comment><comment><USER34> Homeless for nine months and about to be officially destitute tomorrow. At least I've had a vehicle to have shelter and live in a warm area.

Combo of Homelessness and poverty is a cycle that is quite difficult to get out of. I took on programming work from nice folks while still homeless, which absolutely backfired. Lack of a normal safe routine and attempting to work from public when under such stress can be an effort in futility. Thus couldn't work and couldn't get back on my feet. It's a vicious cycle

The other consequences are deteriorated mental state from isolation, paranoia, and depressive symptoms all of which serve to make digging out of any hole seemingly impossible.

Constant never ending stress, concerns about basic survival, concerns about physical safety change your mentality. Idgaf attitude prevails, to the point where crime including violence seem less unjustified.

I could go on, and obviously this is just an anectode

<comment><USER34> Bye bye!!!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The first time I saw abject poverty was in high school on a family trip to Hong Kong. I saw an skinny old lady, wearing literally rags, washing herself from a puddle. I had never seen that in the other countries that we went on family trips to. The image is burned into my brain.

I am lucky having grown up in a middle class family. My father also grew up in poverty and it affected me as well. He was able to provide for us bery well but the specter of being poor was burned into my psyche to an extremely unhealthy level. It lead to a decade of fear and broken relationships because I was so paranoid about losing my money and my livelihood.

Now the combined income of my wife and I make us easy 1%ers and my perceptions of money have changed again. Instead of saving every penny we made smart financial decisions, like buying a house that was very affordable instead of getting as big a house as we could pay for. I'm reasonably comfortable that I will have a job until I retire and I'm very sure my wife will. This allows us the luxury of spending money on things that we never would have, like nannies and cleaners, and traveling business class instead of economy.

It's something I never, ever, would have considered 20 years ago. When I was scared about money in my 20s and early 30s (never living in poverty,though) I felt vulnerable and that I could "fail". Going through the dotcom bust reinforced these feelings to the point where I went to the hospital several times due to anxiety attacks. I felt like this wouldn't last and "winter was coming" so I saved every penny and even ended relationships over money.

After a particularly bad breakup I realized I had a problem. My mindset now is I can always make more money if I lose my job. It might have to be something unpleasant but it can happen. I'm not wasteful with money but I don't obsess over it anymore. I'm grateful for being in this position obviously, because all it takes is a really bad recession for things to get really bad. Aside from a couple of perks, like the cleaners and nannies, I generally save most of my money for "winter". It's a position that, as I said, I'm grateful having. I have friends who aren't in the same position, and our mindsets in life are completely different.

</comment><comment><USER36> If you are poor you cannot shop sales the same what you can if you have money. Stocking up on items is not really an option.

<comment><USER37> I think you mean buying in bulk. Buying in bulk is great but often not because if it is food it might go bad before you eat it and if you are poor your limited on space... so huge packs of items don't fit well in your tiny space. Plus the up front cost is a real killer since the money is saved over time. And if you have more of something you might end up using more because it's convenient. And finally if you are splitting rent with many people they will help themselves to the bulk items.

<comment><USER38> There's a subtle difference between "buying in bulk" and "keeping a reasonable stock".

I grew up in a quite poor family and my parents are terrible with money. One thing that frustrated me to no end is that they would almost never buy something ahead of time. An item would literally have to run out before they'd consider buying its replacement, which meant I'd regularly get in the shower in the morning to find there is no soap, no toothpaste, no toilet paper.

You'd end up going to a local convenience store and paying 2x the price for the item because you need it now. Your grocery budget becomes hugely inflated, and you still end up buying the same necessities. Also when you work on a system of buying one item only to replace the previous, you really miss out on bargains because you have to pay the full price it is at the time you need it, instead of a week or two earlier when the same product was BOGOF.

At the same time, they throw away tonnes of food which has gone off because they can't plan meals and shopping consists of "we might eat that." Food which has a long expiry date (canned foods, etc) always runs out.

<comment><USER39> > You'd end up going to a local convenience store and paying 2x the price for > the item because you need it now. Your grocery budget becomes hugely > inflated, and you still end up buying the same necessities.

I see this at a lot at my local 7-11, many poorer people do a lot of their grocery shopping there even though an aldi is 5 minutes walk away (so it's actually closer for some of them, literally across the road) and three other supermarkets are under 15 minutes walk. I suspect there is some sort of psychological effect (possibly from advertising) that is compelling them to go to 7-11 instead of somewhere cheaper and that they aren't making a conscious financial decision.

<comment><USER40> Maybe that's why they're poor: Because they make poor financial decisions.

If they keep going to 7-11, they will not get any richer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is a large part of the culture change over the last 60 years. Those adults in the 50s grew up through the depression and war.

It was hard adapting to the prosperity of the 60s. The young literally could not understand their parents attitudes.

</comment><comment><USER42> I grew up in poverty. My dad is fortunately able to get tuition assistance through the Native American tribe he is a member of. With that assistance, he was able to graduate law school and become a lawyer. As soon as he did that and got his first job as an attorney, our lives changed dramatically. My fondest memory of that time was buying brand new clothes. That never happened before, at least not that I can remember. I was so amazing to wear clothes that weren't hand me downs that were initially purchased used from a thrift store.

The thing is, even with the tuition assistance, both of my parents had to work double shifts almost constantly to keep food on the table. I have many memories of my siblings and I coming home to an empty house in elementary school because my parents would be out working their ass off for us. Most weeks I wouldn't see them until the weekend. Now, as adults, my siblings and I are now living well enough in middle class.

Government programs and assistance for the poor can fail and can be taken advantage of by people who would rather squander that assistance, no doubt, but that doesn't mean all people are like that. It can and does work, but even with assistance, it is not enough. My dad was very fortunate to have a tuition free ride through law school, and we as a family were fortunate enough not to run into anything that derailed his desire or ability to finish law school. Without that tuition assistance, I doubt he could have secured the loans that were needed. Simply cutting assistance programs will not make poor people to 'get back to work' and dig themselves out of poverty. It was next to impossible to do so when I was growing up and it is even worse now.

Can those programs be better? Yes. Should we cut them because they aren't the best? Absolutely not. Please.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is not the first time this article has come up, and as usual I'll give my 2c.

What qualifies me to talk about this issue? I was raised in the UK on income support, single mother, social housing, low income city etc;

Now the situation has changed somewhat in the UK; back then in the UK it was possible to get by without going into debt if you were smart about things and I believe this no longer to be the case, but I am no longer in this system and; to qualify my statement further: it was not possible to be poorer than my mother was. No family and no registered father on record. (He would have had to pay child maintenance if he was on record, the state does not supply this if there is an absence)

What I found to be true is that my mother will buy the cheapest thing that will do the job, she will treat her time as unlimited in finding similar quality goods for less money. She still trawls second-hand stores and will not buy anything that needs maintenance.

Her cars tend to be 1-step from the junk-yard (even though she has a steady well paying job now).

For myself, I select heavily for things that require less maintenance too. I buy extremely high quality things because I assume that my job is temporary and that I will once-again be plunged into poverty, and if anything needs to be replaced in that time I may not have the financial freedom to do so. I do not have anything that requires recurring costs (no netflix, no apple music.. I will not subscribe to anything that is not a utility), I do not take long- term contracts (if there is a choice between 12months at a cheaper rate or month-to-month for 10% more I will pay the 10% more not to be tied).

