Engineers Allege Hiring Collusion in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/01/technology/engineers-allege-hiring-collusion-in-silicon-valley.html <comment><USER3> I have personally witnessed the frustrating side of this "no poaching" pact. A close friend was tired of the "Manager Arrogance" at one of these colluding companies.

He quietly put out the word,pretty quickly got approached by a hiring manager at another company - things were going swimmingly.

Then the Hiring manager put in the Req to HR - a V.P. called him personally and but confirmed this "no poaching" B.S. The wage hike would have been considerable for my friend (you can guess the two companies - Arrogant vs Top Payer) & he was pretty upset to learn that the real reason was Jobs being a Huge Asshole and bullying everybody into such a blatantly illegal pact.

So this is a very real "wage theft" collusion case. Unfortunately most of the parties involved had the "good" sense to NOT document it officially so the Smoking Gun might be hard to prove conclusively.

There was even a "no hire" list at one of these companies tacked on the wall of a HR Manager with the Caption "If you hire from there, we will fire (u) from here."

<comment><USER4> What about quitting first after knowing of this fact?

<comment><USER5> You mean everyone quit together? That's called a strike.

<comment><USER6> A strike involves work stoppage, it's a very different tactic than mass resignation.

In 1999, Major League Umpires Association (MLUA) were not able to legally go strike so they opted to use mass resignation as their negotiation strategy. It backfired, cost 22 umpires their careers and led to decertification of the union.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Major_League_Umpires_Assoc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Major_League_Umpires_Association_mass_resignation)

<comment><USER5> I'm sticking with strike. "mass resignation and everyone loses their jobs" just doesn't have the same ring.

<comment><USER7> Ring or not, they're utterly different. Striking employees expect they will still have their jobs when the strike is over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FYI, the exact definition of the class here is people who "worked as a salaried Technical Employee":

(a) for Apple from March 2005 through December 2009;

(b) for Adobe from May 2005 through December 2009;

(c) for Google from March 2005 through December 2009;

(d) for Intel from March 2005 through December 2009;

(e) for Intuit from June 2007 through December 2009;

(f) for Lucasfilm from January 2005 through December 2009; or

(g) for Pixar from January 2005 through December 2009.

Source: [https://hightechemployeelawsuit.com/faqs/#q0](https://hightechemployeelawsuit.com/faqs/#q0)

If you fall into this group and want to file a claim to be part of the settlement, you have until March 19th to do so (which you can do via the above website).

<comment><USER4> What happened in December 2009?

<comment><USER9> The Justice Department intervened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What can the villains in this drama use as power to force their illegal price fixing on reluctant companies?

Just what you'd expect.

"Mr. Jobs proposed a no-poaching deal to Edward T. Colligan, Palm's chief executive. Mr. Colligan responded that such a deal would be unfair to employees as well as "likely illegal." Mr. Jobs then threatened to unleash Apple's patent lawyers on Palm."

Yep. It's our badly broken patent system yet again.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, since most of Palm's ideas on smartphones pre-dated the iPhone. No wonder we've changed the patent law to first to file, rather than first to invent.

<comment><USER12> Size of portfolio matters.

This is the reason that tech companies seek to acquire _large_ rather than _technically sound_ patent portfolios.

Briefly: defense against infringement runs around $1-$10 million per patent )(it may be higher, my information's somewhat dated). Defeat one patent, and the company with the larger portfolio presses suit with another, and another. _Even if the plaintiff successfully defends itself against these suits, it 's still out $1-$10 million per patent._ Often far better to strike a licensing deal for $40k (or some value less than $1-$10m).

It's possible to countersue, and this happens, usually with the result that the companies reach a cross-licensing arrangement.

<comment><USER13> In a successful defense, does the defending party get their legal fees reimbursed by the suing party?

<comment><USER10> "does the defending party get their legal fees reimbursed by the suing party?"

Almost never.

The law requires "exceptional circumstances" for an award of attorney fees and the CAFC (the patent appeals court) is inclined to reverse even fees awarded under those circumstances.

There were two cases argued at the Supreme Court this week to try to define what constitutes "exceptional" and reduce the authority of the CAFC to weaken the awards. [0] The court isn't expected to change much.

There is a bill in Congress that has passed the House and is being considered by the Senate [1] which would change the rule to award fees by default "unless the court finds that the position and conduct of the nonprevailing party or parties were reasonably justified in law and fact."

So plenty of people even in languid Washington are frustrated with the current lack of fee shifting. Maybe something will be done. Maybe not. Washington is not famous for swiftness or wisdom.

[0] [http://patentlyo.com/patent/2014/02/shifting-arguments- highm...](http://patentlyo.com/patent/2014/02/shifting-arguments- highmark.html)

[1] [http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr3309eh/pdf/BILLS-113...](http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr3309eh/pdf/BILLS-113hr3309eh.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm really glad to see that this issue is getting more coverage in the mainstream press. There was an article/editorial a while back (discussed on HN) from the guardian, but unfortunately, the writer used the incident (the collusion) to go on a rant about how valley leaders are hypocritical libertarians. That (reasonably enough) lead to a long debate about whether the leaders are libertarians even if they are mainly democrats, etc...

This article stuck to the point much better. I do think Mr Levy (quoted in this article) went a little far in suggesting that the engineers are a very well heeled class.

"Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley, has the highest average wage in the country," said Stephen Levy, senior economist at the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. "San Francisco and San Mateo are not far behind. It would be a mistake to think of these plaintiffs as an oppressed set of victims."

Agreed, programmers in the bay area aren't dust bowl refugees. However, we need to recognize that the relatively high salaries don't go far in high cost regions (where many of these companies are located), and aren't that high relative to the higher wages typical of these regions.

Application developers in SF earn, on average, a tiny bit less than RNs and a whisker more than dental hygienists (links at end). I'm 100% ok with good wages for nurses and dental hygienists, but keep in mind that these tech companies have been almost frantically lobbying congress to do something about a severe shortage of highly educated programmers and engineers.

Well, first and foremost, how about you stop colluding to suppress their wages? That might attract a few more people into the field.

[http://money.usnews.com/careers/best- jobs/rankings/the-100-b...](http://money.usnews.com/careers/best- jobs/rankings/the-100-best-jobs)

[http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most- co...](http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most-common-jobs- in-san-francisco-pay/#18915101=0)

<comment><USER15> Is there indeed a shortage of app developers because of the low wages? I was always thinking of software as a segment where entry barriers are relatively low - compared to, say, medicine - and pay is exceptionally good. Of course, everybody wants to be paid better, but it doesn't look like software engineers are suffering especially badly from low pay.

<comment><USER14> People (including me) often say that barriers to entry are low, but I think it's a bit more complicated than that. There are no _legal_ barriers to entry. But barriers to being a "mathematician" are also low. But would you say that the barriers to doing meaningful mathematical work are low? It's out of reach of most of the population.

Anyone can hang out a shingle as a software developer, but are the barriers to getting through the technical grilling typical of a software interview process really low? Just because there are no legal barriers doesn't mean that it's an easy thing to learn.

I don't think that software engineers are suffering from bad pay, but is the pay high enough that it makes sense to be talking about a severe shortage that the government should start fixing? Based on pay, I'd say we should take the "software developer" shortage about as seriously as we take the "dental hygenist" shortage.

<comment><USER15> I'd say definitely lower than RN. Not to mention all kinds of certifications that can be expensive and time-consuming too. Great software engineers are rare, but common ones are nowhere near the level you need to be to make a significant contribution to math field. And the pay is much better.

<comment><USER16> Most of the developers I've met from the companies mentioned have masters or phds as well as substantial work experience on real-world projects. Those that don't are usually exceptional individuals.

<comment><USER15> You have very biased view of the industry then, probably because of the specifics of your social circle. Absolute majority of tech industry doesn't have PhDs and does work that in no way, form or manner requires PhD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > It also offers a portrait of Silicon Valley engineers that differs sharply > from their current caricature as well-paid villains who are driving up the > price of real estate in San Francisco and making the city unbearable for > others.

What? "unbearable"? That seems a little out of place. Would most NYTimes readers have any idea what he's talking about?

From the author's recent articles list:

\--

In little more than a decade, Google has become essential and omnipresent. Now the question is whether people will start to resent and oppose it.

\--

As entrepreneurs invade regulated industries and evade traditional watchdogs, the question of who is responsible when something goes wrong looms large.

\--

Airbnb likes to say that it gives more people the money they need to pay their bills. But new research suggests that as the sharing industry spreads, more people are going to need that money, because they'll be unemployed.

\--

Uber and a Child's Death

\--

Hard-hit by recession, many in Europe have questioned whether jobs at Amazon's warehouses there are good for the economy or dehumanizing.

\--

seems to exclusively write negative stories about bay area tech

<comment><USER18> Wow, did Eric Schmidt run over his dog or something? Guy's got a serious bias!

<comment><USER19> No. It has worked out well for his career.

[http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s...](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/david_streitfeld/index.html)

"In 2013, Mr. Streitfeld was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting "for its penetrating look into business practices by Apple and other technology companies that illustrates the darker side of a changing global economy for workers and consumers."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This case is a beautiful demonstration of the dynamics of both "free market" and regulation. Free market dynamics demand (in this case as in all cases) that large players must never compete on prices or wages (as your competitors have the resources to fight back, so competition on price just makes everyone worse off). On the other hand, regulation was used both to stop an exploitation by the market (antitrust), as well as a tool wielded by capitalists to strengthen their stranglehold (patents).

