The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer - <AUTHOR> http://quillette.com/2018/01/05/empathy-gap-tech-interview-software-engineer/ <comment><USER2> From one of the comments (author, Nathan Spears):

> People with Asperger's can navigate social situations remarkably well after > they learn "the rules" of social interaction.

That's my experience. I too, was socially awkward kid who taught himself basic programming by reading computer manuals around the age of 10. I constantly got picked on though out elementary and middle school. In high school it got a little better because I started to imitate social behavior and personal style that I picked up in other (cooler) people, mainly as a survival strategy. Spend more than 5 minutes talking to me though, and you'd be looking for a way to mosey out of the conversation.

I went into software development where I felt that I'd truly found my breed. Then I started a software (product) company where suddenly I had to attract customers and pitch them my product in demos.

I will say this: forcing myself to learn sales was monumental both professionally and socially. I am now pretty smooth in nearly any social interaction and even when things don't go perfectly, I keep a general "fuck it" attitude in my back pocket (which is quite handy for avoiding that paralyzing over-analysis following a misstep).

The point is this: if you think you're somewhere on the subclinical spectrum, don't just give yourself that label and wait for the world to come around to you, or avoid doing the things that you don't think you're suited for. Do things that make you uncomfortable. Grow and improve on every front. As an aspie, you're probably pretty damned good at actively learning the traits that seem to come naturally for other people.

<comment><USER3> I took a quick look at the ASQ test mentioned in the article [1]. A lot of the things in there, I would have answered "definitely agree" when I was a teenager.

Sometime in college, I forced myself to socialize, and did everything I could to learn what I needed to fit in. For example, I learned from the internet to dress and care for myself so I didn't look like a 17 year basement nerd, and a bunch of other things I guess most people just pick up naturally by being around other people in high school.

Today, edging towards my 30s, looking at the questions on that test makes me feel surprised at how "well adjusted" I've become compared to how I was at 15 years old.

[1] [https://psychology-tools.com/autism-spectrum- quotient/](https://psychology-tools.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/)

<comment><USER4> Don't discount how much the things that made you a social pariah in public school make you unique and interesting by the time you hit your mid-twenties.

I played a lot of varsity sports which shielded me from much of the abuse, but otherwise was pretty different socially. When I went away to Uni I had a chance to "start fresh" and that same quirky personality, combined with forcing myself to be a little more outgoing (i.e. share my true self), went over great. A big part of it was the natural filtering of the people in my environment; a lot of the "cool" kids peak and become irrelevant after high school.

<comment><USER2> One of my favorite Oatmeal strips: [http://theoatmeal.com/pl/senior_year/pe](http://theoatmeal.com/pl/senior_year/pe)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is going to rub lots of people the wrong way, I suspect, but it's level headed, well reasoned and well written. Although I ultimately disagree with some of the conclusions drawn at the end, (particularly:

> Because contemporary moral codes delineate women as vulnerable or > marginalised, we stop seeing them as individuals with unique talents and > idiosyncrasies, but as representatives of a victimised class.

I think labeling or delineating women as 'vulnerable or marginalised' and ignoring their unique qualities and idiosyncrasies is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Acknowledging that women are 'vulnerable or marginalised' shouldn't remove their individuality, you can easily have both, but that's beside my point here)

I legitimately didn't realise what the tone or conclusion of the article were going to be when I first started reasoning, because it does a good job of presenting scientific research without any inherent judgements. The other thing this article achieves that the cited manifesto failed to achieve was not to necessarily provide judgement, criticism or suggestions around 'what should be done about problem xyz'. It presents some facts, presents some opinions, and then (thankfully) doesn't decide to rip the hard work of well intentioned people to shreds. And for that, I think this should be commended.

<comment><USER6> > Acknowledging that women are 'vulnerable or marginalised' shouldn't remove > their individuality, you can easily have both, but that's beside my point > here)

I don't think you can easily have both, and this problem underlies much contemporary political conflict. At its core is a pervasive hypocrisy: people readily engage in broad, often negative, stereotyping about groups they oppose, or are not a member of, while aggressively resisting and resenting any attempt to stereotype about their own group, or groups they favour.

So, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, some people will make broad statements about Muslims, and the need for collective action within Islam to address religiously motivated violence. Others will reject this, and say Muslims in general cannot be held responsible for the behaviour of a minority of extremists.

Then, in the aftermath of a sexual harassment scandal, some people will make broad statements about men, and the need for collective action by men as a gender to address sexual harassment and sexual violence. Others will reject this, and say men in general cannot be held responsible for the behaviour of a minority of harassers.

Oftentimes, the same people will be on the complete opposite sides of each debate. And they will unthinkingly employ language and rhetorical tactics in one that they would utterly reject in the other. This behavior can be seen in almost all discussions across or about political affiliation, race, religion, gender, sexuality, and just about any other cleavage you can think of.

This is the real empathy gap. People reflexively respond to any criticism of their own groups with hostility, while attacking others without restraint, and dismissing hostility from members of that group as an overreaction. They recognise a degree of individuality and diversity within their own favored groups that they simply can't or won't recognise in others. They use tactics against their enemies that infuriate them when used against themselves. In some cases, they may recognise that those tactics are wrong in specific cases, and even in the abstract, but defend their use by themselves or their allies with excuses based on cambatting political correctness or appeals to historical victimhood.

Making all of this worse is that statistical thinking about groups _is_ a necessary of component of any mature political debate. Certain traits or behaviors often are more prevalent within some groups, for a variety of reasons, and being able to recognise and talk about this is basic prerequisite for any attempt to address social and political problems.

In theory, people should have no problem recognising statistical differences in a group, while also recognising and respecting the inherent right and diversity of individuals within that group. In theory, people should be able to hear comment, even criticism, about their own groups, and judge it purely on its statistical reality, without feeling that it is a personal slight upon them. But in practice, this doesn't happen.

Besides the reflexivite hostility discussed, statistical thinking often does give way to blind stereotyping amongst outside observers, and this stereotyping gives rise to discrimination. Causal factors are ignored, or distorted, and adaptive traits are portrayed and inherent, and vice versa. Instead of helping to inform rational debate, this discrimination entrenches and exacerbates division. Soon, _any_ statistical thinking about a group that carries an implied or perceived criticism becomes tantamount to discrimination, and groups become hypersensitive to it.

All of this is probably just an inherent flaw in human cognition, and likely unfixable, without some kind of attempt at species-wide genetic engineering that completely reconfigures our co-operative behavior.

<comment><USER7> Excellent summary of the core issue. Though I think there should be room for some nature vs. nurture debate. Exclusively attributing this behaviour to our genes seems a bit like the "lazy excuse" to me. I don't see why properly educating ourselves could not lead to a population with improved inter-group empathy (or both, i.e., trigger that evolution at the generic level, too). But yes, maybe changing our educational system is as hard as finding a genetic engineering-based solution...

<comment><USER5> I agree with you and the grandparent partly, but if you take an intersectional view of diversity issues, solving diversity and (as you put it) increasing inter-group empathy are effectively one in the same. For me, the constant rearing of this connection (societal scale problems being solved in tandem by solving other societal scale problems) is what convinces me that ideas of intersectionality are real, but sadly leads to the conclusion that yes, the problems are extremely difficult and operate on generational scales.

<comment><USER7> The upside here being that societal evolution seems to be accelerating, just as nearly everything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >Gideon tells me that in his experience there are many autistic traits that don't fit at all with our cultural conception of masculinity. Hypersensitivity to sensory stimulation is one of them, as is the tendency for those with autism to develop anxiety and depression—conditions that in the general population are higher in women than in men—the predilection of autistic people to prefer consistency and predictability also contrasts with the masculine trait of risk-taking.

This is unsurprising, considering autistic males tend to display slightly feminized neurological structure and behavioral traits compared to control males.

[http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/201/2/116.full](http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/201/2/116.full)

[http://www.jaacap.com/article/S0890-8567(14)00725-4/pdf](http://www.jaacap.com/article/S0890-8567\(14\)00725-4/pdf)

Likely relatedly, the incidence of gender coherence issues (up to full gender dysphoria) are over 7 times more prevalent in the autistic community than the general population.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/the- link-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/the-link-between- autism-and-trans-identity/507509/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone feel anti-social after a full day of programming? I always suspected that programming can temporarily reduce empathy at the end of the day. I don't have asperger's but I often feel a lot closer to that after a really intense day of speaking a machine's language.

