Fine Uploader is shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/FineUploader/fine-uploader/issues/2073 <comment><USER2> > I've grown tired of continuously defending my inactivity and decisions > against trolls on Twitter, the issue tracker, and elsewhere. It's draining > and I don't have the patience or energy to deal with it any longer. These > same people expect to impose their short-sighted and non-generalized values > and goals on a project for which they have contributed nothing and are not > willing to maintain. The sense of entitlement from a small but vocal > minority that do not understand FOSS and refuse to understand it is very > much a concern, and I'm simply not interested in shrugging that off anymore.

In the last three days, I've been accused of my code not being open source and that I should remove all mentions of open source from everything I owned, because I simply haven't pushed to Github in a month or two.

This was joined by another user who claimed that open source license legally forces me to make the 'secret' code I've been holding off public, which, again, does not exist, because the code on the repo was effectively current.

I've been working full time for the last 8 months, on my own savings, to provide a peer-to-peer mass communication tool, and I'm releasing it for free.

To say that this made me feel _horrible_ for the past few days would be an understatement.

<comment><USER3> Sorry you feel bad. That really sucks to get messages like that. Personally, I'd just ignore the noise and focus on the good. Remember, it is far easier to be a keyboard warrior than it is to create something awesome.

People in the service industry see this all the time. A 1 star review on a restaurant really hurts. Everyone should know how much effort it is to run a restaurant and how much can easily go wrong... a bad review is really disheartening.

<comment><USER2> Thank you. I understand these folks are few amongst many, but boy, when you don't hear from the many, only from the few, it makes you think whether this was a mistake.

Regardless, I've removed all mentions of open source from my product (but kept the license unchanged), just so I won't have to deal with this again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I lack the free time at this point in my life to continue to maintain and > develop a project of this scale, and the codebase has languished for a > little while already.

> I've grown tired of continuously defending my inactivity and decisions > against trolls on Twitter, the issue tracker, and elsewhere. It's draining > and I don't have the patience or energy to deal with it any longer. These > same people expect to impose their short-sighted and non-generalized values > and goals on a project for which they have contributed nothing and are not > willing to maintain.

> The sense of entitlement from a small but vocal minority that do not > understand FOSS and refuse to understand it is very much a concern, and I'm > simply not interested in shrugging that off anymore.

Not familiar with this project but would like to thank the author as well as all the other amazing open source contributors in the world for doing something that made/makes the world a better place.

I dream of a day when we have a solution to these problems. Where an engineer can get paid as much as they would at a job to fix those issues people raise. A platform that also allowed creators to block people who are clueless and unkind.

Some day we as a community will figure it out.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the correct way to view this is as a courtesy notice that "Hey, that thing you might have used for free is being discontinued." That's it.

There is zero reason to expect FOSS developers to be schooled in good PR or something. He may think that spelling out his logic for his decision is useful information to other people. He may even be right about such an assumption.

I would not infer that he is intentionally being petty, kvetching per se, etc. It might be accurate, but who cares? He published a courtesy notice. He could have shut it down with zero announcement.

I am reminded of this comment I made 3 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824166)

</comment><comment><USER6> Disclosure: I work on a 'competing' file uploader.

I'd like to thank Richard for the relentless efforts in pioneering this robust uploader. As a member of the Uppy team I have had the pleasure of a few encounters with him where he adviced us on e.g. saving directly to s3. I regard him more as a bright peer than a competitor, the ecosystem is large enough that we can afford that luxury. And I guess being in open source helps. Like, I'd dont suppose there's a cutthroat mentality between Linux and FreeBSD contributors for instance :)

I can relate to the gh-issue fatigue becoming unbearable if you yourself no longer have a need, or a way to make it into a sustainable career. Worse: others are building businesses with your free product and make wild demands. Our team is fortunate enough that our own business can benefit from Uppy and so that we can allocate paid-for-time; but if all that effort has to come from your spare time, that could also have been spent on your family or making money to feed them.. the weight really adds up and wears you down.

So: Much respect for keeping it up for so many years, breaking new grounds, and being a big inspiration to us.

<comment><USER6> Of course it is Ray and not Richard, I am sorry. It is too late to edit now. Should know better than to post on the move :o

<comment><USER7> This is Ray. I'm trying to lay low after archiving my project as I really just want to move on at this point, but I couldn't help myself and read some of the comments here anyway. Thanks for this, Kevin. Uppy is a fantastic library and I wish you and the rest of the Transloadit team the best. If I were looking for an enterprise-class upload library in the future, I'd absolutely choose Uppy at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The sense of entitlement people have of open-source projects is ridiculous, ESPECIALLY if they haven't contributed to it.

<comment><USER9> What is this comment in response to?

<comment><USER10> >I've grown tired of continuously defending my inactivity and decisions against trolls on Twitter, the issue tracker, and elsewhere. It's draining and I don't have the patience or energy to deal with it any longer. These same people expect to impose their short-sighted and non-generalized values and goals on a project for which they have contributed nothing and are not willing to maintain. The sense of entitlement from a small but vocal minority that do not understand FOSS and refuse to understand it is very much a concern, and I'm simply not interested in shrugging that off anymore.

<comment><USER9> Thanks! I read it a couple of times and missed it each time. It was before my coffee, so I guess I'll blame that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat related : are there any guides/tutorials about how to do secure file uploads in webapps and how to avoid obvious security pitfalls?

Reading the Django docs [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/topics/security/#user-...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/topics/security/#user- uploaded-content-security) , specifically,

>Django's media upload handling poses some vulnerabilities when that media is served in ways that do not follow security best practices. Specifically, an HTML file can be uploaded as an image if that file contains a valid PNG header followed by malicious HTML. This file will pass verification of the library that Django uses for ImageField image processing (Pillow). When this file is subsequently displayed to a user, it may be displayed as HTML depending on the type and configuration of your web server.

is a little concerning. They recommend serving images from a different domain and whitelist file types. Is that enough? Anything else needs to be done to improve security? Does handling uploads alone give attackers an RCE oppurtunity or is it safe to handle files in the server and then upload to aws s3?

<comment><USER12> Here's a start: [https://mobile.twitter.com/olemoudi/status/10239768976618700...](https://mobile.twitter.com/olemoudi/status/1023976897661870083)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for that, great read.

I think for my use case going with s3 will be easier and better for security. So how do I actually do it? Let users directly upload to s3 and have a lambda function call my server to store the url? If the image file is maliciously crafted, how does using s3 help, especially when serving the content? How can I set the headers when serving images from s3? And is there a way to identify that a specific user uploaded this file, so that I can have rate limiting? Is it possible to generate a signature or something to identify a user that I can decode server side to say "ok, this user uploaded the file and he is who he says he is". Maybe sign using the cookie that django sets for each user?

<comment><USER13> There is a few options, such as using AWS Cognito, or signed requests. I personally use signed requests which allows you to specify where and what type of files are allowed to be uploaded. First the user asks my server for a policy and signature, then uploads directly to S3, then sends another request to my server when done. My server will then verify and process uploaded files.

Likewise requests can also be signed so you can implement rate limiting on you side, and just allow S3 to serve the payload. Or you can do thing like use Cloudfront to server the objects which can use various methods of authentication such as signed cookies, or Lambda functions.

Headers can be set in the S3 object metadata.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the explanation. Follow up question : how did you implement the signed cookies part?

