Study Finds No Single Genetic Cause of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/massive-study-finds-no-single-genetic-cause-of-same-sex-sexual-behavior/ <comment><USER2> Just because they can't pin something down to a single or low number of genes doesn't automatically mean there isn't a strong genetic determinant - it just means it might be spread among many factors, making any one factor hard to pinpoint.

From a high level view, the idea that something that is so critical to species survival, like a sex drive, isn't largely genetic determined seems rather unlikely.

I suspect the situation is something like height - this primer gives a good overview of properties of something that might be largely genetic but by many many factors. Also it covers the issue of rare exceptions, being different from the general rule.

[https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/height](https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/height)

Also note height is a continuous function not a binary state of tall or short - I suspect the same is here - this would easily explain, why some people feeling they were born that way, and others feel it's more a choice.

<comment><USER3> > From a high level view, the idea that something that is so critical to > species survival, like a sex drive, isn't largely genetic determined seems > rather unlikely.

Actually I found that surprising to hear. We have so many social processes that in many cases discourage and reduce sexual behavior.

Marriage works against the survival of the fittest you might get from sowing wild oats, but it's almost universal.

Homosexuality, indeed, is a discouragement to species survival (if I understand your meaning correctly). Yet you're claiming it is unlikely that it doesn't originate in genetics?

I don't know, I mean, I basically agree with your final statement - that we don't actually have a discrete variable here even if we largely see discrete behavior (since we tend to prefer long lasting relationships, so if you're F45-55M then you'll probably focus disproportionately on finding an M partner).

And what it means to be a guy or a girl is definitely not genetic. Most of our interaction with sexual beings is "pants on". And those pants, and the nature of our interactions, is hugely cultural determined.

And I think most people have the experience of being attracted to a person without engaging in any sex-seeking behavior with them. And many people seem to have experience of the reverse.

Given the cultural and experiential components of sexual attraction, I really don't think genetics need to be worth that much. Maybe there's some contribution, but it doesn't seem to have much scope, nor does it need it.

<comment><USER4> Marriage trades the advantage of sowing wild oats for the advantage of a pair of committed adults sticking around to raise the children to adulthood.

Survival of the fittest is useless if none make it to reproductive age (or the opportunity to reproduce), and humans are incapable of fending for themselves for at least the first couple of years of their lives. Simply reproducing with many is not a surefire way, and doesn't seem to be the optimal way, of guaranteeing that your genetic material endures.

Bret Weinstein has some interesting thoughts on the evolutionary merits of things like marriage and religion, I'd reccommend having a look at his work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The "born this way" aspect of gay activism is trending down, even apart from the lack of scientific evidence of a strong genetic component.

It was immensely useful during the gay rights movement, especially in the years preceding Obergefell, as a way to essentially persuade straight people, "This is not something I can control, so it's not something I can change, even if I wanted to." There was a de-emphasis on how sexual relationships typically develop -- through a serious of free, conscious choices to which sexual partners consent -- and instead an emphasis on sexual attraction itself, which often does not feel like a fully a conscious choice.

Now, I'm seeing more and more LGB people, especially those under 30, freely admit what had been considered an open secret: that many of those who insisted that they were "born this way" actually consider sexual orientation _not_ to be immutable, but fluid, to various degrees. Whether one has conscious control over whom one finds attractive at any given time, of course, is another question, but for a time, evidence for sexual fluidity, especially within the queer community, was considered potentially damaging to the "born this way" efforts and de-emphasized or suppressed.

Post-Obergefell, more queer people seem to feel like they've gained enough legal and cultural ground that they can freely admit it, though. And some do in an almost defiant way, saying essentially, "So what if my sexual choices are free choices? If I choose to be gay, who's to say I shouldn't?"

That's a far cry from the prevailing narrative from just 10 or 15 years ago, when very few gay people would admit that they might have any conscious control over being gay.

<comment><USER6> I cannot understand how "born this way" could ever possibly not be true. Sure, today people _can_ "decide" (or whatever) but why would anyone in their right mind decide to be gay like 200 years ago, and risk being ostracized from the community, being sexually unsatisfied and/or severely punished (including sterilization and/or death)?

(Obviously "fluidity" of sexuality does not preclude "born this way" \- it could be that it's written in your genes that your sexuality would/will change throughout your life, similar to many people's libidos and/or hair color.)

Edit: on second thought, it's very possible that it could be random environmental influences (e.g. amount of... I don't know... drums + beech pollen ... the fetus is exposed to in the womb) - that could be pretty much orthogonal with genetics, while still leaving the person with "no choice". It's just that AFAIK most personality traits have a significant genetic component, either actually genetic or epigenetic [1].

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/)

<comment><USER7> >why would anyone in their right mind decide to be gay like 200 years ago, and risk being ostracized from the community, being sexually unsatisfied and/or severely punished (including sterilization and/or death)?

I wish it were that simple, but unfortunately pedophilia still exists even though it fits all your criteria. Clearly some people adopt sexual behaviours even if it could lead them to a terrible outcome. Actually, some might do it _specifically_ for that reason and the thrill of it.

You could make the same comment about religion, drugs, literature, politics etc... It's not rare for humans to adopt behaviors that put them at risk even if there are no obvious benefits. People routinely endanger themselves while doing kinky things. There probably are more kinks out there than there are genes in the human genome. There's clearly a large number of factors at play here, only some of them genetic.

<comment><USER8> This is assuming being gay is purely sexual, which, despite being called a sexual orientation, is misguided. There is more to attraction than sex, such as who you imagine you could be in a relationship with, who you develop feelings for, and who you love. In other words, while one may be aroused by certain sexual activities (kinks), no one develops a crush on someone because of a specific sexual activity.

Being gay isn't a kink, just as being straight isn't.

Straight people continued relationships despite being outlawed, which is the entire premise of Romeo and Juliet. Would you call Romeo and Juliet's relationship a kink?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is not really that surprising considering that the closer we look it seems like all genes affect complex traits, the omnigenic theory.

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/omnigenic-model-suggests- that...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/omnigenic-model-suggests-that-all- genes-affect-every-complex-trait-20180620/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I have read a few cases of identical twins having different sexual orientation. Perhaps they are also good subjects of study, since their genetic make up are so similar, it would be easy to identify if/which genes correlates to sexual orientation.

</comment><comment><USER11> Garbage in, garbage out. This study doesn't mean anything as it relies on information provided to 23 and me. The question asked if a person had a same sex experience, which doesn't mean a person is gay, bi or straight. Further there are plenty of people that wouldn't answer truthfully to the question for a multitude of reasons.

Good for advertising clicks and idiotic comments that have already started to appear.

<comment><USER12> > The question asked if a person had a same sex experience

Yeah i found that weird too. a Sexual experience is not "orientation"

Another interesting thing is that homosexual people use 23andme more frequently than the rest. Perhaps looking for clues like this

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The theory of gay gene couldn't have been supported by the evolutionary algorithms.

Natural selection means that a trait like male homosexuality, if it had a genetic component, couldn't have persisted over evolutionary time if the individuals that carry the genes associated with that trait are not reproducing.

In my observation of two contrasting cultures that I grew up in, it could be better explained by sociology than genetics.

<comment><USER14> Yes it is totally supported by evolutionary algorithms. Traits that are harmful in some situations and beneficial in others can be passed on, like sickle cell anemia which gives a degree of protection against malaria. The same as traits which are beneficial to some of your offspring and advantageous to others, like a strong jaw. Which would probably look better on your sons than your daughter.

It can be evolutionary advantageous for some of your kids to come first, even if it means others come last, rather than all your kids coming second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The key takeway is easily lost:

"genetics seemed to account for between 8 and 25 percent of the behavior. The rest was presumably a result of environmental or other biological influences. "

There is a lot of other research which identify these "other biological influences" as hormonal imbalance during the pregnacy, which in most severe cases causes a child to be transgender, in milder ones gay (this kind of explains "drag queens", gay man who identify as male, but still like to dress up as women sometimes. Not sure if there's a female counterpart to this phenomenon).

</comment><comment><USER12> I get the sentiment but the title is misleading. There IS a significant genetic contribution, but it's polygenic.

<comment><USER16> That's why it says "no single genetic cause" and not "no genetic cause".

<comment><USER17> Technically true, and I'm sure the title wasn't intended to have that effect, but judging by the other comments, it appears some people still seem to be led to believe it meant "no genetic cause" \- so it's still worth pointing out.

But yes, that's not necessarily malice or incompetence on the part of the title's author.

<comment> lone-commenter > _But yes, that 's not necessarily malice or incompetence on the part of the > title's author._

If it's not malice, then it's linguistic incompetence.

<comment><USER17> Well, incompetence in that they didn't manage to achieve clarity for all readers, but not in the sense that someone else would've been able to think of a better title that _would_ achieve that, I think.

<comment> lone-commenter Sure they would: "Study Finds No Unique Genetic Cause of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A lot of otherwise smart people in here didn't read the article and are popping off about how gays choose to be gay.

The article says that it is a POLYGENIC situation, as in "not ONE gene, but many."

</comment><comment><USER19> To make it simple to understand I think "same-sexual behavior" can be compared to left or right handedness. There is not a single gene that determines it (probably more than 40) but it is certainly not a thing people can choose or that can be easily changed during life. More about handedness [https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/handedness](https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/handedness)

</comment><comment><USER20> As someone who knows nothing about this subject, if the cause doesn't appear to be genetic then what does that leave? Environmental? Something else?

