What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs? - <AUTHOR> https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7925/6630 <comment><USER2> [...guide authors approach games with the mindset of a medical examiner. They do not play games so much as dissect them, which erodes enjoyment of the hobby they like best. Rarely can authors "just enjoy the game;" instead they must "stop every 20 seconds to write something." ...]

Is this really the case?

I would rather believe that the writers are gamers too. It's quite common for gamers to play a [fun] game through more than once. So there's plenty of chance to enjoy the game without "dissection", then document the success on the next take.

The way the article put it makes it look like it's a kind of OCD behavior. Which sounds unfair.

<comment><USER3> Or they enjoy dissecting games as they play through, and the author is over here shouting _no, you're enjoying it wrong!_

<comment><USER4> I would argue this the most likely case - I do similar with movies. It's usually not until the 2nd or even 3rd time through a movie I'll really pay attention and 'understand' the plot, I spend a lot of time focused on the background and technical aspects, trying to pick up on Easter eggs for instance, or marvelling at how well something was shot.

You can ask me how I liked the movie, but it's highly unlikely I'll have any idea what happened or even the characters' names, but you bet I'll be remembering a certain shot, a piece of music, maybe the way a prop worked. Am I enjoying the movie _wrong_? Or just enjoying it in _my own way_?

(Just to throw out an anecdote, my high school physics teacher had us watch the 1998 movie Contact over a couple classes. That scene near the beginning after the father collapses, where our main character runs upstairs to the bathroom for medicine, I don't know what it was about that shit but it stuck with me for a long time. It was about 5 years later I finally sat down and watched the movie, twice back to back actually, that I realized what was going on and couple appreciate the film even further)

<comment><USER5> The mirror scene: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0_5HFMPIg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0_5HFMPIg)

(Also, I completely agree with your view.)

<comment><USER6> Wow, with the commentary it's also really cool [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxa3j8bK-c4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxa3j8bK-c4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to LOVE reading GameFAQs walkthroughs for RPGs as a kid. The fact it was just a big text document made it super easy to hide in my "computer typing" classes too.

I'm kind of sad that the whole scene has largely slowed down, at least for modern games... Now you can just find video guides on any subsection of a game you're playing; or follow an IGN guide. I have huge respect for authors of the oldschool guides though.

<comment><USER8> I think mybe part of why it doesn't work so much for modern games is that modern games are constantly being patched and updated. You could write a big detailed guide and then the next day, the devs push an update which changes everything.

This makes modern games less "real", in a pseudo-physics sense: experiments that you perform in them do not replicate over time, due to bugfix patches etc. Sort of like if, after physicists announced the results of the double- slit experiment, God force-installed a "fix quantum mechanics glitches" patch to make it no longer work.

<comment><USER9> Definitely. Still though, many modern games' players would be well served by the FAQs of old instead of ad-laden, poorly researched wikis. And even for those games frequently updated, eventually they do tend to crystallize into a final version after 3-5 years. It's only games like Dota 2 which are constantly getting balance* patches which are a constant sync battle of development and documentation.

* more like humans are incapable of balancing a game of Dota 2's complexity. The cynic in me thinks they don't _want_ to balance it, that that's part of their monetization strategy. Long term I think a balanced game is more fun for everyone, though.

<comment><USER10> One way to balance a game like Dota 2 would be a continuous rebalancing. Parametrize each hero's stats by a "power-parameter". This doesn't have to crank all the stats up equally. One hero could benefit in one way by more power, while another hero benefits in a different way. Then automatically adjust the power-parameter based on win-rates in different skill segments and how often a hero is chosen. The targets should not necessarily be equal, you may want say beginner friendly heroes that lose steam at the upper level. In the end, the goal should be a _fun_ meta.

Like if you were to balance rock-paper-scissors, and you want a meta where rock is played the majority of the time, you might want to give rock an adjustable chance of beating paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nothing beats a high quality FAQ with ctrl+f searching shortcuts. Loads instantly, can be downloaded offline, etc. Now every game has its own wikia instead and you have to wade through garbage to find the info you are looking for.

<comment> james-skemp Additional benefit: could be printed.

In high school I had to print off pages because we could only use the Internet late at night (dial-up), and definitely couldn't have the computer up and running while we were also playing a game. Pick one.

In college my Freshman computer was extremely under-powered, so it was often easier to print off a few pages of what I needed at the computer lab, and then bring them back to my dorm.

I think I still have FF7 materia print-offs in a box somewhere. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The ASCII art that these folks did to set up their chapter headings was beautiful. I remember seeing them making huge block lettering, scenery, and even characters drawn in ASCII art just to give an intro to like a GameBoy game walkthrough. The love and effort poured into these showed

<comment><USER13> I thought those were auto-generated somehow. Never suspected that people actually put effort into them!

<comment><USER14> Some of both, look into Figlet and you'll probably see a lot of fonts you recognize from guides, there are tools to turn images into text... but there are also specialized text editors designed for Drawing Stuff, as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a weird piece. Writing generally pays poorly for most people and JK Rowling's first check was like $2000. Children's authors didn't get rich when she was writing the initial drafts of Harry Potter. It was her series that changed that fact and made it easier for other children's authors.

Anyway, a lot of people do a thing to do the thing. Money isn't everything.

It's weird this piece seems to be agog at the idea that motives other than money even exist.

<comment><USER16> You also can't compare the effort in writing a novel, which involves a huge amount of time planning the story and narrative structure, researching, editing dialogue, multiple re-writes and more, with writing a walkthorough which just involves describing what you see as you play the game.

The difficult bit of writing isn't the physical act of typing, it's all the time spent working out what to write. There's orders of magnitude less time needed for that in these.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, JK Rowling has said that she wrote like twenty drafts of the first chapter of the first book and if you had read all twenty of them, you would basically know the entire story line. She has said the story came to her fully formed and then she spent ages trying to figure out the right way to tell it.

She used to walk her kid in a stroller until the kid fell asleep, then duck into an eatery of some sort owned by friends and write while the kid was sleeping. She would joke "When I'm famous, I will tell the world about your place!" and then did that after she actually got famous.

I think it took her like five years to get the first book written and published.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Jacob Geller had interesting commentary along these same lines last week [0]. In some ways, a walkthrough is an extremely detailed first-person critique: Exploring the game with the walkthrough as a guide, the author highlights each element of the game which they want you to experience.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr6pA15xuFc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr6pA15xuFc)

</comment><comment><USER16> Why does anyone write anything on the internet? Why am I writing this? People write for lots of reasons, and the motivation for writing walkthoughs and FAQs aren't any different to anything else: because people like expressing themselves, they like getting recognition (even if it's meaningless internet points), they're writing something to use themself, or they like the idea of helping out a project they support.

</comment><comment><USER18> It would be an honor to write a gamefaq. I'm not a creative individual. I'm never going to write a novel or a foundational technical work. If there was a game I knew very well that didn't already have a comprehensive guide, though? I could create something that would be referenced for decades.

</comment><comment><USER19> How is this any different then old-school CRPG's and needing to make your own map using graph paper of dungeons?

I remember NEEDING to do this in Pools of Radiance (IIRC), just to get around the dungeon, and make sure I found everything on the level. For those that don't remember the game, you moved one square at a time in a N,E,S,W direction. one move = one square on the graph paper.

No helpful pointer arrows like on Skyrim. You had to take notes, and map out the levels. It was far too easy to spend hours in a dungeon never finding the the door to get to the treasure/clue/quest item.

So some of these guides would be no different then sharing those maps with friends. Of course I had no friends at the time. ;-)

<comment><USER20> I've been playing the Nintendo Switch port of Phantasy Star lately, and there are some parts of the game where it's not 100% intuitive where to go or what to do next (eg: hidden passages that look like walls in first-person view, asking an NPC the same question multiple times until they give a different response, etc.).

I really like the game's charm and character, but there are elements that likely are more meant for a child playing over her summer vacation in the 1980s rather than an adult millennial in 2020. Being able to quickly look up the next step has been a huge boon to enjoying it for me. I'm thankful for those GameFAQs writers putting the time in!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Before online walkthroughs you read official guides from Nintendo Power, or you contacted your local game guru via the guy that knew a guy.

<comment><USER22> And then you spend 10 hours trying to surf on a truck in the hope of getting that #251.

<comment><USER21> No guide would work for TMNT, though. That game had randomized enemies and it was frustrating as hell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wrote an FAQ about 20 years ago. I did it because it was fun, of course. I loved the game and wanted the secrets that I knew that nobody else knew to be published somewhere.

I remember one of the other players created a game guide for the game that was published and made a couple million off it. So there's that too.

</comment><comment><USER24> So this is not relevant at all but I thought I would share anyways. In high school I wrote a 30 page business plan on selling World of Warcraft guides. Keep in mind that WoW at its peak had more than 11 million players, all of which were paying around 14 dollars per month. Youtube, wow wiki and other sources of information weren't popular yet, so knowledge spread mostly from person through person. One of the many reasons people were already willing to pay substantial amounts for guides

</comment><comment><USER25> We're told that we need capitalism because people are naturally lazy and won't work unless compelled. But we see counter-evidence: people want glory (even lame nerd glory, like HN karma or writing a FAQ), and they'll work for that, not just money.