This is my anecdatum, of my mother who grew up working class and became poor through choice, and for me, who grew up poor and became middle-class.

<comment><USER44> _she will treat her time as unlimited in finding similar quality goods for less money_

It is interesting you say this. I have a friend who struggles to get by. Single mom, two kids, a father who does the absolute bare minimum to provide support to his kids, and she is unemployed.

She does get support from the state (rent assistance, energy assistance, SNAP), but it is barely enough to squeak by and what little money is left over is quickly consumed with unexpected expenses.

With that said, I find she spends an exorbitant amount of time searching for "deals". It is not far-fetched for her to spend 2-3 hours to save a $1 on something. While apps like ebates, ibotta, etc.. have made these quick deals better, they still don't cut down on the time she spends. With the apps she spends just as much time searching through the deals or trying to find the best store to get something.

While it can be frustrating at times as a third-party sitting back watching her do this, I can somewhat sympathize. The most frustrating part to me is that she will sometimes say that there is not enough time in the day to get things done. I try to convey to her that at some point time is money. Meaning that she needs to evaluate the opportunity cost of saving a dollar versus spending 2-3 hours to save that dollar.

<comment><USER45> > It is not far-fetched for her to spend 2-3 hours to save a $1 on something.

That's not a far-fetched thing for a poor person to do. $1 can buy a can of beans and add nutrition to an otherwise hungry day.

> Meaning that she needs to evaluate the opportunity cost of saving a dollar > versus spending 2-3 hours to save that dollar.

Opportunities aren't unlimited, and the closer to poverty one is the shorter their term.

So she needs _short term_ opportunities that beat $1 savings for the 2-3 hour period. Short term here means the amount of time it would take her to spend the saved $1-- let's be optimistic and say two days.

What do you have for her that beats the $1 savings and beats it with the same (or better)predictability of success as searching for deals?

edit: clarification

<comment><USER46> Your comment is good. The relevant question is what can I do _right now_ to make money? Maybe Mechanical Turk? (can you make $1 in 2 hours?). The abundance of human potential sitting idle agonizes me.

<comment><USER45> Yes, I think you're right-- MT might be a better use of that time. But then, how many other opportunities look _very_ similar to MT but turn out to be scams? What damage can be done by taking out a payday loan?

I think another way to put what I wrote is that opportunity costs are a luxury one can afford once one has saved enough to move on from focusing solely on _catastrophic costs_ like losing food, shelter, electricity, etc.

OP's friend probably started searching for deals because it returned predictable savings and-- _most importantly_ \-- carried very little risk. The fact that she's filling lots of idle time with the same behavior is evidence of her poverty as she is probably not able to take on any greater risk for fear of catastrophic failure.

Thus it is suspicious when the OP analyzes only in terms of opportunity costs. It would be more persuasive to convey ideas in terms of catastrophic risk. But that's a more difficult problem to address and an area where the OP-- like most people-- has little expertise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Shafir and Mullainathan wrote a book called "Scarcity" that articulates an expanded version of this idea. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER48> I second the recommendation!

They are looking into several forms of scarcity (e.g. time scarcity of busy academics) and how this similarly affects the behaviour, creating a "focus" on the immediate scarcity that distracts from everything else, and prevents seeing the "big picture".

One interesting conclusion being that poverty is a "root" scarcity that begets other forms of scarcity.

Interesting was also the observation that scarcity-behaviour can have desirable outcomes and can be put to use (e.g. using budgeting as a form of artificial scarcity in personal finance).

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Some people think being poor is living paycheck to paycheck. The reality can be much worse.

</comment><comment><USER50> Frankly, a couple of rounds of Angry Birds doesn't seem like a great way to decide important policy. How many of the studies cited in the article were at least replicated a few times?

</comment><comment><USER51> One thing that looks paradoxical to me: In the first half it says people going through financially stressful situations suffers from deficit in IQ level and drop in cognitive performance. But at the same time, they can take smart and wise decisions as the experiments suggested.

</comment><comment><USER52> WNYC ran a _great_ podcast series on busting myths about poverty. Here's a link: [https://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty- myths](https://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty-myths)

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder how relevant is the question asked in the original article, or - maybe better said - to whom the question has been asked.

>The researchers asked real people of various socioeconomic strata if they were willing to travel an extra 30 minutes to save $50 on a $300 tablet. Some said they were. But when asked if they'd drive that far to save the same amount on a $1,000 tablet, some of the respondents changed their minds. Their answer depended on their income.

I wouldn't even think to ask such a question about buying a $300 (let alone $ 1,000) tablet to someone who clearly cannot afford it (the actual poor people).

I mean, when you are dealing with someone who is homeless or that is on foodstamps (or similar assistance for the very basic needs) are you really going to ask them about the $50 savings on a completely voluptuary item such as a tablet, particularly a $ 1,000 one?

And the question is about "driving" (implying that the "poor" has a car).

</comment><comment><USER54> I.could tell you a story about how my broken family made it all happen, how a family of 6 boys never made it better, a city or circumstance made the option to be wealthy almost impossible or how generations of economic destruction made me this way. But this all matters not, for what I think , I become.

The only 3 books you will ever need to break out of the cycle are these. ·THINK AND GROW RICH ·GRIT ·A PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE

They are all fundamentally written for you to find the answer on the first page, on the front cover, in every chapter, and of course within YOURSELF. Go now, Be rich.

"Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, but not you." \- Jim Rohn, [http://www.bquot.es/s/1023](http://www.bquot.es/s/1023)

</comment><comment><USER55> _The proportion of the global population living on less than $1.90 per person per day has fallen—from 18 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2013, according to the World Bank. In the United States, however, the poverty rate has been more stubborn—41 million people lived below the country's poverty line in 2016, about 13 percent of the population, nearly the same rate as in 2007._

Is this a fair comparison? I thought that the poverty line in the US was defined relative to median income. If the definition is changed to $X per day after inflation then maybe the US doesn't look so bad?

Also I would like to see some kind of adjustment for immigration. Imagine that the US lifts 10 million citizens out of poverty and at the same time accepts 10 million poor immigrants. Is it fair to say the US has made no progress on poverty?

</comment><comment><USER56> > US lawmakers have expressed frustration when investments such as welfare > programs don't pull people out of poverty.

Most US welfare spending is explicitly excluded from measures of poverty; if you're measuring "the values of X excluding Y", increasing Y isn't going to move the needle.

"The U.S. Census Bureau determines poverty status by comparing pre-tax cash income against a threshold..."

American anti-poverty measures overwhelmingly take the form of tax credits (eg, the EITC program), food stamps (SNAP), housing vouchers (section 8 vouchers), and health care (eg, Medicaid). All four are excluded when looking at pre-tax cash incomes. For good or ill, we don't _give_ the poor cash.

I know that's not really the point of the article, but it was a bit jarring.