<comment><USER21> What do you think causes big noses?

<comment><USER22> I would like to say your comment is right on the nose, but it really isn't a helpful question at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's plenty of evidence to suggest some portion of likelihood of being gay is controlled by parental hormones. E.g. the probability of being gay is observably higher in men born after an older brother.

So... this was obviously going to be true.

</comment><comment><USER24> If I understand correctly, this result is exactly equivalent to "no single genetic cause for heterosexual behavior", which does not seem as dramatic.

</comment><comment><USER25> What about genetic causes in the parent(s)? Such as a genetic cause in the mother affecting the hormonal levels in uterus.

<comment><USER22> That should still result in specific mutations having significant effects.

And maternal effects are a thing that can be computed statistically, both as a genetic and environmental factor.

And it's not helpful to confuse sexual orientation with hormonal causes or effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder what if it's a learned behaviour.

I used to very odd kid and mostly spent my life around girls from very early age.

I almost never had male friends which ofc changed in late teenage.

Now, don't find females that attractive and mostly spend time with guys.

Don't call me sexist or smth but I find it's more fun to work with guys. That's my preference.

<comment><USER6> Proximity can go both ways... You might as well develop a strong _liking_ of girls/women because of proximity.

I've been bombarded from young age (by pop culture, TV, magazines, porn) by thin women wearing make-up. I have a strong sexual preference for thin (fitspo thin, not anorexic thin) women and a strong dislike of women wearing make-up. Go figure...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I always thought the claim of a genetic cause for sexuality was a bit premature. Even if one is "born this way", that doesn't necessarily mean it's genetic.

</comment><comment><USER28> I find it difficult to believe a universal genetic cause since same-sex relationships generally don't produce off-spring and would be naturally selected out.

<comment><USER22> In fact I read some time ago that one mutation that does have a small contribution to sexual orientation, has the same allele frequency in most Human populations, suggesting that even the "gay" allele is positively selected for.

A Human individual's fitness affects the chances of his whole family. And it's just not true that Homosexuals don't have children. In practice they have fewer children, but more than you might think.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are good books for advanced topics in Python?  - <AUTHOR>

I have been programming for almost a year and full time for 5 months.  Looking to add to my holidays reading list. So far I've seen recommendations, eg Think Python(http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html) and Programming Python (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Python-Mark-Lutz/dp/0596158106/).  Thanks for any tips and advice! <comment><USER2> Foundations of Python Network Programming is pretty ok on network related topics([http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Python-Network- Programming...](http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Python-Network-Programming- Goerzen/dp/1590593715))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @tordf!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I guess the question is what do you mean by advanced topics? What direction do you want to go in? The latter book you mentioned seems to cover a number of topics and is probably a good bet.

If you are interested in the web, both these books were good: [http://www.amazon.com/Python-Web-Programming-Steve- Holden/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Python-Web-Programming-Steve- Holden/dp/0735710902) [http://www.amazon.com/The-Definitive-Guide-Django- Developmen...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Definitive-Guide-Django- Development/dp/143021936X/ref=pd_sim_b_12)

Here are a few books that cover some "advanced?" topics that I'd like to read when I have time (would also like to hear other peoples' recommendations on them): [http://www.amazon.com/Python-Data-Analysis-Wes- McKinney/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Python-Data-Analysis-Wes- McKinney/dp/1449319793) [http://www.amazon.com/Twisted-Network-Programming- Essentials...](http://www.amazon.com/Twisted-Network-Programming-Essentials- Fettig/dp/0596100329) [http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Python-Network- Programming...](http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Python-Network-Programming- comprehensive/dp/1430230037/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y) [http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tornado-Michael- Dory/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tornado-Michael- Dory/dp/1449309070) [http://onlinebookplace.com/programming-computer-vision- with-...](http://onlinebookplace.com/programming-computer-vision-with-python- tools-and-algorithms-for-analyzing- images?region=us&engine=google_pl&gclid=CJDNub2Z9rMCFe5FMgodTy8Azw)

I'm not sure on your background or the quality of these books, but an understanding of data structures, algorithms, and object oriented programming could be considered important: [http://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures- Algorithms-Using-Pytho...](http://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Algorithms- Using-Python/dp/0470618299) [http://www.amazon.com/Python-Algorithms- Mastering-Language-E...](http://www.amazon.com/Python-Algorithms-Mastering- Language-Experts/dp/1430232374/ref=pd_sim_b_2) [http://www.amazon.com/Python-3-Object-Oriented- Programming/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Python-3-Object-Oriented- Programming/dp/1849511268)

Although these and other intermediate to advanced topics tend to be covered better in non-language-specific books such as this shotgun blast to the head. Don't worry, it's just an "introduction": [http://www.amazon.com/Introduction- Algorithms-Thomas-H-Corme...](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms- Thomas-H-Cormen/dp/0262033844)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @poof131 - I'd like to go deeper into algorithms / data manipulation / social network analysis (for my job), and also web programming using python (weekend reading).

I'm currently reading Python for Data Analysis but feel like I can read about how to use a library but it's hard to retain specific syntax use cases if I'm not using those libraries immediately / frequently.

One book I really like is Collective Intelligence (<http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do>), which has some good examples on social network analysis.</comment></comment>


As RIM continues to fall behind Apple, investors call for ouster of co-CEOs - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/05/30/as_rim_continues_to_fall_behind_apple_investors_call_for_ouster_of_co_ceos.html <comment><USER2> for full disclosure, i used to work at RIM and it was a great company to work for.

i think this article nails one aspect of RIM's downfalls really well. they're stuck in the past. but the reason why this is the case isn't because their technology is outdated or that they're too stubborn to move forward. they're just slow. really REALLY slow.

even while i was working for the company (in their northern CA office), everything was slow. decision making, development, pushing a product out. for example, take the playbook. it took them over half a year to move the playbook from announcement into the hands of users. with the market for tablets heating up rapidly, that was just way too much time.

another thing that causes this slowdown is RIM's lack of silicon valley presence. they have one small contingency out in redwood shores but that's it. sure, you can argue that RIM is located in the heart of canada's engineering capital, but that's still no silicon valley.</comment>


Ask YC: Expressive languages for spatial nodes - <AUTHOR>

What do you consider flexible languages for spatial maths? I have a set of nodes in a space, they are connected to each other in a graph, have have different bond strengths. I need to navigate through nodes quickly, for instance grab a node and grab certain nodes that match a certain node strength that is adjacent through one or two dimensions/nodes.
Each node has attribute/values pairs, and I want to be able to query nodes by those attribute/values.
AWS SimpleDB is too slow.
I am an amateur python programmer, this is the last language I've learnt, this is my third week using it.
Before that I came from ruby, which I abandoned for it's speed.
Pretty good at jquery/javascript, which I spend time in, and, almost don't want to mention this, PHP. Of course SQL amateurish (learned joins only 4 months ago) but I really can't make a case for SQL being suitable for my needs. I have studied "SQL for smarties" by Joe Celko.
I have Ruby, Erlang, Smalltalk, or Lisp, or R(?), io(?) in mind. I do just know Ruby in this group, the others I have not much clue about. But I'd learn in a heartbeat if you can make a good case for your language of choice for my problem set. <comment><USER2> MonetDB could be useful here.

MonetDB[1] is good for applications where you load the data once and then run lots of joins over binary relations, assuming your application works well with an RM/T[2] style schema.

In RM/T you have one entity relation that holds your entity ids and one property relation for each attribute. All your queries become many-way joins as they must traverse all the property relations. This is something you would never do with an ordinary RDBMS but is exactly what MonetDB's binary- association table scheme is designed to handle[3].

With MonetDB, you use SQL to define your schema in the familiar way. At the physical level MonetDB stores your data in an RM/T-style representation.

You may also want to see if Proximity[4][5]'s QGraph is suitable for your application. It uses MonetDB in it's implementation. The tutorial[6] includes an example of how to use it with Jython.

[1] <http://monetdb.cwi.nl>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_Model/Tasmania>

[3] [http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/Assets/monetdb_lectur...](http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/Assets/monetdb_lecture.pdf)

[4] <http://kdl.cs.umass.edu/proximity>

[5] <http://kdl.cs.umass.edu/proximity/about.html>

[6] [http://kdl.cs.umass.edu/software/documentation/tutorial/ch06...](http://kdl.cs.umass.edu/software/documentation/tutorial/ch06s08.html)

<comment><USER2> For spatial processing, you may find this MonetDB application a lot more interesting:

Sloan Digital Sky Survey / SkyServer provides public access to SDSS for astronomers, students, and wide public. A project to make a map of a large part of the Universe: 230 million object images, 1 million spectra, 4TB catalog data, 9TB images

<http://www.win.tue.nl/~tcalders/presentations/ivanova.ppt>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If this is perf. critical and your data easily fits in RAM, then your problem does not sound exotic enough to resort to obscure or special-purpose languages. You should be able to whip up efficient data structures for this in python without much trouble. In fact depending on your data set size and query specifics, it may be acceptably fast in any of the listed languages (including Ruby!) assuming you have the right data structures. You really wont know until you have tried it. I would suggest you start in whatever language you know best.

(If it doesnt fit in RAM, I would consider it a much harder problem and I can imagine resorting to an at least partially SQL-based solution).