<comment><USER20> I feel like the "managing burnout" articles and discussions here on HN add to that too. Even when given incentive via a salary it can be mentally or emotionally hard to stay motivated at one's job. I appreciate that articles like this are helping us understand why people like to do things better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> See if you can spot why this walkthrough is noteworthy: [https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super- metroid/faqs...](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super- metroid/faqs/10114)

<comment><USER27> Will you tell us?

<comment><USER28> I took a cursory look; the text is justified basically everywhere. If you take a look at the FAQ, the author mentions he did it all by hand ("carefully selected words", I may be misquoting) without the use of any software. Pretty neat, if not rather obsessive.</comment></comment></comment>


China Warns of 'Prejudice' After Being Bashed in US Telecom Report   - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/china-warns-prejudice-us-telecom-report

<comment><USER2> This is about trade/competition and has little to do with security. I have no inside information concerning this, but I doubt there are any real security concerns. Methinks Cisco and Juniper are just better at lobbying congress than ZTE or Hauwei. China has been playing fast and loose with WTA rules regarding subsidizing industry and this is most likely retaliation.

</comment><comment><USER3> quadruple irony points to the US getting up on their high horse about this after subverting their own companies to institute mass surveillance of the world's Internet users: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A> et al.

<comment><USER4> Not sure how it's "ironic" that a nation state is attempting to act in a self- interested way, in each of these cases. Regardless of the success or wisdom of that action.

<comment><USER5> I think "hypocrisy" is the sought after word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Washington cannot be trusted to be free of influence from AT&T and Verizon.

Duh, in the Capitalist country the government is influenced by the businesses and in the Communist country the businesses are influenced by the government.</comment>


Top darknet drug marketplace, Dream Market, is shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-dark-web-marketplace-will-shut-down-next-month/ <comment><USER2> Another one bites the dust.

Does anyone have any theories on the methodologies being used in these Operation Onymous/Bayonet/Shrouded Horizon to figure out who tor users are? I heard one theory related to 'traffic confirmation' attacks which DDOS a particular hidden service, and then basically flood the Tor network with 'LEO relays' which are then used to figure out the point of origin.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151201/07281232952/tor-d...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151201/07281232952/tor- devs-say-theyve-learned-lessons-carnegie-mellon-attack-worries-remain-that- theyre-outgunned-outmanned.shtml)

With the amount of busts happening these days, it is definitely a scary time for those brave enough to host hidden services that engage in illegal activity.</comment>


Legal Compliance, Alcohol Delivery and the Instacart Debacle - <AUTHOR> http://tumblr.swigme.com/post/37743776537/legal-compliance-alcohol-delivery-the-instacart

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Delivering six-packs quickly is a core part of Instacart's fundraising pitch: <http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/how-instacart-hacked-yc/></comment>


States Consider Delays to July Bar Exam in Response to Virus - <AUTHOR> https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/states-consider-delays-to-july-bar-exam-in-response-to-virus <comment><AUTHOR> It's a very tricky scheduling problem with a lot of dependencies and limitations. Essay exams kind of have to happen at the same time, because it's so easy to say "hey, there's a 5th Amendment question on there" and give someone a huge advantage in last-minute studying.

The questions are hard to write, hard to calibrate, and take a massive effort to grade consistently.

There are only so many venues that can accommodate thousands of simultaneous exam takers, so rescheduling is a nightmare.

Remote proctoring can't scale to this. "AI" remote proctoring is a surveillance, enforcement and due process horror.</comment>


Is It Cold in Here? (Sexism in Science) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2011/07/20/is-it-cold-in-here/

<comment><USER2> The trouble is, there are _only_ negative examples in these pieces. Even Rebecca Watson's video, she just says, "Don't do that, it makes me uncomfortable." There's no positive examples - in mainstream media, in "geek" media, in the public geek consciousness - of a good way to treat women. They're always being hit on, at least. So, if guys with few social skills go by what they see other people doing (following the only examples they have), they will be offensive without meaning to be.

So, instead of a list of "bad" behaviors, are there any examples of good ways to interact with geek women? TV shows with non-romantic relationships with geek girls, good topics of conversation, lists of things to say when you just want to hang out with someone and don't want to seem like you're hitting on them, anything?

Also, Watson's complaint seems to contradict some other accounts, like Mac McClelland's quote "When a French UN peacekeeper I'd met went AWOL to knock on my door, wanting to know, when I gladly unlocked it for him, please if he could kiss me," she let him in. Is there a quantitative difference between hitting on a woman in an elevator at 4 in the morning, vs. knocking on her door and trying to get in her pants?

<comment><USER3> The reason is because popular media has little incentive to offer examples of stable, healthy relationships. It is much more interesting to show lots of dysfunctional characters interacting in strange and unpredictable ways (e.g. 30 Rock, Seinfeld, etc). So, please don't take advice on how to treat women (or anyone, really) from popular media. Because it doesn't purport to teach you that, and it doesn't have any sort of track record here. It specializes in selling you cultural fantasies, actually.

As for the last paragraph, well, the difference is summed up in one word: context. Obviously, Watson and her admirer didn't have enough of it. But her admirer also chose a terrible spot and time to proposition her.

BTW, using terms like "qualitative" WRT to human behavior is not productive. Humans don't always behave rationally or in their own self-interest, especially in relationships. This is not a bug, generally.

<comment><USER2> Haha, yeah, I don't mean to pretend that social behavior is an exact science or anything. But broadly, there are some classes of behavior that are acceptable and some that are not. Watson is describing a set of behaviors that are not-OK. The behavior McClelland describes is presented as something that is "acceptable". I don't mean that the guy will get in her pants every time, I mean that you can't fault him for his behavior even if he's turned down.

I mean, to me, telling a woman that she interests you and carefully asking her to your place seems like an OK thing. What's unacceptable about that?

<comment><USER3> Those particular behaviors were not OK to her in that situation.

Had the situation been framed differently, she might not have even mentioned them at all. What if she was in a bar when it happened? What if it wasn't 4 am? The fact of the matter was she may have felt like she couldn't say no to the guy.

<comment><USER2> Well, there's a big difference between saying "I felt uncomfortable in this particular situation" vs. saying "No guy should ever behave this way." I feel like she was saying the latter, and I've given it a lot of thought and I think that's not fair. Somehow I feel like she should take responsibility for feeling uncomfortable (which is fine, ethically) instead of blaming the guy for making her uncomfortable (which would be bad, ethically).

I'll probably just throw out this anecdote entirely and not learn anything from it. Oh well.

<comment><USER3> Maybe.

But drawing a conclusion for most females with n = 2 seems...tremulous. And expecting some sort of resolution between two different situations for which you don't have the complete context (nonverbals are key) is also going to be difficult.

Now that I think about it, if you're looking for your own reference point, you might as well start with whatever your gut says, and alter from there. You'll learn quickly where you need to be. You're probably going to be too aggressive or too timid, and the only way to learn is to get out there. I was too timid, and some girls cut me some slack...but many did not. But I don't regret being too timid (despite missed opportunities) because, well, that was me, and I had to learn those things. I'm with a wonderful woman now, and am pretty close to where I'd like to be, and where I feel I should be on this scale.

Best of luck.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Egypt ancient city unearthed by archaeologists - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east <comment><USER2> Correct URL: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle- east-38084391](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-38084391)

<comment><AUTHOR> Weird, don't know how that happened. Thanks!</comment></comment>


One world versus many: the inadequacy of Everettian accounts of quantum mechanix - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0624 <comment><USER2> Consider Aspect's experiment and Bell's theorem.

Consider a blanket. Pick a spot on the blanket. Duplicate (entangle) the spot into two. Move one of the two spots along the blanket but fold the blanket carefully so that the distance along the blanket surface increases but the distance in space between the dots remains the same.

The suggestion is that "entanglement" causes a "fold". Any interaction, such as communicating a message, will travel along the surface of the blanket. It takes "the long road". But entanglement keeps the entangled points connected in a space that is not related to the "blanket space".

In this model, entanglement causes a "fold in higher space" which keeps the entangled particles in contact. Ordinary non-entangled particles reside in the normal 3-space.

I've read the implicate order book and I'm among the people who subscribe to de Broglie's pilot wave idea (although I think the "particle" is more like a "wavelet" (as in a concentrated packet of energy).

Any information-carrying signal that we could recognize needs to travel by electromagnetic radiation, which would travel in spacetime (i.e. along the blanket). So the fold could not be used for signals.

The blanket model also has the advantage that it does not need hidden variables to explain correlations.Nor do you need the multiverse to explain probabilities. A measurement just reveals "which side of the particle" is "sticking out of your side of the blanket.

Cloning isn't possible because you'd need access to both sides of the blanket. Collapse occurs because in order to detect the particle with electromagnetic interaction it has to "stick out of the blanket" (thus, collapsing into a direction) and remains in that orientation.

