Experiment: No Comment Scores - <AUTHOR> Over the years several people have suggested not displaying comment scores.  I finally decided to try it.  There are so many users now that voting is starting to have a bit of a mob feel to it. We'll see if this makes the site feel better.<p>Voting still has all the same effects (on karma, and on position on the page), so I encourage users to keep doing it.  The only difference is that comment scores aren't displayed in threads. <comment><USER2> Wow, this interferes with key elements of my system for voting/commenting on HN. Here are some things that don't work now:

* If a comment is sitting at 1 or 0, I'll try to avoid downvoting it unless I really think the comment subtracts value from the site.

* If a child is attracting more votes than the parent, and I think this is because the child commenter didn't comprehend what the parent was saying, I vote to level out the comments.

* If I see a comment sitting in negative territory that I feel should only be a 0 or 1 because it wasn't that bad, I'll upvote it even if I otherwise wouldn't have.

* If a thread is already dominated by a couple of high-scoring comments, relative to its age, I'm less likely to post a new top level comment. My feeling is that if a good comment just sits at the bottom because it arrived slightly too late, I've only added noise to the thread. The lack of visible points makes it much harder to gauge how a new comment will 'compete' on the thread.

* If the scores indicate that something is being widely misunderstood, I might comment where I otherwise would not have to try to restore sanity.

Of course, if this change were to stick, it would alter the character of the site, and we would all develop new voting and commenting systems. I can already tell that this change magnifies my tendency to vote with an eye toward reordering comments rather than voting on each comment in relative isolation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Voting patterns showed a lot of users voted to get a comment to what they felt was an appropriate score: they wouldn't up- or downvote something unless they felt its current score was too low or high respectively. But if comment scores aren't displayed, you won't need to anymore.

<comment><USER2> Hmmm... I always considered that a feature rather than a bug. Only voting when the scores looked "wrong" was an optimization. How do I decide when to vote now? I have a feeling I'm going to settle into a pattern of voting to reorder comments and that I'm going to vote less overall.

<comment><USER3> I also considered that a feature. I have 3 choices: -1, 0 and 1, and almost always I choose 0.

I do think that people make too much of karma and comments scores. But I don't understand why pg thinks this particular aspect is an improvement.

<comment><USER4> I can see why the change is for the better: my vote (-1, 0, 1) should not be skewed/altered based on past events (others voting). Also, an "appropriate" total vote count is not something that an individual should be determining; it should be a collective thought. The only thing an individual should decide on is whether to award the comment a -1/0/1 purely based on the comment, nothing more. This change removes everything else (or so we assume: but considering the fact that the position on the page is still modified, it's not perfect, but it's close enough in my book).

<comment><USER5> "The only thing an individual should decide on is whether to award the comment a -1/0/1 purely based on the comment, nothing more."

exactly

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One Idea I've had for fixing this problem is to weight the value of a click based on position on the page. The further down on the page, the more weight its gets. Therefore the most popular topic at the top only get marginally incremented as people read it first and decide its worthy.

On the same note, if an article is _waaaay_ down at the bottom, and someone's taken the time to read it and likes it, then it should get a good solid bump. This will create a "bubble effect" and allow those treasures that are buried deep down in the comment land, to rise to the top and even accelerate as more users find out and rank them.

This essentially is a formula to equalize the comments and give them a fair playing field as they battle for the top most position.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a good idea. I will see if I can figure out an easy way to do that. It may be enough just to make the time decay on comment scores faster.

<comment><AUTHOR> Update: I wrote a new function to rank comment threads, and it's being used now. Seems promising.

<comment><USER7> Back a while ago I submitted an idea, that maybe there are herd (mob) effects on comment threads happening.

This should do the trick (driving the long tail).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any chance we can see scores when we're looking at our own comments section?

Often when I notice a bump in my karma I look at my comment threads to see what was so popular.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, now there should be scores next to your own comments. Better?

<comment><USER9> You know how sometimes online stores won't tell you the price of something until you add it to your cart? Hacker News feels kind of like that now. Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.

I feel kind of lost.

<comment><USER10> _Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality._

Fuck that. Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying and form your own opinions? That groupthink is just going to naturally turn out better than forcing every member to think about what they're reading?

For the longest time, HN has become more and more "accessible", at the cost of a lot of intellectual discussion. I've seen a lot of conversations where one side of the argument is downvoted to hell and it makes the other side look "correct". I just saw a thread two days ago where somebody _in_ the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit. That's utter shit and it hurts Hacker News.

I'm fine with spending more time reading a thread if it means I'm legitimately thinking about what people are saying. This is a terrific improvement to the system, and it feels a hell of a lot less claustrophobic than it did when every single thing people said was being judged as if it were an objective statement capable of being "good" and "bad."

Hopefully this also stops people from downvoting statements based on disagreement. Feels less vindictive when you can't see what your vote's done.

<comment><USER11> I'm the guy who said "Look at your comment score; looks like I'm right." The details are off a bit, though; it was "judging by your comment score, the parent speaks for the majority." I didn't participate in the discussion before that, so "I'm right" would have been a nonsequitor.

More importantly, though, the discussion itself was about the poster's _demeanor_. In all other situations, downvoting isn't an accurate measure of sentiment toward the post, because voting mixes such things as agreement, clarity, obnoxiousness, and humor ratings, weighted differently for each person, into one opaque integer. However, in this case, when a person is voted down for [obnoxiously] arguing that they aren't obnoxious, and the parent is voted up for arguing that they _are_ , in fact, obnoxious, the score really only has one meaning, in both cases: how much people dislike the poster. This is an exceptional situation; I never would have argued "by comment score" otherwise.

<comment><USER10> Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> But now I cant quickly skim off information from a thread. There are 87 comments in this thread at this moment. I am not interested in reading 87 comments about this experiment. I am however very much interested in seeing what the top few most insightful comments in this thread are. That feedback is very important. Right now I am feeling blind as a bat...

<comment><USER13> I feel your pain. I don't think I like the new system that much. At least so far.

I'm used to scanning comments as a way to determine which articles to read. Postings with a lot of comment action usually indicate something emotionally appealing.

Once I go to the comments section, then I filter by score, only looking at comments above a certain threshold (depending on how much time I have). I usually try not to comment, unless some comment has been upvoted to a high level and doesn't make sense to me.

Alas, there are a huge number of comments that I disagree with or fail to understand, and only by knowing the score am I able to determine whether or not my adding to the discussion will help the other readers.

That don't work no more. Now I'm just blindly poking around in the comments section, not really feeling connected to the discussion at all...

<comment><USER14> This is precisely the problem. Without some idea of what earlier readers think of the comments it is much harder to skim.

The top-level comments presumably rise and sink based roughly on their karma (though the algorithm also seems to have other considerations, like momentum). But what of the second-tier comments and below? Ripostes are often where the action is.

I might find that I'm reduced to skimming for names that I recognize. That's how the rest of the web works. The web in general has no karma system, so the way to "upvote" something is to repeat it with your byline: You Twitter it or reblog it (or retweet it, or re-reblog it) with a link and your signature, implying a certain degree of implicit endorsement.

I expect that if this system holds we'll start seeing more "amen" comments. I kind of _hope_ so, frankly: Now the only way I will spot an incredibly insightful but short comment buried downthread is if I see a bunch of comments from people I vaguely know saying "amen".

I'm not sure this trend will represent progress, however.

If we want to tinker, consider this: relative rankings on a page. Find a way to distinguish the top-voted 20% of comments from the second quintile, and the second quintile from everything else. (My instinct is not to bother distinguishing things below the top 40%, and of course negative-karma comments presumably are still doing their disappearing act, my favorite cute HN feature.)

At the risk of repeating the legendary eye-searing Orange Name experiment... we could turn the byline of comments in the top 20% a different color from the second 20%, which in turn is a different color from everything else.

Red is probably the wrong color for any of this -- too loud. Think "green". I'm thinking _shades_ of green: Comments in the first quintile have _very_ green bylines, comments in the second quintile have _slightly_ green bylines, and all the other comments have their usual light grey bylines.

<comment><USER15> I may be off base here, but perhaps HN isn't being designed to make skimming easy. Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content, and then voting on that content, is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding.

PG wrote an essay which discussed the 'fluff principle' at work in other voting-based aggregator communities, in which the most superficially sensational content usually rose to the top, beating out longer-form but more intellectually substantial content: <http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

I think this move by PG is aimed at reducing the herd mentality of voting, and reducing the ability of readers to engage in voting without having engaged the content first.

However, I think your scheme of highlighting comments by quintile is probably a good one. It gets us away from thinking about raw scores, but also serves to reward and reinforce good commenting contributions/behavior by setting an example for others to follow. In order to stave off the herd mentality of 'piling on' upvotes or downvotes, perhaps votes made subsequent to highlighting (or greying out in the case of negative comments) should have half the weight.