<comment><USER14> Use the the aws sdk to generate credentials on your server, pass the returned creds to your frontend. The request to generate the credentials allows you to lock down the size and type of file. They can go directly into a form or used in javascript. Lot of github libs and stack overflows that go into more detail. [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/sigv4-UsingH...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/sigv4-UsingHTTPPOST.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thank you for Fine Uploader. It's been really helpful.

A my-fault anecdote: I submitted a PR for a minor new Fine Uploader feature, and when a few followup questions were asked about documenting the new feature, I never got around to completing the tasks.

So, at least in my case, I intended to contribute and did "most" of the work, but failed to make the time to bring my PR over the finish line. Perhaps there were a bunch of well-intentioned-but-ultimately-not-usable contributions like mine, and maybe they also contributed to the frustration.

I try (but sometimes fail) to remember that so, so much of the stuff I use every day to maintain my livelihood was created by others, for the free use of others. But it's such an embarrassment of riches that sometimes one forgets to be thankful and that's when the feeling of open-source entitlement sets in (at least that's how I see it).

In the past I maintained a bunch of little plugins that got a decent amount of use, but it was a long time ago (1990's) and I think the culture was different. There was some criticism, but most people were very appreciative and if there was something they wanted added etc, they would just solve it on their end without any complaints or drama. There was no PR type workflow, arguments over licensing, or expectation of awesome docs/support for a free thing. I'm not saying I want to go back to that per se, but when I think about maintaining that type of project now, it sounds fatiguing instead of exciting.

Not sure what my point is... I guess just to say thanks and that I can totally understand why you'd want to stop supporting the code. But it is used and appreciated, and the fact that you nurtured it for so long is an achievement on its own. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER16> Has anybody written a guide on how to survive having a successful open source project?

I happened to have something [1] get a little usage recently and it took effort not to get sucked in. There were people with questions and needs! And I like helping people! But I also have a life to lead, so I set myself some clear boundaries and worked to consciously accepted that the project wouldn't operate at the standards I'd have for myself if it were my job.

It occurred to me that when I got started in the industry I didn't have the boundary-setting skills I do now, and that I easily could have worked to hard and too long, burning myself out, especially if my project were as popular as this was. It'd be nice to have a guide from OS project leads on ways to keep the project sustainable over the long term.

[1] [https://github.com/wpietri/sucks](https://github.com/wpietri/sucks)

<comment><USER17> > Has anybody written a guide on how to survive having a successful open > source project?

No need for a guide. Close the issue tracker. Only accept pull requests, problem solved.

<comment><USER16> I don't think that's a very good approach.

The contributors I got for my project all first appeared in the issue tracker and we had a few interactions before they decided it was worth their time to write code. That makes sense to me. I would be unlikely to submit a pull request until I was reasonably sure that it was welcome and and that the person receiving it would be a good person to collaborate with.

<comment><USER17> > I would be unlikely to submit a pull request until I was reasonably sure > that it was welcome and and that the person receiving it would be a good > person to collaborate with.

The person you collaborate with do not owe you anything, and it goes both ways. If a PR is rejected, then its author is free to fork the project. But you can't have it both ways, you can't complain about people potentially abusing issues then think there is a special technique to limit the problem, while keeping an issue tracker opened, because there isn't.

Closing the issue tracker will ensure only people capable of fixing issues will collaborate to a project.

<comment><USER16> I understand the theory you're expressing, I just think it's pretty far from optimal.

Closing the issue tracker might have the effect you describe, but will also unnecessarily alienate people who would be excellent contributors with a very moderate investment.

I personally didn't "complain about people potentially abusing issues", so I'm not sure where that's coming from. What I'm interested in is helping less experienced project maintainers find healthy ways to cope with having a successful project.

But given your confidence on the topic, surely you can show us the successful open source project you are running along these lines?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know of an alternative to this library?

<comment><USER6> Disclosure: I'm on the Uppy team but you may want to check it out [https://uppy.io](https://uppy.io).

I think we have feature parity, or close to that. Any extra feature is either opt-in or can be opted out of

<comment><USER18> Thanks, I will look into this then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At the risk of sounding uncaring or such...

Ok?

I mean I don't get why the owner didn't try to find someone else to graciously take the reins without a fork (maybe they tried and couldn't find anyone?), but I don't get the dramatic post and very "taking my ball and going home" tone I'm getting.

Again, maybe it's just me looking to wrongly but when 4 out of 6 reasons are referring to yourself and not the project...

The bit about having to defend yourself on Twitter, I guess I don't know this person and how bad they have it, but I find it hard to imagine someone just _inundated_ with Twitter noise over a library to the point they need to walk away in such an abrupt manner, like taking the slightest amount of time to transition would be life ending ( _definitely get not wanting to deal with noise over free work, but this is a known problem and they could have started a conversation about that_ ), and I _definitely_ don't see how this will _reduce_ the amount of attention they get...

<comment><USER20> Why even bother being on Twitter? I keep hearing developers encouraging each other to be active on Twitter, but who gives an actual fuck what goes on with Twitter? All it seems to do is generate drama on every front. Do developers(or anyone) really need to be on there? If I were the owner, I would have just closed my Twitter account in the face of demanding freeloaders.

<comment><USER19> I respect their right to be on Twitter in peace, but yeah I'd probably block users before I'd list Twitter complainers as a reason how I'm closing the lock on a popular library and throwing away the key instead of just walking away yourself... because that's definitely one way to get a lot of people (imo rightfully) complaining about what you did.

Also kind of kills your credibility in the future. Walking away over toxicity is fine, doing it like this? Not so great. (of course there's something especially egregious we don't know about, but they're laying a lot out in that post, I'd expect to see it there...)

<comment><USER21> > Also kind of kills your credibility in the future. Walking away over > toxicity is fine, doing it like this? Not so great.

Credibility, yeah. _Sure, this guy gave away his work for seven years but can we trust him to work for free in the future?_

<comment><USER19> Exactly.

Because every day millions of people give away their work.

I give away my work. I've dealt with rude people using software I made since I was pretty much a kid, those people didn't know who their vitriol was directed at.

What makes this guy so special that to spite the vitriolic subset of all users he gets to be the one who throws a wrench in a project?

I said this in a comment below:

You think the kind of person who would insult a library maintainer on Twitter is going to read his Github issue?

"Oh it stopped getting updates" "Good, now my code won't break anymore!" "Security vulnerabilities in libraries? What?"

He's literally only spiting the very people who make projects like this worthwhile, the kinds of people who would want to submit PRs, make useful issues, and people with a genuine interest in the project, exactly what he's saying he lost.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get request path in PHP for routing - <AUTHOR> https://coderwall.com/p/gdam2w

<comment><USER2> Is that different to:

parse_url(http_build_url(), PHP_URL_PATH);</comment>


When the U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html <comment><USER3> The concept of no members of a group fitting into the average range for all observations is reminiscent of the 'curse of dimensionality'. Can anyone with a data science background make the connection here?

Secondly, this seems to explain why everyone hates autocorrect.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, in this case if the 10 traits are independent and the chance of falling in the "average range" is 1/3 for any one trait then the probability of any one soldier falling the the average range for 10 traits is (1/3)^10 = 1/59049.