Tachyons are particles that live in the topology that embeds the blanket. They can travel "faster than light" because they don't have to follow the blanket geodesic (like travel thru the earth rather than around it would be faster than the speed of sound in air).

Gravity is little more than a ripple in the blanket surface.

Interference could also be explained as a "rotation to the other side", making the particle (wavelet) seem to "disappear" since it can no longer be detected electromagnetically.

Since entanglement (as near as I know) spontaneously decays this would be due to the fold in the blanket eventually separating. The fold separates when there is a local disturbance (such as a measurement) or any other concentration of EMF.

So I think that the topology of the situation explains a lot without hidden variables or multiverse.

Unfortunately, this idea isn't something I can figure out how to test. All my ideas need electromagnetism, which moves along the blanket surface. The only apparent evidence I can come up with is the "720 degree rotation" required to return a system to its initial state. This suggests that there is an embedding of our normal spacetime in a higher dimension. Perhaps the 720 degree rotation involves rotating the particle so a 360 rotation makes it "stick out the other side of the blanket" and a 720 brings it back ot the same side?

Somehow the test has to involve the 720 degree issue. The test has to use topology and the 720 degree twist to show that the "blanket" is embedded in a higher surface (similar to the idea of measuring angles in triangles to show you live on a sphere). The key to the whole game is the minus sign that shows up in rotations. Unfortunately I have yet to figure out how to get from there to a specific topology.

I need to find some testable effects of the minus sign.

I am taking a topology course to find out more.</comment>


FDA finds new toxic hand-sanitizer ingredient, expands warning to 157 products - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/fda-finds-new-toxic-hand-sanitizer-ingredient-expands-warning-to-157-products/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and- availability/fda-u...](https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and- availability/fda-updates-hand-sanitizers-consumers-should-not-use)

The list of products can be found at this link</comment>


Why your company should hire open source developers - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=821

<comment><USER2> I think the article is technically referring to traits commonly found in _project leads_ in open-source. As opposed to, people who make only occasional, minor contributions to well-established projects, or just toss up random code snippets on a blog, never to be updated again.

I am not at all criticizing the value of these other forms of contributions to open-source. But I am skeptical that an interviewer could draw useful conclusions when reviewing someone's open-source contributions if they are minor. To examine the points of the article:

1\. "Knowing how well they write code": If they _aren't_ a chief maintainer of a project, it's not really that easy to tell which random contributions are theirs. You need some fairly large and organized example, for this to be a practical review.

2\. "Knowing how to patch": I don't think the vast majority of projects have to deal with this situation. So while it is useful experience, it doesn't seem _more_ likely that someone in the open-source world would have that experience.

3\. "Passion": Again, most people aren't going to be deeply passionate about contributing 1 or 2 pages of code to a 10-year-old project that has thousands of revisions. The people who _will_ be passionate are the ones who wrote the thing from scratch and are improving it to this day.

4\. "Support": This is actually a paradoxical case, where the people merely _using_ open-source software (and having never seen the code) may be more qualified to support software over time, than the developers. This is because developers spend their time, well, developing, and would be overwhelmed if significant time was just support. Plus, see #3, how many people would be passionate about a project that is a support burden?

5\. "Saving money": This is more a reason to use open-source software, than a reason to hire any particular person because of their open-source experience.

<comment><USER3> There are really a couple or three genres of open source projects:

\- Those which are basically just hobby projects that are coincidentally open source

\- Those which are basically commercial projects, but coincidentally open source

\- Those which are large, community oriented projects, with real open source dynamics

The first two really don't involve much additional benefit that wouldn't be picked up elsewhere, despite legally being open source work. The last of them is where you pick up the more requisite hackeryness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Open source developers have had to think on their toes and patch the programs that Microsoft has (often times) intentionally broken."

This is definitely true for members of the Samba team, but open source development does not necessarily involve cleaning up Microsoft's mess. It also does not necessarily involve a work ethic of any kind, good or bad.

I'd suggest hiring hardworking and quick-thinking developers; I don't think work in open source precludes laziness or dullness.

</comment><comment><USER5> If an open source developer is defined as "one who is committed to a particular OSS project and is a regular code/review contributor" there are only two scenarios that I see where my company should hire him

1\. My company stands to benefit from the evolution of said project (think red hat)

2\. He is ready to move on and not contribute to the project any more. I would need his full attention to be on the project I am hiring him for.

I don't agree with the article that any random company should go and start hiring open source developers.

<comment><USER6> (I'd like to apologize in advance if my tone is a bit harsh, I'm not trying to be insulting.)

You'll get my full attention when you pay me for 16 hours of work, what I do in my spare time isn't for you to decide. There also aren't a whole lot of programmers to pick if you disqualify all the ones that work on side projects (open or closed), just because you can see that hes working on something else on his own time doesn't mean hes not doing his job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would have though the reason is quite simple. Most companies would fall into the category of software users and as such have no desires what so ever to become developers of software.

If you're not in the business of developing software, you won't be needing software developers.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was thinking about hiring a dev or several to work on OSS I use too - it can be a savings too, since if OSS you use and depend on and have vested interest in has active development it can attract more developers you are not paying for.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious about the 6% (as of this writing) who voted "No" on the poll.

</comment><comment><USER10> Have tried to hire open source developers. Most of them are very busy and expensive. But I still ask prospective hires to see their GitHub accounts. If they don't provide a link, they are automatically disqualified.

<comment><USER11> And what if we don't have a github account? It's like disqualifying a candidate because they like the wrong sports team, or make a vodka rather than gin martini. Pure idiocy.

Not to mention just because they haven't written open source in the past doesn't preclude quality work. I'd hire someone who does DO-178B over an average open source developer any day.

<comment><USER10> The point wasn't the GitHub account, although most developers I know in the Ruby on Rails land have one and put all their open source code there. Since Rails is so GitHub centric, you can see if they forked any rails apps, what they are watching, etc.

If they had stuff on their own repositories or other sites like RubyForge, Google Code, etc. that is fine.

When someone does open source code it shows that they are passionate about programming and that they are not doing it just for a paycheck.</comment></comment></comment>


Farewell to America: Returning to England After 12 Years in the US - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/gary-younge-farewell-to-america? <comment><USER2> It's always refreshing to see descriptions of America by people who have lived here a long time after living somewhere else long enough to be without American presuppositions about how life works. One of the things I found most startling about coming back to the United States at age twenty-six-going-on- twenty-seven after three years of living overseas was reverse culture shock. When I first went to the other country I lived in (Taiwan), any time an experience felt strange, which was often, I would just say to myself, "Of course this is strange, this is a foreign country." But I was very taken aback when I returned to the United States and found out that many experiences feel strange here now--I know that the United States is not the center of the Universe. Now that I've lived in more than one country, it's a whole lot harder to have a standard for "normal" for many aspects of life.

The writing in this article is very interesting, and the author reports many interesting incidents. This article deserves your close reading attention, and I predict it will be good food for thought for the readers who read it from top to bottom. I look forward to a future article by the same author about what he thinks about Britain after he lives there for a while following so many years away in America.

<comment><USER3> Can you give any examples of experiences that felt strange when you returned? Just curious what types of things you noticed...

<comment><USER4> Seconded.

Three years is an awfully short time to notice things uniquely as though one were an insider. It has been my experience that cultures do not unfurl that easily for outsiders to be allowed in and wrap one's head around, all the motivations for the reasons why a society organizes itself in a certain manner much less, comprehend the complex inner dynamics of such organization.

edit: HN is starting to become a strange place. Take the time to explain how your experiences abroad - even the short ones - helped you gain non-threadbare insights about that culture, which fully invalidate my disagreement above, rather than partake in purely intellectually-lazy flaming.

<comment><USER5> TokenAdult is talking about his perspective as an outsider.

He was in the US for 26 years, left for 3 years, and then returned to the US. He says that 3 years away from the US was enough time for somethings to feel strange when he returned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with the overall point of the article, but one nit is that it isn't great to cite Michael Brown's shooting as evidence of police racism. There is evidence (witness accounts consistent with physical evidence) to back up the officer's claims. Citing that only weakens your case. The other examples are valid, though.

<comment><USER7> Many police shootings are "justified" by US standards, which are much lower than they are in some other places. You don't get to the low number of police shootings in the UK, Germany, etc. using US standards. In other words we have both a specific individual problem of racism, and a systemic problem that tells cops to shoot.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps another explanation for a disparity of police shootings in the US vs. UK is that US police are confronted with armed and/or aggressive criminals more often.

Are you familiar with US and UK law enforcement standards on use of deadly force? I rather doubt they are significantly different.

<comment><USER9> I believe they really are very different.

The best example that comes to mind is [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX5CPx4RKWw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX5CPx4RKWw) \- a man with a machete actively engaging uniformed officers on the streets of London. While it does look like it should be set to the Benny Hill theme, the man was apprehended alive. They didn't just contain him and wait for a armed unit (which are highly available in London).

Perhaps I'm stereotyping US police forces, but I do think the same situation in inner-city US would have been a clearly justified shooting.

They do get a bad rap, and there have been some very debatable exceptions. But I truly believe that overall, we set a very different bar for justifying deadly force.