<comment><USER14> _Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content... is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding._

If you think that the secret to encouraging _engagement_ is to flatten out the structure of the information, and ask everyone to read everything in order to discover the influential, popular, or insightful bits...

... you desperately need to read _The Paradox of Choice_ :

[http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More- Less/dp/006000...](http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More- Less/dp/0060005688)

There is nothing _engaging_ about thirty screenfuls of undifferentiated choices. When presented with that, I'll just leave. If I wanted a firehose of undifferentiated, recent, quality content, presented in a way which made it very difficult to nucleate a conversation or form a community, I'd be using Google Reader.

[EDIT: Incidentally, if not illustratively, I should point out that I haven't actually read the entirety of _The Paradox of Choice_ myself. I listened to the author lecture about it for an hour in a podcast, and I started to read it, and I appreciated the concept, but I felt that the book kept repeating the same point too many times and I had other uses for my time... ;]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This change might improve voting, but it decreases the value of that voting.

I'll stipulate that the voting might be more "fair", if that is a goal. I'm not sure it should be. It might make the "game" of getting high karma more fair, but I'm not bothering with or bothered by that game anyway.

On the other hand, I can no longer use the results of this voting to help me skim a conversation. I want to know what everyone else found most valuable, without having to read through every comment on my own. I can't do that anymore. This completely breaks how I use HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, comments over a threshold (currently 5) now have a red dot prepended to them. Is that better?

<comment><USER17> > _Is that better?_

No, it's about the same.

It's not a problem with hiding/showing scores/hints, it is a fundamental problem with the voting model. As it stands, the process of voting is meant to re-balance the discussion tree to make it more interesting to an _average_ reader.

IMO what makes more sense is to use votes to determine the preferences of an _individual_ specific reader. If I keep voting up posts by a user X, then in all likelihood I will be more interesting in X's posts in the future. The same goes for downvotes. Additionally if X votes up Y's posts, then I may also be interested in Y's posts as well.

Lastly, the up/down voting score for a specific post is going to be equivalent to the score under existing model, and that can be used to sort posts for anonymous or uninitiated users.

PS. This is not a trivial change and it is a lot of work. I realize that.

<comment><USER18> Reinforcing the average makes good sense if your goal is to keep the community aligned, rather than simply please the widest array of readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> PG: Will you be applying some metric to determine if this improves site feel? If so, what metric?

<comment><USER20> I think the two obvious metrics are volume of comment votes and average comment score. I don't know which way you would want those two to go though.

<comment><USER21> If the standard deviation in comment scores decreases, that indicates more people are voting in disagreement with the majority, which is probably the intended purpose.

I believe pg has in the past just used "this seems better/worse" as a metric, but it's hard to say how noticeable any change from this will be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> But don't votes also give feedback to the commentor? I have used this to learn what works within this community and what doesn't. Now, I only know by approximation to my total karma, or if i am bad, that I turn gray.

<comment><USER22> Just as an example, my karma just jumped a bunch of points. Was it because of the above post, or was it due to europe waking up to some posts made a few hours ago?

Perhaps my sense of dislocation will pass in a while.

<comment><USER23> I feel similarly, actually. It's okay if others' scores don't show up for me, but I don't think scores will serve as effective (dis)incentives for behavior if they're too abstracted from the immediate cause, as is the case with having to try to guess which of my last thirty comments resulted in the upticks in my overall karma score. In fact, if anything, I think linking it to overall karma score may tend to _increase_ obsession with karma, because now I have to watch my overall karma like a hawk and spend time thinking about the likely source of change to determine whether I've stepped on my dick somewhere.

I say bring back the ability to see one's own karma, perhaps with a preferences option to turn it off, regardless of what happens with the visibility of others' comment scores.

In fact, if anything about one's own karma would be hidden, I think the overall score would be a better choice to hide than the scores of (one's own) individual comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I didn't realize how much I was affected by the comment ratings until they went away. Commencing cognitive restructuring.

<comment><USER25> "Commencing cognitive restructuring."

Indeed. Interesting how fast the brain adapts. I just caught myself looking at the total score and trying to predict which comment is getting upvoted (since I see the total increasing). And I don't even care about comment score!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can still see the score on the "edit" page, which means I can still edit my post to whine about being downmodded. Since nobody knows the degree that I am being downmodded to (or corrected to), people might upvote more than they should.

(I have also noticed that people don't stop upmodding even if the score is visible. I got 80 points yesterday on a one-line comment poking fun at Joel Spolsky. WTF?)

Just like when there is the delayed "reply" link that isn't showing, you can still reply to a comment by clicking the "link" link.

Edit: why is this being downmodded?

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed.

I didn't see the comment you mention, but that is exactly the sort of thing I meant about voting starting to have a mob feel.

<comment><USER26> It was this one: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840748>

Although I don't have any data, I think that if the same comment was posted today, it would end up with more points. If I see a comment with 80 upvotes, I usually let it stay there rather than bumping it to 81.

One other comment; I find it hard to navigate my "threads" page now. I used to focus on highly-voted comments to improve and reply to; now that I don't know what other people like, I have nothing to go on.

I guess spending less time on HN might not be a bad thing, however :)

Edit: one more thing. I still have a reflex-like urge to click the upvote button when the author name says "pg". With no number, it is even harder to suppress the urge.

So far I have managed, but I can't guarantee that I won't change my mind :)

<comment><USER27> I was thinking something similar when I saw this change. I know I am affected by by the comments score when I vote, but I think it's more of a moderating effect. I might vote down a smart ass one line remark if it has lots of points, or vote up something that is so-so if it's been voted down.

Interesting to experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I notice that nobody here is playing devil's advocate, so allow me. What was wrong with the site beforehand? Sure the comments have a mob feel to them sometimes, but that's just something a social _anything_ app has to deal with.

Over all, I like the comments on HN much more than say reddit or digg by far. Plus, I've never seen a community that responds so well to criticism as this one does.

<comment><USER29> Overall I agree with you, but I think this will be an interesting experiment, I want to see what happens.

<comment><USER28> As do I. Like I said, I was playing devil's advocate. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In long threads I skim based on scores. I try to give low comments at the bottom a quick read to vote on them, but one thing I definitely look for are long threads like this:

+5 -3 +4 -2 +4 0

That means someone is being generally rude or uninsightful, but the replies are good, so I'll just read the replies. If there's a long thread of a bunch of 1's, then two people are talking at each other both uninsightfully. If both people are voted up a bit, that means it's a good discussion and the whole thing is worth reading.

I'll give this a good trying out before forming an opinion either way, but the loss of skim-by-score ability is slowing me down just a touch right now. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm seeing dots for some comments instead of the score. It looks like gray dots for comments with a high score and red dots for comments with a very high score. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the change to some extent?

Edit: Sorry, it looks like this was explained after I had loaded this page. Still, this seems like a partial reversal. Also, this story is at #16 on the front page and really should be at #1 considering the magnitude of the change.

Oh and just one more question: I'm seeing this comment at the top of the page. Is that just how it looks for me, or is it that way for everyone because of the new ranking algorithm?

Another edit: From PG's explanation, I thought the gray dots were all turned red, but I still see gray dots for some comments (including one with a negative score).

<comment><USER32> Where was it explained? I'm still searching.....

<comment><USER32> Got it...

Thanks. The comments here are getting to be so much that they are hard to follow. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think you can remove the word "by"

<comment><USER34> "10 points by ivankirigin" is actually quite misleading. It looks like "ivankirign" gave the comment 10 points.

We are having the same problem on how to show it correctly on GraffitiGeo. We ended up using "by ivinkirigin, points: 10", which in my opinion is still not perfect.

Any idea on this?

<comment><USER35> Why not just "ivinkirigin, 10 points" or something. I think it's fairly obvious that the first word is a username.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Interesting experiment. I thought I was going crazy all of a sudden.

A suggestion: Any chance the numbers could show later as the article gets older? I'd like to see how the votes resolved after some time. Or perhaps hide them only on front page articles?

<comment><USER25> "I thought I was going crazy all of a sudden."

heh! so did I . I actually asked a friend to look at it and tell me if he saw what I was seeing! (Long day, too much code, off to bed)

EDIT: I tried to vote up the comment above and got a "Can't make that vote" message. Then I tried to vote down a comment and got the same message. Bug?

EDIT2: Now I get a blank page on upvoting. I guess PG has a REPL open and is changing the site "live"

EDIT3: Blank page on voting (firefox/linux). This acts as a subtle disincentive to vote. "Oh I am going to see that blank page again and then need to click the browser back button. I'd rather continue reading(vs voting)". Is this by design? I hope not.

EDIT4: Fixed.