<comment><USER5> That is true, but this can be just as much an issue in 1 dimension. Consider that the average person has roughly 1 testicle. I think it's about understanding distributions, and joint distributions are a big part of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing that strikes me here is how much we repeat the mistake of Norma (taking the mythical average body and assuming that differences mean problems) today in talking about people's minds.

I started using computers before it was fashionable, before my fellow nerds started being worth billions and ending up on magazine covers. It's hard to describe now how much our difference was seen as wrong, as the sign of a problem.

I have to wonder how much other natural differences gets medicalized. I know I have friends who take drugs for "insomnia" even though the only problem they experience is that they don't always get the "average" night of eight hours uninterrupted sleep. (Which anyhow is a modern invention. [1]) When I was in mourning after my mom died, a few buttinskys suggested I talk to my doctor about antidepressants, even though actual experts thought I was doing fine. And I worry about the number of schoolkids who have their differences medicalized because, in effect, they are inconvenient for overburdened teachers using industrial-age models of education.

I have no solution here, but I definitely find it troubling.

[1] For more, see this podcast, especially the "Til Morning is Nigh" segment: [http://backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the- clock-4/](http://backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-clock-4/)

<comment><USER7> Modern psychology does not care about average it cares about capable of functioning in society. If you can't avoid say screaming in public that's a problem not just a non issue. Arguably the tolerances might be low, but it's hard to argue with the basic premise.

Granted doctors assume if your talking to them you have a problem. But that's arguably a reasonable prior.

PS: The extremes of behavior get very far out there, notmenjoying talking to people is fine, not being able to so communicate is an issue.

<comment><USER8> > _If you can 't avoid say screaming in public that's a problem not just a non > issue. Arguably the tolerances might be low, but it's hard to argue with the > basic premise._

People are prescribed stuff for much much less than "screaming in public", including feeling stressed in BS high stress jobs, being "hyper-active" at school, etc -- with "modern psychology" more often than not siding with the normality of abnormal and abusive societal norms (as it always did. Science is conservative. Not so long ago you got medical treatment for being gay, for example).

> _Granted doctors assume if your talking to them you have a problem. But that > 's arguably a reasonable prior._

Doctors also prescribe and over-prescribe all kinds of BS to people who don't need it, and get all kinds of pharma percs for doing so.

Heck, they'll go even to doing un-needed operations, compared to that, prescribing BS is nothing:

[https://www.google.gr/search?q=uneeded+operations+scandal](https://www.google.gr/search?q=uneeded+operations+scandal)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While hindsight is 20:20, parts of this should have been more obvious.

> Daniels generously defined as someone whose measurements were within the > middle 30 per cent of the range of values

> Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions > of size ... less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all > three dimensions.

30% raised to the third power is 2.7%. Basic probability. I guess everyone assumed there would be heavy clustering instead of largely independent variables?

<comment><USER10> > The Aero Medical Laboratory hired Daniels because he had majored in physical > anthropology, a field that specialized in the anatomy of humans, as an > undergraduate at Harvard. During the first half of the 20th century, this > field focused heavily on trying to classify the personalities of groups of > people according to their average body shapes — a practice known as > "typing." For example, many physical anthropologists believed a short and > heavy body was indicative of a merry and fun-loving personality, while > receding hairlines and fleshy lips reflected a "criminal type."

Also, for what's it worth, this was during (or at least not too far removed from) a time period where researchers were trying to ascribe all sorts of random characteristics to people based on whether they were "Negroids", "Caucasoids", or "Mongoloids".

This says a lot to me about how people thought about physical characteristics back then. If researchers assumed male-pattern baldness was associated with a "criminal type", then it's not a huge stretch to imagine that researchers assumed there was a "pilot type" with a large number of clustered or heavily correlated characteristics.

<comment><USER11> Lombroso et al.

Worth noting that this phenomenon is typically described as "medicalization." Othered groups medicalized include women, African Americans, homosexuals, and many other groups. The medicalization of Jewish ancestry cropped up and was amplified during a not-too-distant past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> joint distribution of 2 normal distributions isn't necessarily a normal distribution in 2 variables. Independence would be sufficient condition for that, yet obviously there is no independence between various measurements of a human body.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_normal_distributi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_normal_distribution#Joint_normality)

<comment><USER13> Which is funny, because the problem seems to arise exactly because the variables are independent. If they were dependent then one could imagine all sizes correlate with height, for example .

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow! This has implications for human genetics (a study that originated partly in considering human body size measurements like those described in the article) that I think most popular writers on human genetics have not taken into account. There was an article posted to Hacker News earlier this week that suggested, surely falsely in my opinion, that human genomes can be optimized for intelligence to such a degree that we won't even be able to estimate IQ scores for future individuals with the same kind of tests that we use now. I rather doubt it. Because of pleiotropic effects of genes, almost surely there isn't a gene shuffle that will massively increase human intelligence, but rather just strategies (as likely to be environmental as genetic) to improve average intelligence within the range already found in the worldwide human population.

Similarly, imputation of "race" by genome testing depends crucially on assuming that the average genome is informative, but for any trait of interest, a person who by both genome testing and known historical ancestry is categorized in some "race" category might have any degree of variance from "average" in the trait found in the whole human genome. It will be exciting to follow up on larger and larger data sets on these issues as human genomics projects continue.

<comment><USER15> _Similarly, imputation of "race" by genome testing depends crucially on assuming that the average genome is informative,_

This is a nonsensical mischaracterization of both modern genetics and the theory of high dimensional vector spaces.

The phenomenon the article is discussing is the fact that the mass near the center of a normal distribution approaches zero as the number of dimensions goes up, and that most of the mass lives a distance sqrt(N) from the origin. This does not imply that a) you can't have gaussians or other distributions which are separated from each other or b) that projections of one of these distributions can't have a different distribution than a projection from the other.

Please go read Foundations of Data Science, chapters 1 and 2 before expounding on this topic further: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- US/people/kannan/book-no-so...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- US/people/kannan/book-no-solutions-aug-21-2014.pdf)

Can you clearly state what, precisely, you think this article proves about either classification, intelligence augmentation or group differences in specific traits?

<comment><USER16> I can talk about some of this, if only because of some of the ethical dilemmas facing me and genome testing as of recent.

Racial Groups as described by a geneticist vs say, a government doing polling on its citizens are different animals.

Goverments == mostly sociological. An example would be Hispanic in the US, where growing up data collection would ask if someone was Hispanic, and now it asks if you are white vs non-white Hispanic. Meanwhile in say, Meanwhile, if someone crossed the border to Mexico, there is no such thing as Hispanic - <USER2> can be White, Mestizo (Indigenous-European hybrid), Indigenous, and Other. It is totally possible to live on the border of the US-Mexico, have reasons to commute across the US-Mexican border, have citizenship to both countries, and have totally different answers on your census depending on what country asked you about your race/ethnicity, because as can be clearly seen, the way that question is asked is different in mexico and the US to begin with.

Let's talk about being Mezito as an idea. From a geneticist's point of view, it doesn't exist. (or at least, not yet, and it is unliekly to any time soon) Which is how 23 and me and buzzfeed manages to get this Gif off of one of Buzzfeed's employees, who very clearly feels he is half mexican (aka mezito) [https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed- static/static/2016-01/21/1...](https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed- static/static/2016-01/21/16/enhanced/webdr01/anigif_enhanced-19351-1453410167-10.gif) In other words, there are no clusters that define "mexican"/mezito

In order to have such clusters, you need to have long histories in one area, histories of inbreeding, and other major causes to make mutations pop selectively. Even with those mutations popping selectively, you also need those mutations/genes to be very trait specific in most cases/ultra selective. Otherwise, you are looking at junk.