It is perhaps worth reminding that the interplay between regulators and the market, and their co-evolution, have taken a different historical path than in Europe. While in Europe big government preceded laissez-faire, or at least, evolved hand-in-hand, the US was largely unregulated for many years. The result was that Ayn Randian titans took control of pretty much all power in the US, advancing the "economy" but at the same time practically enslaving the population. It was after many years of cries for help by the American people, and a long struggle led largely by the press, that Teddy Roosevelt was able to strengthen the government, wrestle back some power, and save the people from feudalist oppression.

Ironically, many Americans forgot what the US looked like when the government was powerless, and the market was allowed to roam free. People like Ayn Rand, who sadly came to the US just as the wheel was turning, didn't see the suffering that their romantic fantasies had brought about when playing out in the real world.

Obviously, as patent law demonstrates, regulation can be (and is) abused by capitalists. As the world changes, power shifts, and players adapt new strategies in this constant power struggle, both the market and regulation need to evolve hand-on-hand. The big question is what will play the role the press once played in exposing the workings of the intricate system of interests that is the economy?

<comment><USER20> " On the other hand, regulation was used both to stop an exploitation by the market "

I don't see any evidence that regulation stopped the behavior in this case. Perhaps the law will be used after the fact to sue or jail some people, but it doesn't seem to be what actually stopped the problem.

As another poster said, the class action date ranges end in 2009 because Facebook (a private company) wouldn't play ball.

Capitalism is a messy system, but it does tend to self correct in the long run.

<comment><USER21> > Capitalism is a messy system, but it does tend to self correct in the long > run.

That's quite a generalization; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

<comment><USER20> You are right. My statement is a huge generalization and I will never be able to find hard supporting evidence in the true sense.

However, my general sentiment stems from looking at the well being of the average person across human history. As humans shifted towards a system where people earned for themselves and kept what they earned, the typical human life improved at an astounding rate. On a much smaller scale, I've never seen people work harder than when they had stake in the outcome.

Anecdotes and generalizations, I fully admit. However, I bet many others with a much wider variety of life experiences than I have reach the same conclusion.

<comment><USER9> Actually, human society hasn't "shifted towards a system where people earned for themselves and kept what they earned". Throughout history there have been motions back and forth towards a amore socialist or a more capitalist system. In fact, I'm not sure you can say that we have such a system in any of the Western countries, right now. People don't just work for themselves: they pool a large chunk of their resources together to build common infrastructure necessary for business.

There was one time, however, when human society shifted from a communal hunter-gatherer society to one having private property, and that was the neolithic revolution. It is pretty much universally agreed that it made most people worse off. They had to work more (you're right about that; hunters- gatherers needed to work only 20 hours a week), got more sick, were malnourished, had to give birth to more children, and lived less (until modern technology, that is). It's unclear why this most important revolution in human history happened, but some theories suggest that it was brought about by the only people who benefitted from it: those who quickly became rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is really pathetic. I can understand companies being ruthless in maximizing their profits but this sort of move is seriously counter productive. If the wages are not competitive it also means less incentive for bright youngsters to get into these professions. If this kind of agreements become more common, I think that will be like we killing our future.

<comment><USER23> Companies do not, usually, plan decades ahead. They manage the next quarter and plan the next three years. Youngsters entering or not a professional area is something that takes 20 years to produce a measurable effect.

Government, is the one that should do the multi decade planning.

<comment><USER15> Except it never does. All those decade-long budgets and long-term plans are a sham that survives in the best case until next 2 year election, but more commonly till the next budget skirmish that happens once a couple of months. Specific people can have long-term agenda but government as a whole is incapable of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Engineers are so highly underpaid for the value they contribute to these companies. What's the average salary, $140k? It should be $300k, half a million total comp conservatively. Even at that amount, employers would still be getting a 50-75% margin on you. It's insane how much we are ripped off. Good eningeers can literally make or save companies 10s of millions a year, but are never compensated for it.

<comment><USER25> Make your own company if it's that easy to literally make or save 10s of millions a year, that way you can set the amount of own compensation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Am I the only one that loves the fact that it involves 64K programmers?

<comment><USER12> As with earlier numbers: sounds like it should be enough for anybody, but I can think of a number of other companies which have been excluded from the suit which should be included. Cisco comes to mind.

<comment><USER27> I think he's saying he loves that it's 2^6 (K) programmers.

<comment><USER28> That sir is not a serious definition of 64k. We all know 64k == 65536 ( 2^16 ).

<comment><USER27> touché

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can Software Engineers in California that weren't working at one of these companies get in on this class action? I mean even if you weren't at one of those companies its easy to see how suppressing wages at the largest companies would suppress wages for the entire industry.

<comment><USER30> Doubtful.

Out of curiosity, why do you want to?

<comment><USER31> for the $$$$

Though this action by major company's would depress wages across the board so its not a totally worthless suit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The sad part is that even though this behavior is illegal, no one will actually go to jail for this. Companies will pay a token fine (like Pixar and Lucasfilm did), and it'll be business as usual, but this time no emails and no documentation.

Unless a few people end up in jail for this, nothing will change.

<comment><USER33> > Unless a few people end up in jail for this, nothing will change.

That's pretty much it. Does the govt come down on corporations for such acts? One rarely sees corporate honchos being jailed for such incidents. More often than not, it is a fine and then things move on to find and execute a different loophole.

<comment><USER32> > One rarely sees corporate honchos being jailed for such incidents.

... except when the corporate honcho refuses to do the government's bidding; in that case, his ass thrown into prison. See: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/09/30...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/09/30/a-ceo-who-resisted-nsa-spying-is-out-of-prison-and-he- feels-vindicated-by-snowden-leaks/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Case docket and documents here:

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/index.html?id=1860459](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/index.html?id=1860459)

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm still surprised Google was in on this considering they are developer friendly and are a "do-no-evil" company to a considerable extent. It was probably pressure from Jobs. Developers hurt by this should squeeze them for every penny possible.

<comment><USER9> Google is no more a "do-no-evil" company than most. They might be slightly above average. Their "employee friendliness", as far as it goes, is blatantly self-serving, designed to create extreme allegiance to the company and possibly long working-hours. This is not in itself "bad", it's just that it isn't altruistic in the slightest, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is bound to happen in any industry where supply of talent exceeds demand AND the powers-that-be can get away with collusion (either by virtue of being 'private' or simply being powerful and thus not give a shit).

So what if one talented employee decided to quit one crappy company 'A' AND is unable to find work at the non-poach pact company 'B'? The place he quit will always find another willing sucker 'coz the supply is ever present (with, at most, a minor reduction in quality).

<comment><USER37> When supply exceeds demand, you do not need collusion, because there are unemployed workers who you can just hire at your target rate. If that is not enough money to entice them to work for you, then it would still not be enough even if you colluded.

What collusion allows is for the employers to maintain these low prices, even when demand exceed supply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The drive to maximize profit by those in the executive suite has caused them to do some seemingly clever (according to those in power) things but are in fact stupid in the long term.

A few years ago I overheard a new senior programmer argue with the cfo why developers should get 2 big monitors instead of a small 19". The cfo initially refused to go along. Of course some of it was due to his desire to keep cost down, as every good cfo should. But then he joked every dollar saved would mean more for his christmas bonus. we were a small/friendly company so I guess that's why he felt it was ok to joke about it. But I do believe his ultimate reason was to keep cost down at any 'cost' so that his bonus check would be bigger, as his performance is evaluated on how he manages the cash flow.

What the cfo didn't see was the productivity gain that could be gained by the programmers having bigger monitors. And these programmers were making near 6-figure salary. Their combined man hour cost was greater than his. But a cfo was making a decision to fatten his bonus check. Obviously this was not a good choice for the firm to make but it had been going on for awhile until the new senior programmer spoke up.

And I think this kind of logic in executive suite is probably common everywhere.

Lastly, I think it's about time these big tech companies add profit sharing ON top of the base salary as part of the compensation package. Why should an executive make SO much more than master and phds who are adding real value to the company?

</comment><comment><USER39> Wouldn't a better idea than putting up a 'no poaching' kind of exit barrier be to give 'bonus every X period of time' kind of incentive, for employees you value and would like to retain?

I wonder if in the world of technology it makes sense to retain a demotivated employee?

<comment><USER40> > I wonder if in the world of technology it makes sense to retain a > demotivated employee?

It absolutely does. The nature of tech work practically demands that every employee develop intimate knowledge of the very specific domain his work touches. It takes so long for new hires to become productive that in most cases the bottom line begs you to hold on to anyone who already has that intimate knowledge.

On the other hand, keeping a tech employee motivated often looks like a fool's game to management. If he's good at what he does, he doesn't see the world the same way as they do. If you're a growth-oriented engineer, it makes sense for you to bounce around different companies so as to maintain a sense of movement and there's not much your employer can do to "maintain your sense of movement" because it's a completely alien concept to them and often presents as "unnecessary shit that will cost time and money and be risky". Your career goals will often clash hard against your company's needs.

End result? This situation where top talent sinks collude to reduce their engineers' inherent negotiating advantage. This practice would be widespread, if only technology weren't such a wide field that any engineer with any desire at all for something better can very quickly find something. It only happened at the top level because that's the only circle in which there is no more upward mobility except among the same cloistered few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Some relevant points for engineers addressed here: [http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/74827679281/battling- outsi...](http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/74827679281/battling-outside- forces-in-employment)

Know who (with)holds information

Avoid information asymmetry

<comment><USER42> It's standard to mention that you work for the company you're promoting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Arguably this helped startups, since an ex Apple guy who couldn't go to Google could found a startup (and then maybe sell to Google later). Still lame though.