<comment><USER37> On a related note, I noticed that I'm just being shown a blank page after voting, rather than redirecting to the original discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm now experimenting with changing the function used to rank comments. I'm hopeful this will both help users find the good comments on a thread, and solve the problem of good but late comments getting stuck at the bottom of the page.

<comment><USER38> The ranking changes you just made completely eliminated whatever mental model of thread dynamics I had left. It's not clear that you understand the degree to which you're playing with fire here.

A 'good but late' comment won't be seen by anyone anyway, due to your front page ranking algorithm that prevents even the most active threads from spending long enough on the front pages.

<comment><USER39> I think HN has always been an experiment. Playing with fire sounds almost like a compliment then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> One PLUS of karma scores next to comments is that I know when to stop reading :)

If my personal interest + the comment score < arbitrary threshold, i quit

<comment><USER28> You know, if there's one thing programmers should appreciate, it's making it easy to see which information you _don't_ want to read.

<comment><USER41> A simple number next to a post doesn't necessarily tell you much about whether or not you want to read it.

<comment><USER42> Sure it does. This is a community of individuals who share common interests. If the community values a particular comment, there's a high probability that I'm going to find value in it as well because of those shared interests.

<comment><USER41> You don't have to be part of the community to sign up for an account and start voting stuff up.

<comment><USER42> I think you're implicitly part of the community once you sign up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> If you had a Likert-type scale, this wouldn't be a problem. I would rate a post 7/10 regardless of what everyone else had rated it. But we just have ups and downs. I think we've all established a sense of what the "right" score is for a given comment. For example, a thoughtful, on-topic post probably has no upper limit for how many points it deserves, while a funny but off-topic post won't get an upvote if it's already got enough points.

Won't this lead us towards a bimodal distribution? Without the crucial knowledge of where the comment's score is, the votes will tend towards extremes: we can't collectively decide when the target comment is near the range that we find appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER44> The bandwagon effect (which is just ridiculous on reddit) occurs because top- rated comments stay at the top. Typical reddit comment at the top of a thread:

      reddit_user 622 points

      Glenn Beck is a wanker!  He sniffs arses!

Everyone agrees with this, needless to say, but they only upmod it because it's at the top of the pile. Otherwise, it's a worthless comment. I find the lack of mod points distracting to an unexpected degree. Bad quantification is better than no quantification...

<comment><USER29> That depends on how you define "bad quantification".

Bad as inaccurate quantification is worse than none.

Bad as rough, but roughly accurate is better than none.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Weird suggestion: now hide the contributor too, avoiding the "vote pg up anyway"category of upvotes.

Then there's just a list of comments and one can vote them up or down on the _content_ of the comment. Ok I did say it was weird.

EDIT: Some great counterpoints below. I agree with them. This is a bad idea.

<comment><USER45> Knowing who wrote a comment often provides very useful context (especially when there is back-and-forth discussion going on).

<comment><USER25> pvg said -> "It would be a little difficult to have an exchange with someone if you can't tell who is who."

cperciva said "Knowing who wrote a comment often provides very useful context"

You are both completely right. My suggestion doesn't make sense.

It was just a "spur of the moment" suggestion to provoke thought (de Bono's PO mental operator). I dind't think it through at all.

<comment><USER46> You could give everyone a unique identifier per thread.

<comment><USER47> That would only solve one of the problems. Some of the users here are skilled enough that the average user doesn't know enough to keep up a disagreement. It's easier if the user names stay.

For instance, the ggp is a security professional. I give more credence to his opinions than others.

<comment><USER46> It was only intended to solve one of the problems, as the other 'problem' is exactly what removing the names would seek to address: a person's authority/history influencing the weight of their comments within a thread. It'd really benefit people who've earned a negative following, but I don't see such a mob mentality on here as opposed to certain aggregators in which biases become apparent in just a few threads.

<comment><USER48> Yes, but sometimes a person's authority is _actually relevant_. Consider this short exchange from the other day: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841887>

On the other hand, when somebody who is deeply respected (be it pg, or any prolific high-karma commenter) posts on something where they have no particular expertise the comment shouldn't get special consideration due to the author.

I can't think of a way to reconcile these, and there's enough people who post here that are actual authorities in relevant areas that I wouldn't want to give up the first. Being able to know that, say, a comment about security was written by tptacek matters more to me than "oh look, pg made a two-word post that got 9001 points".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This new system saves me a lot of time by making HN less attractive.

<comment><AUTHOR> That could be good, if it did it by removing bad attractions.

Some controversial threads with large numbers of votes were starting to feel like fights that attracted a crowd of onlookers. Those are very engaging, certainly, but it's probably better for both fighters and onlookers to have less of them.

<comment><USER38> The solution to that is to make the vote scores logarithmic.

Removing information helps nobody.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It'd be interesting to see the results of the experiment - level of voting before and after, volatility of the voting before and after, rate of change of comment ordering, before and after. Are you planning on releasing some sort of aggregate data or publishing some sort of analysis?

</comment><comment><USER51> Does anyone else find their eyes constantly scanning to try and find the score for each comment? I wonder if this means that I rely too heavily on the comment score? It's amazing how such a subtle change can reveal something more profound.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'd try out rounded percentage scores.

Out of the total comment Karma alloted to all comments for an item, what proportion of this amount is contained within each comment?

The issue here is that upon voting, you couldn't change all displayed comment percentages at once, it'd have to change on page reload.

Also, it could be a rounded 1-10 scale.

\-- edit: would be good to reveal any comment score upon voting: gives an incentive to vote and remain critical. It's also like a marker as to what comments interest you for future recall -- that's something new.

<comment><USER52> also - to make the score pertinent:

\- either cap underlying comment scores at 50 points

OR

\- instead of giving a percentage score for a comment's proportion of total comment points, rank comments in terms of lowest positive score to highest positive score: then give each comment a score between 1-10 by segmenting the long tail into 10 even parts. (the initial ranking may not even need to be used)

having no visible scores seems surreal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This will definitely be interesting. While I think not having comment scores will have a somewhat limiting effect on groupthink voting, it will also probably have a counter-effect on pithy/silly one-liner comments by preventing people from noticing that no matter how humorous or witty the comment might have been it has already gathered as many votes as it deserves. The great karnak predicts a lot more early comments at the first level of two of comment threads being short witticisms that attempts to predict the herd and thereby gather a lot of early upvotes.

</comment><comment><USER54> How about having the scores show up after a week (or X amount of time). Practically nobody votes on week-old posts, but I often use -- for example -- searchyc.com's average points per post to get a feel for a user's contributions.

That would balance the elimination of mob voting with being able to ascertain (historical) credibility.

</comment><comment><USER55> Interesting. I still see some comments a light gray.

Also, like some others , I like know if something I've posted was particularly liked (or not).

And I've been skimming pages looking for the high-karma comments to try to dig out what are likely to be the most worthwhile comments. I suppose there's some feedback effect in place there, as popular comments simply get more attention (and so likely garner more up-votes votes), but there's pragmatic value in having a metric to selectively peruse a post with so much to read. (And, no, ZapRead isn't the answer :) )

</comment><comment><USER56> I love this idea, but it should really be initially implemented as a kind of A/B test.

Simply choose half of the UIDs at random and always show them the comment score, and don't show it to the other half. Track which comments are upvoted most when their score is visible versus when not (there are many other metrics to use as well). It should be pretty easy to determine how much groupthink plays into voting.

I suspect that most people only read (and therefore only vote on) already popular comments, so I suspect groupthink is fairly high here.

<comment><USER14> On the one hand, I completely agree with the scientific merit of your suggestion.

On the other hand, showing different HNs to different people doesn't exactly strike me as community-building behavior. I think it would make the site feel even more like Temple Grandin's barnyard, with us in the role of the cows. Will my species behave better if we design the floor like _this_? Will _that_ tweak to the algorithm prevent us from starting fights among ourselves? Oh, no, a gathering of more than twelve people -- we'd better build a robot to break those up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I think only showing votes for comments and links once you've voted would be a better solution. It's what I'm trying with a side-project of mine.

<comment><USER58> I was going to suggest the same thing. Most polls do not show you the results before you vote, this could work the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I actually expect that posts may become more extremely negative than they used to. At some point, you become sorry for a person with a highly negative comment; or at least I do. Sometimes I upvote comments that are negative because I think that the downvotes are unreasonable. Now there's no way for others to provide a check on the immoral downvoting behavior of others.

<comment><USER48> It seems that negative-scored comments still start to gray out, so you'll be able to upvote something you think has been unjustly penalized.

What you won't be able to do is aim things toward a desired positive score, such as downvoting a one-liner joke with 100+ points that you wouldn't downvote if it were at 20 points or less.

<comment><USER10> It'll be curious to see, then, if those one-liners get even _more_ massively upvoted, or if the reaction towards them becomes something negative.

<comment><USER48> My guess would be: More groupthink, less bandwagon.