Btw, for a very similar problem, I used C++ w/STL for pure performance. It worked well. But I'm migrating it to python to shorten dev time. I figure in the same amt of time in python, I can try a variety of approaches and algo optimizations, for the same time it would take to do a single one in C++ w/STL. And for algos on complicated data sets, you want to really understand your data set. That means playing with it a lot, which is easier in python.

The data structures you use often have a much bigger impact on performance, than the language.

<comment><USER3> Tip for doing this kind of thing, that works in any language:

In some cases, using more that one type of data structure at the same time will allow you to get the best of both worlds in terms of performance. Ie, a spatial index _plus_ a hash table as an index, over the same data, would allow efficient lookups on spatial predicates as well as attributes, over the same set of nodes.

A simple insight maybe, but not one I discovered without a lot of thought. Typically in university they teach you to use a single data structure type at a time, but really that's like teaching kids the alphabet, without the concept of combining the letters into meaningful words.

<comment><AUTHOR> Brilliant, thanks. Yes, RAM is a good option for me.

I figure 2 GB will last me 4 months. Then I can go up to 4, 8, 16, ...

Pretty good.

<comment><AUTHOR> mooneater, do you have any suggestions on how to actually store and persist such a data structure in RAM?

Would I use something like a wsgi webserver, that runs as a daemon, and occasionally dumps the data structure to disk?

Or is something like memcached better?

My preferred way of storing into RAM would be of course only storing changes, instead of storing the whole tree into RAM on every write.

<comment><USER3> Depends how often you are getting new data. If its not too often, you could write directly to SQL. Otherwise writing in batches like you suggest could work too.

After looking at your post again, and depending on data volume, you might be ok with a purely SQL solution too (ie, finding nodes 1 or 2 steps away on a graph is easy in SQL if your adjacency data is all in the db).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's true. But I still have a requirement for a schemaless db, so sql doesn't cut it.

<comment><USER2> By schema-less, do you mean that it's possible that every new record in the database could have a few attribute-values that no other record has, or that you simply don't know what your attributes are at this time but at some point you will know them all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Prolog. For info see "P-99: Ninety-Nine Prolog Problems" at <https://prof.ti.bfh.ch/hew1/informatik3/prolog/p-99/>

Scroll down to the section on Graphs (after problem 73).

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciated, definitely clean code to express nodes and relationships.

Is there a modern implementation that's well supported by a community?

<comment><USER4> comp.lang.prolog is the prolog newsgroup. The comp.lang.prolog FAQ contains information about the various implementations: <http://www.logic.at/prolog/faq/>

SICSTUS Prolog ( <http://www.sics.se/isl/sicstuswww/site/index.html> ) is a widely used commercial implementation. There are others.

FOSS alternatives include:

\- Ciao-Prolog, which might be noted for it's various extensions (breadth- first search, fuzzy logic, WWW programming interface, concurrency, persistence, and more) <http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/Software/Ciao/>

\- SWI-Prolog <http://www.swi-prolog.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> AllegroGraph[1] sounds like it could be suitable as well.

[1] <http://agraph.franz.com/allegrograph>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Your advice is deeply appreciated, thank you everyone who has posted so far.</comment>


Why no looting in Japan? - <AUTHOR> http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/15/why-is-there-no-looting-in-japan/?hpt=T1 This does not actually answer this question...but should be an interesting analysis. <comment><USER2> From _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_ ; Feynman and a colleague are staying at a traditional Japanese hotel in Kyoto:

The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to deliver breakfast. I'm partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, "Ohayo, gozai masu," which means, "Good morning."

Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to him and with equal composure says, "Ohayo, gozai masu ," and puts the tray down for us.

Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!"

We realized that in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we were.

<comment><USER3> I came here to quote Feynman too, but a different part:

 _This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you averaged so many people. But it's no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging._

It seems to me that they asked a bunch of people in the US why they _think_ there is no looting in Japan...

<comment><USER4> It strikes me as a theory with very poor explanatory power. We've seen many crises in the US as well, and Katrina was an _exception_. There have been a couple of others within my lifetime, but it's not politically correct to point out what similarities they may have. (I suppose I should point out this isn't a veiled reference to _race_ , it's actually 100% _cultural_ , but it's still not politically correct to discuss.) It is true in the US we always have to be at least a bit worried about looting, we can't quite _completely_ write it off, but in general it doesn't happen, and we do have a very loose society by comparison to Japan's. Whatever the determining factor is, that is not it, at least not directly.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, not trying to anger anyone or anything, I am genuinely interested. Where in the US was there a natural disaster of significant scale where there was no looting?

I'm actually from Wisconsin, but was living in Cedar Rapids during the floods, and there was looting there. My neighbor was the cop chasing these guys down. I am just curious how other communities were able to avoid looting.

BTW, Cedar Rapids is in Iowa.

<comment><USER6> Not a disaster quite, but in Houston everyone evacuated from the hurricane and no one I knew reported any looting happening.

<comment><USER7> And people turned out to help, first to clean up their own blocks, then to help with citywide food banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was a major power outage in much of the northeastern North America, affecting tens of millions of people, and almost no looting (aside from isolated incidents in Ottawa and Brooklyn) there either. There was a major terrorist attack in New York in 2001 and no looting. There was a major earthquake in San Francisco in 1989 and no looting. This statement that "looting is something we see after almost every tragedy" is simply not true.

<comment><USER9> Exactly! This _Why are the Japanese so different!_ is just romanticising them for not being us. It may not quite rise to racism, but it certainly is silly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am surprised nobody mentioned this yet: Japan has a much MUCH lower level of income (and wealth) inequality than the US, Haiti, etc. [1]

There are just a lot fewer poor people in Japan. So if your house got leveled by the tsunami, you can go to your friends, relatives, family, etc for a little help because they aren't half impoverished already.

I don't mean to demean the theory regarding social differences. I'm sure it's very true that society's standards and everyone's individual respect for shared property play crucial roles in the lack of looting. But I'm willing to bet that economic factors made a difference too.

[1] [https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html)

<comment><USER11> The UN Gini numbers:

      Japan: .249
      US: .408
      Haiti: .592

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality)

Aside from media exaggeration of looting, which is almost instant after a disaster where there are significant numbers of black people. Pretty much, the mirror image of this post. Google "looting in Japan" if you want to take a sample of the most racist invective on the internet. I mean, if the Japanese have honor in their blood...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Japan takes a lot of criticism for being a closed off culture. After living here for a while I have started to believe that it is necessary to support these values. Multiculturalism means lowest common denominator. There are efficiencies you can gain by having a monoculture. Nobody has to lock their bikes, subways can have nice cloth seats and you can walk around in any neighborhood and be safe.

When I came to Tokyo, a lot of foreigners I met who had been living here complained about the uptight nature of Japan. Too rigid, too exclusive, too slow to change.

Before Tokyo, I lived in a very nice part of Brooklyn. I remember I was walking down the street and I saw a man with his child come out of a store. The kid unwrapped his new toy and promptly threw the package onto the curb. I had a flash of anger and was thinking "what's wrong with that guy not correcting his kid?" As I was thinking this, the guy threw his cigarette pack cellophane on the sidewalk. He had different values than me, and I had a dirty street because of it.

In a place like Brooklyn you learn tolerance and how to live with other people's values on a day to day basis. In a place like Tokyo, the system shuns you until you adopt their values. I don't think either is necessarily better but you should be aware of it when you live in Japan and feel left out.

<comment><USER13> "There are efficiencies you can gain by having a monoculture. Nobody has to lock their bikes, subways can have nice cloth seats and you can walk around in any neighborhood and be safe."

Bangladesh is 98% ethnic Bengali; you can read about their crime here [http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1011.html#c...](http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1011.html#crime) ("U.S. citizens should avoid walking alone after dark, carrying large sums of money, or wearing expensive jewelry").

Lesotho is 99.7 percent Basotho, with an intentional homicide rate seven times higher than the U.S. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)

Meanwhile, Singapore, split between large numbers of Chinese, Malays and Indians is one of the safest places in the world (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Singapore>). Also safe is Switzerland, which is so ethnically diverse there are three official languages, each widely spoken within the country. ([http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1034.html#c...](http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1034.html#crime)) .

<comment><USER12> Please note that I'm _not_ saying all monocultures are safe. I am certainly also not saying multi-cultures are unsuccessful. This has nothing to do with safety or success, more efficiency gains and tolerance costs. I'm trying to raise a nuanced point and I went out of my way to say neither is better than the other.

I think the efficiency gained depends on the culture gaining it. Japan has decided that they value safety. In Bangladesh there are probably different assumptions you can make. I don't know what they are and I don't want to speculate because I don't have any experience living there.

 _edit:_ also wanted to add... even though Switzerland is ethnically diverse and speaks many different languages, I would still call it a mono-culture. The swiss are also sometimes criticized for being unique in their ways and resistant to change. Culture is not the same as race or language.

<comment><USER13> "Please note that I'm not saying all monocultures are safe."

Sure, but you attributed safety and other "efficiencies" in Japan to "monoculture." You also wrote, "Multiculturalism means lowest common denominator."

Now you seem to be attributing safety in Japan not to monoculture but to /Japanese/ culture. Fair enough.