<comment><USER10> I don't lose empathy, but I lose the ability to understand or speak English. If someone interrupts me when I am in deep in the groove I can tell someone is talking to me, but I can't understand what they are saying and I can't reply. It takes me around 5 to 10 seconds to context switch back into English.

Amusingly my wife assumes that I am deliberately ignoring her when she interrupts me and storms off in a huff half the time. My staff and students have just learnt that you have to say my name and wait a bit before speaking.

<comment><USER11> > my wife assumes that I am deliberately ignoring her when she interrupts me > and storms off in a huff half the time

If you are interested in tools to reduce this sort of thing, my wife and I developed protocols that help. I've rot13'd them in case you are the type of person who hates unsolicited advice and would prefer to skip it:

\- Jura bar bs hf vf qevivat n pne (NXN 2-gba-qrngu-znpuvar) naq jr ner pbairefvat, gur qevire pna fnl "cnhfr" naq gung rkcraqf bhg gb "V erfcrpg lbh naq gur guvatf lbh unir gb fnl. Ubjrire, V hetragyl arrq gb fuvsg zl nggragvba gb guvf bgure gnfx oevrsyl. Cyrnfr cnhfr fcrnxvat hagvy V fnl 'erfhzr' fb gung jura lbh ner fcrnxvat, V pna qribgr fhssvpvrag nggragvba gb yvfgravat gb lbh."

\- Vs bar bs hf vf qbvat be guvaxvat nobhg n guvat naq gur bgure nfxf n dhrfgvba, jr vzzrqvngryl fnl "hzzz" gb fvtany gung jr ner guvaxvat. Guvf bar unf gnxra zr n juvyr gb ghea vagb n unovg orpnhfr frireny lrnef ntb V gevrq gb genva zlfrys _abg_ gb rire fnl "hzzz" ba gur nqivpr bs zl choyvp fcrnxvat pynff va hav.

Vs lbh guvax guvf fbeg bs guvat zvtug or urycshy, lbh arrq gb gnyx nobhg vg nurnq bs gvzr gb npghnyyl qrsvar lbhe cebgbpbyf. bgurejvfr, gur zbfg yvxryl erfhyg vf pbashfvba.

<comment><USER12> Fyngr fgne pbqrk zhpu?

<comment><USER11> V va snpg npghnyyl qb.

<comment><USER12> Bayl bgure cynpr V unir frra guvf pbqr hfrq. V tb ol gur fnzr hfreanzr bire gurer jura V pbzzrag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always felt that the fact that the tech industry is so welcome to techies and people with "aspie"-type personalities, indicates that in fact we as an industry have more empathy than other industries (or social groups) that shun these types of people (myself included) for what I believe are very superficial reasons.

So, I think the title of the article is extremely biased and draws the wrong conclusions from the writer's own research.

<comment><USER14> I'll have to disagree with your conclusion. If a group is composed mostly of members of a shunned social group, do they have more empathy than others just because they are friendlier to members of that specific shunned social group?

I am immensely grateful for the nerd-friendliness of the tech industry, as I spent my teen years being mocked for being a nerd. But if the tech industry has a higher-than-average number of members who are slightly anti-social, is it really surprising when people accuse this group of having little empathy to members of other social groups?

It is entirely possible for the tech industry to be nerd-friendly _and_ women- hostile at the same time. I'm not saying it _is_ the case, but it _could_ be. And while I've been vocal against the idea of "hide the nerds so girls won't be scared of joining CS programs", I think it's worth considering whether we are being welcoming enough.

<comment><USER13> I never said techies have "more empathy". I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of media attack-pieces blasting techies for having "less empathy", something that is entirely at odds with my own experience.

edit: apparently I did say that. It was in reaction to an inflammatory title I feel is deeply wrong.

People, including the writers of articles like "techies aren't empathetic", like to talk about virtues like "empathy" and apply them positively or negatively to groups they feel part of / outside of. Much of the time, it has nothing to do with the actual virtue, but with this tribalistic instinct of being part of or outside of different groups.

Pretending the discussion is about "empathy" is really doing a disservice to analysis of social groups. Some less-systematic people are annoyed that more- systematic people do better within the tech industry, which in today's world is becoming more and more important for economic success. So they want to explain this away as "more-systematic people are less empathetic". What is actually the case, is "more-systematic people are less empathetic to less- systematic behaviour". But we're plenty-empathetic to people that "get us". And in the other direction, people that this author assumes are "more empathetic" are actually _really really extremely non-empathetic_ to more- systematic people.

edit: assumed the article was another "techies are less empathetic" hit-job, but turns out it is making a different point from all the rest

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have aspergers, and empathize with the feeling that society doesn't much care about our struggle (or, for that matter, knows how to deal with anyone who isn't neurotypical).

One thing I have come to realize though (and I know this will be controversial on here) is that SV and tech in general is this special place where people with limited social skills can go to work for really high salaries to create things of often dubious societal value.

I remember reading in a similar article that many "classical-liberal" types think that the wage-gap between man and woman may be caused by the fact that woman are naturally less competitive. Meaning that they are less careerist. This is of course a failure of meritocracy, in the same way that charisma often trumps skill at a job (which is the big problem for anti social men).

Here is my point: we have these different failures of meritocracy affecting different people, but for people (mostly men) with aspergers there is this special, well paying, industry. So I don't know that we have it that bad, or that efforts to attract more woman (even if you consider the given reasons to be bogus) are really misguided.

<comment><USER16> > I remember reading in a similar article that many "classical-liberal" types > think that the wage-gap between man and woman may be caused by the fact that > woman are naturally less competitive. Meaning that they are less careerist. > This is of course a failure of meritocracy, in the same way that charisma > often trumps skill at a job (which is the big problem for anti social men).

How is this a failure of the meritocracy? To me, this is the meritocracy working correctly and succeeding. A competitive person will naturally work harder to improve their skills because they have a greater desire to be the best. In a true meritocracy, you'd expect them to outperform less competitive people.

<comment><USER17> Are you really faster if you won the race by tripping your competitors?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _the third factor, Gideon said, was the empathy gap, where we tend to be > more receptive to women's pain than men's. When women talk about being made > to feel uncomfortable at work, or being sexually harassed, we feel empathy > and want to punish the wrong-doers. But we don't have the same reaction for > "geeks," or "techbros". Because our understanding of neurodiversity is > painfully lacking, our culture tends to view men as a homogenous category, > seeing all men as inheritors of privilege and all men as possessing the > masculine traits that foster toughness and resilience. We have a habit of > ignoring those who don't, and when they do talk about their vulnerability, > we are inclined to ignore, or ridicule them for it._

The book The Myth of Male Power [https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Male-Power- Warren-Farrell/dp/042...](https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Male-Power-Warren- Farrell/dp/0425181448) explores and describes this factor and many of its ramifications, which are huge and tragic.

<comment><USER19> This is one very obvious critique of the patriarchy, that is also advanced by feminism. Traditional, toxic masculinity does not recognize 'non-manly' roles for men, their emotional and intellectual needs, etc.

It does not, however, follow, that it does not repress women. "But not all mens!" is true, but is also a bit of a red herring. Most members of both genders suffer it to their detriment.

<comment><USER20> If the "patriarchy" is perpetrated by both men and women and negatively affects both men and women, maybe "patriarchy" is a bit of a misnomer?

<comment><USER21> why quibble over the word? you're talking about gender roles, men are supposed to be big and tough and take charge, and womem are supposed to be nurturing and demure and receptive to being taken charge of. it's a model with men in control, patriarchy is a fine word for that. of course if you can't hack your assigned gender role you'll catch shit from those that can. those that can hack their gender role may be men or women; those that can't may be men or women-- this is your observation. but how do you go from that to patriarchy is a misnomer?

<comment><USER22> It's not a useful term because it bakes a ton of political ideas into a concept everyone is expected to accept. Mainly that our society is somehow intelligently designed to put men in charge and that it's not a mix of biology and random happenstance that got us where we are today. It also implies that men actually are in charge. Some men may be but the vast majority are not. If incarceration and university enrollment numbers are examined, it might even look like men as a class are the oppressed not the oppressors.

<comment><USER21> "Mainly that our society is somehow intelligently designed to put men in charge and that it's not a mix of biology and random happenstance that got us where we are today."

i don't believe anyone thinks this a or that anyone cares if we're here by accident of history or by intention.