</comment><comment><USER57> This is why I endorse [https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21731626-case- taxing-...](https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21731626-case-taxing- inherited-assets-strong-hated-tax-fair-one)

<comment><USER58> We already have an issue with business consolidation in the US and the decline of small businesses, I would be wary about anything that might contribute to it, as an inheritance tax might.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I grew up "spoiled" but my grand-parents lived the WWII in France, they weren't poor but they still live in frugality even if they are comfortable since many decades - ex: they do not eat lots of meat. I inherited this frugality and do not like to buy useless stuff.

My girlfriend, a russian who lived in USSR, is the complete opposite. She rely heavily on consumption to be "happy" and to fill an insecurity. It might be genetically cultural, but the communism sadness/deprivation has created generations of Russians who love consumption and luxury lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER60> Very interesting findings. The study seems to indicate that poverty is correlated with better economic decisions, unless the option to borrow is present, in which case, poverty correlates with poorer decisions.

<comment><USER61> That's also why giving money is a lot of time not a solution. Despite being easy, lazy and making people feel good about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Poverty is caused by low or no wages. Not a mindset or lack of education or any other BS. I am technically below the poverty line working as a software engineer on a startup and I work hard. If we made some money or got funded then I would be less poor.

The structural issue is unequal distribution of resources. It's not a personal mental health problem or weakness or other BS used to cover for racism.

Also since I have had less money I have made better decisions not worse. Because I have to.

</comment><comment><USER63> John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15041758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15041758)

</comment><comment><USER64> I might not belong to "poor" because my parents had money, but the thing was that they were extra ordinarily stingy when it came to spending it on me. This resulted in me going to school in torn pants etc

So now that I have money, I don't spend a dime of it. I use the same clothes, same cycle, the only thing I spend money on is books: I buy lots of it.

</comment><comment><USER65> I had a time in my life where I constantly used the calculator app on my phone.

salary - rent - transport - food * 30 < 0 is stressful. And this doesn't account for any incidental expenses.

I was blessed enough to have education, a social support circle, a safety net from parents, and some growth to look forward to. Despite that, the stress caused almost daily headaches.

Its a vicious cycle.

</comment><comment><USER66> I grew up on welfare well into elementary school and my mom married my stepdad who was delivering oil to gas stations up driving all night on trucks.

Before that I spent my first years in a trailer park where my mom had my older brother and I in her teens, living in a single wide with my biological father and his mother. My dad's mother and both of my parents were addicts and alcoholics. I was taken out of custody and lived with family members until I was about 5 before I could live with my mom again on food stamps when she was single. She found a job as a medical transcriptionist and living in a two bedroom sharing a bunk bed with my brother. She met my stepfather at a church when he was a trucker.

Noone in my family including my older brother graduated high school.

I made straight A's was bored as public schools in the south are notorously bad mine was no different with the exception of overcrowding, riots etc, and after my parents foreclosed on their house we moved into yet another tiny apartment but this one was closed to a bookstore. I walked to Barnes and nobles everyday after school and one day after reading the alchemist in one sitting I picked up a teen vogue (I'm a girl) in the 9th grade in highschool, and read a fashion edition on boarding school fashion ($350 Tori Birch flats) and I thought hmm boarding school sounds like it might be challenging....

I went home and applied to every boarding school in the northeast, got accepted into three and a scholarship to 2. I went to one and cried for three weeks when I made an unweighted 3.96gpa because I wanted a 4.0 and needed to get a good scholarship to afford college.

I went to an engineering school and got a degree in Electrical Engineering, I have worked my ass off and dealt with all of the nonsense of going to school with spoiled rich white boys who did engineering because their dad did engineering and spent their weekends on expensive getaway trips, binge drinking at frat houses with jobs waiting for them at their dads big engineering firm.

Luckily for me I met alot of great kids in college as well who were genuinely geeky and there for the experience, but it has not been fun being a girl in engineering and dealing with the nonsense with that plus all of the ignirnace associated with how easy some people have it relative to me and many people who have it way worse than me. I consider myself lucky to be curious and enjoy hard work, and grateful for all the rich people in my life who have donated literally hundreds of thousands of dollars so people like me could afford to have a good education. I am not slighted or bitter in any regard when it comes to understanding how lucky I am (I could have been a girl trying to go to school in a third world country with no rights money etc) in the grand scheme of things and I truly believe gratitude is a healthy attitude to have in life.

That being said, I genuinely think so many people, particularly young white males whose mother's baby them to not end through their 20s have never struggled a day in their life and cannot understand what it's like to have to budget for a vacation, or food for that matter, buy their own first car and not be able to afford.to fly home on the holidays in college.

When I interned in Manhattan in college I actually met guys who tried to impress me by saying they came from nothing because their dad "only gave me $10,000 to invest when they were 18 and wouldn't give me anything else after that" (accept.of course all the luxuries in their life up to that point, including a good education, summer camps at ivy leagues, a brand new car and a fully paid for $200k tuition with no loans, but I digress...). I sat next to a kid at orientation at the company I was working for complaining about his stock options being limited for 10 weeks due to conflict of interest for the company we were working for. Stock? Wow, I was excited to get my first paycheck so I could pay rent. But these kids swear they "came from nothing".

And many girls I went out with I ended up not being able to hang out with because they would go shopping for Jimmy choose ($600 heels) and to clubs where shots are $50 a pop. I couldn't afford to socialize with them and it never occurred to any of them an $80 sushimi dinner with cocktails could be an affordability issue. They were living in Soho, I was in the Bronx living paycheck to paycheck. It was the first income I had ever had.

I genuinely think there is a level of non intentional ignorance about what it really means to come from nothing and it's a big deal considering politics plays into inner city education, taxes etc.

I'd honestly love to see some of these guys I worked with walk a day in my shoes and try to show up in Manhattan at the age of 21 with $300k to liquidate, no debt and a sports car with my background, and try to lecture me about how I'm not "confident" enough and that's my issue when it comes to advocating for myself in the business world.....

I will cry them a river

<comment><USER67> Reminds me of the recent comic about privilege.

Most young people are quite sheltered, and many old ones as well. Ignorance is rampant. Wouldn't take it personally.

Despite a lack of resources at least you got some brains, some in the same situation aren't so lucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> You guys should really read this related piece : [http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/why-poverty-is- like-...](http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/why-poverty-is-like-a- disease)

</comment><comment><USER69> "The proportion of the global population living on less than $1.90 per person per day has fallen—from 18 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2013, according to the World Bank."

Is this because $1.90 is 2008 money is equivalent to $2.50 now?

</comment><comment><USER70> Dickens taught us to look at the poor and think, "There but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford."

At some point this transformed into looking at the poor and thinking, "Loser."

Governments should lean on our media to mediate this message.

<comment> le-mark Interesting, took me a while to discern your meaning here[1]. I had never heard of John Bradford, but basically, it's in the spirit of "There but for the grace of God, goe I".

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Wanna change your mindset? Ill keep it simple to save us all time to START reading.

Read these 3 books, even if its just one chapter of each book in any order, but READ them!

They will change your mind more than any money ever can.

·THINK AND GROW RICH - Napoleon Hill · GRIT - Angela Duckworth · THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE - Rick Warren

</comment><comment><USER71> Or how money changes your mindset ?