In that case, what would happen if 10 million Japanese moved to Bangladesh, making it more multicultural? Would it be a less "efficient" culture? Would it be anchored by the "lowest common denominator," or would the nation improve through the infusion of new cultural values? It seems doubtful that, after conducting this thought experiment, most people could honestly conclude that, "Multiculturalism means lowest common denominator." It likewise seems hard to imagine Singapore in its present state -- including efficiency-wise -- if all those ethnic Chinese has never migrated there.

The big context here is that you were defending Japan against criticism that it is a "closed off culture" and "too exclusive, too slow to change." That criticism is very well earned; for all its many virtues, there is a disturbing level of racism in Japan, against Koreans and Americans of black heritage (usually in military service there but not always, see [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101880815-...](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101880815-149882,00.html)). There is also the matter of Japan's depressingly extended economic stagnation, going on 20 years old now, which is widely and credibly explained as being closely tied to an unwillingness to embrace new, often foreign values around business, corporate culture, risk taking, credit and competition.

The one time I visited Japan, for two weeks, I conjured many positive words to describe the country. "Efficient" was not one of them. The grueling, sit-at- your desk 14 hour workdays that are de rigueur in Japan are not particularly efficient. The make-work jobs everywhere also seemed inefficient, like the guy in a uniform bowing in apology non-stop to people driving by a construction detour in the road, or the full time ticket taker/thanker in the back of the bus who collected my payment stub. The many ritual greetings and apologies also did not seem efficient.

I have a hard time seeing how multiculturalism would not ENHANCE Japan's efficiency -- and economy.

Update:

"The swiss are also sometimes criticized for being unique in their ways and resistant to change. Culture is not the same as race or language."

In that case, Brooklyn is a monoculture of New Yorkers, or Americans, and your original distinction between it and Japan is rather meaningless.

<comment><USER12> _Now you seem to be attributing safety in Japan not to monoculture but to /Japanese/ culture. Fair enough._

Yes I wasn't careful enough in my writing. I mean to say that monoculture allows you to optimize around your values. Lowest common denominator sounds too judgmental but I mean it in the set-theory kind of way. I probably should just have said "common values".

 _what would happen if 10 million Japanese moved to Bangladesh, making it more multicultural? Would it be a less "efficient" culture?_

Yes, I think there would be certain generalizations that you could no longer depend on being true. I don't know what they would be. Maybe it would be better, maybe worse. Maybe it would be you would have to order a wider variety of food at your wedding to make everyone happy. I don't know. I would say that's a reduction in efficiency.

I am aware of racism here and I don't think it's good. I don't think Japanese companies are economically efficient but they pretty good at reflecting Japanese values. I eat a restricted diet and it's an inconvenience that people assume that I just eat the standard issue Japanese cuisine. A lot of people complain about that but I understand why it is that way.

I don't see what is so controversial about what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that having to always be tolerant for the way other people do things trades something off compared to living where everyone already does things mostly the way you would.

<comment><USER13> I think I grok your meaning of "efficiency" now; I'm definitely not suggesting you are an intolerant person.

I would politely challenge, however, the idea that there's roughly equal virtue between Brooklyn-style embraced diversity vs Japan-style conformity. Not only does multiculturalism have a genuine moral attractiveness, which should not be dismissed, it makes for a stronger, more resilient country over the long term. Fresh ideas, fresh values, fresh labor, fresh taxpayers, fresh consumers, fresh inventors and indeed fresh culture are stengths that have been indispensable in allowing the U.S. to overcome its many deep (and often chronic) flaws and attain the level of economic and cultural success that it has. Similarly, a tendency toward xenophobia has hampered Japan's many intrinsic strengths, which have nevertheless been strong enough to set the country as an (oft misinterpreted) example of How To Win.

TLDR: Monoculture is a harmful, false optimization at the national level (though quite useful within, say, an apartment, church or startup incubator).

<comment><USER14> This reminded me of a quote from Shirow Masamune's Ghost In The Shell:

"No matter how powerful we may be fighting-wise, a system where all the parts react the same way is a system with a fatal flaw. Like individual, like organization. Overspecialization leads to death."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This was already debunked:

'Professor Pflugfelder evidently needs to study Japanese history a little better because after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 there was widespread looting and rioting, and during the firebombings of WWII looting was a common practice. If these are deep cultural roots, they only go back about two generations'

[http://partialobjects.com/2011/03/is-looting-our-default- rea...](http://partialobjects.com/2011/03/is-looting-our-default-reaction-to- trouble/)

<comment><USER16> I just read the article, and the one main point s/he makes that struck me is that in Japan, as opposed to Katrina, the citizens KNOW that they'll be looked after.

Comparing the situation to here in Australia where we had floods and hurricanes, it's the same: we know that the government will look after us.

So I agree with him/her. It's got nothing to do with culture/etc. Because if you take away all the efforts the government and international community are making, then I bet the situation in Japan would be totally different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is something that really surprised me about Japanese culture. I went there in 2008 for a study tour and one of the things that really impressed me is how different their attitude towards shared property and public space is.

On numerous occasions I saw things where I thought: wow, in my country (The Netherlands) this would totally get abused, vandalized or stolen. Not that my country is not safe or dirty, just that it is individualized to the extent that people place more value on the well-being of themselves and their stuff than that which they share with others or the public space.

Some examples:

Vending machines are so ubiquitous in Japan that they are an icon in itself. Trash cans, on the other hand, are not. However, you rarely see trash on the streets. Not because there are exorbitant penalties for this, people simply don't do it. People simply drag their trash along until they get to a place with a trash can (maybe their home or office) and dispose of it there.

In crowded areas, there are always plenty of public toilets and they are generally free to use. Not once have I seen one that was dirty or vandalized.

At one point, I found myself in a packed bus that had one of those old- fashioned destination "tickers" made out of a roll of paper with the names of all destinations printed on it. When we still had those buses in my country, they were encased in industry-grade steel enclosures, lest people break the thing or change the destination. In Japan, one could just reach out and do just that, yet nobody did.

In six week of traveling through Japan, visiting dozens of places and most major cities, I saw one wall that had graffiti on it. This was so special that I took a picture of it.

I think it is too easy to "blame" this cultural difference on a "shame" effect, as is often done. I spoke to a lot of Japanese people and my impression is quite different. I would say the major reason why there is so little looting in Japan, is that rather than thinking about their own petty interests first, Japanese consider the quality of the public or shared space to be just as important to their personal well-being. In other words: when western people throw their trash on the floor, they think "Good, I got rid of my trash"; for Japanese people nothing changed, since it is still in "their" space, so they better dispose of it properly.

Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert on all things Japanese. I was just there for six weeks and this is my impression, I might very well be totally wrong :)

<comment><USER18> There's plenty of graffiti, just not in plain sight. Look in the alleys.

Regarding the trash, there's two forces at work. One is that there's a rich naturalist tradition here. Japanese _love_ nature, which is why you see so many people enjoying the parks here. Littering goes against that tradition, and the second force at work is that Japanese people really don't buck tradition.

<comment><USER19> To me, the way they "love" nature, is a bit different form the nature I'm used to. Nature means a weekend walk in the park -meanwhile many riparian areas have simply been paved over. So the love for nature is a little different. It's more "human tamed nature". It's kind of like when humans (yama girls) outnumber trees that you know it's not really nature.

Agree with the rest though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Same reason nobody vandalizes vending machines, even when they're quite literally in the middle of nowhere along the side of an unfrequented road in the countryside.

Same reason it's unthinkable for a Japanese to take fruit or berries hanging outside of someone's yard, even when it's falling off the branch and rotting on the ground, and yet they'd hardly think twice in their downtown drunken stupor to steal a bicycle to get them home after the trains had shut down for the night.

They have different social norms there.

<comment><USER21> Japanese vending machines also have a safety lever (of sorts) that makes all the beverages free, in the event of a catastrophe.

I don't know how it works specifically, but I'm sure there would be better ways than to vandalize the machines in order to obtain the contents.

<comment><USER22> I don't know if this is true, but this was making rounds today:

      If you need water, Suntory vending machines have emergency
      levers beneath a sticker on the upper-right corners. Pull
      the sticker off, pull the lever firmly and you'll get free
      drinks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [http://partialobjects.com/2011/03/is-looting-our-default- rea...](http://partialobjects.com/2011/03/is-looting-our-default-reaction-to- trouble/)

 _when you feel like you're on your own, when you feel abandoned and the only one who you can depend on is you, then yes, you're going to do what you have to do to survive. This has been seen around the world in many countries and cultures. The big difference in postwar modern Japan is that people are confident that help is on the way._

...

 _Here's where you see a glaring cultural difference: virtually nobody in contemporary Japan has this kind of contempt for their fellow countrymen. Yet prewar Japan was deeply divided along class lines, and when disaster happened and the poor starved and burned, neither the government nor the upper classes could be bothered to give a shit. Currently in Japan there are calls for the government to scrap proposed tax cuts and use the money for relief efforts. Can you imagine the same happening in the US?_

<comment><USER24> _Can you imagine the same happening in the US?_

No, we would have both tax cuts and relief efforts funded by deficit spending. That's something you can do when your debt to GDP ratio is 60% and when the world considers your bonds to be risk free.

It's trickier for Japan to do that - their debt to GDP ratio is 200% already (second only to Zimbabwe).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_pub...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_public_debt)

<comment><USER25> Wow, I did not know that. Worse than Greece at 144%!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looting is the exception in most Western nations, not the rule. I love crime here, don't get me wrong, but how many reports of widespread looting have we ever heard in the US? Rodney King riots, Katrina (and that was exaggerated)... that's about it, right? Massive floods strike Iowa, war breaks out, terrorist attacks, lethal heat waves, Bulls win trophy, none of these calamities cause looting.