"It also implies that men actually are in charge. Some men may be but the vast majority are not."

of course, and the vast majority of women aren't in charge either, but the topic has been gender roles, not who's in charge. recall that i was questioning the claim that patriarchy is a misnomer because it's bad for men too. the subject at hand is gender roles and gender expectations.

"If incarceration and university enrollment numbers are examined, it might even look like men as a class are the oppressed not the oppressors."

yes, patriarchy is bad for men. and if you look at the number of people murdered by their spouse it also looks pretty oppressive to women. that's the point, patriarchy is oppressive to everyone.

<comment><USER20> > claim that patriarchy is a misnomer because it's bad for men too.

Nope. What I wrote that it is perpetuated/enforced by both men and women (arguably by women more than men) and has both negative and positive effects for both men and women.

<comment><USER21> yeah, that's the one. thanks for clearing up any confusion that i might have caused by not reproducing your post verbatim.

anyway, gender roles and gender expectations.

<comment><USER20> Yes. "Gender roles exist, and they come with expectations for everyone" is a _lot_ different from "the evil patriarchy is a conspiracy by men to oppress women".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > What we do know, however, is that while girls and women do meet the > diagnosis for

>autism spectrum disorder, the ratio between men and women sits somewhere between 5:1 to

>3:1. We also know that men and women's interests diverge in ways that are congruent with

>Baron-Cohen's systematising- empathising spectrum. Women overwhelmingly prefer working

>with people, and have "artistic" and "social" vocational interests, and men

>overwhelmingly prefer working with things and have "investigative," "enterprising,"

>"realistic," and "conventional," interests.

I feel, after having worked with kids (boys and girls) with Asperger's, that we as a society have historically missed (or dismissed) the signs of Asperger's in girls, and have done them a disservice in life by not helping them with those challenges. This book opened my eyes to some of the specific problems that girls (particularly young ones) face:

[https://www.amazon.com/Aspergirls-Empowering-Females- Asperge...](https://www.amazon.com/Aspergirls-Empowering-Females-Asperger- Syndrome-ebook/dp/B00GDJQNO4/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=)

I realize that only recently have we begun treating boys who are on the spectrum, and I'm happy about that, but we need to do better with girls and young women as well.

<comment><USER24> In case you're interested and aren't already aware:

UC Davis seems to be investing a bit in ASD research. This one, for instance, focuses on girls:

[http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/mindinstitute/research/gain/ind...](http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/mindinstitute/research/gain/index.html)

..and there are a few others. Most focus on the intersection of Children and Autism in some form or another.

Alternatively SciAm ran an article a while back around just this issue of how and why we're "missing it" when it comes to recognizing ASD early (or at all) for girls.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s- diffe...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-different-in- girls/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> His childhood mirrors my own, although academic success is inverted.

I wonder if there is some trait which transfixed us for life, I am certain that the interviewee (Gideon) and I are not alone.

It also beggars the question. Although very non-PC. That were I a girl I would not be dissuaded from this course. I know this because there was literally zero support from anyone regarding computing as a hobby or profession. In fact the opposite, they actively fought against it.

Again. I think I'm very unalone in this regard.

<comment><USER26> I have seen multiple women express surprise that I am programmer because "but you are women" or "I did not knew women can do that". I live in a bit behind the times place, obviously. Conversely, I have seen parents shocked that someone would put boy on art lesson.

Is that part of your answer?

Nevertheless, among my friends, parents agains boy doing computing were practically nonexistent. Computer was usually in boy room and boys were heavily praised for every tiny thing they knew and expected to deal. Their sisters largely aware that it is for boys and not expected of anything (not in my familly I found out only much later).

Note that my parents seen spending much time with computer as waste of time and were systematically attempting to send me out - but they did not seen it boyish nor seen me fundamentally incapable to master it. I had reasonable access to computer and to some books that were in household.

<comment><USER25> > Computer was usually in boy room and boys were heavily praised for every > tiny thing they knew and expected to deal. Their sisters largely aware that > it is for boys

Thats notable. I can see the opposite is true among my friends who are younger, the girls got laptops because they need to socialise (and privately). Boys use the family computer placed in a communal area for fear they were going to watch porn I suppose. But I'm older and when I was young the Internet was not entirely common. Computers were not ubiquitous and those who worked with them were considered sub-human. I can understand a parent not wanting their child to be a "loser" and I believe it cuts over gendered lines.

<comment><USER26> I count myself lucky to never having to deal with that "who uses computer is subhuman" thing. It was more of admired, because it implied that you have money. But interesting thing is, most of the time people back then speent on irc and muds.

I frankly find this setup quite unfair too, but don't see it around me being repeated. Not just because of boy access to private chat, but because of assumption parents openly makes about him. "You would mostly watched porn" is terrible message to the kid. I am also trying to teach my kids that computers are for more then just socializing and porn and show them productive things and puzzlers and such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Because contemporary moral codes delineate women as vulnerable or > marginalised, we stop seeing them as individuals with unique talents and > idiosyncrasies, but as representatives of a victimised class. The reverse is > true of men. Because women are now a victimised class, men are increasingly > seen as victimisers, irrespective of their individual attributes or actions.

I cannot agree with this more. Very, _very_ well observed and phrased.

<comment><USER10> We really have to stop seeing people as members of a group first and an individual second. It is lazy thinking.

<comment><USER28> Survival on planet Earth has critically depended on lazy thinking: generalizing from incomplete scraps of information, and acting in real-time.

<comment><USER29> While true, our current environment of organized society of billions of humans, all within the same info-sphere[0] is significantly different than the environment our species developed in. A lot of our natural tendencies end up being maladaptive in this new world.

\--

[0] - communication transcends distance now, and if something of importance happens _anywhere in the world_ , almost everyone else on the planet knows about it in real-time.

<comment><USER28> It's the same zoo out there, only with mass communication, transportation, comforts and gadgets.

You meet someone in a deserted street, you have the same three seconds to evaluate their threat potential that your ape ancestors had.

<comment><USER29> No, it's not the same zoo, unless you live in Somalia.

Rule of law and working policing changes _everything_ about your reactions to other people. In a typical western country, most of the time you feel threatened just by seeing someone on the street, you're imagining it (proof: count how many times "feeling threatened" turned into "actually being threatened"). Other people don't want to go into jail either, and violence achieves very little compared to patience and civil agreements.

But this is a sort of thing we still can handle real-time, reading things off each others' faces as we go along. Where the charade breaks down is all of our intuitions about state of the world, as we consume mass media.

Humans run on availability heuristic[0]. Quoting from the Wiki, "availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled". Mass media give us heavily filtered view of the world, which does not, in any way, correspond to the real world we live in. Thanks to news reporting, you feel like you're surrounded by rich and beautiful people, constantly threatened by gangs and terrorists, and that everything around you is going to shit. None of that is true, and yet even knowing that, we all have trouble handling it in our heads.

The heuristics we are born with were optimized for small and very localized group of people, not for large, dense populations, and constant light-speed communication with everyone else on the planet.

\--

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > The technology industry is one of the most Aspie-friendly places that there > is.

Amen. I think this is something we should be proud of.

</comment><comment><USER31> > But we don't have the same reaction for "geeks," or "techbros". Because our > understanding of neurodiversity is painfully lacking, our culture tends to > view men as a homogenous category, seeing all men as inheritors of privilege > and all men as possessing the masculine traits that foster toughness and > resilience.

Back in reality, the stereotypes of male nerds/geeks are:

* not interested in activities that leverage masculine traits, like sports

* not interested in the "rough" and often physically abusive hazing activities that go along with sports

* publicly ridiculed for being socially inept, having a hard time interacting with members of the opposite sex, not grooming in the typical way "tough and resilient" males do

Like any stereotypes those are often wrong. Nevertheless they come with _enormous_ empathy-- most humans I know don't condone adolescents getting choked by bullies and will get sad when you tell them stories about it.

Furthermore-- and I don't think I'm alone in this-- my own empathy gap between my stereotype of male "geeks" and male "techbros" couldn't be any wider. I thought people only referred to each other as ${topic}bros to be ironic, the joke being that anyone who would do that seriously is worthy of derision.

<comment><USER32> In the wider world, the stereotype of male geeks seems to be that having endured all the above we're seeking revenge on society (and especially women) for the wrongs they have inflicted on us. Admittedly in my actual life I don't perceive my actual self to be judged harshly by actual people, but in the abstract I get the strong impression that people like me are pretty awful.