</comment><comment><USER44> Serious question - will this do much? Seems like in the case of a win, the companies will give token amounts (9MM from Pixar for example) and the claimants (given there are 64000) will get a tiny little check.

Am I missing something? Is this worth pursuing for a prospective claimant?

</comment><comment><USER45> OK, so you can stop the "no poaching" and you'll have:

\--> smaller than they should be engineer wages --> higher engineer wages --> even higher engineer wages -->

... \--> absurdly high unsustainable engineer wages -->

... \--> more outsourcing --> even more outsourcing -->

... \--> massive outsourcing -->

... ... ... \--> smaller than they should be engineer wages

...I think the "evil masters" of this "no poaching" pact managed to prevent an engineers' job marked fluctuation. And you think about it, such a fluctuation would only have benefited the foreign outsourcing providers and encouraged the displacement of parts of tech industry outside US ...which imho would've have been a great thing for Europe's tech sector and maybe even for worldwide IT innovation as a whole, since lots of new pseudo-innovations start to sound more and more like "american-inbread ideas".

<comment><USER46> Engineers wouldn't price themselves so high that they would be outsourced: that only happens to people who don't have any room left to let their wages fall, either because they already earn too little to sustain themselves or there is a legal price floor (e.g., minimum wage). An engineer making $200k isn't going to starve from taking a 50% pay cut, and they'd certainly rather take that than no job at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> but I was told Steve Jobs was a great man

</comment><comment><USER48> don't tell me a about shortage if the market is manipulated

</comment><comment><USER49> Gee. Maybe there is a labor shortage.

</comment><comment><USER50> how can i join this lawsuit?

<comment><USER51> see: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7323443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7323443)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> ONLY 6 COMMENTS?

People should be virtually rioting for this.

<comment><USER30> Huh?

This isn't breaking news. It's just the latest development in an old and ongoing story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Yeah those poor high-tech workers have a really rough life indeed, it's time someone did something about it!

<comment><USER54> Laws and fairness are for everybody.

<comment><USER53> There's no disputing that. I'm just voicing the sentiment of main street hoping that we techies take it to heart.

<comment><USER54> Yeah definitely its a 1st-world problem. But in context, there's more money and value being squandered in Silicon Valley due to this crime, than if it occurred in many other areas.

<comment><USER31> Collusion amongst employers against employees happens in the third world often with far worse consequences look at south america

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> This is the 99% lead charge that annoys me the most. (especially since many of the people leading it aren't 99%'ers they just think they are)

The assumption is that the only places to work are the big companies. Anti- Poaching agreements are rarely about the Money and more about the "I won't steal your trade secrets if you don't steal mine" types of "we can't patent this stuff" stand offs.

It is also protection against having a company put another company out of business by "poaching".

You look at some of the teams at companies and you can see where a group of 10 guys went from company to company. When they all left most the time that company failed. You can't withstand a blow of having 40% of your team walk, and take everything they were working on to a larger competing company.

"Salary Fixing" doesn't work. Someone always offers 15% more to get better talent and when that eats in to the talent pool everyone else has to ante up as well.

Silicon Valley just feels entitled. Yeah it costs more to live there, but the expendable income of SV engineers is vast compared to engineers anywhere else in the US, and the world.

<comment><USER56> If you are in a non C-level salaried position, and you don't have a few million in liquid assets, it is exceedingly unlikely you are a 1%er.

<comment><USER31> exactly a BART train driver earns about the same as a developer and will have overtime and a much much better pension.

Same in the UK a tube driver earns far more than the average developer does in London and has a Final Salary pension plus overtime.

<comment><USER55> A BART "train driver" is responsible for the lives of hundreds at a time. Attended school, and takes ongoing continuing education classes to maintain their license. They compete for a few hundred jobs in the US and if they don't get or keep that job there is no competition locally to transfer to.

That "SV Engineers feel entitled" thing I said. You just demonstrated it.

<comment><USER31> I am not saying that BART or LU Drivers are overpaid - but that the average SV programmer or London developer is not overpaid when compared to them - <USER2> are not very good at organizing collectively.

Name me one SV tech company that has a final salary pension open to new joiners.

And sorry 95% of the safety is in the TPS system and I would probably bet that the EE's that design and look after that system for London Underground are not paid £60k plus overtime</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I completely block Facebook? - <AUTHOR> Which domains do I need to blacklist, which subnets do I need to block? Blocking should include WhatsApp, Instagram and any service provided by Facebook. <comment><USER2> [https://sarimhaq.github.io/block-facebook- website/?ref=produ...](https://sarimhaq.github.io/block-facebook- website/?ref=producthunt)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11791052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11791052) has some coverage of the topic.</comment>


YouTube lets biggest stars off the hook for breaking rules, moderators say - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/youtube-lets-biggest-stars-off-the-hook-for-breaking-rules-moderators-say/ <comment><USER2> My impression on this is a bit cynical. I often notice a retributive justice motivation from critics of particular youtube and twitch content creators. People see Logan Paul, or Alinity do something marginal and they allow their dislike of that person to blow their response completely out of proportion. They don't just want to see a platform evolve into a more wholesome direction - they really want the person they dislike to get _hurt_. They then hide behind some false morality or virtue signaling about protecting animals or children. To me their motivation seems quite clear. They are not motivated to protect or even motivated by a sense of fairness, they are motivated to attack a particular individual (or a representative of a class of individual they dislike).

The fact that the stars of YouTube/Twitch get more careful moderation as well as the benefit of the doubt in marginal cases makes complete sense to me. 99% of the time YouTube won't have the time to apply careful judgement to a report and they will likely err on the side of caution. For top creators and high- income potential channels they will bring more resources into their decision.

And if you find yourself calling for someones head on a platter, I urge you to consider your motive. Are you really aiming for a more wholesome platform or do you want to see that smirk wiped off of Alinity's face?

<comment><USER3> There's a third alternative where they seek consistency or a kind of flat equality rather than a better place. They don't seem a more wholesome place they seek the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unpopular opinion, given the sheer amount of content that gets uploaded to YouTube everyday, I think that in general, YouTube does an awesome job on moderating all that content and keeping the platform clean.

I don't remember at any time seeing in my home screen anything that was blatantly NSFW.

The combination of user flagging, manual human reviews and especially the content filtering algorithm works great, but of course, there will always be a small number of false negatives that will get highly publicized and used to trash the public image of YouTube in the mainstream media.

YouTube is maybe the best thing that has happened on the Internet since it's creation. You have a place to host videos for free on all topics, where people can freely share and exchange ideas at scale in a captivating format.

Most of the ads you get to see are much more relevant than what you get on TV, which thanks mostly to YouTube I have hardly watched in over a decade.

I think that judging YouTube just because Logan Paul has decided to taser a dead rat and only got a 15 days suspension is excessive.

<comment><USER5> Couldn't care less about NFSW. YouTube is full of spam and click bait, but they don't seem to do anything about it. The top search results still include a lot of crap.

<comment><USER6> As for clickbait: while bad, it's not against the TOS

<comment><USER5> From [https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801973?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801973?hl=en)

> Spam, scams, and other _deceptive practices_ that take advantage of the > YouTube community aren't allowed on YouTube.

Some click bait is in the deceptive practices category. For example if I see "Logan Paul Tases A Dead Rat" [https://youtu.be/GsxYu8vHzBM](https://youtu.be/GsxYu8vHzBM) I'm expecting to see Paul tasing a rat, not a Power Point presentation on the subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Our responsibility was never to the creators or to the users. It was to the advertisers."

I'm shocked - absolutely shocked! - that after years of activists and a large chunk of the press using advertisers as a tool to lean on YouTube to ban specific videos, their moderation policies are now largely aimed at keeping advertisers happy. Whoever could've seen that one coming.

</comment><comment><USER8> Twitch and YouTube are platforms where you can literally upload videos of yourself abusing your pets and not get banned because you bring the platform money.

<comment><USER9> A popular Twitch streamer filmed himself in a public bathroom where children were present. He got a one week ban.

<comment><USER10> A similar thing happened to a local "celebrity" (guy in their 30's films himself on the bathroom with underage girls, wiping their asses; or kissing underage kids in the mouth), and YouTube does absolutely nothing, even after he was criminally investigated for possible sexual harassment (aggravated for commercial purposes).

EDIT: It seems YouTube did close their channel, after the criminal investigation. This should really be the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Same thing happens on Twitch, especially for some female streamers known for streaming in revealing clothing. As an example, this popular female streamer was recently seen feeding vodka to her cat (mouth to mouth) and throwing her cat over her head (intentionally because the cat was blocking her screen while she was in a fight in-game, unclear if cat was hurt) but got off scot-free. [0]

Meanwhile, last year a less popular male streamer was showing off his catfish and accidentally dropped the catfish and got banned/suspended [1] [2]

[0] [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/alinity- gamer...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/alinity-gamer-cat- twitch-animals-sexism)

[1] [https://livestreamfails.com/post/15889](https://livestreamfails.com/post/15889)

[2] [https://twitter.com/alecludford/status/968697869032189953?la...](https://twitter.com/alecludford/status/968697869032189953?lang=en)

<comment><USER12> The whole aggression towards women who wear revealing clothing while streaming concerns me. There seems to be an element of puritanical anti sexuality in it.