That is, comments that (intentionally or not) pander to the audience will get more upvotes, but good comments that happen to get several early upvotes won't get the same pile-on effect. That's just a WAG, though.

<comment><USER10> One thing I _do_ notice: I'm already much less frustrated at comments I'm reading here. If somebody says something I disagree with, I can't see if half the site has voted them up, to me it's just a typical comment that I can either ignore or respond to.

Similarly, now dcurtis and I are arguing upthread, and I'm not anxiously wondering if he's been voted up more than me. We're just in a normal argument where neither of us will be proved by the community to be "more" right than the other. That's good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Interesting idea, but now old threads like this, where people voted by modding up, don't make sense:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527681>

</comment><comment><USER42> How about putting comment scores back in for people who have been here for at least X days / weeks / months or who have a comment score total greater than Y? I've been here since the beginning and value having the ability to pay more attention to higher rated comments when I'm skimming discussions.

</comment><comment><USER61> If you gave me the option to switch karma on/off for submissions and comments, I would likely leave both off.

Leaving karma off somehow gives me confidence to contribute more.

Another idea is to remove the (time 'ago). Good comments are timeless :) and old comments seem like nobody is watching anymore, so the dialog seems over.

Thank you Paul

<comment><USER62> I don't need karma either, but the time of submission is important to know whether the poster is likely to read a reply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why not hide the usernames as well then and let the comments be judged purely based on their content ?

<comment><USER63> I bet that would lead a lot of people to start using signatures. No thanks.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps we could assign IDs to posters? The first commenter in a thread is A, the second commenter is B, so that each new thread gives users a new identity.

The problem with that is that anonymity leads to trolling.

<comment><USER17> Troll posts _will_ be modded down and deleted. That's not really a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Will comments still change tone til they fade to nothing as they are down voted?

</comment><comment><USER65> I see a lot of comments here that basically say the same thing: "don't change anything, I was used to the old situation, now I'm lost".

Give it a couple of days worth of trying before casting your 'vote' on the changes, it's a pretty disruptive change because it breaks the routine, but I really think this sort of experimenting is what will bring out the best in HN, if hackers are starting to be conservatives then we really are in trouble.

Give it the benefit of the doubt and an honest chance.

</comment><comment><USER66> About a year ago, I mentioned the problem of "bandwagon upvoting"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217822>

So I'm really glad to see this and hopeful it works out. I think hiding the votes is better than a hard upper vote limit, as it is more organic. I'm really curious to know after the experiment how this affects the voting behavior (more votes, less votes, more for lead, less, etc)

</comment><comment><USER67> This is good -- I really want to read threads without scores. If the experiment ends at some point, I would like to see it as an option checkbox.

I often read comments with highest scores first while often there are good comments forgotten and sandwiched between a few übercomments. Or the übercomment is so conclusive that there's nowhere to take the discussion to. Hiding scores allows me to approach the discussion more objectively.

</comment><comment><USER68> Actually everyone should just try it out for a little while instead of instantly judging the change.

I agree with PG, HN started to have mob feel in the comments section.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interestingly enough, comments voted below zero still show up as gray. Helps to decide whether to upvote an "unjustly downvoted" comment.

</comment><comment><USER69> Ah, I love change! Though a smart hacker can make a model that takes into time and position of a comment to predict the comment score?

</comment><comment><USER70> As far as comment-scores are used to filter one's reading, there is an inherent contradiction in the system:

* the reader wants some filtering, so they can just read the good stuff

* the filtering is done by the readers, which requires they read more than just the good stuff

So the filtering can never be extremely effective, i.e. showing everyone only the good stuff, because then the filtering would not get done at all. I suppose it is a weakness in all public-contribution-based systems.

The work has to be done by someone. Perhaps there are other, better ways of allocating that work. A first thought: lower scored items appear stochastically -- lower score, less frequent random appearance. That might help by making it seem like there is less 'work' to do . . .

It seems the whole subject would warrant a fair amount of pondering and experiment (although it looks basically economic) . . .

</comment><comment><USER71> (Really sorry if this is already discussed, but I don't have time to read 300+ comments in depth)

How about allowing users to set two thresholds for themselves: (1) show only comments above X; (2) begin greying out below Y

What precisely X and Y are or could be I'll leave to the experts.

But this would let everyone decide their own absolute or relative threshold of comments they want to see. Those of you with plenty of time to spend on HN can have fairly low X and Y, whereas those of us that only want to spend a little time on HN each day can have just the popular presented to us. Voluntary herd membership (or rejection), if you will.

Variant along the same lines: An absolute number account setting indicating "I want to see only the N highest-scoring comments/parents".

<comment><USER72> I'm sure HN is not too proud to steal one of /.'s features. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> And here I was, thinking firefox was screwing up the JS. I guess this should improve the quality of discussions a lot, since a lot of people tend to just skim the few comments at the top. Not displaying the comment scores _might_ make them read more.

<comment><USER73> I don't think this'll stop people from just skimming the top.

But, it will stop them from finding those highly rated comments hidden by a low rated parent comment.

<comment><USER37> Which brings us to an interesting point: Shouldn't comment threads be sorted by the total votes for all comments in that thread???

<comment><USER32> That might make sense but it could still mean that a long, pointless, off- topic discussion would rise to the top, above other shorter, succinct comments that might end up buried at the bottom.

<comment><USER37> I believe the shorter on-topic comment would be voted up more than the off- topic thread (unless ofcourse, the off-topic thread involves a sparky issue like Micheal Arrington).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I kind of miss the lack of comment scores. I do think they allow me to be more selective about the comments I read, based on the wisdom of crowds.

Is there any chance we could have two style sheets, one in which they are hidden and the other where they are visible?

</comment><comment><USER75> If this improves the site, should it be applied to submission scores too? Showing submission scores can create the same sort of mob mentality in voting. The only potential downside that I see is people voting less often.

</comment><comment><USER76> I anticipate that one effect of this will be that there will be more threads simply saying "I agree" or "Good comment" since this will no longer be so visibly reflected by the voting.

<comment><USER10> I think that those threads will be downvoted same as always, and when they grey out it'll give other users the impression that those comments are less interesting/worthwhile than other comments.

And, to rant a teeny bit, _that's what downvoting is used for_. You don't downvote people that disagree with you or that say something you don't like. Downvoting is for _removing comments that aren't relevant to the discussion_. That's why they go grey. When I saw your comment, you'd been downvoted and greyed out, and you made a comment with a relevant or interesting point. You should not have been downvoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> It looks like pg is still in the middle of changing things. A moment ago I could see other people's comments' scores in the replies on my "threads" page; now I can't.

<comment><USER26> I have noticed things changing around too.

I hear there is this thing called a "dev server"...

<comment><AUTHOR> I usually do development on my local machine, but for small things like this I use the server's repl.

<comment><USER26> Nice. I wondered why things were changing quickly but there were never any page load errors.

I don't trust myself not to kill my app with a live REPL :)

<comment><USER22> I do it in a live production environment and it can often give you a nice adrenaline flush. I do occasionally fat-finger things, so I try to avoid it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> If I try and vote on a comment now, the ersatz AJAX trick no longer works. I'm actually taken to /vote?for=12345 etc.. so I get a blank page every time I vote. Bug?

</comment><comment><USER79> I think this is very nice because karma isn't really worth anything and comments that are popular still get to be seen without the mob mentality to vote them up

<comment><USER26> I think karma was an incentive for people to contribute comments. You might not be getting sex or money, but you are getting that feeling of creating something other people like.

Now you don't really know if people like your work or not, so why bother contributing?

(I know why: "because someone is wrong on the Internet!" But it is nice to get some karma too, :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I love it. Keeps comment voting honest it seems.

</comment><comment><USER81> I like the hidden comment scores. You can still see negative comments at a glance, and the comments are still ordered by the scores so you can read the high score comments first since they are on top.

If they are turned back on, I'd suggest making it an _option_ , and possibly hidden by default.

</comment><comment><USER82> I'd be interested in seeing this happening for posts in addition to comments, so that there's more of an incentive to vote based on one's own opinion of the post than to fall for "scorebait" and voting on the heat of the moment because it seems everyone else is doing the same

</comment><comment><USER83> Just as an alternative idea - why not colour the score to the background colour - that way it is effectively invisible, yet can still be seen by highlighting the heading.

Although that being said, I tend to gloss over the scores anyway for the most part...

</comment><comment><USER84> This is going to work wonders. imho, it will atleast 'confuse' people who upvote friends without reading the context, specially for all the 'voters' who upvote 'i love/hate my country' kind of comments.

This feature will be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER85> I like this already. How long will you let the test run?

</comment><comment><USER86> i have to admit that i would equally like to see this happen for content submissions.

</comment><comment><USER67> Has this been reverted? I can see the comment scores again.

</comment><comment><USER87> Great idea.