Edit: [https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=tech+industry+men](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=tech+industry+men) . You might get different results but for me the first "positive-looking" story is on page 4 - "The Fittest Guys in Tech - These 10 men break the tech- guy stereotype".

<comment><USER33> I guess it's an incentives thing. How much pushback do journalists ever get in their lives for writing lazy, uninformed and inaccurate articles like that? I'd guess jack squat, because we probably all think we have better things to do with our time than write letters of complaint to the editor. And we're probably right to think so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Using a "car company" Like tesla as an example of the tech industry's misogamy is just fracking stupid - does the Atlantic even have an "industrial correspondent"

Teslas a car company and the sexism in those sort of blue collar traditional company's is way more prevalent

To use a slightly more tech example in telecos when was the last time you saw a female lineman (engineer in UK terms)

<comment><USER34> To follow up my point using an example from a totally separate blue collar industry with massive gender imbalances and much more overt sexual harassment and discrimination allows hr in the tech industry to discredit the journalists and article in question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The Wikipedia article on Asperger's doesn't mention hypersensitivity to touch, but this research suggests that a link does exist:

[http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2006_Blakemore_T...](http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2006_Blakemore_Tactile_sensitivity.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER36> Became curious and took the Autism Spectrum Quotient test and got a score of 35. Huh, who gives

</comment><comment><USER37> from the article

> I had also heard something years earlier about autistic people having issues > with certain types of clothing similar to my own.

similar in what way? from [https://www.autismspeaks.org/blog/2017/06/05/autism-and- resi...](https://www.autismspeaks.org/blog/2017/06/05/autism-and-resistance- change-winter-summer-clothes)

> We know that many people on the autism spectrum prefer relatively snug- > fitting clothing that covers their arms and legs.

...i did not know that. however, i did know that _incredibly fashionable people_ prefer relatively snug-fitting clothing that covers their arms and legs, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER26> Majority of people in tech are not autistic stereotype. The actually autistic were definitely not among the best I have worked with.

<comment><USER38> Yeah I also observed that most people in tech seem to be kind of "statistically normal". However seeing myself more on the spectrum side and also being perceived as that, I noticed workplaces preferring me and similar people to rather work alone. It matches very much the traditional stereotype of putting the programmers in the cellar, not sure if that makes the workplaces more sociable - probably not.

There's in my opinion a lot wrong in tech but I think one cannot say that it's the fault of a certain group. It's rather the habits and "traditions" of the people working in the tech industry that need an upgrade.

<comment><USER26> Do you see that working more alone as a bad thing? One of my gripes with scrum and such is that such a thing is not possible.

<comment><USER38> I like working alone when building new things, so I can do what I want. (Also at that stage there is little risk of possibly annoying discussions.) But when there are problem, whether dev, op or requirements related, then being alone sucks.

I was working at one place for almost 2 years and I ended up working almost completely alone on the dev side (+ most of the ops). Things worked actually quite well and I could even work with some really crazy JS framework but it just started to become boring as hell. Because with work colleagues I could only talk about the superficial parts of my job - the rest was some kind of rabbit hole.

Not sure about the Scrum. I mean when the colleagues rather work alone, I guess each task can be done in solitude. That's at least more or less the case where I work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The author is walking on thin ice by suggesting that sexual dimorphism has a significant effect on cognitive abilities. For her own safety, I hope she doesn't live in San Francisco.

<comment><USER40> You think it doesn't?

<comment><USER41> They are suggesting that SF has a reactionary view to that notion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > He said that society increasingly sees groups instead of individuals, to the > extent that group rights may supersede individual rights in all sorts of > contexts, including politicised work environments. Because contemporary > moral codes delineate women as vulnerable or marginalised, we stop seeing > them as individuals with unique talents and idiosyncrasies, but as > representatives of a victimised class. The reverse is true of men. Because > women are now a victimised class, men are increasingly seen as victimisers, > irrespective of their individual attributes or actions.

> The second factor, he thought, was an attachment to an outdated, blank slate > view of human nature. He says that many people still insist on seeing the > human brain as predominantly moulded by culture, despite scientific evidence > to the contrary. There tends to be a hesitancy towards attributing any > differences between people to any cause that is biological in origin. This > hesitancy has been around for decades, and appears like it will not be > alleviated anytime soon.

I agree with the first paragraph here, but not the second. I really believe that culture plays more of a part than most people think. Cultural differences would explain the higher wages among Asian Americans and Jews, this despite the historic racism that both of those groups have experienced. Both groups are minorities, yet on average still exceed in our society more than others.

<comment><USER43> Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. Didn't we just discuss this? They lead to the same few black holes over and over again—as demonstrated below.

<comment><USER42> I was discussing one of the major topics of the post. Quoted directly from the article:

> He said that society increasingly sees groups instead of individuals, to the > extent that group rights may supersede individual rights in all sorts of > contexts, including politicised work environments. Because contemporary > moral codes delineate women as vulnerable or marginalised, we stop seeing > them as individuals with unique talents and idiosyncrasies, but as > representatives of a victimised class. The reverse is true of men. Because > women are now a victimised class, men are increasingly seen as victimisers, > irrespective of their individual attributes or actions.

If you don't like discussions on this topic, then perhaps you should stop allowing such topics on this site.</comment></comment></comment>


Online life after death - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/18/death.online/index.html

<comment><USER2> This has occured to me, but I would have as much trouble keeping something like this up to date as a real will (unless I knew I was dying! in which case I could just leave instructions).

I have a password scheme (i.e. a way for my husband to figure out what my password on any given site is, without using the same password everywhere). I think this is a good compromise between having all my accounts inaccessible in the event of my untimely death, and handing over my entire digital life to a third party.

Obviously, it involves trusting my husband, but then if I don't trust him when I am alive, why should I trust him when I am dead?

Really, all you need to tell someone is your email access details. Once your heir is reading your email, the rest is easy - within a month or few they will probably get an email for any significant business or person in your life, and end up with a current list that way.</comment>


Ask HN: Should You be coding a client-side open source in ES6? - <AUTHOR> Most browsers (including many old Android/iPhones) still do not fully (or even partially) support ES6 features such as destruction, arrow functions, native promise etc,
so people who do not use stuff like Babel on their js bundle files will not be able to use it on their production environments.. <comment><USER2> Code in ES6, but run it through Babel yourself before publishing it. npm provides a 'prepublish' hook so you can do this automatically.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes</comment>


Europe Moving Toward Single Digital Market - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/business/international/europe-moving-toward-single-digital-market.html?emc=dlbkpm&emc=edit_dlbkpm_20151207&nl=%3Fnl%3Ddlbk&nlid=65508833 <comment><USER2> The amount of hypocrisy is simply baffling.

> European officials hope the removal of online barriers could add tens of > billions of dollars to the region's annual gross domestic product over the > next decade.

hmm... so what are those barriers? what will change?

> Some of the European proposals are expected to target American companies. > Changes to Europe's complicated copyright rules could force Google and other > news aggregators to _pay European publishers to use their online content_. > The Brussels policy makers are also likely to push for legislation to > regulate online messaging services like WhatsApp... And the officials are > also expected to announce new _investigations_ into how American-owned > online platforms like Uber, the ride-booking service, and Airbnb, the > lodging website, operate in the region. Those inquiries might eventually > _lead to legislation_ aimed at helping European companies compete on a level > playing field with their much-larger American competitors in the so-called > sharing economy.

So instead of removing barriers and encouraging growth inside Europe, let's put barriers to US companies, to "level the playing field".

Any word about VATMOSS? I'd like to see a young (or even not so young) startup trying to figure out this mess of charging different tax rates across 28 different countries. Not just charging, but keeping records with location info with 2 matching forms of evidence for 10 years. Those barriers also apply to non-EU companies by the way, but no sane small-company outside the EU is really going to bother. How is that for a level-playing field?

Or what about the cookie law? Yup. Let's put a big warning sign on every site accessed in the EU. This will remove the barriers for sure.

And that's even before we talk about localization into dozens of languages, or local / tax-specific regulations...

... and the examples on this article are also perplexing. Mobile phone roaming charges? (isn't this old news?) access to Netflix? Is this what's going to make the EU compete on a level playing field with the US?

I usually avoid rants, but this article really make me lose hope of building a small business in the EU.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is an interesting paradox going on with the unification of the markets in EU.

Last year Denmark voted for the Unified Patent Court. The obvious argument was that it made it easier for the little inventors to get their patents approved across all of europe. It removed bureaucracy and it made it cheaper.