<comment><USER13> It's mostly kids watching

<comment><USER12> Are these teenagers seeing something more then someone could see someone wearing at the beach?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Same issue with Twitter - their golden goose sometimes lays rotten eggs. But people flock to the platform to see the spectacle.

Balancing moderation with profitability seems to be a real challenge for a lot of companies.

<comment><USER15> > a real challenge for a lot of companies

You imply that the problem can be "solved", but how can it be if users and advertisers have competing interests?

<comment><USER16> Both users and advertisers want clarity.

Will this video contain a someone posing with, and mocking, a corpse?

Will this video contain a someone "cementing" his head inside a microwave?

Will this video of a popular children's game including people yelling words like nigger or faggot?

That bit isn't complicated.

The complicated bit is what you do to cater for the religious bigot advertiser / viewers: do you let them say "I don't want to place ads against LGBT friendly material"?

<comment><USER17> Why not? I would think lgbtqt material would be more valuable and able to bring increased revenue.

Besides people reverse ad buy to avoid certain groups. For example advertising in a church bulletin will excludd many lgbtqt factions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Same thing happens on Twitch with the titty streamers, "just chatting"

And now they are introducing a sub-only stream option, literally turning Twitch into a private cam site

[https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/subscriber- streams](https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/subscriber-streams)

<comment><USER19> I completely stopped using Twitch after it became clear they wouldn't apply rules equally and that the people making the decisions there aren't people I'd trust to order lunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Money talks! This is why twitter has no idea how to handle people when they have created a protected class of people. Some people they ban, others they protect. Its fubar.

<comment><USER21> Like if I threatened to shoot someone, I'm guessing I'd be banned. Threatening nuclear war though... Not a problem for some people.

<comment><USER10> A million is a statistic...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One aspect of this not touched is that that YT's primary response is demonetizing videos or channels- but most get their money from brand deals outside of that.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does it really matter what youtube does so long as the community holds these content creators accountable? Stop giving them your attention (and youtube ad revenue) and they will have to make amends or do something else.

Don't pretend that youtube cares about anything other than how many hours users spent watching ads; and if you don't like it then create your own index where you store everyone's videos for free.

</comment><comment><USER24> Let's all pretend to be shocked.

</comment><comment><USER25> same as everywhere. Big clients always get away with stuff smaller ones are screwed.

</comment><comment><USER26> Imagine living in a world were Logan Paul is too big too fail.

</comment><comment><USER27> What we need is for this administration to get involved. /s</comment>


The Sun seen through the Earth in "neutrino light" (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://strangepaths.com/the-sun-seen-through-the-earth-in-neutrino-light/2007/01/06/en/ <comment><USER2> Since fusion is only happening in the center of the Sun, and the outer layers are almost entirely transparent to neutrinos, this is actually a direct image of the solar core. Which makes it even cooler imo.

<comment><USER3> So they can use this image to directly measure the width of the core?

<comment><USER4> In principle yes....although the specifics of the physics involved kinda make the question itself not well posed.

There is no hard boundary to the core of the sun. The "core" is by definition where nuclear fusion reactions occur. However, those reactions don't just stop at a certain radius...but instead just occur at a lower and lower rate. So even if you could determine with 100% precision where a neutrino came from within the sun, you would still measure some exponential-like decay as a function of radius.

But to add even more complexity there's ~10 different nuclear processes within the sun that produce neutrinos. Those processes all have different radial profiles. So even if you measure with 100% accuracy the radial profile of neutrinos associated with one or two nuclear processes...you still haven't really measure the core of the sun...you've just measured it for a few specific reactions. And for the neutrinos produced by many of the reactions this method cannot work, those neutrinos are too low in energy to provide direction information. And beyond that there are a handful of nuclear reactions that occur within the sun that don't produce neutrinos. So there doesn't really exist any way to measure the radial profile of those nuclear processes.

And this all assume you can perfectly tell where the neutrino came from within the sun, which is also impossible. There will always be some relatively poor "resolution associated with your ability to place a neutrinos origin. Here is the "hard" physics limit to your angular resolution for a relatively high solar energy neutrino...it only gets worse as the energy goes down [https://i.imgur.com/h3n8c4V.png](https://i.imgur.com/h3n8c4V.png). But getting to even that resolution is impossible b/c an interaction will only produce so many photons from Cherenkov radiation (think 100s of photons). Then it becomes a statistics problem...what's the best angular resolution you could possibly achieve given an average number of photons that's around (say) 500. It ends up the answer is "pretty good" but far from perfect. And all of that is assuming the electron scattered from the solar neutrino will travel in only one direction...that's extremely untrue, the electron will always bounce off of other electrons & atoms after scattering. This multiple-scattering leads to even worse angular resolution.

Here's a paper on the subject if you'd like further detail [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.02558.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.02558.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Most lines of this kind are drawn based on some value we agree on, not any intrinsic rule in physics. The boundary of the atmosphere, earth's crust, the extent of the solar system, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The abstract of this paper is one of the funnier descriptions I have come across about how hard it is to stop a neutrino:

[https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/pst/article/view/85...](https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/pst/article/view/859)

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, someone is trying to harness neutrinos for power:

[https://www.power-technology.com/features/neutrino-energy- ha...](https://www.power-technology.com/features/neutrino-energy-harnessing- the-power-of-cosmic-radiation/)

One of my far-future-tech fantasies is that we someday learn to make photovoltaics that are powered by cosmic rays and/or neutrinos.

<comment><USER8> Why not communications? Neutrino-based communication is borderline ideal. A properly-aimed low-energy beam _will_ make it to its target, obstructed or not.

<comment><USER9> Serious answer: because bandwidth is terrible. A transmitter the size of the LHC can only produce enough neutrinos (a few quadrillion per second) for a detector to receive a hundred per second or so. Accounting for noise, that means you can only achieve a few bytes per second at best, and again, that's with using the LHC to produce the neutrinos in the first place. With far less power you could instead use ultra-low frequency radio waves and still get better bandwidth.

<comment><USER10> You'd think the HFT lot would jump at the chance to knock 100ms off Singapore to New York.

<comment><USER11> That's assuming the LHC has less latency than 100ms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not very well versed on the physics, but every time neutrinos come up, I wonder when can we establish a data link that goes through the earth, instead of around it.

When neutrinos can be captured and emitted with good ability, and they can go through the earth, then how feasible it is to build a data link with them from between let's say Japan and US?

It's not possible today of course, because it would have been done already.

<comment><USER13> It was kicked around a few years ago as a way to get a jump on competitors in high-frequency trading:

[https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4646](https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4646)

It's not impossible, but it's kind of absurd. Neutrinos are insanely hard to detect. You need immense detectors, and even you get only a ludicrously tiny fraction of the neutrinos passing through. You'd have to modulate it by turning on and off an immense nuclear power plant, so despite shaving off milliseconds of latency you still wouldn't be able to communicate fast.

There's no reason to expect any of that to become more practical any time soon. Neutrinos are too small, too fast, and too devoid of interaction to manipulate easily.

<comment><USER14> Would _a concentrated high-energy beam of neutrinos_ be easier to detect?

There was a new HN thread about such a beam just an hour ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528970)

We'd modulate this high-energy beam. Data bandwidth would likely be quite low, but _in terms of latency, it should be the fastest_.

A beam directly going through Earth (e.g. from North America to Asia) is definitely going to be faster than optical fibre (or satellite) links that have wrap around the Earth.

I'm assuming neutrinos are sparse in nature, which is 50,000 metric ton pool of water was needed to detect the neutrinos emanating from the sun. But if we artificially create a highly concentrated beam of many many neutrinos, even a 99.99% loss / non-detection rate shouldn't be problem. (Again, bandwidth would be low, but we are aiming to minimize latency.)

<comment><USER15> "in terms of latency, it should be the fastest."

Unfortunately, not even then. Nowadays you generally neglect the latency of the physical act of receiving a bit and being sure whether it is a one or a zero because it is such a small amount of time compared to the other characteristics of the journey, but in this case you can't do that. The amount of time it will take to be sure whether it's a 1 or a 0 being sent will be dwarfed by the amount of time it would take to send a conventional TCP packet containing significantly more than one bit.

Note that while we neglect it, it still exists. If you zoom down to a small enough scale, you don't get a pristine series of ones and zeros, but a noisy voltage or light signal, and there can be plenty of attoseconds where the current voltage/light could correspond to either a 0 or a 1 coming in next.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So I understand how they can detect the presence of a neutrino, but how do they trace that back to form the image? Is the Cherenkov radiation directional?

<comment><USER4> The process behind this measurement is that the neutrino hits an electron in the detector. That electron will (with relatively high likelihood) travel in the same direction as the incident neutrino. The Cherenkov radiation produced by the electron is emitted in a cone shape along the direction of travel.

The photo-detectors observe the Cherenkov light and through some well tuned algorithms the electrons direction is "reconstructed". Super-K has no doubt spent significant effort improving & evaluating their reconstruction algorithms.

Once you have the reconstructed electron direction there's almost no hope that you can reconstruct the incident neutrino direction...but that's generally okay, b/c you can usually just assume the neutrino traveled exactly parallel to the electron (i.e. directly away from the sun). But that's sometimes wrong which is (partly) why you see a lot of "fuzz" around the solar core in the image.