So, one of the reasons ashkenazim are testable as ashkenazim is because they have a very long history of inbreeding. So do the japanese compared to other asian groups, same with the Finnish, especially if you are Saami.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575505/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575505/)

Still once these ibreeding/long history facts start to subside, you end up with whatever is the strongest trait set in a pure mendelian fashion. It is why there are plenty of ashkenazim who definitely decendants of the founder populations of ashkenazim who don't carry other sets of Ashkenazi marker genes, whereas there are ashkenazim where you can't tell who do carry these other genes. The other random sets come from other places (sex..mutations..) and are bred out with enough time. (Otherwise there would be many many more questions about how I exist, genetically speaking, since I should not be able to metabolize alcohol in about 1.5 hours...)

However, most traits are not one gene == one trait. It's how the music plays together, especially in concert with epigentic factors. For many things involving "intelligence" (or actually lots of things for humans), we're looking at a non-mendellian inheritance pattern, including Genomic imprinting issues ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting) ). So while some gene related to "intelligence"/"thinness"/"insert something here" might be more observable among certain groups/populations, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist among other populations and some other factor, genetic, epigentic, or otherwise, is suppressing your view.

This is why if/when you get involved with genetic research on humans, the ideal is to get the entire family (as much as possible) involved in tests - even if the original candidate comes from a human genetic isolate polpulation. There are otherwise broader concerns about power and sample size in the study, because you might be looking at something which is actually something else.

[http://www.nature.com/gim/journal/v4/n2/full/gim200210a.html](http://www.nature.com/gim/journal/v4/n2/full/gim200210a.html)

(but, hey, what do I know...I had to ask geneticists and people doing research in this area when I found out my genome is worth something accidentally...)

<comment><USER17> Great post, thanks! You use 'Mestizo' once, and then 'mezito' several times. Is this slang, a repeated typo, or a term of the art? Google doesn't find much for it.

<comment> barry-cotter Mestizo means mixed Amerind European ancestry, exactly like mulatto means mixed African European ancestry. They're both from colonial Spanish racial categories.

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

<comment><USER17> My phrasing was unclear. I'm familiar with "Mestizo" \--- it's "mezito" that I'm wondering about. Urban Dictionary suggests that "mezito" is just a typo, but the author uses it consistently and perhaps separately than Mestizo.

Deep in the search results are occasional other people who appear to be using it intentionally: [https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t53845/](https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t53845/)

I'm wondering if like "cholo" it has particular connotation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholo)

Incidentally, I was recently fascinated to learn that some consider "cholo" to come from Nahuatl: [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Cholo](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Cholo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My company Treemetrics has been challenging the forest industry for method used for measuring forests. They use the average tree size as the method for valuing a standing forest. From our data we see forests with thousands of trees where only a handful of average trees actually exist. Very helpful article for me to explain the flaw of averages.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is incredibly poignant in a world where our designers and engineers are moving to provide users less options and less configuration, deeming their ideal designs, meant to meet 'most users needs', is superior.

<comment><USER20> exactly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This was a very interesting article. And I can't speak to the statistical methodology described. But I think it paints too broad a brush in terms of why the Air Force fatality rate (or "Class A Mishap Rate" as it's called) decreased over the decades. Quick side-note – I'm a former USAF pilot and studied USAF history a bit.

The short version is – technical details like adjustable cockpits certainly played a part. But the bigger driver was the ever-increasing culture of safety, mishap prevention and leadership accountability.

Safety: things that were common place "back in the day" have been banned for many decades in today's Air Force. These include traveling without appropriate weather checks, acrobatics maneuvers at low altitudes and unauthorized airspaces, and flying without enough sleep.

Mishap Prevention: incredible resources are poured into scientific investigations on what exactly happened in each incident so that A) we can learn from it and B) all pilots can be briefed on the mistakes made so that they can save their own lives.

Leadership Accountability: if you are a senior leader at an Air Force base with a fatality, you have a large issue on your hands that needs to be handled with extreme attention to detail. Lapses in safety are not looked favorably upon at any level. I wasn't in the USAF back in the day. But it's fairly obvious that there was less punishment meted out when mishaps occurred compared to when they happen now. Different times – yes. But overall fatalities were just accepted as "something that happens."

The safety culture is all-pervasive and common in today's military. But there were different attitudes back in the '40s. So while many of today's pilots gripe about the excesses of safety culture - and I was one of them – most pilots know deep down that it's a good thing. I wouldn't want to return to the old school days where crashes were just the cost of doing business.

</comment><comment><USER22> Thought this would be about [http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/01/21/selection-bias- and-...](http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/01/21/selection-bias-and-bombers/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Articles like this remind me how rational and practical the military is. I know so many brilliant military minds, yet war itself seems outdated and plagued by so many emotionally irrational decisions. I can't reconcile those two thoughts.

How can people inside the military be so incredibly smart, yet still think it makes sense to ... you know, kill people's friends and families and not expect them to become terrorists.

What am I missing? It can't just be greed. Military industrial complex. The military minds aren't smarter than that? I struggle with it.

<comment><USER24> I can't speak for the entire military[1], but I've known a few "brilliant military minds" and they rarely, if ever, talk in terms of killing. The military's goals are usually things like area denial, disrupting lines of communication, limiting access to materiel and supplies, degradation of morale, etc.

These aren't just euphemisms. If you're trying to win a war solely by killing the enemy, you're going to be in for a looooong and _bloody_ war. In fact, there's long been a thinking in the military that "a dead soldier removes one soldier from the field, but a wounded soldier removes two".

What makes the military, and war, seem "outdated" or downright "despicable" comes down to, I think, two things:

1\. War is often what happens when two sides have let long lingering issues fester to the point that dialogue is not possible. In other words, the only thing anyone wants less than to throw the first punch is to be unable to throw the second.

2\. Yes, military industrial complex. Specifically, the MIC has muddled the "goals" and abstracted them away behind many layers of "weapons systems" and "advanced tactics". That is, if you're a general attempting to disrupt lines of communication, and you have to decide on committing the lives of your soldiers and potentially taking the lives of your enemy, you might consider a battle plan that minimizes loss of life. If you're that same general and Raytheon (or Lockheed or Honeywell or...) offers to sell you the CommsRuptor 7000 that will take out enemy communications at the press of a button (and a signature on a check for $300M), you might not adequately question the impact on lives. War used to be about loss of blood and treasure. Lately it seems to be more about treasure and blood...

[1] Especially not the "grunts" that see front-line action. I've heard, anecdotally, that enlisted soldiers are often trained in such a way that they enter war zones with raw blood-lust. Whatever your opinion on this practice, I took from your question that you were more interested in the thinking of the decision-makers, i.e. commissioned officers.

<comment><USER25> I wouldn't say "raw bloodlust" is accurate. I'd say the life of a serving infantryman is so boring, repetitive, and mundane that getting the chance to use your training in combat will look very pleasing to almost anyone. Especially on deployment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure averages used in the wrong way affect many more fields than any of us can realize today.