But here is the thing. By making it easier to get your patents approved in one country to be valid in all of EU countries you are also opening up for patent trolls because now it's much cheaper for them to try and get patents.

So in a weird way many would argue it's going to have the opposite effect. It's going to make it easier for those who specialize in patents to start getting access to markets it was too expensive before. (In fact a US patent troll has been setting up their office in Ireland exactly because of the expected unification of the Patent Process)

For startups the unification is also presenting itself as kind of a headache because when you unify something a bunch of countries have to adhere to whatever the unification results in. So again it sounds great on paper but the consequence might well be unfortunate.

And now this. Which sounds great but is going to present more problems than it's solving.

What Europe really need is for the taxation side of the markets to be unified NOT the legislative process yet this is exactly what the EU does again and again and it's hurting more than it's helping.

I wrote more about this issue in this essay for those who might be interested: [http://000fff.org/why-is-europe-failing-to-create-more- unico...](http://000fff.org/why-is-europe-failing-to-create-more-unicorns)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure this will work as brilliantly as VATMOSS...

</comment><comment><USER5> I was surprised to not see any mention of VATMOSS. I assumed that was what the "Single Digital Market" was referring to when I read the headline.

</comment><comment><USER6> Speaking of the EU, anyone knows what is going on with the credit card fee cap? It's supposedly in effect, but I haven't seen anything in practice.

<comment><USER7> I the biggest change I've seen in Germany is that Aldi started to accept VISA and MasterCard. Before it only accepted the German EC card system because credit cards probably had too high transactions fees in comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Netflix is blocked from offering online content in any of the 28 European Union nations in which it has not signed a country-by-country licensing deal._ I'm not sure I understand this. Why Netflix didn't sign those deals? Is it because it doesn't want to deal with so many countries individually?

<comment><USER9> It has to get licenses for the content for each country separately which would make the costs very high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This will be really interesting. What if the EC decides that you need to provide services in 26+ markets _at once_ , when you launch, to prevent digital exclusion?</comment>


The problem with Facebook's fake-news flagging system - <AUTHOR> https://www.quod.us/article/the-problem-with-facebooks-fake-news-flagging <comment><USER2> Redshift?</comment>


Show HN: TextFile – Android, Dropbox, Notes, Text Editor, Lists, Drafts, .txt - <AUTHOR> http://www.lifethinkist.com/beta-testers

<comment><USER2> Is your HN title really the best place for SEO spew?

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome a comment. Thanks so much for the feedback holyjaw. I have a lot to learn both about Hacker News and about how to tell people about my app in the best way.

Great point. My intention for this title was to explain the key features and uses for my app in as little space as possible, so that people who might be interested in trying it would get a chance to see it. Hacker News titles are very limited in space and I struggle with what to use for a title. I wondered if using just the key features in the title got more to the point of what the main uses and features of my app are.

But thanks very much. Point taken. It sounds like you'd rather people use a sentence title instead of comma separated values like I did here. If I'm wrong about this let me know. I'll definitely consider this if I make another post to Hacker News. Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

<comment><USER3> I found your way of listing features pretty hard to parse. It's almost like reading someone's shorthand notes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks pmx. Before I had the beta ready and up I posted just the screenshots to Reddit ([http://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/2jss4e/dev_snea...](http://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/2jss4e/dev_sneak_peak_of_textfile_dropbox_android_app_to/)) using the following title. It was too long for HN, especially with the Show HN: TextFile at the front.

"Dropbox Android app to keep your notes, lists, drafts, and tasks in text files."

But anyway, do you guys like that better or do those commas still bug you a bit? Of course if you have any ideas let me know. Thanks again. I'm at a point where the more feedback I get about anything the better, because I don't know what the heck I'm doing :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


World debt clock - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder who the world is in debt to and if words like global debt crisis are used to foster a sense of impending doom in people cuz it lets governments control them better?</comment>


Superhero.js: articles and videos on building large JavaScript apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/superherojs/superherojs

<comment><USER2> Dupe: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5406302>

<comment><USER3> Not really. This is more like a PSA, a github link where you can help maintain and contribute to superhero.js.</comment></comment>


Latest Bitcoin Core Code Release Protects Against Nation-State Attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.coindesk.com/latest-bitcoin-core-code-release-protects-against-nation-state-attacks <comment><AUTHOR> Attack architecture

Erebus falls under the general "man-in-middle" attack scheme made possible through the P2P nature of bitcoin. Greek for "shadow," Erebus is itself a derivative of the "Eclipse" attack first described in 2015.

As theorized, the malicious actor will try and connect to as many nodes as possible around one node that the attacker wishes to isolate (an exchange's node, for example). The malicious node can begin to influence the victim node by connecting to its peers. The end goal is to make the victim node's eight external connections pass through the malicious party.

Once accomplished, the victim is isolated from the rest of the network. The malicious actor can decide what transactions and information are sent to the victim; this information can be completely different from the rest of the network and could even lead to a chain split or censorship.</comment>


Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design - <AUTHOR> http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5899-Some-perspective-to-this-DIY-storage-server-mentioned-at-Storagemojo.html <comment><USER2> Ok I must be missing something. Everyone is knocking this backblaze thing because it doesnt do ZFS or because it is not a "super duper high end san replacement" or because the components are not rated for enterprise level work. It seems to me that a company whose product is personal and small business backups does not need any of those things. They have software to do mirroring. Why would they need any fast network filesystems if all data comes and goes via the internet? Will the hard drives see that much data I/O, or will they mostly just fill up and sit idling with the very occasional read for restore (i strongly suspect the later)[1].

Of course on the other hand, there are the poeple touting it as the end all be all, a solution to kill NetApp.

I guess what Im wondering is: how did so many people get the idea that this article about a specific solution to a specific problem was actually some sort of general purpose solution attacking all the big name people? What am I missing?

[1]A huge chunk of this article is about the hard drives and PSUs not being enterprise ready, but for an enterprise load, but I just don't see it. I bet a lot of these boxes run idle a large chunk of the time. I have 10 year old desktop hard drives running just fine in a file server, because it has a similar load: mostly idle most of the time.

<comment><USER3> "how did so many people get the idea that this article about a specific solution to a specific problem was actually some sort of general purpose solution attacking all the big name people?"

Backblaze did it, They did it when they decided to put this graph in the article:

[http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost- of...](http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of-a- petabyte-chart.jpg)

It's an apples to oranges comparison.

<comment><USER4> Well no, it's not an apples to oranges comparison because no hardware vendors offer a solution which is comparable to the one Backblaze have devised.

That graph is simply comparing their solution to the closest commercial equivalents. It just so happens that these are all way off because all hardware manufacturers want to design their hardware to provide the highest throughput.

(That said, our experience with the Sun X4500s hasn't been great from an I/O point of view.)

<comment><USER5> It is an apples to oranges comparison because Blackblaze is only including the cost of components in that graph for their solution, but they're including all of the research, development, assembly, and support costs in the other vendors' solutions.

What are the labor costs for testing all their hardware (with 10 sata controllers no less)? What are the labor costs for assembling all those systems? What is the labor costs of developing the system architecture? What are the labor costs of creating their storage application which reduces their need for in-box redundancy? And if you want to talk about Amazon there is data center rental, power, cooling, and ongoing administration.

In short, they're comparing the costs of their components to the costs of a ready-to-go solution from other vendors. Sounds like apples and oranges to me.

<comment><USER6> They did invite these criticisms by drawing comparisons to S3, EMC, etc. However, they already tried to factor out the cost of operations so that s3 was on equal footing with the non-service offerings. We can quibble about the specific numbers they used, but I think the bigger quibble is that by their own estimates, those costs are substantial, seemingly far outstripping their hardware costs by something like an order of magnitude. Even so, at the scale of a pentabyte or more, the savings are substantial enough to be worth addressing.

As for the missing costs that you cite, think this through. What do you really think the per-unit costs for assembly and testing are? Even if each unit required a couple of man-days, the costs would probably only add ~10% or so per unit. The other costs you cite for the initial hardware and software engineering are fixed costs, the same whether they are storing 1PB or 1,000. Also, if they did their job right, much of the per-unit testing cost should be mitigated by the overall systems design. The system management automation can do a test cycle on new nodes before promoting them to production use, and of course, failures should be dealt with automatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to work for a large consumer photo site, and we wished we could trade speed for lower cost or lower power consumption. Forget SCSI drives, SATA disks were 10x faster than what we needed for long-tail storage. If a photo became popular, we could cache it forward. The parato-ization of the photos was probably 99.9/0.1. I'm actually surprised that drive manufacturers haven't come out with a slower disk that is cheaper, lower power, and/or more reliable. We could find a zillion places to hide latency from our users.