<comment><USER6> That's a pretty bad example. Firstly, if I was with 29 other officers I wouldn't shoot anyone who didn't have a gun either. But if I was alone (as the officer was) I'd be pretty stupid to try to take on a physically larger man. Also, I'm pretty sure you could find examples of American police officers not shooting people who were armed. A negative examples doesn't prove much.

I agree that American police are more (overly) aggressive. But there is also truth to the statement that America has more violent criminals.

<comment><USER7> It is not likely that all 29 policemen showed up at once. They managed not to shoot him until he could be subdued. US police have both a racism and a doctrine problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a Scandinavian that has lived in the UK for a bit more than a year, I think racism might be lower here in exchange for a rampant classism and bad public services when compared to average EU places like France, Belgium or Spain.

<comment><USER4> Could you perhaps expand on what you might mean by "bad public services" ?

<comment><USER10> NHS is quite saturated, the road network and Internet are working way over capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author brings up things that a lot of people might not know such as whites generally over estimating the age of black youths.

The problem is he then goes on to assume every negative experience with a white person is because he is black.

<comment><USER12> I don't see that at all. This comment says more about your mindset than anything else, to be honest.

<comment><USER11> What mind set is that?

<comment><USER12> Well, I do not presume to know your mind, like you seem to presume to know the mind of the author of the article.

However, your comment does seem to dismiss the the article as a list of personal grievances of the author, rather than illustrations of common cultural issues. To me, the article obviously consisted of considerably more than that.

Unsurprisingly, privilege makes it easy to dismiss concerns of the groups that are "other", that do not reflect our personal day to day experiences.

For me, the value of articles like this is in providing a window into the issues that most of us do not have to deal with normally, and making me review my own preconceptions to see if I have unwittingly treated people differently than I should like.

<comment><USER11> Do I know the mind of the author fully? No. But I can look the long article he wrote and the thoughts he puts forth.

I didn't dismiss the article. I stated it brings up things that need to be known (a positive). I then went on to say the problematic part. Some of his Hhis thinking is also inline with what I see in some social media that turns things in to an examples of racial discrimination or privilege when that simply isn't the case. Outrage over giving Dlyn Roof a bullet proof vest or food when in fact that is a common practice not a reward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It has become impossible to have objective discussions about something like this --or anything political-- on HN. In this case you'll be labeled as racist if you disagree with the article (already happened in one post I saw). So, there's no discussion at all. Game over. Done.

I happen not to agree with much of what this writer said. I have lived in four cultures in three continents in my life. The USA is most definitely NOT what this author paints us as being. I have noted how, for at least the last twenty years, the overwhelmingly left leaning media has made it their job, perhaps unintentionally, to destroy the US from the inside. This is nothing less than despicable.

While working in Europe fifteen years ago I noted that CNN and TV shows out of Hollywood were the primary exposure to "America" most of the world got. And what an ugly, unfair, one-sided, twisted and hateful image it is. I would hate us too.

No, this article is hateful and highly biased. Go ahead, call me a racist if you must. It'll only add to the nonsense.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps the reason we can't have a discussion is because you post rambling meta-commentary complaining about HN, insult your audience, and then post unrelated rant-ish statements complaints about left leaning media.

<comment><USER13> Nope, it's mostly because some in the HN audience fail to recognize "Emperor Has no Clothes" situations mostly due to indoctrination and a refusal to truly think things through. It is astounding to see how otherwise intelligent people fall pray to some of the most obvious ideological manipulation. I can only ascribe it to youth and lack of life experience.

I mean, here we are actually lending credence to the idea that the US is a racist society, when in reality, the vast majority of Americans are not. At all.

This is utter nonsense promulgated by political actors that benefit greately from minorities, racial and ethic groups being angry at "America". Having these groups remain angry, poor and disenfranchised is a strategic political goal aimed at creating large voting blocks. After elections they are dropped on their heads because improving their standing in life would lose them votes. This is sick. And this isn't limited to the US.

Your profile says you work at Facebook. If this country is overwhelmingly racist, how many of your coworkers would you say are racist? 50%? 25%? 10%?

I mean, you have over 10,000 coworkers from all walks of life. Surely there are a bunch of fucking racists in there since the USA is such a racist nation, right?

How about at Apple?

Google?

Tesla? SpaceX?

Surely Microsoft, don't you think?

No, your shit doesn't stink. The racists have are "those" people. Over there. The old couple living on a farm who own three shotguns. The fucker who watches Fox News, she is a racist, yeah, every las one of them!

Or is it more likely that the correct explanation is that racists (who are despicable pieces of shit) might be just as abundant as rapists, child molestors, murderers or criminal thugs. In other words a very small segment of human manure that is the sad reality in any society.

The vast majority of the people in this country are good honorable people. You, your parents, siblings, extended family, circle of friends, their families and friends, etc.

Chances are most of them are great people who don't hate anyone and would not hurt a fly. Yet here we are lending legitimacy a pile of bullshit pushed forward by a sick ideology that uses people like pawns for political gain.

If I am wrong, please, pray tell, how many people in your family and life are racist? Surely your family, friends and coworkers are no different on average from similar circles around the nation.

You see, when you slow down to think a bit and bring things down to a relatable level the perpective is quite different.

Does racism exist? Of course. Is it rampant? Of course not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This appears to be a long-winded telling of the kind of nonsensical crap that has been circulating as of late that tries to convince people a circle is a square, or up is down or something equally preposterous.

 _How did the descendants of immigrants become xenophobic?_

The founders of the USA were not immigrants, they didn't immigrate to join Indian tribes, they were founders of a country. And until very recently, immigrants to the USA immigrated and integrated, they became Americans, they didn't immigrate and expect to receive special treatment because they were a member of group X.

It's not xenophobic to simply not want your country and culture to be overrun with competing cultures. The idea of multiculturalism is nonsense. Cultures can't coexist that's just not how it works, a culture is the dominant way of life in an area, you can't invite another culture to come and live within the confines of another culture, that makes no sense. What is being done in such a case is you are inviting significant changes to the host culture, and it shouldn't be surprising that most people are pretty content with their home culture and they're not receptive to the idea of having foreign cultures thrust into their home.

 _cannot pay a visit to their home country because they are undocumented_

Are you f-ing kidding me? Can't do you something because it is likely to reveal that they are in violation of a law they willfully chose to violate? That's some kind of big problem we should be concerned with?

A nation without laws is no nation at all. What's the point of any country having rules and regulations for the people they admit if people who break those rules are simply overlooked, much less greeted with pity and concern for their plight of possibly getting caught?

When matters such as these are written about in the media why is it that preference is so often given to euphemisms such as 'undocumented' when what they are actually trying to describe is _illegal alien_?

-

Another commenter mentioned the race angle that was brought up in this article, I luckily missed most of that in my brief skimming.

The real race problem that never seems to be addressed, and it's an uncomfortable reality and whatever the solution is, it is not immediately apparent and I suppose that is one reason why there is a near and total blackout on the subject in the national media. But it doesn't explain why the national media tries to portray the facts in a way that is near 180 degrees opposite to reality.

The real race problem is that when it comes to interracial violence, and black on white vs white on black, the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence. It's not even close.

<comment><USER16> >> "The idea of multiculturalism is nonsense"

Say that sentence on St Patrick's day sometime and see how much sense it makes. Or Cinco de Mayo. Or eat at a cal-mex or tex-mex restaurant. Here in America we _celebrate_ our multiculturalism. We sure don't avoid it because it's "nonsense".

>> "the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence"

Care to cite that? I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be citing, but I was pretty quickly able to find that the majority of hate crimes are committed by white offenders: [https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate- crime/2010/narrat...](https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate- crime/2010/narratives/hate-crime-2010-offenders)

<comment><USER15> _Say that sentence on St Patrick 's day sometime and see how much sense it makes. Or Cinco de Mayo. Or eat at a cal-mex or tex-mex restaurant._

Those are examples of heritage. Multiple heritages can form a culture. Cultures are the formal and informal laws, social mores, and general modus operandi of a people. An example of the unwelcome effects of attempting to fuse incompatible cultures - [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rotherham+rapes+pakistani](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rotherham+rapes+pakistani)

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the- unspeakable-...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-unspeakable- truth-about-rotherham/article20335529/)

 _Here in America we celebrate our multiculturalism. We sure don 't avoid it because it's "nonsense"._

It's not a question of whether it is celebrated or not. It's a matter of if you think about it for a bit it makes no sense, it's logically impossible. There could be two or more adjacent cultures and as history shows, they are likely to come into conflict. But there cannot be one culture that is composed of multiple cultures because what a culture is, it's very definition, is what a group and area have in _common_.

Also, as you may or may not be aware, Cinco de Mayo is a mostly American invention.

And if "multiculturalism" whatever that is, is so great, you'd think someone would have come up with support for that notion by now beyond "Ethnic food!"

 _Care to cite that? I 'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be citing, but I was pretty quickly able to find that the majority of hate crimes_

If it wasn't clear, by 'violence' I meant things like rape, murder, and assault.