<comment><USER17> Isn't this image a bit circular then (pardon the pun)? The "hot" pixels in the middle represent the electrons with a direction perfectly aligned with the direction to the Sun, while the cool-blueish outside pixels are a representation of the electrons traveling at an angle? Circular in the sense that you know where the Sun is, and are looking in that direction, and the electron trails are just confirming that.

Is this image telling us anything new? Can this method be used for any type of observation? Or it simply serve as observation in the opposite direction: knowing where the neutrinos come from, you can infer in what cone the bounced electrons can move?

A fun thought: if one day, a secret organization starts running an undisclosed nuclear fusion reactor, will it show up on this "photo"?

<comment><USER4> The detector does not "look" in any direction, it is in no way "pointed" at the sun. It records the direction of all events that occur within its volume. But once recorded they compare the direction of all events with the direction from the sun at the time of the event. The angle between the solar direction and the event direction is what makes up that image. If the neutrinos were not coming from the sun, the image would look like white-noise. Since there is a clear "peak" at the center you can make a good estimate about what fraction of events in your data set came from the sun. That amount is a direct measurement of nuclear processes going on with the sun over the course of the dataset...which is physically interesting. Here is the 1-D version of the neutrino "picture", [https://i.imgur.com/7OmXXtn.png](https://i.imgur.com/7OmXXtn.png) (cite: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07538.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07538.pdf)). You can tell quite clearly that there are many more events pointing away from the sun then are pointing back towards it. Exactly how much more is the interesting physics measurement done here.

All that being said, the specific shape of the "sun" in the image is influenced by many factors many of which are related to the detection mechanism and the detector itself...and don't tell you that much about the sun. Eventually (one hopes), detectors will improve to the point where the "shape" information of the image is reliable enough to extract interesting solar physics measurements from it.

P.S your fun thought on the detection of a fusion reactor is extremely on point. There exists a under-construction experiment in the UK called "Watchman" that hopes to detect a neutrino signature from a nuclear power plant being shut off and then being used to produce material for a nuclear weapon. The idea would be that you could observe activities of nuclear facilities in a "rouge nation". See here [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/science/nuclear-bombs- ant...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/science/nuclear-bombs- antineutrinos.html) or here [http://svoboda.ucdavis.edu/experiments/watchman/](http://svoboda.ucdavis.edu/experiments/watchman/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's a fun paper on how you could use a particle accelerator to blow up nuclear weapons in their silos from the other side of the planet with a neutrino beam. There would be no defense against this (highly fanciful) countermeasure. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep- ph/0305062.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0305062.pdf)

<comment><USER19> Good luck generating a 1000 TeV neutrino beam with that flux. Currently, humanity is at 6.5 TeV for protons, which are easily acceleratable because they're charged. Neutrinos have to be produced through a fixed target collision setup which translates only a small fraction of the original energy into neutrinos. So I dare to predict that by the time we can have such a beam we have wiped ourselves out with nuclear bombs.

<comment><USER20> Not to mention you'd have to know where to aim your neutrino beam...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Do we know how many neutrinos were registered during the 503 days? I'd be curious about the resolution of this image.

Also, in order to cause the Cherenkov radiation, the neutrino has interact at least with an electron, I wonder about the percentage of the number of neutrinos interacting with the water in this vs. the number of neutrinos that interacted with Earth on the way.

Not anything practical... I'd just be curious.

<comment><USER4> For their more recent data they reported seeing ~32000 solar neutrino events over a 1600 day dataset (cite: top-right of page 13 [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07538.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07538.pdf)). Their detector nowadays is more sensitive than it was when the OP was published so I would estimate the image comes from probably around 5000 neutrino events.

And I don't know any specific numbers but you can be sure a large amount more of neutrinos interacted with the air/rock between the Sun and Super-K than interacted in the detector volume. But that number (whatever it is) is still tiny compared to the total flux (which is ~5 million per square centimeter per second).

And that's of just the "high energy" type neutrinos that Super-K is sensitive to. The lower energy varieties are more like 10 billion per square centimeter per second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Question from someone who has no physics background - they mention the neutrino can go "faster than speed of light" \- how is that possible?

<comment><USER23> I think you're talking about "the electron is accelerated at a speed greater than the speed of light in water"? The "in water" is the important bit. Light travels [as measured in a straight line] slower in water due to bouncing off of the water molecules. It's not that light itself is slow it just takes light longer to make it through the water because it takes a longer path.

<comment><USER24> It's not taking a zig-zag path like you imply. That would be scattering and it would end up in a random direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Article says the image is from a 503 day exposure--it doesn't say how, if at all, the nighttime data is decoupled from the daytime data. Perhaps it is something like "technically 0.0001% of this image might be from nighttime readings".

<comment><USER26> There is no nighttime, nutrinos go straight through stars and planets.

<comment><USER27> There is in principle a day-night effect which may be measured. The electron flavor component of the neutrino can be enhanced or diminished by the presence of matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How do you image neutrinos? I mean if you're imaging the sun with light you'd use a pinhole camera, for normal images lenses or mirrors, but if neutrinos go straight through the whole planet how do you make a lens for that? Or a pinhole camera?

Edit: I see that someone else asked a similar question, the answer being that you image electrons that have been knocked loose by neutrinos, which is much easier.

<comment><USER29> > much easier

Well, that's relative ;) It still takes hundreds of highly-sensitive detectors and many tons of hyperpure water to detect neutrino reactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There was a detector that had a catastrophic failure during construction, and I am thinking it was this one. Anyone recall that story?

Effectively, a bad unit cracked, and because they were submerged in a fluid, it created a shock wave that caused other units to crack, which caused more units to crack. They had to replace some large percent of the sensors and it set them back something like a year.

<comment><USER4> You are correct, that happened to the Super-K detector in the early 2000s. It's briefly mentioned here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super- Kamiokande#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande#History)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can we use this principle to decrease the latency between continents over the internet? Like transmitting data via artificially generating neutrinos and sending them directly from say Asia to Latin America? There has to be a way, no?

I'm not a physics guy so it would bee be better if someone with domain knowledge could chime in.

<comment><USER31> Sure. Your 'NICs' would be rather expensive[1] and you'd need to minimax bandwidth vs. error correction for the number of detection misses.

[1] Here's a picture of one: [https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5b23cd9d1ae66220008b5...](https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5b23cd9d1ae66220008b5296-2732-1366.jpg)

<comment><USER32> Also note this is only the receiver, you'd need another device of similarly massive scale to transmit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That's impressive. But I'm also curious as to what other applications this setup can be useful for, because that looks to be one hell of an expensive operation. It's awesome to see such things actually happening.

<comment><USER34> While not done with neutrinos (at least not yet), a very similar setup is used for stufying geological structures. Usually either cosmic rays or muons produced by cosmic ray collisions are detected and depending on the number of detections over time, the density of the rock they pass through can be determined. By filtering the energy of the particles, you can look at radiation directionally (particles coming straight down have more energy than those that come at a shallower angle). You can have a detector next to a volcano and get an "x-ray" of that volcano.

Neutrino detectors can also "see" active nuclear reactors. One could imagine using a detector located outside of a suspect nation to validate their claims with regards to nuclear nonproliferation (ie that they're not running their reactors overtime to produce more plutonium than they report).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if there were there any attempts to observe the rest of the universe with this kind of equipment considering there are n number of neutrino sources.

It could reveal the general shape of the universe or center of universe.

<comment><USER4> The Ice Cube experiment has done that exact thing. Here's the most recent publication from them on that subject, [https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.08488](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.08488). Here's a slight older but perhaps more digestible result from them [https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/view/449](https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/view/449)

</comment></comment><comment> c-smile The most interesting fact on the image (IMO) is that the halo is clearly elliptical, why?

Is the image aligned to the "main" ecliptic plane of Solar system or rather to Sun's rotation plane (7.25° from those) ?

<comment><USER4> I think what you're seeing is either a random noise fluctuations, or perhaps a result of the coordinate system they're using for that image. If you take a look at a similar, more up to date, image from Super-K that uses more data you don't see any sort of elliptical nature. [http://www- sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sk/physics/image/image_sola...](http://www- sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sk/physics/image/image_solarnu/solpic_1500d_2_1.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Should the article's title on HN reflect its publication date? (2007)</comment>


Things I Won't Work With: What This Compound Needs Is Some Hydrogen Peroxide - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/09/27/what-this-here-compound-needs-is-some-hydrogen-peroxide <comment><USER2> Kept me laughing all the way though. Another fun read from Lowe's "TIWWW" series.</comment>


Microsoft's AI has learnt how to write its own code and create its own programs - <AUTHOR> http://www.globalfuturist.org/2017/02/microsofts-ai-has-learnt-how-to-write-its-own-code-and-create-its-own-programs/ <comment><USER2> This looks like an overview for laymen. Is there a more technical and detailed report?

<comment><USER3> On HN: [https://hn.algolia.com/?utm_source=opensearch&utm_medium=sea...](https://hn.algolia.com/?utm_source=opensearch&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=opensearch&query=deepcoder&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment></comment>


Is this language without letters the future of global communication? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@chrisgaul/https-medium-com-chrisgaul-is-this-language-without-letters-the-future-of-global-communication-15fc54909c12 <comment><USER2> Global signage, maybe, general communication and business will remain English</comment>


Let's Talk about Logging - <AUTHOR> https://dave.cheney.net/2015/11/05/lets-talk-about-logging <comment><USER2> I generally agree with the article. Personally, I don't log _that_ many informations in my applications.