Yeah, one of those things is not like the others _sigh_.

<comment><USER5> Wow,

where did you get the idea that no one in Iowa got robbed during the floods?

As a matter of full disclosure, I think I should tell you that I lived there at the time of the flood and had to listen to my neighbor go on and on about what he was dealing with. Neighbor was a cop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Man, you guys are just busting out with the exotism in this here thread. "People there carry honor in their blood"...

<comment><USER28> The original article is definitely full of that sentiment, although the responses here are more measured.

Still, why has no one mentioned the fact that there is nothing left to loot in the areas most effected?

<comment><USER29> I do believe joebananas is referring to this[0] comment, which is indeed on HN:

> Honor is something we can't describe but japanese people carry it in their > blood.

0: <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2330020>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So I read that, and the first thing that jumped out to me from the quotes: "The so-called civilized world can learn much from the stoic Japanese."

If you don't consider Japan part of the "civilized world" you have probably not updated your social mores since WW2 and should reconsider that before commenting further.

<comment><USER31> Either I'm misunderstanding you, or you read that the wrong way around. The point is that those who _do_ consider themselves civilized are, in reality, not civilized when compared to the Japanese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Many other people on this thread have compiled lists of "western" tragedies that did not come to looting, so I think calling it a cultural thing is out.

I think the difference is that when people believe the world is watching and that help is coming (ie September 11th, this earthquake) they maintain their composure. People destroy and loot when they feel that the world has forgotten them and that help is not coming. During Hurricane Katrina the government was quite slow to respond. In Haiti it took nearly two days to reach twitter/the public and trigger international relief. Almost nobody was there to hold them over until then, and chaos happened. I think this is quite rational: if you felt the world had ended and that it was not going to be made better, you'd probably act like an animal and only think of yourself too.

</comment><comment><USER33> Japan certainly has social mores that discourage petty crime.

There are also practical considerations at play. The damage is so severe that there's not much left to loot, and there's and nowhere for looters to keep what they steal.

The article makes comparisons with Haiti and Katrina, but the damage in Japan is more total than either of these. In many towns there is literally nothing left.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366395/Japan- tsunam...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366395/Japan-tsunami- earthquake-Haunting-images-450-Britons-feared-missing.html)

<comment><USER18> Also, if you loot, you're ostracized. You will forever be remembered by your community and friends as a thief.

It's very, very hard to form a new group of friends, if you have no existing connections to leverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is probably a presumptuous or naive statement, but the very first thing that came to my mind was: if you have ever been to Japan, you wouldn't even think of asking this question.

<comment><USER35> By all means, please do elaborate.

<comment><USER36> I was thinking the same thing. Modern Japanese culture looks very negatively at people who put their own interests ahead of everybody else's, to an extent that you probably can't imagine if you haven't been there, and this is backed up by very low levels of inequality.

I remember a news program I was watching in our Japanese class in, uh, probably 1992. A couple of policemen were interviewing a distraught convenience-store clerk who had just been robbed.

"Did he look blue-collar, or white-collar, or what?"

"He just looked like a normal person! But obviously he wasn't, because he robbed the store!"

Our whole class (this was in the US) burst out laughing. The idea that, in order to commit armed robbery, a person would have to have some kind of mental abnormality — it was so alien to us as to be comical. That idea used to exist in US culture; Lombroso's theories used to be popular, eugenic policies were often justified on the basis that "morons" were likely to be criminals, and the word "crook" was a neat little package wrapping up the idea of mental abnormality causing lawbreaking. Much of Clarence Darrow's career was spent defending the most abhorrent criminals on the basis that their criminality was beyond their control, although not merely because of mental defects.

But, at least since the 1970s, an alternative conception of law and lawbreaking has been popular in the US — perhaps due to the absurd drug war, perhaps due to the discovery of abuses like the Tuskegee experiment, J. Edgar Hoover's campaigns of persecution against national heroes like MLK, and government deceptions about Vietnam and the dangers of fallout from open-air nuclear testing, perhaps due to the increasing cultural influence of Hollywood, or perhaps simply due to the failure of prosperity to be widely shared.

Whatever the cause, though, people from the US almost universally think of lawbreaking as a common and often harmless activity, not something limited to the mentally handicapped or partially insane — something that many people would do if the law weren't restraining them.

Also, in Japan, if you deviate from social norms, everyone will pressure you to conform. In the US, it's usually just the police.

Therefore the difference in looting behavior is unsurprising. I hypothesize that if you look back to 1955, you'll find natural disasters in the US with almost no looting, too.

Here in Argentina, things are even more American than in the US.

<comment><USER37> > Whatever the cause, though, people from the US almost universally think of > lawbreaking as a common and often harmless activity, not something limited > to the mentally handicapped or partially insane - something that many people > would do if the law weren't restraining them.

I don't think you're correct, that's certainly not a "universal" thought, although I suppose there may be subcultures that believe this. I live in the US, and I don't know anyone who thinks this way (at least no one I've discussed it with). We think criminals had a bad upbringing, or that they have some kind of psychological problem (which may be due to physical brain problems).

> "He just looked like a normal person! But obviously he wasn't, because he > robbed the store!"

I like this response; it sounds like the response I'd have given.

<comment><USER36> > I live in the US, and I don't know anyone who thinks this way

You don't know anyone who thinks of _any of_ jaywalking, speeding, streaking, riding in a car without a seatbelt, smoking marijuana, and snorting cocaine as common and often harmless activities? _Everyone_ you know thinks of _all of_ them as activities limited to the mentally handicapped or partially insane?

<comment><USER38> Maybe the parent poster is from a rural area and hasn't yet reached driving age.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The Japanese have a lot of respect. When I visited a common thing said was "If you leave your wallet on the street and come back a day later, it's likely it will still be there or in the closest shop."

<comment><USER40> This actually happened. When we were living in Tokyo my wife lost her wallet. A day later she found that it was sitting in the basket of her bicycle outside our building. This was a busy street in a business district (Nihonbashi) with hundreds of people going past it and it was a large new coach wallet with at least a few hundred in cash.

Not that someone wouldn't have eventually stolen it though.

<comment><USER21> >Not that someone wouldn't have eventually stolen it though. Japan is only nearly Utopian.

Let's be careful with the orientalism. The suicide rate[1][2] is one thing that personally bothers me.

Japan is fundamentally different from the West, and this has its advantages and disadvantages.

[1]: [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_count...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate)

[2]: [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_OECD_...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_suicide_rate)

<comment><USER41> Clear trends:

* Southern Europe/Mediterranean/Levantine countries - low suicide rates.

* English-speaking/Northern countries/former Communist block in Eastern Europe/Developed Asian countries - high suicide rates.

Seems to be related to amount of daylight, climate, stress and competition.

<comment><USER42> Has anybody else noticed the magical effect of sunlight? A few days ago was the first sunny day of the year. Everyone was very happy.

<comment><USER43> Magic, or a surge of vitamin D3 in their bloodstreams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is an outrageously biased article. The previous two globally-advertised large-scale disasters happened in western anglo countries and had minimal, if any, looting. I'm talking about the floods that devastated Brisbane and the Queensland coast, quickly followed by a category 5 cyclone smashing into Townsville (Australia) and the Christchurch earthquake where the centre of the city was levelled (New Zealand).

Both of these disasterous events had extremely little looting. Both of these events saw _strong_ outpourings of community spirit and solidarity, with lots of volunteering and food drops. It's not something that's mysteriously Japanese.

This is important because the article paints this as a Japan vs the World thing by roping in the UK, Chile and Haiti.

The article lists the following as reasons why there is little looting in Japan: \- buddhism and shinto \- honour and dignity \- conformity and consensus \- national pride \- high discipline \- they return your lost wallet \- more highly evolved race (!) Few of these are attributes that random interviewees would say are characteristics of Australians or New Zealanders

The Japanese are a unique culture and credit needs be given where due, but we need to stop talking about them as if they're magical and mysterious, beyond mortal ken just like Tolkein's elves.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the explanation that there's no looting because the Government's emergency response is very good and people are getting what they need at the shelters.

<comment><USER19> >there's no looting because the Government's emergency response is very good...

That wasn't particularly the case during the great Hanshin EQ of 1995. I think they did try to improve gov't response to disasters since then. So, yes, I believe they have faith in the gov't, but it's not because of a stellar record.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I went there in the 90s and remember leaving my wallet in a store, then walking down the street a man tapped my shoulder from the back and when I turned I saw the store owner giving it back to me. Man I was touched by that gesture. A couple of stores down the road we entered a jewelry and my gf tried some expensive pearl necklaces just for the fun of it (like Y3M a pop ($30k back then)) and she forgot to return the last one she tried. A couple of blocks down we noticed and looked at each other with that weird sensation and the urge to return it, like if we were guilty of something we really didn't do.

And we did, they guy thanked us like a million times. We felt the most honorable people on earth. Honor is something we can't describe but japanese people carry it in their blood.

<comment><USER47> >that weird sensation and the urge to return it, like if we were guilty of something we really didn't do.

Same thing happened to us in a Spanish clothing shop. Wife went out with some blouse she tried and somehow this didn't trip that alarm at the door. While groceries shopping nearby we notice the blouse.