You cite something for which there is actually a degree of ambiguity, discretion, even politics in its prosecution, 'hate crimes.'

Why don't we just stick to the basics, numbers to numbers, dead bodies. A murder seems to be ipso facto a hate crime. Blacks kill whites far more often than vice versa.

<comment><USER17> >>A murder seems to be ipso facto a hate crime. Blacks kill whites far more often than vice versa.

Wrong. Murder committed in the course of a robbery is not a hate crime. Even robbing and killing a white person because "white people got money" is not a hate crime. A quick Google search will let you know the real definition.

<comment><USER15> I'm not talking about the politically motivated definition of "hate crime." Look up "ipso facto."

I made the point that anyone who kills another individual for some trivial material gain, or other arbitrary reason, no doubt harbors more than a little hate for themselves, others and society.

-

On a meta note, I wish people would learn to formulate their cases without leading with a blurt of things like "Wrong." Then they would hopefully devote a little more thought to the issues they are discussing, especially the important ones

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The same article ( _exact_ same, not a different agency) was already posted twice... yet you change the title to put it through a third time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I think this is an important article for Americans to read, and it hasn't yet received any significant discussion on the site. Specifically, I changed the URL to resubmit it. The change to the title was to increase clarity as to the content, and incidental to the resubmission.

And until I tried to submit it myself, I had thought that it had only appeared once. The previous submissions are [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811591](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811591) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820574), each with only 2 comments and fewer than 10 upvotes.

<comment><USER19> That usually means the community isn't interested. Just because you believe it should be on the front page is not a justification for posting duplicates :)

<comment><USER20> Your argument assumes that once a story has appeared once or twice, the community has probably seen enough of it for lack of votes to count as a consensus. That's a natural assumption, but false: it overestimates how much attention /newest gets and underestimates the impact of randomness.

When I became public as moderator I heard from a lot of users (e.g. [1]) that the biggest problem with HN was high-quality stories not making it to the front page. At first I was skeptical. I was looking at /newest a lot as a moderator and hadn't been noticing much good stuff on the cutting room floor. But the users saying this were good, observant HNers, and I kept hearing it, and it got me worried. So I started looking at /newest more systematically, and then I was shocked. Not only were many high-quality stories being overlooked, probably most of the finest submissions—the out-of-the-way, intellectually interesting, totally unexpected submissions that make for the best of HN—were getting ignored. I'm still not sure how I could have missed that; I must have been looking at /newest at least as much as anybody.

Since last summer, we've put a lot of effort into addressing this. One simple thing we did was clarify that a few reposts are ok if a story hasn't had significant attention yet [2]. That's why it's ok that nkurz reposted this one.

ScottBurson hit the nail on the head, I think: giving good stories multiple cracks at the bat is one way to counteract the randomness of what gets traction here. Sometimes people abuse it, e.g. by reposting things that don't belong on HN or by being overly promotional, but those are fairly easy problems to solve and their cost is much smaller than the benefit of having more substantive stories—especially those out-of-the-way gems—on the front page.

The above isn't an opinion about the current article, which I haven't read, but it's clear that nkurz reposted it for the right reason, which is that he thinks it's intellectually interesting and well-written. That's the kind of thing we want users to do.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494367)

2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

<comment><USER21> Do these reposts have to be by different people, or can the original submitter of a story that goes nowhere resubmit it a couple more times over the next day or so to try to get lucky?

<comment><USER20> They don't have to be by different people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "My decision to come back to Britain was prompted by banal, personal factors that have nothing to do with current events; if my aim was to escape aggressive policing and racial disadvantage, I would not be heading to Hackney."

Not sure what we're talking about here then. The whole article sounds like a post factum rationalization. Lots of feelings with not so many arguments.

<comment><USER23> You want arguments against racism?

<comment><USER24> If the racism is so bad, why are so many people trying to immigrate to America, Canada, New Zealand , Australia and Northern Europe?

<comment><USER25> Racism is hijacked nowadays in the USA, it almost exclusively means white racism against blacks. The original meaning (discriminating against any "race" by any other "race") is greatly lost. If you want proof just go to twitter and look up some of the recent threads about Rachel Dolezal case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Fleeing one "racist" white country to another "racist" white country. Eventually there won't be any racist countries left to flee to, given how non- whites are so abundantly attracted to them, racism be damned. Does that occur to our author? Why doesn't he flee to Equatorial Guinea?

<comment><USER27> He explicitly states he isn't leaving (or fleeing, if you want to be needlessly dramatic) because of race. Try reading the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This article is one sided in that it assumes that White fear of Blacks is baseless, when in fact Blacks commit crimes at around 5x higher rate than Whites. Not all this difference can be explained by poverty, but even if it could, most White people are also afraid of White people who come from social classes with very high crime rates.

I'm not saying that most or any of the attitudes of Whites described in the article were justified, but it's one sided to focus entirely on the police and White attitudes and ignore Black crime.

<comment><USER14> That's the textbook definition of racism. All white people aren't judged by the actions of white criminals. But all black people are.

<comment><USER28> More like Black victimization by police is considered a racial issue, but Black crime is not.

<comment><USER14> The two issues are distinct. Stop trying to justify racism.

<comment><USER28> You'll have to explain that better. Stop trying to shut down debate with the R word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm somewhat confused about why this is on HN. The guy doesn't work in technology. He's not leaving because of technology. The article doesn't talk about technology. It doesn't even talk about the immigration process -- which immigrant entrepreneurs and technology workers on visas can relate to. Y'know, despite all the troubles I'm having with my visa (After seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested I have to leave the country and re- apply for a different kind of visa -- a major pain) I still want to stay here. The U.S has many problems, but at least they are out in the open and people are working on them. This is a great place to work and has far, far, more opportunity than the UK. The writer may want to read Cory Doctorow's recent article [1] about how London has become almost impossible to live in.

[1][http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving- london.html](http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html)

<comment><USER5> Do you think HN should only have articles that have a link to technology?

<comment><USER30> > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're > evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or > disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's > probably off-topic.

<comment><USER5> But sparkzilla doesn't mention any of that, and only mentions lack of tech.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The next wave in higher education - <AUTHOR> http://www.jensbackbom.com/2020/07/15/the-next-wave-in-higher-education/ <comment><USER2> Yipes, the future is now. I wonder what this will do to opinion journalism and society.

Is it possible to have too many ideas? Will we get tied up trying to decide between too many options?

</comment><comment><USER3> If you take the time to read this article, read it all the way to the end. It is not what it might seem to be at first glance.

Though the title is about higher education, there are is a clear tech tie in.</comment>


Porcupine, a fast linearizability checker for distributed systems in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/anishathalye/porcupine <comment><AUTHOR> It implements the algorithm in "Faster linearizability checking via P-compositionality": [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00204.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00204.pdf)</comment>


Gravity-defying ramps take illusion prize - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100511/full/news.2010.233.html

<comment><USER2> Direct link to the video. [http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/2010/impossible-m...](http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/2010/impossible- motion-magnet-like-slopes/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's well worth clicking through to the video linked from the article. The illusion is very simple and very convincing; it's a simple matter of perspective, but even after seeing how it works I can't make myself see it "right".

<comment><USER4> Same here. It's totally mind blowing.

I just don't know if I'd have the same problem if it wasn't a video but I had the subject right in front of me. But since it won a illusion prize, I guess my answer is already there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For whatever reason, Japanese vision researchers seem to do this sort of thing a lot. At the ex-ex-day job, where we had a robot vision lab, I'd get a "Check out this demo from X at Y university" email at least twice a week.

Dr. Kitaoka was our office favorite:

<http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html>

<comment><USER6> A true gold-mine of illusions.

The "Kochi-jo castle and Kinkaku" illusison ( <http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/tagi3e.html> ) is quite fascinating. Close-by observers see one castle and far-away observers see an other castle.

I wonder if you could use this technique in marketing. Where you would have a sign that showed different things, depending on how far away you are standing.

<comment><USER7> _Close-by observers see one castle and far-away observers see an other castle._

There's also an old version with faces, which I found even more impressive: [http://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/435058989_9d83960682_o.jp...](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/435058989_9d83960682_o.jpg)

Take a few steps back and the faces swap!

I have seen optical effects used on billboards but not this exact one, yet. Perhaps it's hard to achieve a good effect at billboard size.</comment></comment></comment>


Building a Better News Feed for You - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/06/building-a-better-news-feed-for-you/ <comment><USER2> > The goal of News Feed is to show people the stories that are most relevant > to them.

Starting the blog post with such a platant lie was already enough for me.

In no way will they change anything in the news feed that is not somehow related to how they present ads.

At the current state FB ads lose their effect as they are burrowed in way to much other ad-like bullshit. If it gets more personal again, i assume these ads get more effective again as well. Good for me i guess.</comment>


Scientists with Links to China May Be Stealing Biomedical Research, U.S. Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/health/china-nih-scientists.html <comment><USER2> It's good to see the US Government and the N.I.H taking better precautions on data and research security - China has had a track record for sneakily exporting scientific/medical/_everything_ information from other countries for years now and I think the USA along with other countries are wising up to it now.