<comment><USER8> Seagate Barracuda LP and WD RE-GP are ~6000 RPM disks that are lower power than normal 7200 RPM SATA. Maybe next year they'll come out with ~5000 RPM disks.

<comment><USER7> Cool. I wonder what sort of density could be achieved with slow solid state storage. The line between disk and tape continues to blur, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's a pretty weird analysis, comparing a system that is special purpose with a general purpose one.

He's concentrating on disk-to-board throughput, but this being network attached storage on a LAN, using the motherboards' single ethernet port the amount of data read or written to those drives per second will never exceed 1 Gbit/second anyway.

I agree with the reliability analysis though, backblaze seems to be on fairly thin ice there.

Still, it seems to work for backblaze, I'm taking it as read that they've lived through a bunch of drive failures by now and they seem to still be in business.

<comment><USER10> I think his 'DC-3' analogy is valid - BB has a decent system if you don't mind the risks, Sun is selling peace of mind.

<comment><USER11> FUD and RAS being two of the basic tenets of marketing most anything in the enterprise IT space, after all.

<comment><USER3> There is a lot of good engineering in the Thumper. There is a lot of clever engineering in the Backblaze. The comparison states a lot of valid points on power distribution, drive reliability and RAID throughput.

I see Backblaze will learn a lot from building their storage systems and future versions may be much better, but this one cuts too many corners for me to feel confident it will have the same kind of reliability I would recommend.

What amazes me most is the use of desktop-grade hard drives. Not because they are sloppily built, but because their performance requirements are so different from a server environment.

This makes for some nice reading: [http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/6/28493-hard-disk- drives-...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/6/28493-hard-disk-drives-the- good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/fulltext)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "It's the same with this storage, this hw needs the parachute in form of the software in front of the device."

Yes, _software_ on (relatively) unreliable hardware is exactly how Google has been able to scale to such an immense scale.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think everyone agrees the Backblaze (bb) has no performance - and that's fine.

But a lot of his complaints are about reliability, and thats kind of a moot point since Backblaze (and anyone sane) stores every piece of data on at least two (and ideally 3 or more) separate bbs. I would argue if you don't need performance (i.e., no huge database), but you do need a lot of space, you're better off just setting up two 'mirrored' bbs (so that when one goes down, the other takes over) than almost any 'enterprise' solution.

He does have a point about ZFS though - I'm sure at that kind of scale eventually the RAID 5/6 write-hole is going to bite you in the ass.

<comment><USER14> I read that as "every piece of data on at least two (and ideally 3 or more) separate bbs", meaning BBS as in a bulletin board system. Wow, that caught me off guard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fascinating read, and its nice to see he brought up a lot of the concerns that were mentioned here. A few things that I noticed:

He mentioned that 1 Disk uses 120 MB/s, so 5 of them is 600 MB/s. He then says that converts to 6 GB/s. Now, I'm not all that familiar with speeds, but I know 1000 MB is 1 GB, so shouldn't 600 MB/s be .6 GB/s?

Other than that, he raised a number of valid points. The Backblaze system is NOT general purpose. Its designed to take a bunch of data (Backups) and hold on to it for as long as possible. In that situation you don't need high Throughput, or even all that reliable hardware. Once the drives are full, their usage will drop, and as long as the RAID can be kept up to keep the data secure, as long as costs stay down they're fine to keep replacing hardware.

One thing of note, and something I never saw in the Backblaze article: Their service promises to hold your data for 50 years. Assuming that one of their pods is filled, what is the estimated cost to keep that data over the course of 50 years? I would assume they calculated that out, and that the data showed to go with the consumer grade parts, but I would really like to see the numbers.

<comment><USER9> You got confused about the GB/s because he uses the capital "B" at some point where it should have been the smaller 'b' for bits, not bytes. So, 600 MB/s is 600*8 = 4800 Mbps.

I hope that clears it up.

Please note that this is the guys private blog, he definitely does not speak for Sun in that spot and to label the article "SUN Engineer responds" makes it seem like the response is an official one but it very clearly isn't. The text is full of other mistakes as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> He also leaves out that you could buy 10 of these Backblaze things for the price of one Sun X4540. So with a distributed load, thats 10x the performance, 10x the reliability, etc... I'm not an expert on storage, but I'd be curious to see how that stacks up, never mind the comet-proof redundancy by placing your storage in datacenters across the world.

<comment><USER17> 10x the rack space, 10x the cooling, 10x the power ...

<comment><USER14> People often forget that the rack space, the actual physical space, is very costly. Depending on the datacenter, the power might run you just as much too. Last company I worked at was essentially forced out for using too much power per U.

<comment><USER18> Would you really buy a hackish low-spec solution like this and then place it in a premium rack?

Given the idea, buy 10 and place them at geographically diverse points, you may as well put them in the back room at branch offices or something. Who cares if one goes offline for a while. Hell, put them in countries with good consumer internet connectivity (japan, korea, sweden etc) and just use that.

If you're going ghetto, go all the way!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _At first don't compare the mentioned list prices with the street prices for components._

This is why small companies, startups, and people new to the storage world hate working with storage vendors. I understand the economics, I get why they sell storage the way they do, and I like my 70% discount off list price, but it makes for a horrible user experience.

If I were a cleverer person, I'd apply an every-day low price model to "enterprise" storage.

<comment><USER20> I went with the reseller I did at svtix, primarily because they were upfront enough to list prices on their website. <http://egihosting.com> \- I don't want to spend time fucking around over price, and I'm sure you don't want me to waste your time. Post the price, and I'll buy it or I won't.

Seriously, If you say you want six figures for your product, I'm walking. I don't have that kind of scratch, and I'm not going to waste your time or my time lowballing you. If you really mean $30K, well, I'd have to scrimp and save for a few months, but it's doable if the product really does solve more than $30K worth of problems for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Even though Sun are at the cheaper end of the SAN market - I struggle to see why adding a network interface to hard drive still ends up as 10x the cost of the drive.

</comment><comment><USER22> I agree that what the article misses is that Backblaze is spending the money on software rather than hardware, since the price difference is so huge (and the software solution is a fixed cost).

What I'm more interested in is whether the lower MTBF of the cheap drives and home-brewed chassis ends up with a higher cost per year due to higher failure rates. If a desktop drive costs $100 and fails three times a year, but a server drive costs $200 and fails once every 2, the initial cost savings is moot.

<comment><USER18> Well, remember that if you were seriously on a budget you'd just return all the failed drives for warranty replacement (Seagate is 5yrs). The hardware costs would never add up to more than the enterprise, it's that the labour costs of dealing with it would be more, and worse - more likely to lose data. Enough more likely to justify the additional cost? Hm, I doubt it, not for this use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How is MTBF derived? He claims "1.2 million hours normalized on 40 degrees", that's almost 140 years. It seems to me that it's just some extrapolated test statistic being bandied about with no relevance to real world conditions.

</comment><comment><USER24> Seems like he's just making it easier for Backblaze to match feature to feature by listing out the differences O_o.

<comment><USER25> I'm pretty sure Sun isn't worried about Backblaze as competition in the enterprise storage market. Building cheap storage boxes is much different than building what Sun provides.

<comment><USER24> That's usually how disruptive technologies start out though; the fact that Sun doesn't care makes Backblaze that more dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> zfs with OpenSolaris is a good tip. 2009.06 is a much less mess (leave alone that we-will-rewrite-everything-in-java svc:/* horror)

<comment><USER27> zfs performance in 2009.06 has some _very_ serious problems, particularly with zvols.

<comment><USER28> Do you have references and pointers? Is this going to hurt me when I put two non-storage servers live running 2009.06?

<comment><USER27> You can find a number of them on the opensolaris forums if you search on terms like 0906 iscsi, comstar 0906, etc... here's an example: [http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=104593&...](http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=104593&tstart=105)

Our experience was that 0906 was utterly unusable if you're using comstar, with performance being mildly degraded for straight zfs usage.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Last month, we killed our first eBay data center - <AUTHOR> http://datacenterpulse.org/blogs/geekism/death_datacenter

<comment><USER2> Couldn't they have put the server on Ebay?