>And we did, they guy thanked us like a million times. We felt the most honorable people on earth.

We go return the blouse, the alarm starts while we enter then we have to fiddle explaining in half-Spanish what we meant to do.

We end up paying for the damn blouse, with the guard next to us but we don't get a receipt because that's company policy (I'd guess a form of punishment so you couldn't return the item).

In the end we both regretted returning it and kinda ruined the whole evening.

Not sure if this is a valid Spanish/European-Japanese comparison but it certainly is a corporate versus humane shop comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> A guy in my class parked a shiny bike not locked for a month. After a month when he came back it was still there. The chances of this happening in Amsterdam are very slim. Even if you only lock your bike to something with a big chain somebody with a metal cutter will come and get it if the bike is shiny. And better lock both of your wheels and the frame through the chain or else you end up with a bike without wheels. Unfortunately the steering wheel and saddle are not so easily locked.

<comment><USER44> The saddle is just as easily locked - get a light chain and a padlock, wrap it around one of the underwires of your saddle.

As for 'steering wheel'... a bike that unusual is asking to be stolen by a curious enthusiast :)

<comment><USER42> My bike doesn't have this, although my racing bike does. Unfortunately racing bikes as made in such a way that you can detach parts easily in a couple of seconds...so it's really necessary to bring two locks or one very long one to lock everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> NPR had a good piece about how the Chinese looked at the Japanese and wondered the same thing when hey had so much price gouging and looting themselves during their last major earthquake.

<comment><USER49> Ok, just to be clear, since when did Chinese start looting in earthquakes? I admit there are prices gouging in the 2008 earthquake, but looting?

<comment><USER48> There was some looting during the 2008 earthquake, but not really that much upon doing more research. They did have significant issues with price gouging on essential goods like food/water/blanknets etc. The way the NPR worded it, and the chinese nationals they got sounds bites from made it easy to jump to the wrong conclusions...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Broken windows at work here. Nobody loots because nobody else loots.

In any instance, it takes a few disgruntled, enterprising people to start a riot or mass vandalism. Particularly the disaffected.

Racial homogeneity can only go so far to explain things, but Japan is a country where people generally look out for one another. When I was there, people were so polite that I thought these people were feigning politeness. I remembered walking out of a food stall when the head waiter would call out that a customer is leaving, and all the wait staff would turn around and bow and ask us to come again. It was simply amazing. I guess by learning to be polite even when you are tired, stressed, you become very good at being outwardly calm and it helps to maintain social order.

Incidentally, I remembered the caning incident where a young expat in Singapore spray painted cars and got several strokes of cane as a punishment. Wanton destruction is an alien concept to me when I grew up in Asia. A lot of vandalism with spray painting were simply copy cats importing an unwanted culture.

</comment><comment><USER51> This was the first thing I thought about when it all kicked off. I watched a video on one of the news reports and when the earthquake hit, staff in the stores instead of hiding tried steadying shelves to stop things falling off.

We honestly have a long way to go.

<comment><USER52> Japan also gets more earthquakes than most places that you're probably used to. Even though this one was larger, it seems that to the Japanese, dealing with earthquakes is rote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I think it is high level of "human capital" plus an understanding that your society is a cooperative venture. I am not sure, but I would hazard that most Japanese are highly literate, brought up to behave well, and that there is actually a social contract in force. I am willing to bet just a little bit of money that your average high school grad (i.e. "working class") Japanese person would rival our state college educated class for both high levels of good behavior and knowledge. I bet there would be similar behavior in the Scandinavian countries.

And, interestingly, everyone would expect the students at a state college or better to behave just like the Japanese.

Really, the fact that there is such widespread poverty, thuggery, and low educational levels in the US is just plain embarrassing. That you can't trust the people you live around is the weird thing, not that you can.

</comment><comment><USER54> The answer to this question is completely obvious to people who spent formative years in Asia and are free of American/Western taboos (we have other taboos no doubt but not these).

Here is why there is no looting in Japan. Across the world -- in the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, South Africa and any country where they live side by side -- people of primarily Northeast Asian descent tend to commit crime at lower rates than people of primarily European descent, who in turn tend to commit crime at lower rates than people of primarily sub-Saharan African descent.

You can google the various crime stats if you aren't aware of this. Here are the California state statistics:

<http://stats.doj.ca.gov/cjsc_stats/prof09/00/22.htm>

Divide that by California population totals to get the rank ordering of violent crime rates by population.

You can also look at table 43 of the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, which is fine for establishing the black/Asian violent crime ratio, but which lumps Hispanics in with whites, inflating the apparent white violent crime rate.

<http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_43.html>

Similar stats can be obtained for other countries with a bit of googling. Now, the absolute magnitudes do change (1), which one could legitimately ascribe to the local culture. But the trend is very consistent.

There isn't a country across the world that I'm aware of in which people of primarily sub-Saharan African descent commit crime at a lower rate (or have higher educational levels, incomes, and so on) than people of Northeast Asian descent. Interested in counterexamples, but this appears to be a very consistent pattern.

Obviously there are other factors as well. But the probability of looting seems to be proportional to a group's propensity to disorganized violence (e.g. murder, rape, robbery) and inversely proportional to their ability to commit organized violence (e.g. military actions).

No doubt this post is extraordinarily blasphemous. But someone had to say what a good fraction of the rest of the world is thinking.

(1) Cultural variation seems to shift magnitudes but not rank ordering. That is, it does not appear to be a large enough factor to make Northeast Asian descent individuals in country X commit more crime than sub-Saharan African descent individuals in country Y. At least, I couldn't find any examples of this for any (X, Y) pair in the world, but perhaps you can.

<comment><USER55> Conflating race and socio-economic status is a pretty classic justification for racism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> At the same time, we must ask: Why _so much_ looting in Haiti and New Orleans?

</comment><comment><USER57> This is not a perfect truth. Friend reports that her family have seen (directly or indirectly, I don't know) both theft and rape. Nonetheless, the extent is probably much less than any other place of crisis.

</comment><comment><USER58> Population genetics, as it affects those parts of the nervous system involved in social behavior, together with geography and a long common history, predisposed the Japanese to strong ethnonationalism and social stability in a well-organized and well-supervised hierarchical order. Under premodern conditions this did not preclude intracommunal violence under codes widely understood and enforced; but in the affluent post-WW2 world, with good standards of health and education, and under imposed consensual government following certain highly salutary experiences, these old factors directed the Japanese to an exceptionally high level of nonviolent social cohesion and intense but benign racial-national consciousness.

[http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/262162/people-want- know...](http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/262162/people-want-know-contd- john-derbyshire)

</comment><comment><USER5> One word : 'Individualism'

The article mentions UK floods, Chile and Haiti earthquakes, and Katrina. The UK, Chile, Haiti and US are all 'Individual at the Center' societies. By contrast, Japan is not so 'Individualist' a society.

You may have less looting in a place like Japan after a natural disaster of this scale. However, if there is ever say ... oh ... a recession, you will have 100,000,000 people standing around waiting for the authorities to 'fix it'. You will observe far fewer people launching startups for instance, than you would in similar recessionary environment in say ... Chile.

Just wanted to make sure everyone realized that 'it cuts both ways' as it were. All societies have strengths and weaknesses. In fact, as in this case, the strength of any society usually is its weakness.

<comment><USER59> More so, modern Japan is not a pure entity, it is the product of Japan's prior history, the events of WWII, the American occupation, the reconstruction, and the close ties with America since. Without all of the latter Japan as a nation would be quite different today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I think it's really just because there aren't many poor people (socialism is good :D)

I'm pretty sure it's not honor. Middle Eastern cultures also put plenty of emphasis on honor and dignity, but there are many poor pockets of society that simply ignore these values during times of crises.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'd personally think that it's because the japanese have a greater sense of 'us' than in countries where looting occurs. Nobody thinks to loot from their family, only from other people.

</comment><comment><USER62> Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because there are no news reports about looting doesn't mean it's not going on. The social difference may be in how news are reported, not in how people cope with disaster. I'm not saying that's what is going on, just saying that the statement "there is no looting in Japan" is taken as fact without any closer examination, which is a very unscientific approach.

<comment><USER62> Also, from the photos of the stricken areas that I've seen; what are you going to loot? Everything is destroyed, there is no way to get around, there are rescue teams working around the clock. It's not a situation where houses were flooded but remain mostly intact. There are no houses anymore.

Photos of empty store shelves are from areas outside the disaster zone where people are preparing for a possible radiation disaster where they would be unable to go out of their homes for days. That's not a situation that is conductive to looting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I've collected heartwarming tweets from the eye-witnesses of 2011 Sendai earthquake as seen on Twitter timeline.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330680>

They tell their experiences following the earthquake. These snippets of what moved them and touched them during these very trying times are heart-warming.

From the tweets you can see the spirit of "in it together".

</comment><comment><USER64> By and large people _don't_ go crazy looting during disasters. The idea that the moment authority disappears, we instantly devolve in to dog-eat-dog anarchy is a myth - mostly promulgated by those who feel it's their job to be the one in charge.

There are notable exceptions, of course, but for the most part people can do a pretty good job of policing themselves.

</comment><comment><USER65> People respecting people, even in great tragedy and chaos. Refreshing.