(This one is going to go down, but that's all I have to say.)

</comment><comment><USER88> Ahhh.. And I thought my browser was acting up again.

</comment><comment><USER89> this is weird and surprising to me, but it's causing me to look at news.yc in a refreshing new way. so i guess that has to be a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Odd sort of "improvement"

Hacker News -- now with less information?

I would imagine that the more readers become engaged with the site the more information about the site they would want to consume, no?

<comment><AUTHOR> What matters is the quality of the information, not the amount. One of my goals has always been to decrease the amount of stupid information flowing through the system. That's why there are no downvotes on submissions: my observations of Reddit suggested that downvotes were more often reflexive than upvotes.

<comment><USER13> I'm with you on your motives, and it'll be interesting to see how the site reacts.

It just clashes with the idea that sites should be very simple to use, but engaging in detail over time -- that as users spend more time on a site they become interested in more details, whatever those details are. I think you see this in the number of HN mining apps posted. People who are engaged want more stuff from what they're engaged in.

I'm definitely not for information for information's sake, just find your tweaking counter-intuitive. Seems like shooting all of the animals to prevent them from escaping the barn.

I look forward to somebody telling us how the experiment went.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Please, don't think HN is big enough to justify this change (I wish I could downvote you! :).

</comment><comment><USER52> How about an API?

</comment><comment><USER91> It's a really good idea, but it kinda feels awkward.

<comment><USER92> I see nothing awkward about it. It just makes you upvote and reply to the most thought provoking and insightful posts rather than the ones with the highest counts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> turn off voting at 50 points.

</comment><comment><USER93> Interesting psychological side effect I just noticed: I wasn't previously aware of my tendency to scan a long thread for comments that stand out because of their high comment scores but I just did it when I opened this thread and felt like I didn't have my usual bearings. In one sense it levels the playing field. In another sense, though, it removes some key information that helps us to prioritize where we direct our attention.

</comment><comment><USER94> This decision is very good for improving quality of content of comments.

Maybe it is good idea to display author's karma instead.

People love to see magic numbers. =)

</comment><comment><USER95> And they said K5 was dead...

</comment><comment><USER96> WTF ?? <script>alert(/XSS/)</script>

</comment><comment><USER6> The Hacker News community should decide if this featured is enabled (maybe a poll post).

Having you just take this away on a whim because you felt it "might" be better is pretty poor taste in my opinion.

It all most feels like papa Apple just rejected an iPhone app because they didn't like the "feel" of it.

Please bring back the comment scores ASAP. I can't envision myself staying round here without them ;-)

At a minimum, give me the option to turn it on for my own viewing pleasure.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm looking for a Python mentor - <AUTHOR>

I have been learning to program for a couple of months outside school using some great online resources including MIT Open CourseWare and the O'Reilly School's Python course.
I have a ton of ideas for small and large apps and programs that I would like to develop.
While the current courses and tutorials are excellent, I feel that I need more specific and advanced skills for the programs I am creating and I would also like to fast track my Python learning.
Therefore I am looking for a Python expert (it would be nice but not required if they had some knowledge around data retrieval and Django) that could help mentor me and fast-track my learning.
Basically I am looking for somebody who could answer my questions via email/Skype and point me in the right direction from time to time.
The amount of help would of course be down to the individual mentor's time constraints.
While I'm not be any means an advanced programmer yet, I would be willing to work extremely hard at improving my skills and of course also give something back to my mentor.
I'm not sure what as a mentor you would like in return for your time, but I would be willing to program for you (when I am at a sufficiently advanced level), offer some cash, give you equity in individual projects or all projects created over the time you mentor me or SEO services.
I am currently doing part-time work as an SEO for a couple of companies and the main reason for learning to program is to make possible my project to disrupt the SEO industry (see: www.theopenalgorithm.com for basic details).
If this sounds like something you would be interested in please contact me at email@example.com or feel free to reply here with any questions you may have.
Thanks in advance for your help. <comment><USER2> Have you considered using stack overflow? It's a great way to have access to mentors and people to help you and if you're working in a particular domain, you will have experts to help you. With one single mentor you're stuck with only what they know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your advice, yes I have asked questions on Stack Overflow and found the response to be excellent, and I plan to use it in the future.

But with a mentor you can ask more general questions, whereas with SO it tends to be more code/error specific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you're learning to program from scratch, you really need to start with Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way" <http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/> . This is going to be much better for you than the MIT and the O'Reilly stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks for your advice, it looks like a great book with lots of top exercises.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ive been working with python/django for about 6 months now so i wouldnt call myself an expert but i understand where youre coming from and im willing to help you out. How best to contact you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, email@example.com, send your profile links.</comment></comment>


SEC Awards Record Payout of Nearly $50M to Whistleblower - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-126 <comment><USER2> We should know more about this. Who was the individual? What company they wistleblow about? These facts matter.

<comment><USER3> I don't see how whistleblower identity matters as long as the information and the validity of it is vetted by the SEC. The only use for that information I can think of would be to retaliate, which would go against the whole principle of having a whistleblower program in the first place.

> Whistleblowers may be eligible for an award when they voluntarily provide > the SEC with original, timely, and credible information that leads to a > successful enforcement action. Whistleblower awards can range from 10 > percent to 30 percent of the money collected when the monetary sanctions > exceed $1 million.

It looks like they not only vet the information, but also provide awards based on the results of successful enforcement. Not only that, but also

> All payments are made out of an investor protection fund established by > Congress that is financed entirely through monetary sanctions paid to the > SEC by securities law violators. No money has been taken or withheld from > harmed investors to pay whistleblower awards.

The funds come from successful enforcement and harmed parties aren't paying for it (neither are the taxpayers, given that it's essentially a "finder's fee" on criminally-acquired funds).

As for the whistleblowed-on company, I can definitely see a case to expose that information so that we can know who the rotten ones really are.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are VPS providers sending passwords in plain text? - <AUTHOR>

I was on the lookout for a cheap VPS (~$10) to test out something. I signed up for  Host1Plus.com and I got my password in plain text.
I immediately cancelled my account. I checked out IntoVPS (which was recommended here) and the same thing happened. Even though they were not accepting payment from "my country"
So I'd like to know, is it the norm to send passwords in plain text. Two random VPS providers, same experience.
I could have used Linode but I just need access for a day or two which is why I am looking for something cheap.
Update
<comment>
I got this form one of them
"Hello,
Password has been sent to you in plain text for easier usage. However, email was sent from server which uses SSL certificates in your provided email address." </comment><comment><USER2> Since you just want it for a day or two, why dont you go for something like google app engine or AWS (they have a free AMI)?</comment>


RaML — Resource Aware ML - <AUTHOR> http://raml.co/index.html <comment><USER2> Surely they saw the relatively well-known:

[https://raml.org/](https://raml.org/)

<comment><USER3> To be honest, I didn't know about the RAML you link until I read your comment. Would this RAML be common knowledge for people who aren't web developers / don't regularly use web APIs?

<comment><USER4> probably not. It's not super popular even among web devs. The last time I remember thinking about it was prob in 2015. I think swagger has won the market for api documentation.

That being said, its still annoying trying to find information about a project when there are conflicting names.</comment></comment></comment>


Best domain name for Groupon.com like site? - <AUTHOR> http://poll.fm/f/1zg8j

<comment><USER2> Is crowd sourcing the choice of domain name intelligent? Other people may register best suggestions, the people voting may not be your target audience, and your intuition may be quicker and provider better guidance.

<comment><USER3> The few I checked had already been registered...hopefully by the poll author!</comment></comment>


Mini-Mainframe at Home: A 6-CPU Server from 1997 - <AUTHOR> http://www.cpushack.com/2019/01/12/mini-mainframe-at-home-the-story-of-a-6-cpu-server-from-1997/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting, and seriously nostalgia-inducing, but... THIS IS BY NO MEANS A MAINFRAME. A large server does not equate with a mainframe on any level. If it contains x86 parts it isn't a mainframe for sure.

<comment><USER3> > If it contains x86 parts it isn't a mainframe for sure.

Nitpick: mainframes often contain x86 chips supporting various I/O devices, much in the same way that a modern x86 machine may have an ARM core or two or ten lying around somewhere.

Even when tweaking the definition to "uses x86 as the main CPU" this would rule out certain vendors (Unisys being the primary example that comes to mind) whose mainframes consist of an emulator running on a locked down Linux or Windows Xeon system.

<comment><USER4> IBM mainframes' "support element", which basically means operator console, was at one point a PC running OS/2 Warp:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140305172128/https://www-304.i...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140305172128/https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg2f2b053a60fd5a852852568dc00605f0d&aid=1)

<comment><USER5> On current IBM mainframes Support Element is ThinkPad running Linux.