As to the allegations of racism - unfortunately due to human nature and the sensitivity of the issue, there of course will be some racial bias against the Chinese. I hope the majority will be able to sense this and reconsider their thoughts before they come actions.

</comment><comment><USER3> This bothers me much less than other examples of china's ip theft. The research still gets done. Patients still reap the benefits, researchers publish as usual. Having the data stolen can only increase the probability of applications being developed. This is the whole point of publishing research anyway. The rent seekers who run pharma companies may lose money, but i just cant make myself care.

<comment><USER4> I agree that the net effect for the world might be nearly equal but it's still inherently unfair for the US and those who attempted to conduct the research in a US institution.

You're discounting the loss or setback of career for the US based researchers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems to be an instance of "intellectual property theft", which makes me wonder, isn't the research from these universities published on academic journals anyway? Are they being accused to be "stealing" from the journals or what?

<comment><USER2> I would assume that some of the data being stolen is from current, on-going, potentially high confidentiality research projects - otherwise this wouldn't be making headlines.

The article is also saying that as part of doing medical research at the NIH, you cannot accept financial contributions from the "Thousand Talents" program in China. It seems like the article is more about researchers breaking important conflict-of-interest policies and it just happens that those researchers are mostly chinese and the stolen data is being exported to China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does the title go from "Vast Dragnet Targets Theft of Biomedical Secrets for China" to the one in this comment thread? The original is much closer to the spirit of the original article.

</comment><comment><USER7> No way</comment>


There Are No Dream Homes - <AUTHOR> https://hmmdaily.com/2019/03/26/there-are-no-dream-homes/ <comment><USER2> Bleh, what a terrible article full of generalizations.

My wife and I considered building a large 6,000 sqft dream home on acreage but at the end of the day we realized that space wasn't what made a home a "dream home" but instead utility of the space and the ability for it to support our lifestyle and kids.

Having toured many multi-million dollar homes and having interviewed several architects we now view the opulance and oversized rooms as a liability in the "upkeep" column of our family's time balance sheet.

We decided to stay in our upper-middle class home and renovate it with things that require less upkeep so we can do more living in the house and less maintaining.

<comment><USER3> I've been amazed as to how badly designed new houses can be. Square feet alone, I agree, is a near useless metric.

I'd love to see the user personas that went into the development process. I don't see my needs in there.

A local builder sells a two story model with ZERO bedrooms on the ground floor. If someone is elderly or disabled, or just breaks their leg and needs to be in a wheelchair for two months, the house is basically unlivable.

The number of designs I've seen which devote hundreds of square feet to seperate formal and informal dining areas, and near room-sized alcoves (not isolated enough to make into an office, too big to be a hallway), while still having 10x10 bedrooms, miniscule closets, and claustrophobic bathrooms baffles me.

<comment><USER4> > A local builder sells a two story model with ZERO bedrooms on the ground > floor. If someone is elderly or disabled, or just breaks their leg and needs > to be in a wheelchair for two months, the house is basically unlivable.

For better or worse, that has been typical of multi-story houses for over a century.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm thought this article was going to be about McMansions losing value over time, but just seemed like an opinion piece with a couple of anecdotes about elderly people having problems selling very expensive estates.

Here's an article about McMansion depreciation: [https://www.fa- mag.com/news/mcmansions-define-ugly-in-a-new-...](https://www.fa- mag.com/news/mcmansions-define-ugly-in-a-new-way--they-re-a-bad- investment-28633.html)

What's interesting is that the valuations mentioned for McMansions are... like an order of magnitude cheaper then the multimillion dollar estates mentioned in this piece.

So... I looked for the WSJ article this was really a response to: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-growing-problem-in-real- estat...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-growing-problem-in-real-estate-too- many-too-big-houses-11553181782)

What is actually concerning was this statement:

> Boomers currently own 32 million homes and account for two out of five > homeowners in the country.

So... given that boomers are less than 10% of the population but are 40% of the homeowners, I suspect there will be a strong downward pressure long term, since, well, all these boomers are probably in their home before "the home".

<comment><USER6> Won't most of them just pass their homes to their kids? I am trying to say, that maybe this 40%/10% is normal at any time.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I was just going to say -- look at places like Greece. The home ownership rate is about ~75%. It's pretty common for people to own multiple homes, too.

The average Greek person is not wealthy, but the value of these homes is not insignificant either. Mostly, Greek people live like they're poor, even though -- in theory -- their real estate holdings are worth a small fortune.

I met a Greek lady with 4 houses, one of which was on a super desirable island now -- worth well over $2.5M. She can only afford to visit the island once a year for a week, but she refuses to sell the house. Not because she's speculating on the value continuing to increase. Just purely for sentiment.

People are strangely attached to homes. And also (most) people see homes as good investments. Recent history is really working as confirmation biases for that. But long-term, objectively, housing has been an okay investment.

I just can't see all that collapsing because of a little downward pressure. Especially when it DEFINITELY hasn't happened in most aging countries.

One could argue that it has happened in Japan. But Japan's real estate boom in the 90s was truly unbelievable.

So it's really hard to say if house prices have gone down in real terms -- or if they were just so ridiculously insane in the 90s that it had a long-lasting anchor effect on prices ever since.

<comment><USER8> The property taxes must be too low then.

<comment> village-idiot I'm not sure what the nominal tax rates are in Greece, but the level of tax dodging in that country is famously high, I wouldn't be surprised if effective property taxes are very low.

<comment><USER7> Michael Lewis in his book Boomerang details this hilariously: The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. I believe he said the effective tax rate is under 12%. RE tax he said basically nobody pays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am unsure what that blog post is trying to say, exactly. That some people build big houses and regret it? Some others buy a house and then grow to old to maintain it? Okay, so what? A lot of people build their perfect house and love it. Many people live decades in their home (my parents have been living in their house since 1970...). My dad still mentions to me every time we're sitting in his back yard (an acre filled with trees he planted himself) that it is his dream home and he can't imagine living anywhere else.

<comment><USER10> The pull quote in the middle sums it up nicely. "People guess who they are and what their lives are about, and they guess wrong."

<comment> compiler-guy Some people guess right and never have any regrets. Some people guess right, and then life happens.

And yes, some people guess wrong.

But that article thinks everyone guesses wrong.

<comment><USER11> That someone enjoys their home is not enough to say they made a great choice just a good one. People grow attached to all sorts of things.

My personal experience is people are most likely to enjoy a home that's easy for them to afford as it never feels like a burden.

<comment><USER12> _" people are most likely to enjoy a home that's easy for them to afford as it never feels like a burden"_ \-- that is exactly my dream home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "How buildings learn" is a book every software engineer should read. The thesis of the book is that we predominantly take an aesthetic judgement of buildings as static spaces and this pushes us into processes that are big design up front.

HBL makes the argument that all buildings will intrinsically change in need and purpose over time and "great" buildings are those who have adaptability built in. He points to Building 20 at MIT as an example of a building that was accidentally built to be adaptable and generally ignored within architecture circles but beloved by the building inhabitants.

<comment><USER14> This is one of my favorite books of all time. I read it while remodeling my house (and am also a software engineer), and I bought 5 copies to give away afterward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am honestly unsure what I would use a 7500sqft house for. Not even including the garden/land.

Our (me plus wife and kid) previous apartment was 900sqft, and our house is now 800sqft, and while a bit tight, this works pretty well for our family.

I like the aesthetics of big homes, but practically, I just don't need all that space. We spend pretty much 80% of the time in the same 250sqft (living).

I would love me a garage/workspace though.

<comment><USER16> I think it's really great when everyone has their own space to hang out. Kids, or teenagers can have their own room. The adults probably share a bedroom, so maybe two extra places they can each make their own is pretty nice.

Nothing needs to be huge, but I think a door is a pretty big deal.

<comment><USER15> True, and we do actually have 3 bedrooms in that space. Just pretty tiny ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Ben and Valentina Bethell spent about $3.5 million in 2009 [..]. The couple > listed the home in 2015 for $4.495 million, and have since reduced the price > to $3.995 million.

It's somewhat insane that houses are automatically assumed to appreciate. They have lived in the house for a decade, and it's no longer brand new. Why should the purchase price now be half a million more than the construction costs were?

<comment><USER18> Unless someone is going out of their way to buy a brand new home, nobody cares about the age. You have the home inspected, and if the roof is good (replaced recentlyish) and there's no structural damage, your good to go. It's not like depreciation on a used car. A house is a house.

Hell, lots of times newer homes are more shoddily built then older ones.

<comment> saiya-jin There are things which survive centuries like walls, and then stuff that slowly disintegrates and is a proper nightmare to change/replace - plumbing, electric wiring, general room layout with those thick structural walls, size/layout of windows etc.

I can guarantee you that electric wiring from 1970 is something different than that from 2010 (personal experience, sockets slowly failing).

Old apartment/house is definitely an additional maintenance cost and possibly tons of other inconveniences, and should be priced accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can relate. After moving around a lot we bought our "forever home" 10 years ago. Forever doesn't last that long. A big house owns you. We're trying to sell.