<comment><USER66> From another board:

"We have friends over there and what info we are getting is that they are having to deal with heartache and problems of Biblical proportions. If it weren't for those citizens who are in the older age group who know what to do in desperate times there would be more problems. The older people are self reliant and remember Hiroshima, Nagasaki...they know how to share with each other and help each other in the worst of times. Panic has not gripped them as it would a lot of other countries...look at Haiti..look at other regions where something less than this has taken hold and how they react."

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Aside from the strong cultural values and homogeneity of that culture, I would think socioeconomic factors must have a major impact. I don't know how the statistics stack up in Japan, but looting is generally an activity of the poor and disenfranchised. Anyone have data pertinent to this?

<comment><USER68> <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/world/asia/22poverty.html> The poverty rate in Japan isn't that much lower than the US (15.7% vs. 17.1% according to the article). However, people below that line in Japan are somewhat unwilling to admit being in poverty.

<comment><USER69> It's not only people that are poor, but people that have a poor culture that loot. I can bet there were lots of poor people in Japan that didn't loot or steal from their neighbors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I can't find the link right now but I'm prety sure I saw a news report yesterday about some looting happening. In any case, I see absolutely nothing wrong with looting in an emergency situation where there is no access to food and water.

<comment><USER35> Well, that's surviving, not looting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> There wasn't any looting also in the 2008 Chinese Wenchuan earthquake, where people are much poorer. I don't think the absence of looting has anything to do with the Japanese spirit, and is more about the human spirit.

I'd expect the same from anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER72> Does not surprise me at all. I remember being in Japan in the service for only two weeks. Two things I remember:

1) I left a noodle restaurant and left a little too much for the bill. The owner ran me down on the street and handed me the change. She would not accept it as a tip even after I begged her to keep it for her honesty.

2) A policeman on foot simply has to waive an orange baton at you if you were speeding. Offenders just pulled over.

There is much to admire about Japanese culture. Really what it comes down to is, the USA is a ME-first culture. Japan is an US-first culture. I always say the way to get back at Japan and most of Asia is to westernize them.

</comment><comment><USER73> I've heard anecdotally that the Japanese are horribly repressed. They also have the second-highest suicide rate among industrialized nations: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_suici...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_suicide_rate) (South Korea is #1, USA is #20). They may be composed, but their culture is far from an ideal.

</comment><comment><USER58> From a review of Wilson and Herrnstein's Crime and Human Nature:

        "Criminals tend to be young males who are muscular rather than thin, and who have lower-than-average IQs and impulsive, "now"-oriented personalities, which make planning or even thinking about the future difficult."

Is there any group other than the Japanese for whom that description would be less fitting?

</comment><comment><USER74> Income equality? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009.png)

If you already have about the same amount of stuff as everyone else, stealing seems silly.

</comment><comment><USER75> But there is looting in Japan.

Andrew Sullivan on The Atlantic has articles linking to cases of looting, fraud, child molestation and hoarding.

The Japanese government itself just isn't very forthright with regards to collecting and releasing information about victims and events.

</comment><comment><USER76> I'm guessing they haven't run out of food yet. Then there's the "no guns" thing.

</comment><comment><USER77> In part, it's the Yakuza. In the neighborhoods they control, no one commits crimes they disapprove of. It's much better for it to be peaceful for the gambling and other revenues.

<comment><USER78> That would be really interesting if true. Do you have any sources to back that up?

<comment><USER20> No. The Yakuza generally do not participate in civilian affairs, nor are they interested in "policing", except where someone becomes a personal nuisance to a higher-up or someone disrupts their business.

Their primary interest lies in the financial side of mizu-shobai type establishments, gambling, and money laundering.

They also offer thug-work-for-hire, which is helpful when the police aren't, but you've got to be careful dealing with them because there tend to be hidden costs to their "help".

* whoops. replied at the wrong level :P

<comment><USER20> What I am saying is that the lack of looting has nothing to do with the Yakuza.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> From what I've heard many vendors are also giving away their goods, especially food, during the crisis, so it sorta precludes looting doesn't it?

</comment><comment><USER80> I'm not a Japanese, but I will say it's because of their Bushido spirit <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido>

</comment><comment><USER81> Japan seems to have very little crime, or at least, very little obvious crime. This may be rooted in their distant past. Here is a quote from "Sources of Japanese Tradition - From Earliest Times to 1600" which contains description of Japan by Chinese from around 297 CE:

There is no theft, and litigation is infrequent. In case of violations of the law, the light offender loses his wife and children by confiscation; as for the grave offender, the members of his household and also his kinsmen are exterminated.

</comment><comment><USER82> How about because the Japanese have been living on that island for what, 30,000 years? I think they have a sense of longevity in their culture that we could all really learn from.

<comment><USER83> So have the people of England, what's your point?

<comment><USER84> No, they have not. Roman Briton was a different society than pre-Roman Briton. The Anglo-Saxons came about 1500 years ago and nearly completely replaced the Britons, genetically and culturally. The Norman invasion was about 950 years ago and greatly changed Anglo-Saxon culture, although not as much as the AS changed post-Roman Briton. There were several other invaders (Danes, etc.) as well.

By contrast, the Japanese are perhaps 3,000 years old as a distinct ethnic group on the island.

<comment><USER85> _The Anglo-Saxons came about 1500 years ago and nearly completely replaced the Britons, genetically and culturally_

Replaced in that region, but the Celtic peoples were driven West and North (Wales, Cornwall, and Northumbria).

<comment><USER84> Yes, that is true, and I should have mentioned Northumbria especially because that was a wonderful culture, but their numbers were still greatly reduced. Cornish culture is now completely wiped out.

Edit: Cornishness wiped out as far as continuity. I respect the "revival movement" but the re-rooting process will take awhile even if most of the people there support it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Does looting commonly follow earth quakes in a large percentage of other countries?</comment>


Website that will log you out of all your accounts - <AUTHOR> http://superlogout.com/ <comment><USER2> goddamit...atleast ask for a confirmation.

</comment><comment><USER3> AKA "The list of websites that don't know what CSRF is"

<comment><USER4> Some site don't check this in the logout page on purpose, for example google: [https://sites.google.com/site/bughunteruniversity/nonvuln/lo...](https://sites.google.com/site/bughunteruniversity/nonvuln/logout- xsrf)</comment></comment>


BeOS Lives: Haiku Impresses - <AUTHOR> http://osnews.com/story/20951/BeOS_Lives_Haiku_Impresses

<comment><USER2> It's nice to see Haiku making such good progress -- I feel that the existence of a user-friendly open source OS that's not a UNIX or Windows derivative is a good thing in itself, if only because it may be keeping alive some ideas that don't fit in the legacy-oriented Linux mold.

Maybe Haiku could become a nice netbook OS? Its single-user media focus certainly fits the bill. (Although Internet appliance computers were Be, Inc.'s swan song marketing attempt as well, so maybe they don't want to reopen that wound...)

I do think that Haiku needs some kind of forward-looking showcase project with a bit of gloss. Right now the superficial impression is that they've mostly catched up to a decade-old commercial project. Consider these screenshots of the first and latest release of this system...

BeOS Developer Release 4, from 1994: <http://osnews.com/img/20869/screen2.gif>

Haiku, from 2009: <http://osnews.com/img/20951/1.png>

(I prefer the 1994 version actually -- those tight pixel fonts and prominent grids of awesome 45°/30° icons must have something to do with it... The old light-grey look actually looks fairly contemporary alongside the Leopard and Windows 7 aesthetic.)

<comment><USER3> I second netbook OS suggestion. They should port Haiku to popular netbooks e.g. acer aspire one, asus eeepc, MSI wind, so that anyone could run it without any problems.

This way there is no hardware hell(at least not that big) and you get usable system for the masses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Out of general curiosity, why doesn't a OS like this focus on being a VM-only OS? If they went this route, they wouldn't need to worry about driver hell, right?

And god knows I'm not going to give up my core OS anytime soon for a toy OS. But I'd love to play with it inside my VM!

Seems like an easy decision. What am I overlooking?

<comment><USER5> Because its developers want to use it as an every-day operating system without the overhead of another. They don't see it as a "toy OS" but rather something actually useful that they want to use on a day-to-day basis.

It's worth adding they already provide drivers for at least VMWare and possibly other virtual machines as well as VMWare images so it's not as though they're treating virtual machines as second-class citizens.

<comment><USER6> Couldn't there be created a hypervisor OS that translated diverse drivers to a single, unified API, and did nothing else (basically running the VM, in kernel space, without scheduling.) I could see Linux stripped down to perform this task--having all computers appear to all operating systems as the exact same hardware might push some distinct advantages along with it. For example, a network is a network is a network; it would be the hypervisor worrying about if it was a wi-fi one or a cell modem or whatever, and then providing a clean API for any additional features one might have over the other (connecting to APs for wifi.) Actually, picturing this further, it would be perfect if the hypervisor exported all its APIs over 9P. Any extra features would be immediately discoverable.

<comment><USER7> While this is an interesting idea, and definitely possible, I'm left wondering if it would be desired. By that I mean do we want all networks to behave in the same way, do we want all devices to be represented by their lowest common denominator?

Essentially creating this specific hypervisor OS would create a lot of places for leaky abstractions, and you'd end up creating a lot more special case code to detect and fix those abstractions then you would if you just coded the drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Haiku is a seriously impressive piece of work.