</comment><comment><USER72> The question I have is: in the ideal society, should anyone have to live with the consequences of their actions without a government safety net to save them? It seems that the liberal answer is "no" and that "nobody is ever at fault for a bad circumstance, and the government should always provide a free solution to get people out of any trouble they are in"

\- Examples: health, abortion, addiction, debt, bad money management, etc.</comment>


Yehuda Katz and Tilde.io - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nitrous.io/2013/08/05/nitrous-stories-i-yehuda-katz-tilde-nitrousio.html

<comment><USER2> This is a really well-constructed piece of marketing. Yes please, I do want to code like Yehuda Katz! Sure, I'll connect my entire web presence to your service to earn credit!

But is nobody else concerned about needing an internet connection to write code? It looks possible to sync a local repo with their boxes when connected, dropbox-style. But the use case they appear to be focusing on is their in- browser collaborative IDE, which is all kinds of problematic for me in cases like using my own bash settings, coding on airplanes, simulating my production environment, coding on life rafts on approach to a refugee flotilla in the Pacific ocean, and just plain hating latency.

Looks like a perfect for coding on a Chromebook or similarly handicapped machine. For the time being, though, I like my dev environments like I like my video games - offline.

<comment><USER3> For those few precious moments that I'm not coding, I shouldn't be coding anyways. I've been using nitrous on a 4G Virgin mobile hotspot while I travel. It's a bit slower, but fine. Still easier than keeping my machine configured and the IDE is quite good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used a friend's Chrome Pixel exclusively for the last week, as I was in between work laptops. I wanted to make some changes to an old App Engine app, and instead of figuring out how to dual boot it and all that, I decided to try Nitrous. I was able to clone the repo, get my build tools running with Node and Ruby (handlebars, compass), run a local App Engine server and preview it, deploy the changes to App Engine, and push the changes back to the repo.

The neat thing about using Nitrous is that I could theoretically work on that app from any machine now, and not have to set up a bunch of tools that I don't use otherwise.

So, I might keep trying to use it for my little side apps, the ones that I work on once a year and don't necessarily have an environment set up for.

They were also super helpful on Twitter, on a Sunday.

</comment><comment><USER5> It would help me out if anyone wanting to try this out signed up with [https://www.nitrous.io/join/X01nmhYHezs](https://www.nitrous.io/join/X01nmhYHezs)

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm about to try this out, actually. Anyone else tried nitrous?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, nitrous is awesome - been using it for several months (with ember, rails & sinatra). I'm actually in it now. This is the future, for sure. Having a pre-configured box is a dream. I was able to create a new nitrous box (ubuntu), clone an app and have it running in three minutes. Took me all day to configure my Mac for rails...

Shameless plug: [https://www.nitrous.io/join/BiSdgSxLjIk](https://www.nitrous.io/join/BiSdgSxLjIk)

<comment><USER6> just signed in, going to play with it around a little. Thanks for the invite!

<comment><USER3> Hey, thanks for the 'nitrous' which gives me the ability to spin up more boxes. I keep trying to get them to take my money, but I think they're trying to work the network effect thing before charging.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the invite. My mac air's fan was running really loud, so this way all of the stress from running the local server is gone and I'm not all edgy about it. It was pretty easy to get all setup this morning. Just deployed to production a little while ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wave coming.

</comment><comment><USER8> When Yehuda needs money he came online to tell us some funny story.

I think he isn't happy for 50K DOLLARS got on kickstarter (1) for doing "nothing". He is a "writer" and "performance guy" but after merging his "thing" merb into rails 3 he quit leaving rails with a lot of issues and poor performances (compared to rails 2.0) and Merb... dead, as 99% of his "open source". He started bundler (badly) and leaving it in a bad shape to be fixed by someone else, same for thor and moneta ...

Now, late evening, his crew is giving him some points and comments to this crapware in order to get some visibility.

Give him your money!

He use the "opensource" only to increase his income, nothing else.

[1] [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp)

<comment><USER9> Yikes. This is pretty inaccurate.

Rails.app (now Tokaido) is on Github [1] and is coming along quite nicely. Our designer used a build of it to get one of our Rails apps up and running quite smoothly last week. It was super slick and as far as I can tell, there's no indication of it being at alpha or beta stage. It already works great.

Not to mention that Tilde has been working on Ember.js and developing Skylight.io as well. They're keeping busy and producing A TON.

Usually I wouldn't respond to this kind of thing but I think it's a pretty tough sell to anyone that Yehuda isn't working his ass off with the rest of Tilde.

[1]: [https://github.com/tokaido/tokaidoapp](https://github.com/tokaido/tokaidoapp)

<comment><USER10> As an outsider (no opinion on OP/wycats), I'm curious why the Rails.app is being developed under the name "Tokaido"? I remember the kickstarter campaign coming up on HN/twitter a while back with the Rails.app branding and was curious why I never heard about it after. Even the github repo readme doesn't mention rails?

<comment><USER11> See the blog post here, which is from over a year ago: [http://yehudakatz.com/2012/04/13/tokaido-my-hopes-and- dreams...](http://yehudakatz.com/2012/04/13/tokaido-my-hopes-and-dreams/)

<comment><USER12> I don't see the post explaining the rename, other than stating that at its core that the app is really a binary distribution of ruby (that can do rails things via statically linked libraries), hence IMO ruby.app might be a more appropriate name than rails.app from a technical perspective.

<comment><USER6> But from a legal perspective, you're kinda dead on the water, so that's the point.

<comment><USER12> My point was that while the linked article was interesting, it didn't explain why it was renamed (although the author did do so in this thread.)

<comment><USER6> I agree with you there. Thats some crucial information that should have been put in the article rather than explained in this thread where no one is ever likely to see it.

<comment><USER12> You're not understanding me. (This isn't too important, but I'll explain.)

dmix asked why the company was renamed. ics referred dmix to a post. I pointed out that the post ics pointed to doesn't answer dmix's question. wycats had written this in the past and shouldn't be accountable to ics linking to it for this purpose.

<comment><USER11> I knew that the article did not specifically address the change but at least made it clear that the change had been in place for some time. It was my mistake for forgetting to include reference to the tweet from wycat which did specifically address the question.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Passwords are Obsolete - <AUTHOR> http://passwordless.org/

<comment><USER2> Article proposes a variant of auth via SMS or email. An interesting idea if SMS or email could be considered "secure"

<comment><AUTHOR> They're not in any meaningful sense (excepting the rare service supporting encrypted email), but password reset mechanisms are already equally insecure.</comment></comment>


Heatmap of Twitter knowledge by location (heatmap.js + Google Maps) - <AUTHOR> http://www.inboxq.com/location <comment><USER2> Neat, but on just about every topic there's a huge bias towards California, North East Coast, and England (because those are tech hubs?).

<comment><USER3> Agreed. This would be way cooler if it took total tweet density into consideration so that it wasn't always London, NY and LA.

<comment><USER4> Definitely something we've considered for a future enhancement. Our summer intern worked on this map over the last few days and we wanted to release it before he headed back to the UK later this week.

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't mind getting my hands on a summer intern who could turn that out in a few days.