<comment><USER20> Interesting - we're contemplating buying our forever home in the bay area. Currently living in a 3 story townhouse style that's very walkable to whole foods, parks, caltrain etc. with a modest mortgage but considering moving into the more suburban areas / driving areas so we have a yard to set kids free.

What about the big house is owning you? Mortgage and maintenance?

<comment><USER21> Speaking as a child of the suburbs, transit-accessible urban areas are a lot nicer for the kids themselves. Even the nicest American suburbs suck for anyone who can't drive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Apparaently people don't watch enough of 'BBC Grand Design' and also 'YouTube Tinyhouses'.

Otherwise they would know better :D

1600 sqft sounds relativly big to me and would double the space we have. But size is less important than: \- Having light! Srsly like natural brightness \- Good connection to work / city live \- nice garden with a view \- smart building design like having a extra room for washing cloth, power sockets which are well positioned etc.

</comment><comment> compiler-guy Yes, some people over build and others over buy, but it's a pretty big stretch to go from that to the title of the article. Plenty of people are happy in their custom homes, and stretched to get them.

That there are some who have regrets doesn't invalidate that fact.

</comment><comment><USER23> I just bought my dream home. It's about 680 square feet (almost double if you add in the wall thickness). It needs a lot of work. It's ~220 years old.

It was 68,000 Euro and is near the train, on a few acres of loamy land, and has a few outbuildings I can use for woodworking, etc.

At that price I can treat it as a thing I use, and not some stupid investment. It's cheap enough that if I want to move I don't have to chain together mortgages, etc.

That's all I ever wanted in a home, really. Nobody seems to be building that now, aside from the tiny homes movement, and those are maybe a bit _too_ small (I have a kid).

</comment><comment><USER24> _... Eventually these houses will hold four families each, or they'll go back to woods and fields, slightly formaldehyde-tainted from the lumber. ..._

It's interesting to think of the future scenarios that would cause each outcome to play out:

1\. Housing continues to skyrocket beyond any reasonable consumer inflation expectation. The only way to "get in" is to go in with one or more other families.

2\. Housing prices begin to fall like so many prices throughout the rest of the economy. Nobody wants to take the risk of being stuck with an overly expensive thing they can't unload.

<comment><USER25> 1 almost certainly requires zoning changes to allow multi-family housing in the places people hype these kinds of huge houses today. Don't count on the neighbors to support that, and keep in mind the ones with money will use that money to buy influence.

<comment><USER26> That zoning change might raise local prices a lot. Neighbours may believe their own property will appreciate in value massively, and approve the zoning change just for that reason, especially if it's advertised that way to them.

Never underestimate the ability of people to ignore everything else, when property price increases are at the forefront of their minds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would quite prefer a "Wizard's Tower".

A 4+ story vertical structure with 1-2 rooms per level, leaving more ground space for a garden/hedge maze etc.

I wonder if more of us introverted techy types would prefer that too.

Would it be impractical?

<comment><USER28> Yes. It'll be fun, and magic, and amazing. And then you need to get a new piece of furniture on the 4th floor. A little bit later, you break a leg, and everything but the ground floor is off limits for weeks.

You slowly age. Climbing stairs is not as easy as it used to be. Whenever you want to talk to your spouse, they're guaranteed to be 2 floors away.

It's a dream home, but I'm not sure it'll survive reality.

<comment><USER27> Yes, that raises the question of how the heck does the old wizard archetype manage to climb up and down all day?

<comment> saiya-jin old wizards with high level either levitate, teleport or summon minions who carry them up obviously

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Our real estate agent summed it up: A Dream Home is any property my client buys as long as I make money.

</comment><comment><USER30> In the meantime, the tiny house movement is growing:

> [https://thetinylife.com/what-is-the-tiny-house- > movement/](https://thetinylife.com/what-is-the-tiny-house-movement/)

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

> > [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tiny+house+movement&t=ffab&atb=v15...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tiny+house+movement&t=ffab&atb=v151-2__&iax=images&ia=images)

</comment><comment> village-idiot I'm in the process of purging a large portion of my possessions. I spent a distressing amount of money collecting items that got used once or twice, got put into a closet that cost me a lot to rent (hooray Socal!), and now are taking up a large amount of my mental space trying to find a way to ethically and economically dispose of them.

I cannot possibly imagine how much useless crap you can accumulate in a 2,000 ft home, let alone 7,000 or larger! Why in the world would you want all that space?

</comment><comment><USER31> Sure there are. But you can overdo it, or outlive it.

The Bay Area's finest example of outliving it is Filoli. It's a estate off 280 near 92. More than one square mile, in Silicon Valley. At the end, it was occupied by one woman in her 90s, along with a large staff.

(It's now open to the public. There are tours and a cafe. The house is big, but not monumental, like San Simeon. Mostly the place is gardens and pastures.)

<comment><USER32> > More than one square mile, in Silicon Valley.

I was momentarily outraged, until I found it on a map. The San Andreas fault runs _right_ through the center of the property. Makes me glad it's basically a garden now and not a housing development =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't know how or even really if it applies, but the phrase "too clever by half", and in particular the article that has appeared here several times before [1] came to mind.

Also a thing I've thought about, which is echoed in the opening bits of the article, is that many people will buy or build a starter home, and then over time build it up into something much fancier or larger. At which point, it isn't really a starter home anymore, and who is going to want to buy such a thing when they could just do the same over time except in the style they actually wanted?

[1] [https://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by- half/](https://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/)

<comment><USER34> It's always entertaining to look through the older Zillow listings for moderately to very expensive houses. Without fail they are testaments to bad taste. They'd cost a sizable percentage of the purchase price to renovate. Yet, the owners just keep holding out hope that someone with equally bad taste will eventually come along and snap it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Apologies that this isn't a particularly constructive comment, but I have to say:

There is little more I hate in the world than articles that have a full sentence as some header text and then repeat that exact sentence almost immediately in the paragraph following the header text.

<comment><USER36> Why?

<comment><USER35> I feel like I've been tricked into reading the same sentence twice. My precious time has been wasted. (I'm half-joking.) In the case of this article:

> A house is an investment, except it's also a necessity, and it's also an > expression of status, which together make the investment wildly expensive > and illiquid.

This sentence exists twice. Why include it as a header? The sentence is long enough and this isn't poetry, so it is fair to assume the repetition wasn't for any sort of artistic effect. Just leave that sentence within the context of the paragraph where it's written. Maybe even bold it, but the reader shouldn't have to look at those words twice.

I can maybe understand it when it's a quote from another person, under some arbitrarily small word count, like ten. I assume there are some rules in journalistic writing that allows for that style, such that it's normalized to the reader.

<comment><USER37> Those aren't headers, they're pull quotes. Badly formatted to look just like a header. Also, I hate pull quotes for the same reason you do. I can't _not_ read them, and half the time they're something I already read, half the time they're something I'm about to read anyway. I just don't see the point.

<comment><USER38> Pull quotes don't belong on the web. They made sense when people were thumbing through magazines, not lists of website headlines. If I click your headline, I'm already going to read the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The one that's paid off is a pretty good step.

<comment><USER14> And almost always a very, very large step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's certainly possible to draft a list of true needs, and wants that are unlikely to change, and systemically search for or build a property that meets them without introducing new needs or wants. For us, it's a 2,000 sq ft Sears kit bungalow we purchased after considering whether we could live the rest of our lives here and whether our children would be likely to appreciate having growing up in it.

</comment><comment><USER41> the article is just a summary of the WSJ article. why not just post original?

<comment><USER42> Because you have to give them money if you want to read it.

<comment><USER41> [https://outline.com/rzbtHT](https://outline.com/rzbtHT)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> For a steep discount I am sure it's someone's dream home who is in their 40s.

<comment><USER44> That's what I thought. Put the house in an auction starting at $1 and it will find its price point. Biggest problem is people thinking someone will pay cost-plus-sentimental-value-plus-a-nice-profit when 2 houses could be built on the same dime and under modern standards. Used stuff must be sold at a discount.

<comment><USER45> That's why they say land is an investment and appreciates; houses depreciate. Bet the land in those remote areas is still worth the small value they paid for it while the houses are losing value by the minute.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "spent about $3.5 million in 2009 to build their dream home: a roughly 7,500-square-foot, European-style house" er no that is not European we mostly live in much smaller apartments or houses.

<comment><USER47> When us Americans say "European style home" we usually mean "Italian Villa".

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> How do these non-tech, low-quality, overgeneralized articles make it to the top of HN these days? Voting broken or does it really appeal to the HN audience?

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't get the point of this article. Some people regret buying mansions?

I agree that as someone who is passively looking and going to the occasional open house, my "dream home" is one that is 1) in an urban center 2) does not require a car to get to/from 3) is priced so that the mortgage payment is comfortably below what I expect to earn 4) has a good amount of natural light 5) small enough to easily maintain and 6) the small space is functional.

Basically, I just want a small, functional, well-designed space in an urban center within budget.</comment>


Photovoltaic growth: reality versus projections of the IEA - <AUTHOR> https://steinbuch.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-projections-of-the-international-energy-agency/ <comment><USER2> I think the quality which needs reflecting on is not that in any given year they're always wrong, but that for all years they have been specifically wrong on the lowside.