Normally, my users will just dump the whole log in an e-mail with a "doesn't work" message attached.

IMHO, a logging facility should grow with the project and I think the standard logging package in go is the right size.

About bubbling up the errors: absolutely! Always let the caller handle it!</comment>


Just launched jerknessreminder.com, feedbacks highly appreciated. Thanks - <AUTHOR>

here is the url http://jerknessreminder.com <comment><USER2> Don't you guys think you should credit Zachary and put up a link to awesomenessreminders.com as a source of your inspiration?

To say that you are not affiliated on a non-clickable bit of text after ripping off half their homepage is a little low.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. I am putting a link right now.

<comment><USER3> FYI, that link currently seems to be broken. There's an extra %22 at the end of the url, like this:

<http://awesomenessreminders.com%22>

instead of this:

<http://awesomenessreminders.com/>

<comment><USER4> fixed. thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Q: Is this made to harass/persecute people?_

 _A: No, it is just a joke. If the person target by the joke just ask us to stop, we will stop immediately, no questions asked._

Ah, too bad.

There are are several people I would sign up to get this (and I'm only slightly kidding).

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think that we should take the risk of being sued for harassement? maybe we can say that we do that just for one month, once a week, then we stop.

<comment><USER5> No, of course not. I was just being facetious.

If you allowed real insults, it could get out of hand quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> well we won't use real insults ever, just insults related to how much you are a jerk, not heavy insults.do you think this matters ?

<comment><USER5> It's a slippery slope.

Even _with_ that disclaimer in your FAQ, things could get ugly for you.

IIRC, the "awesome" guy said that around 7% of the people they call get upset with hearing they're awesome.

I imagine your numbers, from recipients who don't get the joke or are caught in a bad mood, would be higher.

FWIW, I would never offer a service like this, not only b/c of the potential liability issues, but also for all the bad karma you could stir up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the first site of the network and the last will help us stirring down that bad karma. anyway thanks for your feedbacks! the informations you point out are really useful

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> clickable <http://jerknessreminder.com></comment>


ISPs' Error Page Ads Let Hackers Hijack Entire Web - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/isps-error-page.html <comment><USER2> This is one of many reasons why I run my own dns server (which looks up the authoritative name servers for each domain directly from the root servers), rather than trusting comcast.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hijacking subdomains is a real form of identity theft and should be prosecuted.

</comment><comment><USER4> The DNS has always seemed like such a fragile system to me.</comment>


Google returning 404 errors on mobile phones - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/search/google%20404 <comment><AUTHOR> Appears to have come back, at least on my phone.</comment>


FAA poised to require electrical wiring fixes before 737 Max can fly again - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-poised-to-require-electrical-wiring-fixes-before-boeing-737-max-jets-can-fly-again-11583704341 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.is/UXRGa](https://archive.is/UXRGa)</comment>


Barebones C64 emulator written in C99, compiled to WebAssembly in under 64K - <AUTHOR> https://floooh.github.io/oryol-sticky-tests/c64.html <comment><USER2> Is the code for this open? Curious to have a peek and a poke...

<comment><USER3> fwiw, the github author has starred this repo [https://github.com/kondrak/rust64](https://github.com/kondrak/rust64)

There also exists this header file: [https://github.com/floooh/yakc/blob/master/src/yakc/systems/...](https://github.com/floooh/yakc/blob/master/src/yakc/systems/c64.h)

<comment><USER4> It also seems to be based around Oryol [0], where this project is part of the test suite [1].

[0] [https://github.com/floooh/oryol](https://github.com/floooh/oryol)

[1] [https://github.com/floooh/oryol-sticky- tests](https://github.com/floooh/oryol-sticky-tests)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Neural network that impersonates writers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JacobPlaster/ann-writer <comment><USER3> I haven't looked at the code, but glancing at the results leaves me thinking it might need more work.

The output seems to me around the level a Markov chain might produce. Karpathy's RNN code produces much, much better results[1].

I wonder if manually extracting features and training the RNN on that is a mistake? RNN's tend to work well on text because they encode understanding of the parse tree themselves.

[1] [https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn](https://github.com/karpathy/char- rnn)

</comment><comment><USER4> this doesn't look like a neural net to me. from NeuralNetwork.py

      from sklearn.neighbors import KNeighborsClassifier
      # Create a sperate neural network for each identifier
      for index in range(0, len(NaturalLanguageObject._Identifiers)):
           nn = KNeighborsClassifier()
           self._Networks.append(nn)

<comment><USER5> So then it seems like the author of the code doesn't understand that "NN" means "Nearest Neighbors" and not "Neural Network"?

He mentions that he used sklearn's Neural Network libraries in his blog post, but sklearn doesn't have any aside from RBM.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was confused with the difference between an SVM and a neural network. Easy mistake I guess. The whole goal of this project was for educational purposes, so im still happy with the outcome.

<comment><USER6> OMG, how embarrassing for OP. This is what scares me about technical blogging. Messing up unknowingly in an area I'm not experienced in and getting scathing critiques from my fellow hackers. Keep your chin up OP and next time remember to do your homework. +1 for the effort anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am afraid this author has no idea what he is doing - and is loosely throwing around terms he does not understand. What the hell was his normalization procedure. Dangerous to readers who do not know a lot and will get confused while reading.

</comment><comment><USER8> I ran a Markov chain text generator on _Finnegans Wake_ once. It came out looking much the same. :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Fun hack. If anything, it highlights how compelling deep learning and RNNs are: no messing with NLP, no messing with building other features or adding up classifiers, etc. The manual feature engineering means it might work better on a smaller dataset, but even then probably not.

For comparison with Andrej Karpathy's RNN code ([http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)) training on the "HarryPotter(xxlarge).txt" (76K) file using the default hyperparameters and a batch size of 25 gets me:

      > But Atfa the loom proset! No contarin — mibll,'s just pucking to live
      > note left them hard and fitther, clooked of course little happered to
      > trige on the fistpened. Their knew Harry mear from the shind-beas
      > eveided, at Uncle Vernon's thepped to spept were pelled and beadn
      > Harry, distine dy use. Harry had in a amalout, into the fish sfary door.

The difference here is tokenizing on words vs letters: the RNN code is trying to learn the structure of English from completely zero whereas the code here gets to work with well-formed words from the beginning. But otherwise, the results in the linked post are about as silly semantically:

      > Input: "Harry don't look"
      > Output: "Harry don't look , incredibly that a year for been parents in .
      >   followers , Harry , and Potter was been curse . Harry was up a year ,
      >   Harry was been curse "

EDIT: Updated the RNN output text. Was sampling from a checkpoint file for a different input corpus. Got confused by the long similar-looking filenames. Doesn't change the overall point though.

<comment><USER10> I just can't agree that a simple, linear-time operation like "tokenizing words and basic n-gram models out of them" is a tedious problem like you seem to be implying, nor do I feel a solution to this very-solved problem is "compelling". Word tokenization and n-gram models are simple, unreasonably effective, and very fast. If character-based RNNs do better (albeit far more slowly during training), great, but nothing to see here, let's move along.

As I've posted here before, people have been training character n-gram models and getting language modeling performances comparable to those from word-based models---without using neural networks---for at least a decade. That it works with RNNs is no surprise because it worked just fine with the much more constrained predecessor technology.

<comment><USER9> My problem isn't that the feature engineering is expensive or tedious, it's that it's privileging a lot of information that NNs learn from the data. Yeah ok, Markov models (n-grams) are simple and fast and produce good results for generating representative text.

Deep RNNs are simple and produce good results for a huge, diverse range of problems with no new domain information. As Andrej Karpathy wrote:

> Sometimes the ratio of how simple your model is to the quality of the > results you get out of it blows past your expectations, and this was one of > those times.

N-grams don't have nearly the power (eg longer-than-N-range structure like grammar) and don't generalize nearly as well, making them a lot less surprising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have you considered the copyright on the Harry Potter training data?

<comment><USER12> fair use - <USER2>

<comment><USER13> I would still be cautious. There is no need to use exactly this text.

Anyway, there are countries that don't have a fair use policy. So in this countries your repository could not legally be used.

IMHO, this is an unnecessary use of copyrighted material when there are thousands of equally well suited texts that have fallen out of copyright.

<comment><USER12> What you say is true - although I'm not sure it matters. There are heaps of art forms which are out of copyright, why should people critique/parody new films? Because they're relevant and people understand the content

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > I decided to use scikit's machine learning libraries. [...] The writer I > create uses multiple SVM engines. One large neural network for the sentence > structuring and multiple small networks for the algorithm which selects > words from a vocabulary.

This person has no idea what they're talking about. sklearn has no neural network code whatsoever.

EDIT: this feels like a testament to sklearn's greatness, honestly.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd be interested to know if this could be turned into a tool that lets you know how well your writing (or coding) matches the "house style". (Mostly for technical documentation, requirements specs etc...)

I'd be even more interested if it could be turned into a sublime text plugin that highlights words / phrases that deviate most strongly from the house style.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. I guess that was my main goal really, learning the structure of some text. The vocabulary generator was a pretty recent add in which is why it is quite in-accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is brilliant! I tried it out. Waiting for a larger data set! +1</comment>


Microsoft Drops Prices for Some Azure Instances by Up to 17% - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/14/microsoft-drops-prices-for-some-azure-instances-by-up-to-17 <comment><USER2> Competition in the cloud space is a beautiful thing. I really hope we don't end up with Amazon being a monopoly provider.