<comment><USER4> James is awesome. And, we found him via Hacker News!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Population size needs to be factored in. NYC, LA/SF, Boston, London, Chicago, and a couple other large cities are pretty much always the top, primarily because they are the largest English speaking population centers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Might be nice if the map didn't hide part of the world (Australia, New Zealand etc)

<comment><USER7> Sad to see that Australia didn't make the cut :(

It looks like they're fetching a static image from Google Maps and using a jQuery library to do the heatmap (which uses canvas). Not sure why they made it that way. Would have been a perfect fit if they fetched a rectangular map and got moved that text on the right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be great to do something like this for an election. A heatmap for people who voted #red or #blue. Seems like a lot of neat uses for this.

</comment><comment><USER9> On topics where there's not many tweets (e.g. haskell), it's nearly impossible to tell that anything on the map changed at all. Perhaps the data also needs to be normalized?

<comment><USER7> Yeah it needs a few things done before it can become usable. Get rid of the assumption knowledge = frequency of keyword. Normalize the data. Account for population differences.

Would also be nice if you could pan around but it looks like the code relies on a static image.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the great suggestions. All are features that we'll add in the future. The goal was really to get something out there that had a small bit of utility and spend more time on it if people found the visualization interesting. As I mentioned a few threads up, this is something that our outgoing summer intern worked on during his last few days with us and we wanted to release it before he headed back to school.

<comment><USER7> You're most welcome! I hope I didn't come off too harsh - I understand it's an early preview as most things are. I look forward to seeing it flourish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice idea, but no queries I could think of yielded any surprises, and almost every topic was dominated by the media capitals of NY, LA, and London.

Apparently, also, there is no expertise worth plotting anywhere in Asia or even Australia.

It was more fun to type in diseases and pretend the overlay was a map of contagion. EG: [swine flu]... There's a massive outbreak 1500 miles west of the Galapagos!

<comment><USER11> I hunted around for a few things like "node.js", "Php", "True Blood", "Harry Potter", etc... they all fit within the same pattern you noted. (with minor, or not-unexpected variances)

My favorite was "Maple Syrup"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Gotta wonder what the defn of 'knowledge' is here - just mentions of the keyword? Does that indicate knowledge?

<comment><USER4> No- it's not just keyword mentions. Our main product analyzes the both the content of an individuals Tweets and social factors to make decisions about what they know. I'd be happy to share more about how we do that- shoot me a note at email@example.com if you want to chat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You need to normalize the results by population density.

Pretty much anything I type, I get the same results - NY + LA + SF + London.</comment>


Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid - <AUTHOR> http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/justice-et-affaires-criminelles/actualites-judiciaires/201505/26/01-4872822-saisie-chez-uber-des-donnees-auraient-ete-modifiees-a-distance.php <comment><USER2> Hacker News is an English-language site. We don't in the least disparage other languages, but a submission like this is off topic here.

<comment><USER3> I'd really prefer some latitude offered for stories which:

1\. are generally significant, particularly

2\. about a company closely followed by the HN community, and where

3\. no obvious english-language alternative exists.

Sometimes it's through just such postings that the English language coverage _is_ initiated.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Background: Uber's offices in Montreal were raided a few days ago by Revenue Quebec: [http://globalnews.ca/news/1998322/montreal-uber-offices- raid...](http://globalnews.ca/news/1998322/montreal-uber-offices-raided-by- revenu-quebec/) . What is new news is that the URL above (a major Montreal newspaper) says that the local CEO called Uber HQ in San Francisco, who then tried to remotely encrypt data on Uber corporate servers, laptops, phones, and so on, during the raid. Revenue Quebec investigators noticed and are now expanding their seizure order.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is funny to see how 30+ different governments are now up in arms against something that is essentially just a set of computers running on the internet, i.e. the Uber platform.

I wonder how many copycats will spring up in the future, and become Uber2, Uber3,and so on?

In Canada, Uber obviously made a serious mistake. They should not be physically present anywhere. Their strategy does not work, if governments can physically attack them. They are themselves missing the point about themselves.

I see governments everywhere seething and claiming that they want to shut down AirBnb, but where to do that? AirBnb does not have offices or staff over there, and therefore make it impossible for these governments to engage in their core business, that is, to use violence in order to impose their stupidity onto others.

<comment><USER5> Or block of their bank transactions.

<comment><USER6> Bitcoin

<comment><USER7> That'd probably cut AirBnB's customer base to 1% of what it's now.

<comment><USER8> Not if the app converts USD into Bitcoins on the fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I dont understand why they were trying to do this remotely?

Wouldnt it have made more sense to have all the devices already encrypted? Then if someone does a raid - simply turn off all the devices - and your protected?

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure what the benefit of encryption there is anyway. Governments have a very effective way of decrypting stuff like this: getting a court order to hold employees in prison until the data are decrypted.

Maybe they have no actual non-contractor employees in Québec? I'd be pretty pissed off if I was sitting in a Québec jail because someone in SF decided that during a raid was the appropriate time to implement encryption on my devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are we sure that the government agency really understood what happened here? It may be that a single laptop was doing a file vault update or something, and they jumped all over the place.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, we're pretty sure... if you read the article, you might be, too: multiple laptops and cell phones were remotely rebooted via the remote management facility at the same time (10:40), leaving them in an encrypted and unlockable state.

Commenters seem to think their servers were being remotely encrypted as well, but I didn't see any info to that effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What strikes me as odd about this is that the laptops weren't encrypted to begin with.

Relying on remote encryption to protect the data could have been defeated by simply taking the network offline at the beginning of the raid.

Potentially a remote lock prevents employees of Uber Canada being ordered to decrypt the data as they lack the means, but presumably such a court order would lead to head office having to decrypt the data anyway.

</comment><comment><USER14> >Investigators are looking for evidence to demonstrate Uber Canada is violating the tax law by not collecting GST and QST on behalf of its drivers to UberX.

For those who don't want to google translate. Further down it says that this is one of those things Uber doesn't think it has to do because it's an app, not an employer. Quebec seems to disagree and be willing to follow up.

</comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of Cryptonomicon, [http://www.euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide82.html](http://www.euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide82.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if the devices were actually encrypted already, and were simply rebooted so they would all be sitting at a boot password prompt.

</comment><comment><USER17> If the devices were encrypted beforehand, would that even help?

I wonder if these actions could be legitimized by Uber claiming that they were merely trying to protect user data.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, no FDE on laptops, etc.? I'm glad Uber just hired Joe Sullivan as CISO; seems like best practice for any reasonable company these days.

</comment><comment><USER19> Oh, man.

An attempted coverup is often punished harshly. Richard Nixon and Martha Stewart should have taught everyone that. How is this not obstruction of justice[1], or whatever Canada calls it?

       Obstruction charges can also be laid
       if a person alters, destroys, or conceals
       physical evidence

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

<comment><USER20> Obstruction of justice might be punished less harshly than whatever the data they were encrypting implicates them in.

Generally the best legal strategy is to not do anything illegal, but sometimes that window has already closed ;)

<comment><USER21> Was this article just removed from the front page?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Un peu trop tard Uber...

</comment><comment><USER23> Is anyone else excited for this development? This is going to make good reading for months to come...