<comment><USER27> That's basically the entire premise behind the Black Swan meme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For anybody getting a message that says "Please try loading the page again after activating mobile data or connecting to a Wi-Fi network." = it's not your connection, despite what the page says. The mobile site, [http://m.thestar.com/](http://m.thestar.com/) , is giving that message on desktop too and it comes from the site itself.

</comment><comment><USER29> Has nobody heard of quetelet?

<comment><USER30> I think we had a discussion here on HN not long ago but I can't find it.

edit:

Found the article:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the- inve...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-invention-of- the-normal-person/463365/)

comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155889)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is it just me or does this sound oddly familiar to machine learning recommendation systems?

ie: show an item based on the average of all the other items that everyone else has looked at.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, I was thinking of the same thing. It's not my field professionally though, so I am not sure what the relevant conclusion would be for machine learning though (or if the comparison holds at all).

<comment><USER33> I don't think that's quite correct.

Recommendation engines normally work by taking the things you favor, then looking at who else favors those things, and deducting that you're all likely to have shared interests.

<comment><USER34> Yeah I'd assume the simplest recommendation engines work on correlation. A recommendation engine working on average would be complete garbage, you'd be better off picking recommendation at random.

<comment><USER35> Quote emcq's response above:

> If you're thinking about the cold start problem when you dont have any > information about a user, yes it's possible that your overall statistics is > a combination of many subpopulations that doesn't really fit anyone very > accurately but there are ways around this as well.

I'd say a better approach (but may have user experience penalty) would don't even decide for the user, ASK. For example, take Flipboard / Quora as an example, you are asked to choose some topics to follow at the beginning. Assume research/data show 80% of the users are software engineers and 90% of them always pick "technology" as a topic they want to follow, would you rather show technology as one of the top five in the list of topics to choose? There's actually a lot of experiments you can do from a simple selection/survey process. I personally can't stand at going through pages to find something relevant, but I am also surprised to find things I never thought would be interesting to follow if I weren't present the options at all / or earlier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is a great example.

It doesn't take a lot of dimensions, though. I've seen many system workloads where the average latency was not the latency of any of the requests.

</comment><comment><USER23> Thinking about this and the wisdom of crowds makes my brain feel fuzzy.

</comment><comment><USER37> If the environment was homogenized enough this would no longer be an issue.

</comment><comment><USER38> analogous anecdote: if you've ever tried to drive a sports car in a seating/steering/pedal/shifting position that isn't tailored to your body, it feels really awkward and it's very difficult if not impossible to drive fast with precision.

i would guess that in a sports or race car, everything needs to be within a few millimeters of where it "should" be in order for it to feel right. multiply the speeds and divide reaction times by 4-5x and i can see how you could easily crash a plane with a tiny margin for error.

</comment><comment><USER39> Reminded me of

"Be together. Not the same"

~Android :)

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't see the problem. The fact that no person fit the model perfectly doesn't mean that the model was a poor choice.

The question shouldn't be whether any customers fit the cockpit perfectly, but how many customers do and do not fit absolutely. You build the legroom so that most legs will fit, and headroom so that most heads will fit. Then as many people as possible shall fit. Everyone will have some dimension that isn't perfectly accommodated, but few should be rejected. The fact that nobody fits perfectly doesn't take away from a design that reasonably accommodates as many people as possible.

A cockpit is not a suit. It's a communal chair/workspace meant to be used by various persons over many years. The metric of a good design should be how many/few people are so out of standards that they cannot work properly in the space. This is a perfect metaphor for hiring. Look only for that 'prefect fit' and you won't hire anyone, or you end up with hiring the only applicant to get past the roboreader. Seek a broader standard and you'll find plenty of good people even though mr perfect never appears.

<comment><USER41> > A cockpit is not a suit.

The opposite is true. To fly an airplane with precision, you need to "strap the airplane on."

That means sitting in the position with the best visibility and best reach inside the cockpit, even a Cessna 172.

(In a 172, you should sit high enough to be able to see each of the rivets on top of the cowling.)

<comment><USER40> Yes, but the seat does adjust. It isn't the case that the cockpit must be tailored to every person. Each Cessna, 747 or f-16 seat is practically interchangeable amongst the type. These aren't WWI biplanes with nothing more than a cushion. Even then, the cushion height, the prime dictator of eye level, is adjustable.

<comment><USER42> I don't know about postwar planes, but at least some of the WWII war birds had notoriously poor seat adjustments. For example BF-109 had a seat that doubled as armored fuel tank. It's bit tricky to add adjustments to such heavy piece of furniture, so they didn't.

The thing here, just like you pointed out, is not to tailor the seat for average nor individual, but a _range_ that suits most individuals.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sports Violence Is About Our Struggle with Mortality - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspoken/sports-hooliganism-comes-down-to-a-fear-of-death-rp <comment><USER2> If you go back to Ancient times, we used to capture men and then watch those same men be eaten by lions alive. I firmly believe that while we outlawed that type of entertainment, it is very much alive within all of us. It is human nature and while we willingly admit that we would hate to see anyone be harmed or killed, there might be a secret desire in all of us to actually enjoy seeing it without having to actually experience it.

In modern times, we have movies that portray this for us. But we also have mostly nonlethal forms of entertainment as well, of which most of the time, two teams are pitted against each other. While we actually don't desire the harm that may come of it, we still enjoy the entertainment it brings.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sports in the USA is lucky you don't have really serious problems with "Ultras" / Football hooligans.

What the article doesn't mention is the sectarian nature of some football hooligans eg Rangers vs Celtic.

I recall going into the flying Scotsman near kings cross (this is pre the gentrification ) - I was thinking "fuck if they ask me which team I support and I get it wrong I am toast and being from a mixed marriage it would make it even worse</comment>


Owning a Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2014/03/23/owning-a-programming-language <comment><USER2> The central claim of the post is that Microsoft and Apple look after their developers while Facebook and Google will not. This is demonstrably false.

The post says:

> Microsoft and Apple have massive vested interests in supporting their > languages and platforms. They stand to lose a lot to their core businesses > if they stop. Developers' interests align somewhat with theirs in this > regard: one developer doesn't have a lot of power in those relationships, > but the sum of all developers definitely does, so these companies generally > need to care for these languages and maintain these platforms for a long > time.

This reasoning fails dismally when applied to Microsoft's own technologies: VB6, Silverlight, Windows 8 Phone (original version). All these developers cast out. There are surely more examples.

<comment><USER3> The analogy was to C# and Objective C, not to those other languages. The argument went

1\. Facebook might abandon Hack at some point

2\. No, Hack is like Objective C and C#, which Microsoft and Apple support just fine

3\. No here is how Hack is NOT like those languages, community support is not important to facebook like it is for ObjC and C#.

So how Microsoft treats other languages is completely irrelevant to that particular point, and actually supports what Marco is arguing here, since you're implying that programming languages might be abandoned even if community support does matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I appreciate your general point, I disagree with the notion that companies have a vested interest in protecting a language, tool or framework only once it has attracted a critical mass of developers. Other factors signal a company's commitment. Case in point: your comment about Dart. A few weeks ago I and two of the engineers who helped develop Dart gave talks at Google about the future of Angular / Dart.

It's public knowledge -- yet many people don't know -- that Google is also using AngularDart for large internal projects. Though the technologies still have relatively small user bases, Google has devoted considerable time, money and manpower to building software with AngularDart and to making it accessible to external developers. For example, my talk was part of an initiative called FlightSchool that provides comprehensive tutorials, workshops and other resources.