Now if they could all lower network egress pricing I'd be really happy.

<comment><USER3> I doubt that will happen. Very few people list that as their deal breaker, and it's their entire business model. If egress were cheap you could easily load balance between providers.

<comment><USER4> Mainframes: IBM - natural monopolist

PC's: Microsoft/Intel - natural monopolists

Mobile: Apple - natural monopolist

Cloud: Amazon - .... (take a guess where this is going)

<comment><USER5> Mobile: Google Android 70+% (Apple iOS is only 20% worldwide)

Cloud: Amazon, then Digital Ocean is the second, than long nothing, ...(?)..., Azure, ...

<comment><USER6> Who is using Digital Ocean in Europe?!

It is all about AWS and Azure over here.

<comment><USER7> Since they have a data center in Frankfurt we use it for some stuff. But on the edge for Hetzner vServers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Now I want more competitors for platforms like Heroku just so that they can put their prices down. Heroku is great, but it is crazy expensive. Furthermore, I don't see any signs of Heroku lowering their price at all.

<comment><USER9> Is Heroku really that expensive? I use their new $7/month instances and I have no complaints with performance and features. $50/month for a managed Postgres database is a bit expensive but other cloud storage options like Cloudant (use the service in same AWS region as Heroku) can be very reasonable.

<comment><USER10> Heroku is expensive when considering you can use similar tools on a vps for a fraction of the cost (or get a whole lot more for your money).

And yeah, when you charge $20 for SSL, you're expensive.

<comment><USER11> When you have to spend even 10 hours a year maintaining that vps, I think most PaaS pay for themselves.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry but at $20/mo for basic SSL, you can easily spend $40/mo on Heroku for ONE app, almost $500/yr!

A private VPS with enough resources for 4 of those same apps would be 2-4X cheaper.

If your time is so valuable that you can waste money like that, congratulations, but many of us find halving a price and learning marketable skills in the process to be valuable.

<comment><USER11> It's $20/month for basic SSL for custom domains. You can still have SSL at [https://your-app-name.herokuapp.com](https://your-app-name.herokuapp.com).

If your app is so important that SSL is necessary, that's worth $500/year. Or your app isn't that important and the point is moot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I only one who is experiencing terrible speed of Azure CDN?

[http://imgur.com/2pAzabn](http://imgur.com/2pAzabn)

[http://imgur.com/xiymJUt](http://imgur.com/xiymJUt)

<comment><USER13> That's the Azure.com website's CDN, but I can check on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are a lot of great services Azure offers and I would absolutely love to throw my money at Microsoft...but not all of it. I find it crazy that their SLA on VMs only applies if you have two VMs. Essentially, you are having to pay double just to maybe get 99.95% connectivity.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/support/legal/sla/virtual-...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/support/legal/sla/virtual-machines/v1_0/)

<comment><USER15> Any type of high availability requires multiple servers

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't have a use-case for Azure, but very happy MS are in the space.

<comment><USER17> Like you I don't have any valid use case right now, but I'm interested in Service Fabric[1] though. It looks like Amazon Lambda, it screams vendor lock- in but much less than Lambda, as it seems easier to code and import dlls

[1] [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/service- fabric/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/service-fabric/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Things are really going to pick up when interconnections between clouds becomes faster and easier. AWS's switch to VPC is actually moving this along nicely.

Many people actually want to be in two clouds for redundancy.

</comment><comment><USER19> Dear Azure team: you will be more awesome if you offer Linux VM running natively on Linux Host, more developers will come.

<comment><USER20> What difference does the host make? You're not interacting directly with it anyway, as far as I know.

<comment><USER19> If your Windows host need Windows update, then all the Linux guests would need to be rebooted (but seems they've managed to reduce the number of reboot significantly since last year). But regarding the performance and security, most people using Linux still prefer a Linux VM host.

<comment><USER21> Wow, not really. If perf is fine who cares about the hypervisor. Regarding reboots, if they are using hyper-v they are probably on top ofServer Core which minimises patch surface and thus reboots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I guess this is the new field in what they want to try to venture more into. I think the CEO was the former cloud head so no doubt its apart of his strategy

<comment><USER23> Azure is like 8 years old at this point, so it's by no means a new field for them. It's just that before there was no Google forcing everyone to cut their crazy fat margins.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Digital Marketplace and Community for Freelancers - <AUTHOR> https://hypelance.com/ <comment><USER2> Good luck with this. Community building is a tough road ahead.

I much prefer these old/traditional forums to the full-on marketplaces -- and I see that you use Invision. (I'm getting nostalgic now) :-)</comment>


A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576.pdf

<comment><USER2> [http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576](http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576) [non - pdf]

Here we introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images

Gatys, Echer, & Bethge

<comment><USER3> I don't know if this was deliberate or not, but the ordering of the authors' initials and subject matter strongly reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's book _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ (aka GEB)[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach)

<comment><USER4> Although I possibly recall Hofstadter has remarked he is not a fan of hierarchical pattern recognition architectures like deep nets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R9bJGNHltQ&list=PLujxSBD- JX...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R9bJGNHltQ&list=PLujxSBD- JXgnqDD1n-V30pKtp6Q886x7e)

Video by paper authors - convincingly transforms photos, by applying artists style.

<comment><USER5> It's not by the authors and it adds nothing (wouldn't say it's worth watching), but he provides a great set of links in the description!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> daily mail version :)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3214634/The-a...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3214634/The- algorithm-learn-copy-artist-Neural-network-recreate-snaps-style-Van-Gogh- Picasso.html)</comment>


Does anyone else hate coding on laptop? - <AUTHOR>

I feel 50% less productive when coding on a laptop.  Part of it is the trackpad, part of it is the smaller screen, more cramped keyboard.<p>My preferred set up is a desktop with dual-monitors, the bigger the better. <comment><USER2> Hate it? Quite the contrary - one of my favorite ways to spend an evening involves an Eee pc, my side-project, and a great local bar which offers a great whiskey selection and has a sushi chef on staff til midnight. (Liberty, in Seattle on 15th between Mercer and Republican.) You don't get much smaller than a netbook with a 1024x768 screen, but I just maximize an xterm and rotate between tabs, and it works fine.

At work I use a Macbook with two extra monitors and an external keyboard, but I set it up that way more because I could than because I really need all the desktop space. I have a bunch of terminals on one monitor, web/chat/email on the other, and do all my coding on the third; but I'd be just as productive with two monitors, and the only thing that really gets annoying with a single monitor is trying to deal with chat windows.

Maybe the thing I'd lose would be the ability to distract myself quickly and get back to work without having to move windows around; I might tend to stay distracted for longer periods of time, since the code would be hidden under the web browser (or whatever) instead of just being on the next monitor over.

<comment><USER3> I'm the opposite.

I can tolerate using a laptop if the screens big, but otherwise I don't want to program on it.

I have a 23" (1920x1080) monitor and a "20.5" (1600x900) monitor that I use both at one time to code on. I have a high-dpi mouse which once you get used to the sensitivty, is awesome with large monitors. Coding this way is great because I can use one large monitor for coding or UI design and the other monitor for looking up the documentation, reading a tutorial, or watching/listening to a lecture/talk (I tend to need background noise as I code).

I don't really know if my productivity has increased since purchasing a larger monitor, but I know it's much more convenient now.

Although I have programmed on a large laptop before and it was very helpful to code in a quiet place without distractions

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate coding on anything _but_ a laptop. Having the keyboard + trackpad + monitor in such a tight space greatly decreases the time my hands and eyes spend moving. I've tried dual-monitor setups before, but they make me feel like my head is on a swivel.

Additionally, with a laptop, I can take my primary work environment with me everywhere I go. Coding at a coffeeshop or in the car is the same as at home at my desk; you can't do that with a desktop and multiple monitors and a mouse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure you can, git or mercurial.

<comment><USER4> I'm referring to the physical work environment - I don't have to fight muscle memory if I want to work somewhere else for the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm the same way. dual monitors are also a must for me. Coding on on screen and refreshing on the other and looking back to the code without losing my place is just much smoother than toggling/minimizing.

Another thing is, with a laptop, ur mobile, so you might be coding in some foreign environment, which can be distracting. With a desktop, I'm bound to my own familiar space where I can be most productive.

</comment><comment><USER6> I work from home so I like using both, dual-screen setup in "office" and laptop for when I want a change of scenery. I'm definitely slower on the laptop but it's worth it to get away from the damned desk when I want to & Dropbox + mercurial takes care of all my sync issues.

</comment><comment><USER7> I find having something like a Tiling Windows Manager and some custom keyboard mapping helps tremendously when coding on a laptop. Rarely do I have to use the trackpad, though it doesn't help the constrained keyboard and screen size.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's annoying when the laptop keyboard lacks some keys you are used to, e.g. the Windows key or the Windows popup-menu key. You can bring up the Windows popup-menu by pressing Shift-F10, though.

Mouse vs. trackpad is an important point. In my experience, a TrackPoint is more usable than a touchpad (trackpad). So be glad when your laptop has got one.

</comment><comment><USER9> No, I prefer it.

Lately, I've even stopped using external monitors, keyboards, mice, & Ethernet cords. I come into work, plug the laptop into a dedicated power brick and start working. I'm able to focus more without windows spammed across multiple monitors.

I have one of the new MacBook Pro 15" (with the Thunderbolt port).

</comment><comment><USER10> A "desktop replacement" laptop is my solution to wanting the flexibility to work remotely on occasion.