Somewhat surprisingly it seems to be completely stock ThinkPad without any built-in weird interface hardware and the mainframe is connected by bunch of USB cables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> follow-up [http://www.cpushack.com/2019/01/14/part-2-mini-mainframe- at-...](http://www.cpushack.com/2019/01/14/part-2-mini-mainframe-at-home-the- story-of-a-6-cpu-server-from-1997/)

<comment><USER6> They continue to insult mainframes by comparing them to large PCs...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, otherwise I like the article set. It probably doesn't help that IBM's messaging on what makes them unique is so damn poor. Also, I guess I'm going to find out how their pSeries strategy works in practice when we get our iSeries replacement which is going to be a S914.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hm. Is the site being hosted on said server? It's feeling like it's maybe been hugged a bit too much.

edit: Aha, something in the hosting setup may be blocking PIA.</comment>


Seattle's next light rail plan is slow because it reflects our values - <AUTHOR> http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/04/07/st3-is-slow-because-it-reflects-our-values/ <comment><USER2> It would cost $200m to add tracks to the 520 bridge, and there's an existing 100 foot wide right-of-way from Renton to Bothell. I.e. for less than a billion and a couple years, the trackage could be more than doubled, and more than double the communities served.

The fact that this is not part of the 25 year $50b plan means something is terribly broken about Seattle's mass transit plan.

<comment><USER3> It would cost that much just to add the pontoons to the bridge. The cost of actually adding more bridge width and the rails thereupon would be more.

<comment><USER2> I read that the 520 new bridge was build to accommodate light rail with $200m in additional spending.

<comment><USER3> Did you read that from WSDOT? WSDOT says this:

"How much would it cost to add light rail to the floating bridge?

[...] Secondly, it would cost between $150 million and $200 million to construct the 30 additional pontoons and to install them on the floating bridge, alongside the 77 pontoons required for the six-lane bridge. There would be other costs associated with the bridge deck expansion and other infrastructure, including rail lines."

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's what I'd read, and apparently it would cost more. But it clearly is designed to accommodate the rail expansion, rather than having to build yet another bridge for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't underestimate the value of the monorail that can transport someone 6 blocks in light speed.

</comment><comment><USER5> By the time they do everything right and in the proper way no one will want the stupid thing. It will be outdated and stupid. That's the Seattle way: aversion to making decisions fast and moving along. People here are aftaid of taking any risk. And on top of that, there is a severe amoung of entrenched old school thinking.

</comment><comment><USER6> The good news is that by the time they are finished, the whole thing will be obsolete. Self-driving technology is going to completely change urban transportation.

<comment><USER7> I will put $100 into an index fund and bet the proceeds that self-driving technology will not be competitive with rail by 2040. The technology will be much harder to bring up to the necessary level than anyone expects, and without banning human drivers (politically impossible for the foreseeable future), you'll never be able to match the capacity of rail.

<comment><USER3> Even with perfect software how could cars, self-driven or otherwise, ever compete with rail? A four-track rail system has a per-track throughput of 100000 people per hour. Freeways can get 2000 cars per hour per lane, and an average of 1.6 people per car works out to only 3200 people per hour. That's the theoretical best. Actual roadways never approach this figure.

<comment><USER8> > Freeways can get 2000 cars per hour per lane

I'm missing something, in a single lane at 60mph you would be able to get ((60 * 1608)/5) (assuming car is 5m long) = 19296.

If we assume that there is 5m of seperation between every car (possible when _all_ cars are automatically driven and communicate with each other) that's still 10k cars an hour.

4 lane highway, 40k an hour, assuming occupancy at 1.6 that's 64000 an hour.

Human driven no way, we are too unpredictable and react far too slowly to safely drive in that way but computers probably could.

<comment><USER3> Well you just made a pretty unfair comparison since you added up to 64000 for all four lanes vs 100000 people /per track/ on a 4-track railway. But I think your assumptions are all pretty optimistic. You wouldn't be able to run cars that close together on a multilane roadway because cars would need to move between lanes to enter and exit which would cause pipeline shocks if there was that little room.

Anyway the main difference between my claims and yours is that yours are speculation, while mine are based on history. We've seen five million people disembark at actual railroad stations. It's happened. We don't have to speculate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 25 years! holy moly!

</comment><comment><USER10> Sound Transit is a regional transit authority. Seattle has little to do with it (except in 50 years there slightly more rail).

Please fix the nonsense title.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe I'm missing something,

But I honestly don't understand the point of spending billions of dollars building light rail, when the solution seems much simpler.

Roads? Check

Busses? Check

Busses are way more flexible than rail. They can utilize existing road infrastructure. With some investment into dedicated bus lanes in high traffic areas, and more busses/bus routes, people can be moved around with significantly less capital investment.

<comment><USER12> I agree with this quite a bit.

I'd like to see a US city facing traffic/growth problems right now really embrace BRT[0].

To me it seems like the pragmatic solution, given the already extensive freeway networks in most US cities, and the incredible capital outlay required to get any sort of rail system up and running, not to mention the 20+ year timelines.

But I think most Americans have a much stronger stigma of buses than subways, so maybe it's just too uncool for the US to ever embrace.

[0]: Bus Rapid Transit - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit)

<comment><USER13> Seattle already has a pretty expansive bus network, including express busses and a combined light-rail/bus tunnel.

And yet... the roads are still gridlocked.

<comment><USER14> Seattle's bus system sucks - and it's not just gridlock.

There aren't enough running to make it make sense. This is probably because there aren't enough people actively taking the bus... because there aren't enough running.

It would be ideal if they raised the gas tax significantly and funneled the money into a better bus system. Get cars off the street and add more buses.

Who's gonna vote for that, though?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


It Is Not Evil, Per Se, to Send Your Kids to Private School - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-29/is-it-evil-to-send-your-kids-to-private-school-.html <comment><USER2> As a parent who faces a choice between semi-bad public schools (Pasadena, CA, home of Caltech) or private schools, I find this debate amusing.

I think the authors of articles like these should declare, in the first paragraph of the story, the number and ages of their children, and where they go to school.

Three children, all teenagers, all in private school.

I'm not going to fuck up their lives with someone else's political agenda.</comment>


Enigma - <AUTHOR> http://enigma.media.mit.edu

<comment><USER2> In fairness, there's a white paper linked on the bottom. I scanned it. It sounds like an etherium competitor, specifically for computation. It describes a p2p system of compensated nodes, with an external blockchain to manage access\identity. Nodes run pieces of the data through simulated circuits, similar to a protocol described by Cohen in [2013 Crypto]([http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-40084-1_1...](http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-40084-1_11)). The authors claim they got the O(n^2) down to O(n), and parallelize the rest. Storage via a distributed hash table. Other fancy stuff to ensure correctness.

My concern for the site is toward the bottom. They advertise "Fair income distribution: Users get paid for their data". If this were google, that might work. As this is a private computation service, I don't know which way the typo should go.

</comment><comment><USER3> Click 'Learn More' ->

"Enigma is a decentralized cloud platform with guaranteed privacy. Personal data is stored, shared and analyzed without ever being fully revealed to any party. Secure multi-party computation, empowered by the blockchain, is the magical technology behind it."

If the author's find this, that's the vaguest, most poorly worded summary of a service I think I've ever read. I don't know a) how it's decentralized b) how my data is stored, shared & analyzed c) whether to trust the blockchain being called 'magical'.

<comment><USER4> It makes sense as short buzzwordy marketing text. If you scroll down further there is a link to the whitepaper which describes it in great detail.

"A peer-to-peer network, enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private. Enigma's computational model is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi- party computation, guaranteed by a verifiable secret-sharing scheme. For storage, we use a modified distributed hashtable for holding secret-shared data. An external blockchain is utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation, correctness and fairness of the system. Similar to Bitcoin, Enigma removes the need for a trusted third party, enabling autonomous control of personal data."

[http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf](http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf)</comment></comment>


The Center of Sidra: The Culture and Custom of Spanish Cider - <AUTHOR> http://cidercraftmag.com/the-center-of-sidra-the-culture-and-custom-of-spanish-cider/

<comment><USER2> Shameless plug - I'm from Asturias. Currently, I'm trying to bootstrap a startup which will sell high quality food at reasonable prices from small producers. A bit of a romantic idea.

Supermarkets, especially those in Northern Europe, need to get disrupted. They're an oligopoly making truckloads of money by selling products of dubious quality at unreasonable prices.

Cider is obviously among what we are stocking. It's a quite unique thing, I think. If anyone wants to do business in EU/US/Far East just let me know via my profile.

<comment><USER3> Working with "northern european" retailers myself, I can tell you're in for a bumpy ride (their scale is so huge they can basically force your suppliers to stop supplying you if they want to), but there's definitely a market for food at reasonable prices from small producers. Good luck in your endeavour!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've spent a lot of time in Asturias myself, and the culture of sidra and the wonderful little bars (sidrerias) that serve it are treasures. If you are lucky enough to find yourself in the north of Spain, don't miss out!