Having said that, I wouldn't argue that a large user base is the most important signal of mutual support and leverage in the relationship between engineers and software companies.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Apple effectively owning Objective-C._

Is that true? I spent the last four years coding primarily in Objective-C for Linux and Win targets; none of the tools I used were from Apple.

<comment><USER6> You're the only person on the planet doing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with the OP on support for Hack not being core to FB's business.

I am not sure if can agree with the Google Dart comment. Google has a vested interest in making it as easy as possible for content creators making stuff for the web. From some Dart development I have done, the whole ecosystem looks good to me.

</comment><comment><USER8> Facebook has obviously invested huge resources into developing this language and its supporting architecture. It's being used extensively throughout their presumably massive code base. To suggest that they could simply drop it and walk away ignores these things. Also, presumably they developed it for a reason; it fulfills important needs of theirs and they're not going to simply let it whither on the vine.

</comment><comment><USER9> Oh please! Obviously Facebook benefits when people use their programming language more. People contribute to the standard library, test stuff, share stuff. The pool of people familiar with the language to hire from gets larger.

It's so obvious I wonder what goes on in the op's head.

<comment><USER10> OP's head is a linkbait fluff article magnet which is somehow seen as the holy grail here on HN and other echo circles.

I have no idea where this originates from and it hurts me to see that his void content gets picked over actual quality content just because it's "the Marco". His domain should be - wildcard at the begin and end - permanently banned from Hacker News because it only drags us into a wasted spot on the frontpage.

<comment><USER11> It also provides us with wonderful comments like these. I don't enjoy Marco for the articles, I enjoy him for the HN comments. It's the best part.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Automate Your Human – Forming Good Development Habits - <AUTHOR> http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/05/20/automate-human-good-development-habits/

<comment><USER2> That "sigh" moment is really important. If you want the benefits of good habits like TDD, you need to make them rewarding at the micro as well as macro level.

More carrot, less stick.

</comment><comment><USER3> A tenth of a second seems to be a common threshold for how long something can take before it becomes a noticeable delay. (I've seen 75 - 200 msec in UI literature.)</comment>


Ask HN: Would you answer yes or no questions for 5 cents? - <AUTHOR> I'm thinking of running an interesting economic experiment, where I charge an asker 10 cents per person to ask a number of people a yes or no question <comment><USER2> Mechanical turk does already exist for this, so in terms of distribution, the problem is solved.

However the price and sample size still might need some tweeking.

Using your numbers, I'm paying $100 per 1,000 people, per question. 1,000 is an arbitrary number I chose to represent some kind of usable sample size.

Furthermore, re: the specific 1,000 people that answer my question(s), it is probably important to know their demographic background in depth.

This way, I don't waste $100 asking 1,000 seniors from North Dakota if they have ever heard of my avocado toast restaurant on 32nd and Broadway.

I guess in a lot of ways, this is what survey companies and ad agencies are doing.

So, it's an interesting problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mechanical turk already exists for this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes. That'll be 5 cents please.</comment>


No More Mixed Messages About HTTPS - <AUTHOR> https://security.googleblog.com/2019/10/no-more-mixed-messages-about-https_3.html <comment><USER2> but if my website is a blog that allows user submission, how I can make sure users won't submit [http://images](http://images)?

<comment><USER3> See the "Resources for developers" at the bottom.

<comment><USER2> I do not understand that part. I do everything in https.

But as a platform, I have no control over user submitted content. If they post links to http, I don't want my platform be broken.</comment></comment></comment>


Remind HN: It's Valentine's day - <AUTHOR>

Being geeks, our natural reaction is to point out all the flaws in society that allow a commercial "holiday" like this to exist and thrive.  But I have an alternate suggestion.
Try buying your girlfriend flowers.  Compare your results with last year and see it there's an improvement.
Remember, you're not caving in to consumerism and peer pressure.  You're running a controlled experiment.
Good luck! <comment><USER2> You could come to Japan, where ladies have to buy you chocolate and then the gents choose to reciprocate a month later (or not).

I'd complain on general principles, but since Valentines Bingo has covered my apartment move, two months of rent, and a romantic evening out, I guess I have limited standing.

<comment><USER3> Is it wrong that when I saw this topic I assumed it was going to be a post about optimizing for holiday promotions?

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, Valentine's Day is a little late to run a Valentine's Day promotion unless you're in a brick-and-mortar mall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I see your IP is from a flowers shop downtown!

<comment><USER6> <http://i.imgur.com/prFIq.jpg> (via the TV show CSI, haha)

I love UI reproductions in TV shows... this looks like a glorified Winamp plugin for doing reverse ip lookups hah.

<comment><USER7> Cross post that to reddit stat :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The slightly amusing thing is I did actually buy my girlfriend a card this year, however whilst in the shop I had a great solution come to me that would solve a problem, I obviously was not paying full attention as the left hand inside of the card was clearly aimed at a bloke.

My usual excuse is working with a greetings card company as one of our clients its always a busy time of the year

[Shameless plug] So for those that have forgotten theres a collection of iPhone ecard apps I have been involved in here

Jeego lite (free) <http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/jeego-lite/id399428058>

Starcards ($0.99) [http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/valentine- starcards/id4183077...](http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/valentine- starcards/id418307708)

Disney Valentines ($0.99) <http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/disney- valentines/id416908996>

</comment><comment><USER9> I like to think of Valentine's day not as Valentine's day, but as Single's Awareness Day.

Because that's what I'll be for this year.

<comment><USER10> You've still got plenty of hours to change that, if you want. I'm sure there also plenty of other singles out there wishing for a partner today. :) Go for it!

<comment><USER11> I think, my problem is how to connect to the right one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On a side note, you can get (at least) double the flowers for the same price on February 15th ;)

</comment><comment><USER13> You are just disguising your acceptance of consumerism by fabricating as an experiment, man.

</comment><comment><USER14> If she has respiratory problems and/or allergies, flowers might not be the best move. If you buy her chocolates instead, do your best to not make her feel damned if she eats them and damned if she doesn't. (My ex had a talent for making me feel like if I didn't eat the chocolates, I was rejecting him. If I did, well, "it was no wonder I was a fat cow". This did not go over well and made me not fond of Valentine's.)

</comment><comment><USER15> I really do not get why I need a special day to say I love you. If I wanna say it, I would just go out and say it. If I want to take her out on dinner, I would just take her out of dinner whenever it is convenient for her and not on a day when she would have to wait in long lines just to eat an ice cream.

<comment><USER16> "I really do not get why I need a special day to say I love you"

It's not about you. It's about her.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are some US companies/non-profits allowed to openly discriminate? - <AUTHOR> Came across this, on the website of a non-profit supported by lots of "big names" (some of the usual suspects and more):<p>>[REDACTED] internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Internships are also open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. We are planning to expand the program to more participants from underrepresented backgrounds in the future.<p>I'm from North-Africa and even there the labour code forbids that kind of stuff. <comment><USER2> This isn't illegal. It's no different then having a scholarship, these are sponsored internships with other companies, not with the non profit. you can still intern with the companies outreachy works with, they are just specifically supporting and seeking members of underrepresented groups.

In other words, all things being equal, with a big enough sample size, a companies intern's racial, ethnic, sexual orientation and gender identities should proportionally reflect the country's population.