<comment><USER3> Instead of putting Ebay on the servers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice pictures.</comment>


Fall cleaning: Optimizing V8 memory consumption - <AUTHOR> http://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizing-v8-memory.html <comment><USER2> Mostly sounds like a case of fixing up some non-optimal defaults - the real hard part is gathering data from real world use cases which is required to make your defaults better.

1) Reducing the V8 heap page size from 1M to 512KB ... results in 2x memory reduction

2) The memory visualization tool helped us discover that the background parser would keep an entire zone alive long after the code was already compiled. ... resulted in reduced average and peak memory usage.

3) C++ compiler not packing structs optimally for V8s case - manual packing saves some peak memory.

<comment><USER3> I'm not familiar with the "packing" concept. How does one go about manual packing? How does it affect maintenance?

<comment><USER2> Compilers typically align struct fields to a boundary to favor execution speed. This may be good for most use cases where there aren't thousands of instances of that struct wasting a lot of memory making it a bad tradeoff.

So C/C++ compilers allow you turn this off either by specifying the data length yourself (bit fields) and/or specifying attribute(__packed__) directive in the case of GCC for example. In this case the packed directive resulted in suboptimal packing so they must have gone with bit fields I suppose to do manual packing.

<comment><USER4> Or you might also rearrange fields of the same type to be together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Piggybacking on this, can anyone recommend an approach for finding the cause of memory issues in v8?

In my case I'm tuning a 3D game, and the heap usage is a sawtooth pattern with GCs about once per second. Not awful, but it would be nice to smooth it out. But playing with Chrome's various memory profiling tools I've never been able to discover where the allocations are coming from - the results always seem to be dominated by apparently internal stuff (like entries called "(code deopt data") or such). Does anyone know any good techniques for such things?

<comment><USER6> Is the game open to public? I would like to give it a look, i have done some amount of optimizations as a hobby.

<comment><USER5> It's not yet, but I'm pretty sure the allocations are happening in the 3D engine I'm using. (I mean the chrome tools aren't telling me that, but when I let the game run without rendering the sawtooth goes away.)

Actually now that I take a second look, some relatively simple demos of the same engine (Babylon.js) show the same sort of behavior. Some rather trivial three.js demos do as well. I might be dealing with something that's just a fact of life for webGL rendering.

Random example (not mine) showing a vaguely similar sawtooth of heap memory usage:

[http://gleborgne.github.io/molvwr/#1GCN](http://gleborgne.github.io/molvwr/#1GCN)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was confused by the article.

      "Reducing the V8 heap page size from 1M to 512KB results
      in a smaller memory footprint when not many live objects
      are present and lower overall memory fragmentation
      up to 2x."

Is it common to say something's shrunk by 2x? Why not say 0.5x (or 50%, half, etc.) I understand growth of 2x and assume this is a mistake, though I'm open to convention.

<comment><USER8> The x means "times" as in multiply and the "lower" inverts it. You could also say it's halved, been reduced by a half, been reduced by 50% or by 0.5. I think if something has shrunk by 0.5x then this could even be interpreted as it having grown 2x but this would be a pretty odd way to say something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hope they don't adversely affect Node's performance with this tuning for low memory devices

<comment><USER10> There is no downside to keeping the overall memory arena size down: better cache locality, fewer stop the world collections. Node programmers have been asking for this behavior for years.

<comment><USER9> As mentioned in the article there is no magic latency, throughput and memory consumption are connected optimizing for one you will sacrifice a bit in the other areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is the relation between the OP and previous work concerning the Ignition interpreter? [http://v8project.blogspot.com.es/2016/08/firing-up- ignition-...](http://v8project.blogspot.com.es/2016/08/firing-up-ignition- interpreter.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> JS is wanted unlimited memory consumption in the language specs. JS is good, but impossible for low-memory tasks.

<comment><USER13> It depends on your definition of "low-memory". The Kinoma XS JavaScript ES6 runtime[1] is designed specifically for low memory/CPU limited embedded devices, and runs very comfortably on 200 MHz ARM devices with 512 KB RAM.

[1] [http://kinoma.com/develop/documentation/technotes/introducin...](http://kinoma.com/develop/documentation/technotes/introducing- the-kinomajs-open-source-implementation/)

<comment><USER14> Looks like that is ES5 only.

<comment><USER13> It currently scores 96.8% on the ES6 Compatibility Table hosted by kangax[1], which is pretty good. That's native, no polyfills or transpiler.

EDIT: Kinoma claims ES6 compatibility is at 98% as of 2016-01-02.[2]

[1] [https://kangax.github.io/compat- table/es6/](https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/) [2] [http://www.kinoma.com/develop/documentation/js6/](http://www.kinoma.com/develop/documentation/js6/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NYTimes to start charging for access to their website. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.html <comment><USER2> I've been hoping for this for over a year now. I'm _more_ than happy to support their journalists oversea and at home (USA for me, as for the NYT). Without some sort of support, we wouldn't be getting the same breadth and depth and quality of news.

It astonishes me when people think this should be free. KNowledge should be free, yes, but news that costs money and much, much time to acquire and then disseminate _does_ cost money and I'm glad to pay for it.

This is high quality journalism from hard working people: asking them to do it for less and less is ridiculous. Content is tangible, to me at least, and worth money, just as a few lines of code "anybody" could write is also worth quite a bit.

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree with your statements but that doesn't mean I'll be paying and here is why: I read articles from probably 15 different sites every day (and not same 15 from day to day). I simply can't afford to pay a subscription to every one of those sites nor do I want pay for just one site and get my news from a single source.

The problem is that this the same dead-tree business model moved to the web. It might appeal to people who consume their information in the classical morning newspaper way but I suspect that is a dwindling market.

<comment><USER4> It seemed obvious to me in 1994 that Web content syndication was eventually going to be the answer to your question ("How can I afford to subscribe to 15 different providers?")

People laughed at me then, they laughed at me when I said it again around 2000, and they'll laugh at me now.... but that still doesn't change the fact that it needs to happen, and eventually will.

It could be that the coming wave of tablet/e-reader platforms will be the last piece of the syndication puzzle. It's a safe guess that the New York Times will have someone at the Apple event next week, pitching a subscription deal. If they offer me access to several other major metro papers/special-interest broadsheets along with that NYT subscription, they've got a deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >>"There's a lot of technical work that we need to do over the next year to get this right," said Martin A. Nisenholtz.

Well, duh. For one, is this cookie-based tracking? I already know how to fix that. Is it sign in tracking? I predict a surge in account sign-ups. Is it IP- based tracking? Say bye to all your AOL users and those behind proxies. Will they force users to install a browser plugin or and ActiveX control or use a FLASH plugin or Silverlight or whatnot? Yeah, that will work for sure.

So, which magical solution do they think they can come up with?

Anyone else thinking this is going to fail quietly in the next few months?

<comment><USER6> Are you somehow implying that a pay-wall can't be built? Porn sites seem to have figured it out quite a while ago so I don't see how NYTimes would be any different.

Of course they aren't going to be able to stop people copy/pasting articles to a friend but that generally isn't a problem.

Even if their pay-wall is only 99% effective and a small amount of smart techies manage to get around it for free it really isn't that big of an issue since people that determined to get the content for free never would've paid for it anyway.

<comment><USER5> I'm not saying anything a paywall: if it is "pay for everything", then you're right, it can be built very effectively. What they're saying is that they want to give free capped usage for users, and I'm thinking that whatever mechanism they think of can probably be circumvented easily.

<comment><USER7> Most people would rather be honest and pay a few dollars than mess with cookies/proxies/multiple accounts, especially if they don't know what a cookie is in the first place.

If someone values his time sufficiently low to make several email accounts to read the NYT without paying... he probably can't/won't pay, whatever is done.

<comment><USER5> That's a very fair point. My only counter to it is that us geeks will spread the word that using Chrome in incognito mode is quite effective.

Ctrl-Shift-N is quite fast, and Google is pushing Chrome very hard, and us geeks are called on for tech support quite often.

I think your honesty thought will win out most of the time, but not always. People like a free lunch and sticking it to the man, especially if they have the tools to do it very easily. We'll see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't suppose this means that subscribers will get a version without banner ads. In the same way that newspapers have historically sold their print version for less than it cost to publish and made their money off print ads and classifieds, I imagine we'll get much the same experience but be paying for it. NYT doesn't want to trade ad revenue for subscriber revenue. They want to augment it.