This can't be an averaging error where they refactor the model from past experience alone because it would either be asymptomatic or variant about the true rate. (I.e. both higher and lower, not just always lower. For the variance to always be lower it's either got to approach the value and so reflect feedback into the model, or its just.. wrong)

Unless they're getting less wrong each year, this is basically doubling down on a faulty methodology. No other discipline would accept this multi year, would they?

<comment><USER3> They're using linear extrapolation. and it's clearly an exponential curve after the fact. the problem is when does it hit saturation and flatten out like an s curve.

<comment><USER2> It's not like we've never seen a logistic supply issue before. If they just said linear as a lowside and did a high side based on saturation at some chosen level we'd have a bracketing. But instead they tick a pessimal box, and then pundits use it and planners use it as gospel for setting finance and risk rates. It's insane planning..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not familiar enough with the machinations of these groups, but could this be explained by loss aversion?

Like I've always heard that meteorologists predict rain more often than their models would actually imply -> because people get mad if they make plans and they get rained out.

Is anyone "mad" if PV beats estimates or conversely is someone at the IEA going to lose their job if they say: "this is the year that solar is blowing up" and someone invests and it's finally the year it takes a break?

<comment><USER5> > "this is the year that solar is blowing up" and someone invests and it's > finally the year it takes a break?

Do you think analysts take more risk hyping solar (b/c investors in renewable energy could lose some $ if solar stalls) or by playing down solar (b/c investors in fossil fuels could lose $$$ if solar keeps growing)?

I guess fear originates from the side where most capital is at risk. Hint: not solar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> IEA's EV growth projections are just as bad. I believe a couple of years ago they predicted something like 3% of the car market will be EVs - in _2040_.

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of the old IBM quote about the market for computers.

It just sounds like a combination of old and entrenched thinking. For the longest time nothing could shake fossil fuels and anyone who believed otherwise was proven wrong. People in the fossil fuel community could succeed while dismissing renewables. But the facts no longer support those old positions, and entrenched organizations will be slow to pick up on it.

I've never heard of this organization but I hope they're not driving policy changes anywhere, though they sound like the kind of org that would...

<comment><USER8> It just sounds like a combination of old and entrenched thinking.

My experience of economics modelling (admittedly very limited) is that it can't help but be skewed towards the status quo. The only solid figures they can use are historical, which will only act as an anchor to the predictions of the potential future.

Additionally, economic modelling is often used as a risk analysis tool, and 'knowns' (with solid historical numbers and patterns) are always less risky than 'unknowns' with limited information.

'New' always faces an uphill battle on many fronts.

<comment><USER9> Are there models which factor in an analysis of their past successes/failures and adjust for them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If it wasn't for pollution, it would be an exciting time to live in. Expect a new influx of Science Fiction books. The genre was born in XIX, the age of crazy progress. I think our time is a similar breakthrough, thanks to personal computers and the Internet.

<comment><USER11> Science Fiction is older than the 1900s. Just check on Jules Verne. The name "science fiction" is from the 1850's, arguably before "XIX". First almost SF books appeared in 1810 (Julius von Voß)

<comment><USER10> I'm going through a 4-book science fiction anthology which starts with Gilgamesh, Utopia, City of the Sun and so on. You really don't need to tell me that. My point was that SF surges in times when science achieves major wins. One surge was in XIX, another in 50's because of first men in space and on the Moon, as well as nuclear holocaust scare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In other news, predicting the future of technology is incredibly difficult.

<comment><USER13> It is. But I think humans are generally incapable of comprehending exponential growth.

<comment><USER14> ...which makes sense because true exponentials cannot exist in physical reality; what looks exponential is the beginning of a sigmoid or bell curve. So the question becomes what the limiting factors are and when they will kick in, thus ending the exponential growth.

<comment><USER12> Right. With the problem that it's usually impossible to know when those factors will kick in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are the IEA's terrible predictions used when modeling future CO2 emissions for climate studies? Will the growth of solar put a dent in all those really pessimistic climate models out there?

<comment><USER16> I don't think theirs specifically, but that type of problem is core to all these models. David Roberts has been complaining about this:

[https://www.vox.com/2015/10/23/9604120/climate-models- uncert...](https://www.vox.com/2015/10/23/9604120/climate-models-uncertainty)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I haven't seen many market studies but those that I saw were... not very predictive beyond rolling dice and generic drawing exponential curves.

I think we might have reached the point where push comes to shove and solar is making its breaktrough. You can't really predict when that will happen. The best we can do is "when problem X is solved" or "price point Y is reached" then it will go off and "once it does it will reach XX% market share in a short time." Afterwards it is easy to pinpoint the exact time where it went off. But beforehand. Hard. Probably impossible. Many technologies die without gaining wide adoption.

The question I'm asking is not how fast solar will reach some percentage but where will it level off? 20%, 50%, 80% of total electricity generation? Will it replace fossil fuel or will it add to that? The total primary energy market is huge compared to just electricity. Will solar replace much of the primary energy consumption, too?

<comment><USER18> > where will it level off?

That is going to depend on what energy-storage technology its paired with to handle when demand outstrips supply. Currently, that role is played by natural gas turbines, which are quick to turn on.

<comment><USER19> No, storage is near irrelevant already. Math for one square meter of solar paneling: that's 186 W of solar cells[1], about $192 installed[2], including land cost, taxes, etc etc etc. A residential system will cost about 3x as much. Over most of the US, that panel will generate an average of 1 kWh per day (5.5 kWh insolation times 18.6% efficiency). To a rough approximation you'll need to store about 30% of that power overnight- 300 Wh. Lets call that $120/kWh for the batteries- that's a reasonable large-scale current cost. Say it lasts 5000 cycles, same as the Tesla powerwall- 13.7 years. In reality that could last way, way longer at a slightly higher capacity, but say you just replace it until the panels run out. That's $192 for the panels and $108 for the batteries, warrantied for at least 41 years. That gives you a cost of 2.0 cents per kWh. Even if you quadruple the cost of batteries, solar is still stupid cheap.

It just needs financing.

[1]: [http://sinovoltaics.com/learning-center/quality/standard- tes...](http://sinovoltaics.com/learning-center/quality/standard-test- conditions-stc-definition-and-problems/)

[2]: [https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf](https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf)

<comment><USER20> > solar is still stupid cheap.

Addendum: and getting cheaper.

> It just needs financing.

I would just like to make the point that this is actually the greatest pain point now. Solar is not getting financed exactly because it is stupid cheap and getting cheaper.

Think about it: will you be investing in something that's already stupid cheap (with bad margins, and heavy international government competition making it cheaper), and getting cheaper ?

That would be a VERY bad investment decision.

So what's happening is "the datacenter investment". Solar power plants are mainly being built and financed by the customers of their electricity, who use it to disconnect from the grid (to some extent). Nobody's investing in it, because it's not necessary.

<comment><USER4> See, this is where I get tripped up. Because I'd think that it would definitely be the time to invest. That you'd want to cut a deal to deliver X amount of solar capacity / year for the next 20 years at what strikes today's buyer as a cheap price. Then you've locked in the payback for the next two decades as the cost to product plummets and your margins expand every year.

There was some talk about how this was the thinking behind the recent "below cost" bids happening in the middle east.

<comment><USER20> This is exactly "the datacenter investment". But the only people who can make it are established companies with predictable long-term power needs. You cannot really invest in it.

Investing in solar companies however (e.g. SUNE, SCTY, ...) went badly (of course SCTY "turned out well" thanks to Elon Musk putting up 2 billion of not- quite-his-own money to saving it, presumably mostly to protect his reputation. This is ironically another reason not to invest, as the difference between a large loss and a large gain was created only by a large external force (sort- of government even, if you consider just how much government money TSLA gets))

So an investment in SCTY was pretty much a simple bet: "do you believe the government will bail out SCTY ?". The answer was yes, in a roundabout way. In the case of SUNE, the answer was no.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building Searchable Encrypted Databases with PHP and SQL - <AUTHOR> https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/05/building-searchable-encrypted-databases-with-php-and-sql <comment><USER2> This is really prune to errors due to concurrency, race conditions, etc. There are several ways to do this "The Right Way":

\- you can just use LUKS and mount the db storage on top of it. \- you can just use built-in encryption at rest [1] \- etc.

[1] [https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/data-at-rest- encryption/](https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/data-at-rest-encryption/)</comment>


Why do banks lean on startups to revolutionise finance? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-do-banks-lean-startups-revolutionise-finance-daniel-abrahams

<comment><USER2> Is it only in UK? In the states we don't have these numbers...</comment>


Amazing - People tweet pictures of their credit cards - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#!/needadebitcard <comment><USER2> Since this is already an automated account that finds all these tweets, instead of just retweeting for publicity/humor's sake, they should add a sentence telling each of the victims why this is bad. At least make sure they themselves don't make that mistake again.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is basics of social media conduct a class that should be taught in school?

I mean, it's easy to say these are just idiots. But maybe they really don't understand the ramifications...</comment>