<comment><USER5> Hard cider is seeing a revival in the US (as well as the UK, as I understand it) One of the first ones I learned about was ACE cider in Sebastopol. They even have a great Perry (pear hard cider)

<comment><USER6> Yeah as the article mentions, Basque cider is totally different from Woodchuck or even the drier brands that you get in the US. The only time I've seen it Stateside is at a Basque restaurant here in NYC (Euzkadi).

<comment><USER7> Have you tried UK farmhouse ciders? I'm curious how the general styles compare. Unfortunately, I don't know the NYC scene at all - I'm rather more familiar with San Francisco. (FWIW, I haven't tried the place yet, but [http://upcidersf.com/](http://upcidersf.com/) is on my radar)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are there Spanish cider's of this style available in the U.S.?

<comment><USER9> I highly recommend this one: [http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/sarasola-sidra- natural/96203/](http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/sarasola-sidra-natural/96203/)</comment></comment>


The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia's U.S. Treasury Holdings - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41-year-u-s-debt-secret <comment><USER2> There's a book called confessions of an economic hit man - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man)

Essentially U.S. helps impoverished nations with infrastructure and other aid, but saddles them with debt in order to control them politically or otherwise.

The interesting part was when it came to Saudi Arabia, which had so much money it didn't need to take on debt to develop their infrastructure. So instead they bought America's debt as this article explains.

I lived in the kingdom from '82 - '04 which was quite an interesting time span to have lived there. Things have definitely changed as a younger, mostly western educated generation, returns home and social unrest cannot be quelled with unlimited social programs anymore.

Most of the Saudi's I know now simply take american concepts/franchises and spin them out over there. From hamburger chains to house cleaning services. Works pretty well for them.

The most annoying thing was the weekends were on Thursday and Friday, so if you wanted to do anything international with a bank you could only do it Mon - Wed as their banks were closed on their weekends and then U.S. banks were closed Sat / Sun.

I believe you can still simply walk to a certain part of town and watch an execution, along with a couple of hands once a week there. Just you know, if you wanted something to do on a weekend.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to hear more. Where you married? What was it like for you spouse? If not, what was the dating scene like in 82?

Did you travel around any? What are the most interesting parts of the country? Did you ever make it to Mecca?

How good are you at recognizing family names and power connections? Did that come with time?

How did people in different parts of the country view each other?

I just returned from a week in Jeddah and Riyadh. Here are some photos from a fancy jail. Housing some of the 5000 terrorist/jihadists in a re-integration program. Think about that, the jihadists get the nice jail, because they are rehabilitatable: [http://www.daviddegner.com/albums/terrorist-rehab-in- saudi-a...](http://www.daviddegner.com/albums/terrorist-rehab-in-saudi- arabia/)

<comment><USER4> _Think about that, the jihadists get the nice jail, because they are rehabilitatable_

This is infinitely more humane than the current US strategy of drone strikes, "kills terrorists" never mind the collateral damage and disruption it causes. Hell our DOC could learn a few things. Here, if you are ever once a criminal, you're a criminal for life.

<comment><USER5> I quite agree with you that the Saudis' approach here is much less horrible!

>Here, if you are ever once a criminal, you're a criminal for life

OTOH, recidivism for sorcery must be pretty low over in the Kingdom, since the punishment for this crime (?) is beheading (!).

<comment><USER6> The fact that anybody would ever get convicted for sorcery tells you all you need to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can see from their reported figures that their U.S. treasury holdings are far too low for a sensible national portfolio. It's a pretty glaring hole, and you know that the money is going somewhere off the balance sheets.

The question has always been how much U.S. debt exactly the Saudi's hold. This is an interesting historical anecdote, but it doesn't provide any information about the size of the debt, other than "much larger" than official figures, which isn't terribly informative.

At this point, Saudi Arabia needs the United States more than the United States needs Saudi Arabia. The OPEC cartel is broken, Saudi Arabia is running a massive deficit, both China and Europe have economies mired in the aftershocks of 2008 which cannot absorb the additional supply, and the United States is energy independent.

If the Saudis are even willing to suggest selling off their dollar-denominated debts, they must be either unfathomably arrogant or extremely desperate. My read is the latter.

They really must want to keep those documents secret. There is no way that a country gobbling up it's meager monetary reserves could afford the hit to the value of those assets as they unwound them, even if they sold them off very slowly and predictably.

Something potentially very bad for world security is in those documents. Something that would force us into confrontation with the Saudis. Something that could cause a run on the dollar.

There must be some extremely senior officials involved in that report. Whoever they are, they're senior enough that they can't be made to disappear quietly into the night.

If those pages do contain information specifically identifying financiers of 9/11, the United States might be war-weary, but you can bet that a massive majority of Americans would demand their heads on pikes. As much as I support the public's right to know, that's a very nightmarish scenario.

<comment><USER8> A few years ago I read a good book on the collapse of the USSR (can't remember the title, too lazy to go back and find it right now). One of the major factors that the author identified was glasnost ("transparency"), which I'm old enough to remember being talked about on the news at the time.

Basically, his thesis was that it was the transparency, after a generation of buildup of really nasty official secrets, that ultimately brought down the communist regime. Once it was clear that everything people thought was probably happening was actually happening, and worse, the whole thing just disintegrated from the bottom up. The regime lost all legitimacy, and the death blow was basically self-inflicted since it was the regime itself that started to open up.

I often wonder about that in the US context. What if a lot of crazy stuff that many people suspect has gone on actually turns out to be true, or what if it's even worse than some of the tinfoil hatters think, and we suddenly start finding out about it all.

I figured it would be some type of Wikileaks or Snowden-type reveal that would do us in, if it happened. But we may actually do ourselves in with an American glasnost that, just like the Russian one of the 80's, is done by well-meaning people in our own government.

<comment><USER7> There is a theory that Perestroika and Glasnost were responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union, but to me that seems unlikely. The Soviet Union was bound to collapse, because it's mandate, by definition, was limitless expansion of communism.

When the government could no longer coordinate production, Perestroika and Glasnost were last-ditch efforts to bring the Soviet Union more in line with Western norms. Unfortunately, since their empire was built on force, the loosening of the reigns only encouraged irredentist movements, until one by one the Soviet republics fell like dominos.

Don't get me wrong. It is a major mainstream theory that the liberalizing reforms unleashed too much information on the Soviet public all at once, causing a massive reaction.

I do believe Glasnost and Perestroika were the cause of the collapse, but it wasn't was because of the volume of information released. Rather, it was the increased freedoms to organize and communicate outside the strictures of the state. Free speech and freedom of assembly are anathema to dictatorship. Once that occurred, it was only a matter of time before their vassal states rose up.

The United States isn't quite as vulnerable to that type of collapse. You have to remember the Soviet style of occupation was absolutely brutal. The murder of anyone considered to be part of the elite class, including everyone from factory owners to the university professors, constant surveillance, and indiscriminate use of force were the first steps upon the Soviets gaining control of a country. The result was subjugated nations and people, not new provinces and citizens.

The United States doesn't have that style of federation. Its provinces are held together by a common national identity in voluntary assembly, not a single nation presiding over others by raw force.

I do also believe that if the United States' TS archives were ever opened, many things suspected by conspiracy theorists would be proved correct, even more would be proven false, and there would be countless other plots no one even suspected.

<comment><USER9> > The United States doesn't have that style of federation. Its provinces are > held together by a common national identity in voluntary assembly, not a > single nation presiding over others by raw force.

Don't say that within earshot of the American South.

<comment><USER7> The South is the largest contributor to the national military by far, the location of the capital, and "the South will Rise Again" folks are emphatic but few. There still is a great deal of (often subtle) racism in the Ameican Southeast, but little to no enthusiasm for actually leaving the United States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bitter Lake [1] connects the Saudi windfall with the rise of global bankers as a power. Showdown at Doha [2] looks into the growing discomfort of US with rise of Iran and the subsequent strategic deal with SA which has lead us directly to the current mess. The role of the Brits (always busy busy in the shadows) is well worth looking into.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Lake_%28film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Lake_%28film%29)

[2]: [http://masoudbehnoud.com/weblog/s2.pdf](http://masoudbehnoud.com/weblog/s2.pdf)

<comment><USER7> _the Brits (always busy busy in the shadows) is well worth looking into._

 _Sigh_ , the British are constantly furthering their own agenda in the Middle East. Their HUMINT network is just much better than anyone else's in the region, and their active intelligence work is informed by a much more nuanced view of that portion of the world.

Americans like to do things from a distance, if they possibly can. Airstrikes, cyberattacks, drones, all involve minimal risk of casualties. The Brits have been on the ground, building their network, for far longer than the Americans.