BUUUUUT, since the internet is a dynamic medium, maybe they could offer a tiered pricing scheme (like every other for-pay web app these days) that includes a no ads option. It should be easy enough: just display the print version of the article.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.html?pagewanted=print)

</comment><comment><USER9> The NYT used to have a pay model. I paid them something like $8/mo. I didn't really use what I got over the free side of the site, but I wanted to support their journalism. After a few months I got an email that they would no longer be billing me.

</comment><comment><USER10> In other news, "billybob to stop reading nytimes.com"

<comment><USER11> No kidding. I dropped WSJ.com last year and don't miss it.

The Internet delivers a WORLD of news sites meaning the traditional publishers have less of a voice than they did when paper was the sole medium.

Their proposed pay wall may ensnare existing readers, but who in his right mind is going to subscribe having never had a relationship with this provider before? "Oh, you want money for that story, the same story I can see a 1,000 versions of in Google News? Buh-bye."

I'd love to see the evidence that supports this decision. This reeks of someone trying to save his job.

<comment><USER12> Aren't most of those other sites derivative though? They opine on the news reported by others (or just copy/paste), and often poorly without relevant context. Moreover, I kinda like one-stop shopping for World, National, Business, and Technology news. It's not perfect, given journalistic biases, but it's often good enough.

I may be biased though. I grew up delivering and reading the newspaper.

<comment><USER13> I grew up delivering and reading newspapers and this has only shown me that the vast majority of "news" is just re-hashed press releases, or opinionated FUD.

The vast majority of my round bought the Daily Mail (who supported the facists in the UK, "hoorah the black shirts") or The Sun (famous for their "HIV is only catchable by homosexuals" opinion).

The world would be a better place without most of the newspapers out there. Quality reporting is another matter all together and is NOT synonymous with the term "newspapers".

<comment><USER12> I grew up delivering a state paper. They did quality reporting about the small state. They still do. But I don't see how they survive without going hyperlocal. The problem is my parents (i.e., the generation that still subscribes) want a general news product in addition to the local stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Largely the same discussion happened on this item: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058507>

Probably there's not much point reading that rather than this, but I thought I'd make the connection since I noticed it.

Also reported here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060009>

A connection is suggestion with the release of the Apple tablet.

</comment><comment><USER15> "But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand."

Given the widely accepted disaster that was TimesSelect, this doesn't seem to be off to a promising start. How do you make such a monumental decision about your business, announce it publically, and say, yeah, we'll figure out how this will work soon, get back to us in a few months.

And it's not just business strategy. As pierrefar notes in another thread, they haven't figured out how they're going to achieve this anyway...

Will they deindex from Google? Wi

</comment><comment><USER16> "Starting in early 2011..." that's an age away in internet time. Things could have changed considerably by then.

<comment><USER7> It's just one year...the Internet in early 2009 wasn't all that much different from now. I frequent the same websites I did back then, personally.

<comment><USER17> As an example of a large change in 2009, Facebook went from 150 million active users to 350 million active users ( <http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline> ). I consider that a fairly large change in the consumer web.

<comment><USER7> Actually... you're right! I completely forgot that I registered on Facebook last summer :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> <sarcasm>I didn't realize anyone still read traditional news outlets.</sarcasm>

Well, maybe only slightly sarcastic.

This is the death-knell of the traditional news media. When they start actively driving consumers away by charging for services once rendered free, there is no way they will be able to recover. The Internet has enabled citizen journalists to get inside the established media's OODA loop and take them out. Established media is too slow and too antiquated to ever be able to catch up, let alone get ahead and stay ahead.

<comment><USER19> Can you point me to some good citizen journalism then?

<comment><USER20> <http://talkingpointsmemo.com> <http://fivethirtyeight.com>

<comment><USER21> Any that aren't about US politics?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I honestly don't think the metered approach will work for them. Most people will hit that point, and instead of paying will search for, and find, they have other alternatives. In the end, NY Times will just lose most of those regulars as the alternative becomes the primary source.

</comment><comment><USER23> The free service right now (having a 'mini newspaper' emailed to you every morning) is nice, but to be honest, I would value this at about $1/month, but I might pay up to $1.50/month to support journalism. I suspect that they will want to charge more than this.

<comment><USER12> You're basically willing to trade one cup of coffee for a month of decent journalism, but no more?

<comment><USER24> And at $1.50 it's not going to be a particularly good cup of coffee.

But I'm in the same boat. I already shell out ~$100 a year for the Economist, and various other subscriptions. If I have to start paying for all the news SOURCES I read I'm going to be out a great deal more. Note I said SOURCES. I'm willing to pay for news, but not a monthly subscription to a news site I only read occasionally.

<comment><USER25> This almost sounds like you'd be willing to pay dues to the AP or Reuters. I don't think that's such a bad idea. I know it would never fly in America but a funding system similar to the BBC, where households have to purchase licenses for things, might work well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> To me, there are order of magnitude differences between good news sites and regular news sites. NYTimes is, in my mind, the best of the best, so I would have no problem with paying. Actually, I'm glad to see them respect their own content enough to charge for it. The advice to consultants is always to not undervalue their time, yet the advice to big companies always seems to be to undervalue their products.

Don't think about it in terms of news. News is everywhere. In-depths reports, amazing visualizations, and insightful editorials are not everywhere, and NYTimes does these better than anyone else I know. I think they have earned the right to charge.

</comment><comment><USER27> The problem with charging for news is that news as it's presented is unspectacular. Most people, if they don't have to-- won't pay for unspectacular information because chances are they can get it somewhere else because it isn't hard to produce or duplicate. I can get the same information from the NY Times at the Washpost. I do like their opeds though. I read David Brooks a lot. But I still won't pay for David Brooks' insight because it doesn't make me money or save me time or do something to make my life easier. That's the only kind of information you can form a business model around.

</comment><comment><USER28> How long will it be before someone implements an NYTimesShare, a la GoogleShare (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062495>)? If they allow a certain amount of free then all you need to do is change your cookies periodically.

To be sure, outfits like the NYT that bring the public high quality news need to make enough money to pay the bills and their staff. I just don't know if this is the plan that will work.

</comment><comment><USER29> The NYT's target demographic is the top 40% of income producers middle age and older. They don't know how to reach us, and they're not worried about it for another few years. If they lose us (in a general sense here), they're not too worried yet. At that point, they'll start hiring people like Kos and other top bloggers on both sides of the isle as their columnists and target us.

Most people under 35 scoff at paying a newspaper because they news they print is not targeted at us.

</comment><comment><USER30> I agree with John Gruber, who cited this tweet from Dave Winer (developer, entrepreneur, writer, and a pioneer of RSS and podcasting):

"My opinion, the NYT will never implement the paywall they talked about today. If they were going to do it, they'd just do it."

<http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/7990139921>

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm interested to see if paid subscribers have ads alongside their articles. I would consider paying it to contribute to good journalism AND have fewer ads (I am aware of AdBlock, however, I am also aware of how the Internet economy current works.)

<comment><USER32> See cable as an example.

Only channels I know that do not have any ads are the movie channels (HBO etc).

So I doubt NYTimes will pass up potential revenue from displaying ads to subscribers. Just that these ads will be more targeted and focused depending on the audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's really quite surprising that it's taken this long to reach the decision, and it will take another year before people start paying anything.

No mention of what will happen to the currently free (and super) iPhone/iTouch app.

<comment><USER34> > No mention of what will happen to the currently free (and super) > iPhone/iTouch app.

I assume it will sadly turn into the WSJ app (few free articles, majority subscriber-only).

Of course, I can see Steve Jobs and Apple working a deal with the NYTimes to bundle a free 1-yr subscription for their iSlate owners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This again? I thought the TimesSelect experience proved that this model doesn't work.

I wonder if they'd be net better off adopting a pay-what-you-want model.

</comment><comment><USER36> Great -- I'd like to support their journalism efforts and I'm not interested in home delivery.

</comment><comment><USER37> Keeping the poor uninformed is important for modern democracy.

<comment><USER37> Can anyone explain the downvotes ? Surely my point is valid even if couched in the sarcasm of devils advocacy - are sarcasm tags needed ?

A democracy cannot function without an informed public. The press has traditionally been seen as the main guarantor of keeping people informed. Creating a paywall is exclusiory to the less well off. This therefore makes the United States less democratic.

Can I please be argued with rather than downvoted or is there no such thing as netiquette these days ?</comment></comment>