<comment><USER24> Get your popcorn ready, Canada's going to set Uber on fire.

According to the article (and what I can make of it via Google Translate) this is for tax reasons, because Canada considers Uber Canada an employer and it must collect tax.

I honestly don't understand why they would bother doing this what with an almost certain Obstruction of Justice charge and the fact that it's pretty obvious that money goes from people to workers via Uber.

<comment><USER25> I don't know anything about the formal structure of working as an Uber driver, but could Uber make the argument that their drivers work for the passengers and that Uber merely facilitates the connecting of drivers to passengers?

<comment><USER24> I think Canada's revenue service wanted to obtain evidence that money went through Uber from consumers to employees. If it were possible to pay any Uber rider directly (perhaps with a separate payment to Uber) then Canada couldn't call Uber drivers "employees." But they are, really. Uber processes the transaction and skims some off the top while passing on the rest to a driver. So Uber drivers are employees in Canada (or will be soon, at any rate)

<comment><USER26> That's quite an autocorrect snafu.

<comment><USER24> Um, yeah. I guess I had it coming, with the length of that comment and my inability to check my writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> wow, this clearly is criminal behavior from Uber HQ. Instead of fully complying with the investigation and using legal means to contest it they are behaving like a bunch of pedophiles trying to encrypt their hard drives so the police cannot get to their kiddy porn stash, despicable...

edit: obviously i'm not against data encryption it's just funny how encryption is used in this case to obstruct justice, article in French, obviously but the headings are saying something like this :

        SF Uber engineers attempted to remotely encrypt the
        data of Uber Canada computers during a search at Uber
        Canada headquarters led by the Québec IRS in Montréal
        last week.

        Search at Uber Canada's office

        Last May 14, dozens of investigators from "Revenue Québec"
        proceeded in searching computers at Uber Canadas's office,
        on Notre-Dame street. Investigators were looking for evidence
        showing that Uber Canada is violating tax laws

        Around 10:40 am, one of the investigators noticed
        that "some handsets, computers and tablets
        were remotely turned on" during the search. Another
        female investigator, who was performing a second
        search warrant in another office, noticed the
        same exact phenomenon, also at 10:40 am."computers
        were being remotely accessed and manipulated, we took
        control of them then turned them down given the
        emergency and the high risk of remote data
        manipulation", can be read in the case made by judge
        Jean-Pierre Braun

(work in progress)

<comment><USER28> Only pedophiles encrypt data?

<comment><USER29> Nothing he wrote implies that. He offered pedophiles as an example of a class that uses encryption to aid crime, not as an exhaustive list of all classes that use encryption.

If I wrote that in a recent program I used a functional approach, like they do in Lisp, would you think I'm claiming that Lisp is the only language with functional programming support? Because that's the kind of error you made in reading his statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Uber is constantly trying to run from the law but eventually the law will catch up with them and finish this farce. Good.</comment>


Wisdom of the Ancients (on googling errors) - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/979/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets this a lot.

There's also a hilarious variation when you google for an error, the first result is a thread on stackoverflow, and it's closed. The only reply being a mod's assertion that the question has been answered elsewhere. And then you're left digging around SO for what feel like hours, looking for this mythical answer. Sometimes in vain.

On a lighter note, kudos to the SO mods who go to the trouble of posting a link to a thread with answers when they close a duplicate. If one of you is reading this, know that you rock. Please hit the ones who don't follow your example around the head with a large blunt object. Thank you.

<comment><USER2> This is probably my all time favorite XKCD ever. It is just painfully true and funny. And yes, I've felt like the guy in it so many times.</comment></comment>


Testing Complex Systems with Maintainable Test Suites – Podcast - <AUTHOR> https://testandcode.com/77 <comment><AUTHOR> Creating maintainable test suites for complex systems. The episode describes some complexities involved with hardware testing, then shares techniques for shifting complexity out of the test cases.

* quick overview of what test instruments are * discussion of API and communication with instruments * techniques for shifting complexity out of test cases

These techniques should apply to all test suites dealing with complex systems:

* Creating test cases that are easy to read and debug and tell a story about what is being tested. * Pushing setup complexity into fixtures. * Pushing lengthy repetitive API call sets into helper functions. * Using stable, documented, interfaces.</comment>


Why T.S. Eliot still matters - <AUTHOR> https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/may-june-2020/why-t-s-eliot-still-matters/ <comment><USER2> I remember the first time I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It spoke to me, powerfully.

I tried The Wasteland next, but I didn't get it.

<comment><USER3> You have to be in the right frame of mind. I think it can help to look at it like a series of short stories, each one building up a psychological or philosophical premise under the surface that is then layered onto by the next.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because, Cats.

</comment><comment><USER5> In the public forum, Eliot's stature does seem to be high. Yet I wonder how many people celebrating him are under the age of thirty. Readers over thirty are likely to have discovered him in decades past when, firstly, there was more of a culture of actual print books (Eliot's long and intricate verse works best on the physical page), and secondly, much of the canon (and the whole idea of a canon) had not yet been so savagely criticized as white, male and elitist.

Readers under the age of thirty, on the other hand, may have grown up discovering poetry through a phone screen, and for readers who believe that favoring female and minority voices is a moral and ethical issue, Eliot's male and privileged background works against him.

Thus, while Eliot's stature is momentarily high because readers of an older generation with older values are presently in a position of authority and can celebrate him, I suspect a critical backlash in the years to come.

<comment><USER6> > and for readers who believe that favoring female and minority voices is a > moral and ethical issue, Eliot's male and privileged background works > against him.

I find it strange that you suggest younger readers would pass over Eliot given his race and background. If one is going to mix ethics and art, surely the fact that Eliot was an adamant anti-semite would be considered long before Eliot's race or background.

Even when Eliot was alive, there were calls from those in the currently "over thirty" crowd to discard Eliot (or fellow anti-semites like Ezra Pound) from literary study.

My own impressions of "under thirty readers" is far more favorable than yours. They seem as thoughtful as ever and take a very nuanced view of such issues. I think one can recognize the brilliance of Eliot's work, but also argue that time for literary study is limited at every level, so making cuts is inevitable. If we are making cuts anyway, arguing that diversity and ethical considerations are worth considering seems quite reasonable.

<comment><USER7> The literary critic, Christopher Ricks, disputes that characterization of Eliot as an anti-semite. He wrote a book in defense of him here: [https://www.amazon.com/T-Eliot-Prejudice-Christopher- Ricks/d...](https://www.amazon.com/T-Eliot-Prejudice-Christopher- Ricks/dp/0571170358)

<comment><USER8> "And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London."

[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47254/gerontion](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47254/gerontion)

There is no disputing Eliot's antisemtism. Eliot was born in the late 1800s. Back then pretty much everyone, especially the educated, were antisemites and racist. Even the "lovable" Albert Einstein was racist. It was a different world/time. And the racism of Eliot or Einstein doesn't detract from the work. You have to separate the art/science from the artist/scientist.

<comment><USER7> "Back then pretty everyone were antisemites and racist".

That's a pretty bold statement, but I will add that the modern state of Israel could not have come about without some key luminaries who stood up for the Jewish people. One being Benjamin Disraeli, UK prime minister. Among many others. In fact, it could be argued that the uk in the 1800s was one of the friendliest places for Jews to live and work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's assuming he ever mattered in the first place, as good an example as any of begging the question.