The reasoning to the "eternal pre-alpha" makes sense in my eyes since it lowers expectations. Criticism over lacking basic features (like SATA issues, CD-booting, partitioning, printing or even Wi-Fi), usability or stability issues (such as unstable filesystem drivers) can easily be dismissed without much crticism, people declaring it "useless" or a "toy OS". An alpha that's actually usable and can be used to attract developers is a good thing IMO and makes it a more significant milestone. It's much better than the alternative of a premature launch.

Also, a fun quote from an article by a different OSNews author in 2004 ([http://www.osnews.com/story/8114/Three_Years_of_Haiku_The_Lo...](http://www.osnews.com/story/8114/Three_Years_of_Haiku_The_Long_Road_to_Evolution)): 'And if Haiku is "ready" by 2010, no one will care.'

</comment><comment><USER8> I discovered BeOS about the same time I started getting into UNIX. I remember being impressed by the graphics and performance (the knoppix-like demo cd was ahead of its time). One thing that always perplexed me was that despite having a POSIX/GNU/whatever interface, they stripped out the multiuser abilities. This seemed like a tragic oversight, particularly as the need for multiple users and security tiering (administrator rights) was taking off.

It's not obvious to me what the Haiku team is doing about security in this regard, but if the same intellectual effort and creativity used to create the BeBox and BeOS was used to address spyware/malware/other desktop security concerns, it could be awesome indeed.

</comment><comment><USER9> What if Apple _had_ bought BeOS?

Now that is a major "what if?". For, not only did Apple actually go on to buy NeXT, but in doing so they brought Steve Jobs back into the company. I.e. we might have had Mac-BeOS and no Steve Jobs: what would have happened?

<comment><USER2> Instead of Steve Jobs, Apple would have acquired Jean-Louis Gassée... But he probably wouldn't have been in a position to take over the CEO job, not to mention being able to replace many of the important executives with those from the acquired company.

More fundamentally: Gassée probably wouldn't have been able to reinvent Apple's engineering values and sprawling product lineup the way Jobs did, simply because he had been so heavily involved in the first place in what Apple had become since Jobs's departure.

(AFAIK, Gassée was in charge of the infamous Macintosh Portable project: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable> ... So it's clear that he doesn't have Jobs's nearly infallible design taste for compact computers and lustworthy gadgets :))

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember seeing BeOS in late 1999 for the first time and thinking "wow, that's really pretty".

Compared to Windows and Linux of the day it was. Now? Not so much.

<comment><USER11> Pretty could mean a lot of things.

Like pervasive multithreading, a 64-bit journaling file system. a kernel written in C++... beauty is relative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I make it a habit to test out a Haiku build every couple of months. The improvements and progress they've made is really incredible.

If I had any free time, I'd love to work on it myself. :|

</comment><comment><USER11> BeOS was (is?) the best OS ever. I feel bad for not having contributed anything to the Haiku project but for the prayers to the non deity agnostics like me don't believe in.

</comment><comment><USER13> I remember when I first started using BeOS- it was version 3. My Brother purchased it at Best Buy, along with a copy of the BeOS Bible- I still have the BeOS Bible in storage. Fascinating history. I thought it was a great OS, but never had much use for it (I was in High School and primarily interested in PC games at the time).

The only other person I ever met that used BeOS was a guy that had bought one of their net appliances.</comment>


How Larry Page learned Java - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/88fa10845061c8ba

<comment><USER2> It seems to me that this submission (and the other recent Google code quality submission) are an amusing but perhaps misleading sidetrack. Google isn't what it is because of Larry's language choice or his coding chops. It's _much_ more about the idea and execution of page rank.

In one sense, this is the classic path trodden by people who listen to all the good advice available here. The idea of page rank was worth very little. What Larry did was learn enough programming chops to build a prototype, then used then prototype to prove the idea worked, then iterated better and better versions as the requirements became more clear and as the bottlenecks became apparent.

This is exactly the sort of advice I'd give today to anyone with "an idea" - learn enough to code up a quick prototype. If you're starting from scratch, choose a modern fashionable language since it'll probably give you an enthusiastic community of people prepared to give advice and help when you get stuck. (right now, my choice would probably be between Ruby and Haskell). Don't worry too much about code beauty or scaleability or efficiency yet - there's a very high chance your idea will turn out to be not such a great one, and you'll either pivot a few times to find a variation on the idea that is great, or drop it altogether for the next "great idea", so don't fall into the trap of investing more effort than required too early. Have a plan for how you'll do it "properly" if you get traction, but first just get something running quickly to see if anybody is likely to pay you for it...

<comment><USER3> Woah there. Be careful with that quick dismissal of what you term 'code beauty'.

Sure, constructing quick and dirty prototypes is necessary, especially if you want to assess whether the idea is actually worthwhile, but this 'well, hey, even Larry Page didn't seem to know much early on so obviously code quality is overrated, blah blah' attitude is a bit dangerous and something of a stretch (we're basing this discussion on him not knowing one small aspect of a then- beta language, c'mon).

Sure, write something quick and dirty, and seek to refactor it later, but keep in mind that doesn't justify not having the chops to be able to write reasonable code _first time_.

I really think this 'none of this stuff matters, it's just aesthetics' idea is really pernicious - what is this 'aesthetic' stuff? To my mind it's writing code which is clear + understandable to you and other human beings - that is all that good code is. I believe that, with discipline, you can learn to do that quickly and efficiently and scale it accordingly from prototype -> critical library without ever just totally letting loose and writing crap (where crap is defined as being difficult to understand). That's before you even begin to consider the quality of the software perf-wise if you make naive algorithm choices.

Note that prototypes very often become core systems way more often than you would expect, so these 'throwaway' systems are often not as throwaway as you first thought.

This stuff isn't aesthetic, irrelevant or subjective nicety (all ideas 'code beauty' brings to mind), this stuff is the very means by which we construct our products and core to everything we do. Can we please stop pretending otherwise?

And, though it's something of an appeal to authority, I do think it's relevant in this particular case - keep in mind when google interview people, they themselves actually seem to think this stuff you're down-playing is important. I doubt an appeal to 'well I'll learn algorithms and so on later once I've got stuff working' would really prove sufficient.

<comment><USER2> Oh for sure.

To a hacker ( or a progrMmer, or the guy who's going to have to maintain the code, possibly when it's scaled to 40,000 servers), code beauty is critical.

To "an ideas guy", a prototype is _way__ more important.

But I hope the ideas guy partners with or hires someone like you, or like Tom Christiansen - the guy who got the "write it at least twice. always throw the first version away" meme firmly stuck in my head back in comp.Lang.perl.misc in the mid 90s.

Modern startup techniques, particularly the "fail fast" mantra, strongly suggest that quick prototypes, even if they are crappily coded prototypes, are often a great idea - and are often within reach of inexperienced or non technical founders.

(and yeah, I know what you mean by throwaway code ending up as critical production systems, just this morning I got mail from a cron job trying to run a crappy perl script I wrote over 10 years ago - it's monitoring critical infrastructure for a project I did for a company I haven't been in touch with since 08, and from the grapevine I hear they got sold in 09 or 2010 and I've never even met the new owners...)

<comment><USER3> Cool, I'm glad you see my point :-) - it's just that there seems to be almost a meme going round, not just on hn, that 'hey this stuff just doesn't matter because the customer doesn't care' which seems fallacious to me (see other posts for why :-)

I think the term 'code beauty' is a poor choice though; that seems to me to implies something subjective, when in fact I fundamentally believe code quality dictacts product quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That seems like a reasonable question to ask on a Java list back in 1996.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I'm having trouble seeing any problem with it.

He wanted to do things the right way, made an effort to figure it out by himself, and then asked in the appropriate forum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In other words, don't just sit there with your hands in your pockets waiting for your friend to figure out the answer!

"How do I learn to program?" "Pick a language, start building something, ask around (with good, detailed enough questions) when you're stuck." Larry's message could have been written by anyone posting on StackOverflow.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's amazing what information mailing lists hold about people.

</comment><comment><USER8> The quality of something working >> any other quality of a project.

<comment><USER3> Grr I've seen many posts like this recently jumping on the slightest stuff - at the risk of being down-voted, what the hell people? I expected better, pretending like we can just hack together pieces of crap and pretend like it doesn't matter is exactly how we end up with 99% of software out there sucking and the few who bother trying for more cleaning up, in fact that's how google won out in the first place.

The quality of software is not unrelated to how its implemented. The quality of software is _defined_ by how it's implemented.

The user might not care about the details of how you got there but they sure do care about the quality of the software itself only they don't see it in terms of the underlying details, only what the product does for them and how it does it.

Now can we stop denigrating our craft, please.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very misleading headline.

</comment><comment><USER10> I love how the email was sent at 4am!

</comment><comment><USER11> Why didn't he just use Google!?

Oh... that was before the inception of Google.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ok, sorry. title is indeed missleading. It should have been:

This was Larry Page! 1996 is perfect and then he decides to use Python after the Java mess ;)

Like I said recently <http://twitter.com/#!/timetabling/status/59909520436117505>

</comment><comment><USER12> That reminds me of Ask HN/Slashdot/Reddit. Ideally I'd prefer most of them to be non-anonymous, but I know in the real world it isn't possible.</comment>


Simple physics and climate - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/11/simple-physics-and-climate/comment-page-1/ <comment><USER2> What is the point of posting this? It says almost nothing.</comment>