If that's not happening, that means some, possibly subtle or systemic issue is depressing the number of an under represented group. Attempting to compensate for systemic underrepresentation is not discrimination, but a response to it.

After all these are interns, not normal employees. Internships are meant to be education opportunities.

And diversity is definitely beneficial to a business, even if it is for employees. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/ekaterinawalter/2014/01/14/reap...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ekaterinawalter/2014/01/14/reaping- the-benefits-of-diversity-for-modern-business-innovation/#41abfcfb2a8f)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's what people get wrong about discrimination laws IMHO.

If you accept the premise that humans are anything significantly more than just a sum total of arbitrary biological attributes that they can't control i.e. skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc. then you have to admit that diversity or anti-discrimination laws are the antithesis of what they claim to be. This is because the laws actively reduce individuals to a minutiae of attributes which the people themselves cannot control and then judge those people based on this gross reduction, actively ignoring - in this diversity equation - personal character, abilities, achievements, and essentially everything which an individual can indeed manipulate and claim some responsibility for.

On top of this ill-defined diversity metric, the laws draw broad generalizations of groups and apply them always and only to individuals, regardless of the wants and desires of the particular individual. Thus, the proponents of anti-discrimination always speak of "whites" or "blacks" or "men" or "women", but at the end of the day it is a particular person who is given a job and another particular person who is refused a job all based on absolutely nothing which either one of them could control.

To me this seems to be the worst form of discrimination, for it is completely unfounded and truly morally malevolent.

<comment><USER4> Descrimination happens on broad characteristics (sex, race,etc) because that's how people descriminate. The central issue is that they descriminate unfairly and that the scope is broad. It's an empirical phenomena rather than a theoretical one. There are laws in many places that protect some characteristics. The laws are reactionary and there to fix an empirically scoped problem.

Positive descrimination aims to fix a similar problem with a different prescription.

<comment><USER3> > It's an empirical phenomena rather than a theoretical one.

Agree.

> The laws are reactionary and there to fix an empirically scoped problem. The > laws are reactionary and there to fix an empirically scoped problem.

Again agree with the statement. Its the scope definition that I think is ill- defined, and in the main, my point is that the actual repercussions of these laws on individuals are ignored. If groups had feelings and emotions and human rights positive discrimination would make more sense. However, only individuals have feelings, desires, a sense of moral right and wrong, and without knowing any details how can someone punish one individual and reward another based off of nothing either of those individuals can control and while simultaneously knowing no relevant details about the actual context in which the supposed "fairness" action should take place?

Imagine in a society the distribution of people of attribute X has a lower mean educational attainment than those of Y and that both distributions are normal - this is the empirical datum. As a legislator you see this datum and think its horrible, as you rightly would, and so you enact some positive discrimination laws which make it more difficult for Y's to get accepted into and graduate from schools and easier for X's to get accepted into and graduate from schools. This all seems fine and in a few years perhaps the distributions close in on each other. The actual question is this: was that a morally and ethically good thing to do?

How can you find out? You could look at the group distributions and you might be happy, but I think this ignores the ethic responsibility a society has to being just and fair towards every individual in a like manner. Thus if Bob has a score of 250 and Jane has a score of 300 on a collegiate entrance exam - ceteris paribus - then Jane should be admitted to the school irrespective of her being a member of set Y because to not do so is to act out unfairly against a real individual, who has done nothing to deserve this, who has feelings and a right to self-actualization of her own.

At the very least, each society should look at the effects positive discrimination laws have on real individuals, detailed subcategories based on controllable factors such as personality, skills, etc - instead of groups, and honestly weigh the costs. As a last example, how many Asians get turned down each year who would otherwise have been admitted to ivy league schools and made better lives for themselves and their families if it were not for the unfortunate fact that they were arbitrarily shoved to some group labeled Asians, which had been assigned higher entrance exams scores than the rest of the applicants, and their worth weighted heavily based on this group assignment? Is this fair and justifiable at the level of the individual applicant?

<comment><USER4> Having to hire 30% women and how you choose to find the right ones is unrelated.

Again descrimination happens categorically. The positive descrimination also happens categorically offsets that.

I get your point about individuals but talking about means is not the same as talking about the emotions of groups (as if they could have them). I think "levelling playing fields" is a better metaphor.

Just as the best boxer doesn't win every fight, policy hopes for fairer outcomes in the main. Often positive descrimination policy is introduced based on measurably successful precedent set elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My answer is "i dont know and i dont understand it either". But I know there would be a public witch hunt if someone posted an ad that they are looking only for white males.

</comment><comment><USER6> Look at the footer for [REDACTED]: This program and all offers related to it are void where prohibited or restricted by law or where operation of the program would violate any law or right. All participants in the program must agree to the terms and conditions of the program which will be provided to the selected applicants.

;)

Though it isn't illegal..

Here's my economics 2 cents on discrimination: if "white" firms discriminate against minorities, the result is for them to behave as if they would rather pay their own money (the savings not spent on costly searches by successfully hiring an employee/having more business partners available) just to avoid transactions with members of a community. The tendency, then, is for them to prosper less than the non-anti-minority firms, so over the long term the discriminatory element of the economy just decreases more and more over time.

However if you go ahead and do the _opposite_ , namely increasing diversity in a sector typically overrepresented by whites (compared to composition of national demographics) so that it matches the nation's diversity, I think there are two benefits for the corporations: one, the direct benefit of being able to promote their diversity initiatives as a type of signaled altruism which could be attractive to potential future interns, and two, the indirect, long-term benefit of having greater access to a population whose compensation is often much cheaper. The programs may be instituted with good in mind, but I remain cynical that there aren't also special interests who realize they can invest in making this a common practice now, just so the price to hire a STEM employee in the future decreases greatly as the pool of applicants is much much less limited.

As for the morality of the "virtue signalling" and underhanded & cynical investments... I don't think is so bad. The only time poorer minorities significantly 'catch up' with the opportunities to the majority's wealth, and social capital in general, is during times of war. Since I don't think war is preferable to diversity initiatives, I think these things do more good in the long term.

(I say all of this as a minority, too, but opportunities given only to those allowed to bear "true authentic identities from wounds of history" leave me incredibly skeptical nowadays, much more than they used to)

Would you say that your country is one where, if discrimination happens, it's mostly like "whites forbidding nonwhites" instead of "whites compensating lack of nonwhites"? I wouldn't be surprised if a good deal of the reason desegregation took ~100 years after the abolition of slavery to become law is because the economy had a selection pressure for that, regardless of hostilities...</comment>


Ask HN: Any advice from developers who started their careers later in life? - J-dawg I finally got my first web developer role this year, at the age of 33. I now spend my days feeling overwhelmed and struggling to keep up with my team, feeling like I annoy everyone else (who are all about 10 years younger than me) with my constant questions. I'm starting to think the team would be more productive without me, given the slow pace of my work and the amount of help I need.
I find myself filled with regret that I didn't start this career earlier, and beginning to wonder whether I'll ever be any good at it. I think this anxiety is becoming a problem in itself - I feel exhausted, struggle to concentrate and find myself procrastinating even when I have lots of work to do. I'd seriously consider quitting if I had anywhere else to go.
Have any HN-ers experienced this and got through it? I could really do with hearing some positive stories from anyone who came to the career later in life or from an unconventional background. <comment><AUTHOR> I started early (first program at 10, first tech job at 15, first full-time programming job at 19), but I've had to reinvent myself about 3 times, with the desktop->web transition in 2005, startup->Google transition in 2009, and now getting into mobile & such in 2015. Each time, I was like "Aw shit, all the stuff I spent my life learning is useless. I wish I'd gotten into this 5 years ago."