If only they'd share more of the fruits of their labor. It's been a quarter millennium, and British intelligence still looks down their nose at the Americans, treating them like a rebellious problem child.

<comment><USER11> If anyone thinks the UK doesn't have an agenda in the Middle East separate to that of the US then you might want to consider the Al-Yamamah arms deal:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al- Yamamah_arms_deal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yamamah_arms_deal)

NB - of course the UK does a lot that aligns with US interests, but they aren't identical.

<comment><USER7> Yes, the United States and Great Britain have similar, but not identical interests in the Middle East.

Their intelligence operatives are almost preternaturally good (or at least seem that way due to their extremely precise knowledge of the Middle East.) And unlike American intelligence officers, they have a much smaller risk of "going native." American officers are rotated every few years to prevent this effect, while the Brits can keep people in place for decades without the same worry.

<comment><USER12> im not surprised.

every (out of 10 or so) brit ive met overseas and had a good chat with out over the last 3 years of being an expat has been a neurotic and/or belligerent asshole whereas most of the americans (out of 20) were able to communicate and assimilate with the local culture.

its become such a pattern that i wont even speak english to a person with a british accent anymore. quite a few of them are just looking for physical fights. so strange.

and thats the end of my n=30 overseas brits and americans anecdote.

<comment><USER13> My girlfriend runs a hostel and in my experience, the "Rule Britannia" types are a (vocal) minority. No country has a monopoly on jerks...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The most surprising thing is the backdoor arrangements the Treasury and Federal Reserve handily created to keep Saudi bonds purchases off the books - through forty years!

I'm sure most people would not believe something like this could be done - that actual governing and federal dealing is so hidden, through changing administrations, in spite of apparent transparency, like annual reports, budgets, hearings, and so on. It really puts a big question mark on the U.S. democratic system, as if that wasn't tenuous enough already.

Oh, and if anyone was in doubt about the shift to Iran, this suddenly being publicized as much as anything tells you all you need to know. It's a big middle finger to Saudi Arabia.

<comment><USER15> +1 Couldn't agree more.

This story would have really surprised me 10 years ago but now I accept that the Economic Royalty (or Deep Government, or whatever you want to call them) use a lack of transparency to do what profits them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a stupid question that is a bit more general than the Saudi case. What's the advantage of selling oil and the using the dollars to buy treasuries or other conservative investment assets? Wouldn't it make much more sense for a country like Saudi Arabia to limit their oil production and finance their deficit of the sales directly instead of using royalties? This assumes that the value of oil will rather rise over time . In addition, for a producer as large as the Saudi's, this strategy should even raise oil prices.

<comment><USER17> Not so stupid: Start with the phrase "Hoteling's rule" for a century of academic analysis of that question.

If you own an oil field, you have to balance a number of factors:

* How is the price of oil changing, relative to overall inflation? You mentioned this one.

But also,

* Are technological improvements (either increasing the total amount of extractable oil in the world, or outright oil replacements) going to dramatically lower the price if I wait too long?

* Is it still going to be my oil next year, or am I going to be first against the wall when the next revolution comes?

My (unsophisticated, outsider) opinion is that if you see oil-producing countries selling as quickly as they can, that's weak evidence that they're worried about the last two bullets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How is it possible to sell U.S. Treasuries in secret or in a dark market while still providing an ostensibly transparent market for Treasuries? Those two things seems counter to each other.

A deal with this structure as a preference seem extremely misguided, and I'm not sure if the secrecy was requested by the Saudis or by the Nixon / Kissinger NSC / Cabinet which was prone to secrecy for no reason. Either way, one more crazed "feather" in their cap that greatly influenced the future of the country for better or worse.

<comment><USER19> _How is it possible to sell U.S. Treasuries in secret or in a dark market while still providing an ostensibly transparent market for Treasuries? Those two things seems counter to each other._

Let's consider equities first. A huge amount of invested money is indexed, which basically means not doing active investing but simply tagging along with the price discovery done by more active market participants. That seems to work out pretty well. Not perfect, but good enough.

Why can't treasuries be the same? There's such a thing as a "noncompetitive bid"[1], which means you agree to purchase Treasuries at the same price that the smarter money chose to purchase at.

Right now there are low limits on how much can be bought by noncompetitive bids. But perhaps the Saudi's just get that price for however much they want to buy? The treasury market is _huge_ _huge_ _huge_. It probably remains reasonably "transparent" regardless of what the Saudis buy.

[1] [https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/auctfund/work/work.htm](https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/auctfund/work/work.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting how for decades, the story of Saudi Arabia recycling US petrodollars, i.e., funding the US deficit by buying US Treasuries with proceeds of its crude oil sales (mostly to the US), while the US sweetened the deal by providing the Saudis with military equipment and supplies, remained entirely in the conspiracy realm, and how with this fascinating Bloomberg story this "theory" now becomes fact.

<comment><USER21> It seems to be that this story has been out there for decades now, and this Bloomberg story just adds a few details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Mentioned is the GAO's finding -- all the way back in 1979 -- that the secrecy had no legal basis. Reports from the GAO, the Government Accountability Office, are a great way to keep an eye on all sorts of wonky, provocative investigations that are often left in the shadows.

</comment><comment><USER23> We pretty much put a price on our morality. Looking at the bond holders graph, it appears we owe about a 1/2-trillion dollars to oil producing nations. It's no wonder we tolerate tolerate gross human rights violations therein.

Sort of like that J. Paul Getty Quote: "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."

Makes me wonder if we have a similar deal with China: we sacrifice our industrial sector (no other nation allowed that to happen) in exchange for bond buying?

<comment><USER24> We haven't sacrificed our industrial sector:

[https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO](https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO)

<comment><USER25> I think this chart helps explain why someone might think so: [http://blogs- images.forbes.com/timworstall/files/2015/10/mfg...](http://blogs- images.forbes.com/timworstall/files/2015/10/mfg1-e1443798818201.jpg)

The US manufactures more than ever before, it just takes fewer jobs to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The Kingdom Opening [1] will give you a fast historical overview.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bHlO057DyY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bHlO057DyY)

</comment><comment><USER27> Since 1971 OPEC is bullied to sell Oil exclusively in US dollars resulting in friction between 1.8 billion Muslims and the West;

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

[http://qz.com/562128/isil-is-a-revolt-by-young- disaffected-m...](http://qz.com/562128/isil-is-a-revolt-by-young-disaffected- muslims-against-their-parents-generation/)

</comment><comment><USER14> The massive issuance of U.S. Dollar debt to Saudi Arabia, as a result of the deal mentioned in the OP, coincided perfectly with the abolition of the gold standard (the dollar being linked to physical gold reserves) [1]. So right from the start, the U.S. was purchasing oil with pieces of paper with no guaranteed value of any sort.

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

<comment><USER28> I'd rather have fiat currency than gold, because that would save me the time and hassle of selling the gold and getting something I can actually spend.

<comment><USER29> > I'd rather have fiat currency than gold, because that would save me the time > and hassle of selling the gold and getting something I can actually spend.

Isn't currency backed by commodities considered something other than fiat currency?

<comment><USER30> It's called the "gold standard".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Look at that gas station photo during the embargo: "Limit: $300 per customer". $300 in 1974? Wow!

<comment><USER32> That's $3.00 :)

<comment><USER31> Thanks - makes much more sense. I haven't had my coffee yet. According to the Dept. of Energy that'd be about 7 gallons. ([http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-915-march-7-2016-averag...](http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-915-march-7-2016-average- historical-annual-gasoline-pump-price-1929-2015)) Not sure what typical passenger car engine efficiency was in those days, though.

<comment><USER33> I remember the '73 embargo vividly. Rationing was based on license plate, even or odd. My parent's two autos were one of each. Of course, a station wagon and pickup truck. So my dad would get up about 4:30, put the snub-nosed .38 under the seat, and go get in line. Those who waited until the station opened were too late. Stations had big signs up if they had no gas.

Gas was always pumped by the attendant. When you got to the pump, he would tell _you_ how much gas you could have. Five gallons was common.

My parents were small business owners. The embargo put their business at the edge.

<comment><USER34> I don't understand why Nixon and subsequent administrations didn't push _hard_ for total energy independence after that, as in moonshot-levels of investment into alternative energy (whether alternative sources of oil or research into nuclear/renewables).

<comment><USER35> Carter tried, and he learned the very valuable lesson that you NEVER level with your electorate. Always feed them happy, optimistic fantasies or your career is over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder how many other secrets we know nothing about in the US like this.

</comment><comment><USER37> Bloomberg site is godawful. It reloaded the article on me 3 times while reading it. Great way to rip off advertisers with more pageviews and piss off readers.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think we always knew that they were buying a lot of government debt, this just makes it official and puts some numbers to it.

</comment><comment><USER27> And believe me this deal/collusion has created friction between 1.8 billion Muslims and the West;</comment>