My current setup: Dell 27" (2560x1440) + 17" Dell M6500 (1920x1200) running Ubuntu.

I can unplug the laptop and work pretty well on it. But yeah, there's no comparison to the filco majestouch keyboard + mouse + big monitor.

</comment><comment><USER11> External mouse + keyboard helps a lot. Though, I hardly ever use a mouse, so I only have to carry an extra keyboard. Thankfully, my keyboard is small, and isn't that much of a problem to carry it around.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would love to have those old heavy keyboards with mechanical sounds :)

<comment><USER13> Then you should get one. Unicomp sells them, using the old IBM designs.

<http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/>

<comment><USER12> awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Doing testing or design work is difficult for me on a laptop, but I find pure coding to be almost better because there is less real estate to invite distractions.</comment>


Why your new programming language won't work - <AUTHOR> http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html

<comment><USER3> I understand how it gets here, but I wish people wouldn't upvote this kind of pointless pandering. I'm sure it has a place somewhere, but it's not HN.

Some new things fail because of obvious flaws. Some fail because of non- obvious flaws. A very few things succeed despite both kinds. Nothing succeeds because it's perfect-- and that includes every programming language we use today.

If there's one thing HN drills into our heads, it's that failure is the only path to success. Yes, your new programming language is very unlikely to take off. It might be for reasons that occurred to this one dude, it might not. Either way, failing to make a new programming language is one of the best ways to come to understand the decisions that went into the development of the ones that succeeded.

There are useful criticisms to be made. "Here are some things you probably haven't thought of. Here are some projects you probably aren't aware of." Many people have managed to write such essays quite lucidly, without discouraging people from experimenting with failure on their own.

"You won't succeed because you suck, and I hate you," which (s/snark//g) is all I read here, is completely unhelpful. Cleverly though it may be written out, and apropos as it may be on a programming humor blog somewhere, it's antithetical to everything HN is about.

And anyway, none of this stuff applies to MY language.

<comment><USER4> "I understand how it gets here, but I wish people wouldn't upvote this kind of pointless pandering. I'm sure it has a place somewhere, but it's not HN."

Should HN only reserve a place for the _other_ kind of pointless pandering, the one the article mocks?

<comment><USER5> People trying to improve things should be encouraged; even if they always fail; and if its related to programming it should be here.

People that mock those people should be taken as amateur comedians, and should be on reddit (not here).

<comment><USER4> "People trying to improve things should be encouraged; even if they always fail"

No, people trying to improve things should be presented with (sane) "barriers to entry".

While there is no "right" way to improve things, there are tons of certified wrong, dead-end, been-here-done-that ways that should be avoided. Engineering is nothing if we don't learn from our collective mistakes, our history, and from proven theory. Else, you get the equivalent of those countless kooks who claim to have invented "cold fusion", "perpetual motion machines" but the "establishment doesn't believe them".

People trying to improve things is not by itself beneficial. Even if we restrict this to programming, we have fragmentation of effort, and you get like 200 frameworks for the same thing with marginal differentiation. If someone comes along with some radical idea, more power to them.

But we reserve the right to mock those coming up with YET ANOTHER tired cliche of a concept and/or implementation. They don't get free applause just for effort.

<comment><USER3> Is it too much to ask that an intellectual community like HN be a place free from both adulation and derision?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I actually read this the opposite way from the way the rest of you ([ ] appear to be [ ] are ) reading it.

No language dodges all of these checkboxes - or even 70% of them, really. I mean, just look at the "Unfortunately, your language (has/lacks)" list. A language which correctly had or lacked all of those as appropriate (jeezus - jut determining what the correct combination is would light half the blagoblag on fire...) would obviously be quite sucky.

The point, then, is that no language can make it through this checklist - <USER2> no language should have to. If your objection can be found on this checklist, and you don't have anything significant to add, then your feedback isn't really helping, is it?

Your feedback

[ ] Can be expressed as a linear sum of items on this checklist (see "trash can")

[ ] Cannot be expressed as such (see "internet")

<comment><USER7> Of course every language fails the checklist somehow. That's the design goal: No language should escape from the joke without being teased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> About ten years ago, a similar checklist was the default response to proposed solutions to spam problems.

And then someone wrote a proposal that checked many of the boxes on that list, but had the odd feature of actually working quite well.

I think that guy quit went on to start a news web site. I guess he was discouraged by the checklist.

<comment><USER9> Ironically, he also went on to invent a programming language with many of the same checklist items.

<comment><USER4> With as much success as implied by the checklist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's pretty win. I nearly laughed tea through my nose.

In particular, this was win:

        [ ] You have reinvented Lisp but worse
        [ ] You have reinvented Javascript but worse
        [ ] You have reinvented Java but worse
        [ ] You have reinvented C++ but worse
        [ ] You have reinvented PHP but worse
        [ ] You have reinvented PHP better, but that's still no justification
        [ ] You have reinvented Brainf*** but non-ironically

<comment><USER11> The expression "[...] is win" is decidedly _not_ win.

<comment><USER12> Languages evolve and living languages change. Speaking or writing in a particular way is one of the fundamental techniques humans use to associate themselves with a culture, society, or any other term for 'group of people'. Criticising someone for their cultural membership is not acceptable here nor should it be acceptable elsewhere. How we talk and write is a tool to define who we are or who we want to be.

You may be trying to suggest that the grandparent post adds nothing to the discussion but that is not what you did. You criticised the grandparent for their association with an internet subculture's vernacular. Criticise the comment, not the parlance it is delivered in.

<comment><USER13> I lived through my teenage years when everyone was saying "Not!" all the time, and I did not let that stick in my vocabulary. As a surly old-timer in training, I reserve the right to complain about any slang anybody uses, and win/fail as adjectives definitely are topping my list these days.

Maybe if we ridicule them enough they'll move on to more clever slang, or at least more obscure slang so that I no longer understand it enough for it to annoy me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I enjoy this final check item:

"[ ] Programming in this language is an adequate punishment for inventing it."

</comment><comment><USER15> "You have reinvented Brainfuck but non-ironically" is classic.

</comment><comment><USER16> They should add this one too:

      [ ] the language name sounds too much like
          clojure, closure, clozure, clojurescript or clojureclr

<comment><USER17>
        [ ] the name is a common word, a single character, or
             two characters, one of them not easily pronounceable,
             and you are neither a demi-god nor a multi-billion-
             dollar company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "[ ] You have reinvented PHP better, but that's still no justification" I always like this one. Even thus I have no real thing against PHP, it makes me smile.

<comment><USER19> I have something against PHP, but there's a deeper point to be made here. A language that does nothing more than reinvent a popular language will not succeed, even if it does a better job. To succeed, a language has to provide a good solution to a problem a lot of developers are having. Some examples:

* C - assembly and machine languages are not portable

* PHP - the barriers to entry for server-side web programming are too hugh

* Java - C++ becomes too error-prone with large teams

* Clojure[0] - there's too much complexity in programming that isn't inherent to the problems being solved

* Ruby, Python - Perl is really useful, but a little too messy

[0] Calling Clojure popular may be pushing it, but there seems to be some momentum building behind it.

<comment><USER20> _Clojure[0] - there's too much complexity in programming that isn't inherent to the problems being solved_

That is more or less what every language is trying to achieve. It would be more accurate to say "Clojure: All other Lisp implementations are impractical".

<comment><USER19> I don't think so. Many languages - I'm specifically thinking of Java and C# here - have made it their goal to _manage_ complexity. Rich Hickey has made it an explicit goal to _eliminate_ incidental complexity and has spoken about it on several occasions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Most excellent. Timely too, given the recent HN links on Dart, PHP.reboot, etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, I don't think I've seen this presentation of a joke in at least 10 years. Not exactly sure it's worth bringing back.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's kindof funny that when you paste this url to Google+, the url will read "C Programming Language Checklist" (because of the favicon..)

</comment><comment><USER24> He should add:

[ ] Manual memory management is not free.

</comment><comment><USER25> A lot of languages fill a much needed gap in the universe.

</comment><comment><USER17> Really, it only needs one:

        [ ] It is a new programming language.

Not really a judgement of the language, though, and it equates 'work' with 'be used by people who did not develop it'.

</comment><comment><USER26> [ ] Clever but I'm not eager [ ] to

       [ ] take thoughts on programming languages from

       [ ] someone [ ] (s) incompetent at markup.

[ ] Sorry.

</comment><comment><USER27> I can pretty much tell anyone who asks why your new programming language won't work.

Its because people like me, the used C for 15 years, Perl for 10, and can't stand Python/Ruby/C#/OtherNewFangledLanguage types... simply do not care about your language.

Yup, its that simple. If you can't hook the guys who've been around the block a few times, what hope does your language have?

<comment><USER28> How old do you think Python is? :3

(Answer: 20 years old; it was first publicly talked about in 1991. Python is as old as Linux!)

<comment><USER29> Here's my favorite trivia story about how old Python is:

You know JWZ's rant about how Java could have made integers first class objects by using the first bit as a flag for whether that machine word contained a primitive type or a pointer to an object, at the cost of only having a range of 2^31 instead of 2^32 (or whatever the word size was)? Python apparently had the same discussion in the early days, and made the same decision as Java (i.e. non-primitive integers, you have to box them to treat them as objects) and the reason was ... that the requisite bit twiddling was slow on DEC Alphas. (In fairness, at the time Guido was working for a government lab full of DEC Alphas.)</comment></comment></comment>