<comment><USER10> He didn't. He was a fad of high school English teachers in 2000-2005, so now a handful of 30-somethings think he was some kind of important figure. Silly.

<comment><USER11> Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN. You've done it a lot, unfortunately, and it's not what this site is for.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER10> How is it unsubstantive?

<comment><USER11> It is a shallow dismissal, snarky, and a non sequitur, for starters.

<comment><USER10> Should I find all the other comments that mimic mine in the past week to see if you've singled them out? There's twitter threads full of them.

<comment><USER10> Never long dang you're right. I won't comment or submit anything again. I clearly don't understand the criteria. Cheers.

<comment><USER11> You're entirely welcome to participate here, and it's not hard to understand the criteria, if you read the guidelines and take the intended spirit of the site to heart. Basically, we want to have a place on the internet that's good for curious conversation and manages to escape the default outcome of internet forums, which is to decline and eventually destroy themselves.

If you take a look at these links maybe the reason why we do things this way will get a little clearer, and if not, we're happy to answer any questions from users who sincerely want to use HN as intended.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20scorched%20earth&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20stave&sort=byDate&type=comment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> He wrote a whole collection about cats. Cats are like 56% of the internet right? Definitely still matters.

</comment><comment><USER13> "...what can be saved from the ruins"

What ruins would this apply to now? I see that the mission statement of the magazine is "defending Western civilization". Erm...

<comment><USER14> Law of the jungle's where it's at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Waste Land might be the most pretentious thing I've ever read. It just oozes self-importance. I've never seen any work that could be described as great that has an overt peacocking quality to it.

<comment><USER11> If you think that's bad, try Byron. "Overt peacocking" has been a thing in poetry for centuries. The hiphop of our era is an example.

I have the opposite impression of Eliot though. I thought self-erasure was a core principle of his poetics.</comment></comment>


Lead Poisoning in Rome – The Skeletal Evidence - <AUTHOR> http://www.poweredbyosteons.org/2012/01/lead-poisoning-in-rome-skeletal.html?m=1 <comment><AUTHOR> A comment by Gibbon1 linked to this page, and it was so good I shared it here - fascinating, good science and well written :-)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=17353039&goto=threads%...](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=17353039&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dlifeisstillgood%2317353039)

<comment><USER2> Yes, it's great article indeed.

As an aside, we _really_ should start teaching and understanding history not as much as single atomic events but rather the cultural outcomes of the biological, economical and geographical agents of change.</comment></comment>


Show HN: a HN android app (weekend project) - <AUTHOR>

I've  been playing around with Android development recently, and made this Hacker News app this weekend:
Market link: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mellort.hackernews ($1)
Dropbox link: http://db.tt/jlqIcBg1 (free: if you like it, DL from the market, too!)
I used api.ihackernews.com for the data. Unfortunately, some of the pagination from that source is broken, so I can only return one page of results. In the future, I might play around with creating my own API server on App Engine.
I'm not sure what my plans are for the source yet, but I'd like to make it open source. If you're interested, let me know, and I can prioritize cleaning up the code.
This was a make-it-work-and-publish-ASAP project, so there are obviously a lot of things that could be added, but I'd appreciate any feedback, regardless. Cheers! <comment><AUTHOR> Links:

Market link: <https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mellort.hackernews> ($1)

Dropbox link: <http://db.tt/jlqIcBg1> (free: if you like it, DL from the market, too!)</comment>


Why obsessing over conversion rate is a waste of time - <AUTHOR> http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/conversion-rate-is-a-waste/

<comment><USER2> This is an awful, awful headline. Entirely misleading.</comment>


Show HN: C# Online fiddler with references, error linting and inteisense - <AUTHOR> http://volatileread.com/UtilityLibrary/SnippetCompiler <comment><AUTHOR> Feedback appreciated</comment>


Tell HN: You know who needs content? Patients in hospitals - <AUTHOR>

I just met an elderly woman in the hospital today. She has been bedridden for a month, in serious but stable condition. In speaking with her, the thing she longs for the most, besides company, is something to read. Books, magazines, anything positive, uplifting and informative.
What I'm suggesting to all entrepreneurs is you could be doing a service in your community, by handing out magazines and books to the many patients who enjoy reading. They have the time to read it.
It would also be an opportunity to bring awareness to your own brand. If it's content you produce, maybe you could package that up and distribute that with a stack of other magazines and books (as long as it's not too esoteric).
The main reason you would want to do this is to bring relief and a smile to the faces of those who are sick and injured. They are often bored and lonely. Yet, depending on what you love to do and what your passion is, you might be able to share that as well.
Maybe someone here can work with this idea. <comment><USER2> Honest questions (and from these questions you can probably tell that I haven't spent much time in Hospitals):

1 - Are you saying mere access to content is the problem? Do Hospitals have limited reading material? Do libraries not provide outreach services to patients? Do friends/family not bring content?

2 - Is there a need and/or market to create/aggregate content specific for this audience?

3 - Anything more specific about the content besides being uplifting? Seems like a broad range of content is needed, which is proving a challenge to my brain.

4 - Is there a technology angle to this at all? Hospitals aren't well connected, old people (who account for a lot of people in Hospitals I'd assume) aren't very tech savvy. I mean, given your audience here, is there something we can do at a technical level to help?

<comment><USER3> As someone who has spent a lot of the last year in and out of hospital:

The problem for me was that all content distribution in the hospitals... the TV, the magazine trolleys, the "library" (another trolley)... were all controlled by small private companies who have made deals with the hospital.

The content is old, seriously lacking in variation (you can have any magazine you want, as long as it's a women's gossip/variety mag), and it's always the same stuff (a few basic cable TV channels that have been recorded, and set on loop).

I had ENDLESS ideas while laying in the beds about technology-based ideas that would make patients a LOT happier, from tablets filled with RSS-fed content from major media companies (+ blogs), to a free WiFi service (if they bring their own laptop/tablet/phone) that is sponsored by marketing, to a subscription-based WiFi connection that gives them proxied web access and where part of the profits go back to the hospital as a donation.

The truth of the situation is, the hospitals won't allow it. They're scared of technology because of interference with equipment, and they're scared of any new content providers in the form of books/magazines/etc because they'll upset the decades-old partnerships with the current partners, and they're pretty much just unable to even comprehend or process any "new ideas" due to the size of the bureaucracy involved at your average hospital.

Again, this is just my view, from my local hospitals. It's different all over the world, and maybe elsewhere there are hospitals that are more open to experimenting with new ways to entertain patients.

<comment><USER4> FWIW in the UK all hospital beds have their own TV/Internet/Phone device that is attached to the wall and swings over the bed to where you want it. It costs money to use, but you can at least watch what you want, browse the web, send emails etc etc.

My time 'inside' was made much easier having that.

We're lucky in the UK though.</comment></comment></comment>


A Spring-like dependency injection container for Objective-C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jasperblues/spring-objective-c

<comment><USER2> Looks neat. Thanks for this!</comment>


Further panning of the arsenic life claims - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/05/further_panning_of_the_arsenic.php

<comment><USER2> As of May 30, 2011, the criticisms are available on Science XPress (Science's pre-print publication venue): <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/recent>

The full-text PDFs appear to be free/public access.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Suggestion for a procedure to test claims of arsenic-based life:

[http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-test- arsenic-d...](http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-test-arsenic-dna- claims.html)</comment>


Never sanitize your inputs (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hackensplat.com/2013/09/never-sanitize-your-inputs.html <comment><AUTHOR> Came up in a separate HN thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11674740](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11674740)</comment>


Tutorial: How to build your own peer-to-peer chat app (like Couple) - <AUTHOR> https://www.hipmob.com/documentation/tutorials/couple.html

<comment><USER2> So my understanding is that this is not really peer-to-peer in the sense that connections are made with a server in the middle of two clients. Unless I got something wrong, connections are not handled stirctly from a client to another.

Or am I completely lost?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're not completely lost at all - your description is correct. All connections are made with a server in the middle.

<comment><USER3> Then it's not peer-to-peer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone - Ayo from Hipmob here. We published Couple a few days ago and thought it would be helpful to show how we put it together. We've also published the source on github (<https://github.com/Hipmob>) so you can take a look at the server & client side bits if you want. Would love feedback at email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER4> Just an FYI, but the website is unusable on mobile (Android ICS). The sidebar navigation completely overlaps the text when zoomed in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for flagging this for us. Can't replicate the error at the moment, but will take jQueryIsAwesome's advice. Meantime, if you get a sec please send a screenshot?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am so offended!! Why is this only limited to any two people? What about interspecies relationships?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah! No users have asked for this yet, but if you can think of features you'd like that would make this super easy, we'll build em. :)</comment></comment>


News or 'Trauma Porn'? Student Journalists Face Blowback on Campus - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/us/college-campus-journalists-newspapers.html <comment><USER2> Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21529455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21529455) .</comment>


Fukushima radiation levels underestimated by five times – TEPCO - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/news/fukushima-radiation-levels-underestimated-143/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am still "on the fence" concerning what will happen in the future ... however all I have seen so far is TEPCO's lying and dissembling - their OODA loop is deny/delay/obfuscate it seems. Until it is capped and truly cleaned up, it makes sense to pay attention to news about Fukushima.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you guys avoid duplication of code? - <AUTHOR> As the organisation grows even past 10 people, we see that people create modules which are already present and duplicate the code. What is the most effective way to control this? A partial solution would be Sonar code scan. But then it can catch the syntactical duplication if I am not wrong. What about logical duplication like to read release version we can have 2 classes - ReleaseVersionReader and ReleaseVersionInfo.
It looks almost impossible to achieve in larger organisation with 100s of employees.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Does the code work? When it stops working then worry about it. Why are you pulling your hair out over duplicate code. Do you know how much duplicate code there is in the Linux Kernel? Gee man, my nerves a shock!

</comment><comment><USER3> IMPE, the most seasoned developers on the project (e.g.: ten years or more) had the experience, that comes with age in position, to know when redundant code was being made and they voiced such during code-reviews for pull- requests.

The intrinsic problem with this approach, of course, is that you need the people to stick around for this to work and to force code-reviews for check- ins.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. This is the only approach which is practical and probably followed by all.

Wanted to see if there is some innovative method out there which can be utilised.

<comment><USER3> I do know that you can create StyleCop rules to try to check for redundancy. For example, we had a type derived from System.DateTime in .NET that was to be used (instead of System.DateTime) and the smoketest builds would fail for the StyleCop violation.

So, using your version example, you could create a rule that checks if the method .ctor() has the word version in it and if it leverages any of the same single lines of code; however, I haven't the faintest idea of if I'm right in that it was StyleCop or how you would go about implementing it but I believe what you're looking for _can_ be done.

Most companies don't go that route, though, unless there's security implications because the ROI is so high for the implementation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Code Reviews can avoid duplication.</comment>


The Iron Fist Coding Standard - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-iron-fist-coding-standard.html

<comment><USER2> YAWN, indent & don't swear. What a nothing article.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I don't like someone's indenting I just reflow the piece of code. No biggie. These kind of rules are what turns me off of corporate gigs. It eventually leads to having to type .equals() instead of = (or == if you use an imperative language). Or the banning of the ternary operator.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you reflow the code, what are you going to do when you check it back in to version control?

Are you going to check it in as you've reflown it, with your own indenting? If you do, and the reflowing substantially changed the indents, that could make the change you made harder to diff against (and possibly piss off the guy who's code you've re-indented).

Alternatively, you could indent it back to the way it was before you checked out the code.. that's kind of a pain in the butt, though (even with automatic indenting tools, which don't always get quite everything right).

<comment><USER4> One possible solution is an "indent-on-commit" plugin. It pisses off EVERYONE equally =)

It does get around some of this though; you don't have the diff issues, and everyone can indent how they like. Those that choose to use the same settings as the auto-indenter get pissed off the least. It's not ideal, but I think it does a reasonable job of at least minimizing the standard deviation of pissoffedness by spreading it around.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Hack the Marathon: Things I've Learnt From Running - <AUTHOR> http://jones.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/things-ive-learnt-from-running/

<comment><USER2> "Runners maintain that it's hard: it's not. It's a lie."

Running is not hard for some people, but for many it is very difficult.

I know a fair amount of runners and they are all the same - very slender, very light. I know some might say that they are this way because of running but I think running is more accessible for people with these traits already.

I am a large individual, not fat (although no longer skinny) and have always been terrible at running. I'm 6'4" and bulky. My thick legs make running a lot of work and therefore not fun at all.

"If you manage to get past the first week of training, you will not stop. Your life will actually reach a stage where it becomes easier to run than not to run."

As someone who did Couch to 5k[1] and had the goal to complete a race (an accomplished), I can say it isn't easier to run than not run and it's also just as easy to stop. Sometimes running for enjoyment isn't enough to keep you going and without an external goal (losing weight, looking good, getting healthy) you just aren't going to bother.

I will say that running is the best home gym ever. Cheap and convenient, and until you are a slender individual great at weight control.

[1] <http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/2/2_3/181.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER3> A great secondary benefit of this advice is that you're more forgiving to your body. Push yourself to hard too fast and you'll be ignoring the track and back in the weight room recovering from something like patellar tendinitis. (In which case you'll be glad if you have a fallback outlet like swimming.)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patellar_tendinitis>

</comment><comment><USER4> tldr: run for enjoyment, not for running sake.</comment>


Transactional Email: Not Just for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://zapier.com/blog/2012/12/04/transactional-email-not-just-developers/

<comment><USER2> Zapier co-founder here: we love bringing tools traditionally "for developers" to folks who are less code inclined. It is really awesome to see our users sending transactional emails via tools like Mailgun/Mandril/SendGrid.</comment>


Ph.D. Thesis by Alan C. Kay: The Reactive Engine (1969) - <AUTHOR> https://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay69.html <comment><USER2> CS PhD theses used to be so dope.

See also Terry Winograd's 1970 thesis SHRDLU [https://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/AITR-235.pdf](https://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/AITR-235.pdf)</comment>