A few things to think about:

1.) Don't define yourself by the specific concrete skills that you know. Instead, define yourself by your ability to learn, to pick up new skills, and to solve problems. There will always be new problems, but as long as you always have an ability to learn, you'll be able to overcome them.

2.) Your past career isn't wasted, you just don't know how it'll be useful yet. Steve Jobs mentioned this in his commencement speech at Stanford [1]: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. "

3.) At least you're better off than all the folks who _haven 't_ yet realized that software is eating the world, and will be coming to web/mobile/whatever development in the future. It's hard now, but in a year when you're a very competent web developer and explaining how things work to the newbies, you'll be glad you put in the effort now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, forgot the footnote:

[1] [http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> You may have been in the work force for longer than your peers, but you're still green in this new career track. You'll just have to accept that you're going to get a little under foot from time to time. This is why you get to make so much more later :)

Early in my career I also felt overwhelmed, you get this feeling that there's so much to learn and almost no time. What if you spend a month training on Angular only to find it's out of date?? My advice, don't worry about that. Even if that happened, the knowledge is still useful because either (A. the release docs of the next version will be enough to get you up to speed) or (B. you've just been exposed to one approach of doing things and you will see this re-surface at a latter point.)

Take one piece of technology or programming technique you're using or need to know in your current job, get some books, training videos, etc. and learn it well, then move on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a young dev (26) that works with a lot of older developers (40-50) rather new to the field. My biggest annoyance with the older inexperienced devs is that they DON'T ask questions resulting in very bad design decisions. Keep asking questions but maybe frame them differently. i.e. instead of "How do I do this?" say "I'm planning on implementing it this way, do you think this will work or is there a better way?" This shows that you did some research and value their opinion.

</comment><comment><USER4> Lots of good advice here. I myself don't have any advice, but I'd like to pass one that I got from a ridiculously smart engineer few years ago. He told me to "learn something of everything and everything of something" \- what he meant was, have a broad knowledge of many many topics (breadth) plus deep knowledge of a few topics (depth)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ugh... I'm 36 and--according to Timehop on Facebook--just hit my 3 year anniversary of "Hmm, I wonder what it would be like to learn to code"? I have a good web developer job, but I hear everything you're saying. I feel the same way, and for people who say "age is just a number," yeah, sure, but it really can be grating to have to constantly be asking kids 10-15 years younger than me for help. I could have written your post--I'm literally procrastinating right now by writing this (despite having a million things to do and accomplishing NOTHING today) and I had to convince myself not to just walk out of my job in frustration an hour ago.

So yeah, no advice to give you other than to tell you that I understand, you're not alone, and let's hang in there together.

<comment> J-dawg I really appreciate you saying that! Deep down I know I'm not the only one, but it's nice to have it confirmed. Yep, let's hang in there together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not so much advice, but do realise you are in double jeopardy.

Firstly you are new to being a developer, and all of the miscellaneous information you need to know to do that job well which you will learn much of in your first year.

Secondly you are new to that company and that team, and knowledge of how THEY do things and who to ask.

The second problem applies for experience developers like myself who have been doing it over 10 years. When an experienced dev changes jobs it is hard. Especially as most companies treat experienced devs like contractors and expect them to hit the ground running.

If you persevere I believe it will become a lot easier after the first 12 months in both aspects. Just keep grinding and it will be very rewarding.

</comment><comment><USER7> First off, a massive congratulations to you on your first web developer role! OUTSTANDING! There are dreamers, and there are doers... and clearly, you are a DOER. BRING IT... I'm getting motivated just thinking about how hard you've already worked in the lab to GET TO WHERE YOU ARE NOW!

I'll try to hit most of your key points:

1\. _" [...] at the age of 33."_

I would encourage you to forget about age. It's just a number. In reality, the clock is ticking for all of us, so I think it's more important to focus on _right now._ Work to live in the moment. Some started early, some started late. I'm older than you, and I just published my first game for iOS in January, in Swift, which was an entirely new language when I started with Xcode 6 Beta 1. So, again, it's just a number. You are bringing the thunder RIGHT NOW, and that's what matters. I can't stress this enough. Sure, wouldn't it be grand if you had started on a Commodore 64 when you were 12? Well, that's not the case, so you do what it takes, you do the work [1], you build that wall of knowledge brick by brick, and you make it happen for yourself.

2\. _" I now spend my days feeling overwhelmed and struggling [...]"_

To be honest, you're not alone. When you are learning something new, this is the nature of the learning curve. You just have to keep building that wall, one brick at a time. Do the work. It's the only way to move forward, the only way to hone your craft. You have to keep driving through.

3\. _" I annoy everyone else (who are all about 10 years younger than me) with my constant questions."_

There is nothing wrong with asking questions. However, you have to know how to ask the right questions and work within the schedules of your colleagues. That is to say, the right questions are, for example, questions about the project, the architecture of the system, etc. For these, work to carve out time with the colleague(s) that can answer these questions, so that you aren't hitting them up in a way that breaks everyone's flow. The "wrong" questions, if you will, could be, "How do I do X in language Y?" Those types of questions are best answered by you doing your due-diligence and off-hours study.

4\. _" I find myself filled with regret that I didn't start this career earlier [...]"_

See point 1 above. We've all played this game. We all have regrets. I wish I would have had kids earlier than I did, for example. But, guess what? I can't change the past... I can only drive forward and GAIN GROUND. So, you'll never win the "Regret Game." You can't win against yourself. Dr. Seuss said it best in, "Oh, The Places You'll Go!" (Please read it if you haven't; it's absolutely wonderful.) Here's the quote: "I'm afraid that sometimes you'll play lonely games too. Games you can't win 'cause you'll play against you." You are striving to evolve and striving to do the best that you can, and any decision that you make will ipso facto be made with the most up to date and diligent decision-making faculties that you can muster at the time. Therefore, you were right for what you believed to be right, in the moment that you made the decision, and that is all that will ever matter; strive to let go of the anchor of regret.

5\. _" I'd seriously consider quitting if I had anywhere else to go."_

I would encourage you to keep grinding, keep learning. You have to embrace the grind. I know it's rough. I've been there; I think we've all been there at some point, to be perfectly honest. But, in some sense, if you do leave, you may find yourself at exactly the same place, in the sense that... yes, you may be in a new job, with new people, new surroundings and perhaps new geography, but you will still be the same technically, that is, struggling to get your grounding and learning the craft. So, it may _feel_ like changing will help, but I would encourage you to carefully evaluate that decision before taking any action.

I wish you all the best.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076143)

<comment> J-dawg This is awesome, thank you. It's weird how good it feels having a complete stranger pay me a compliment. Thanks for all the advice.

<comment><USER7> The honor is mine. Thank you for posting and allowing me to be a small part of a much greater conversation.

Keep hanging in there. Remember how hard you have worked, but also know that there is more work to be done; it's the same for all of us, no matter where we are on the path.

I love this quote from Carlos Castaneda. It reminds me that it's a life-long process:

 _" To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other."_

<comment> J-dawg That's a great quote, and so are all the other ones on your profile!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I annoy everyone else (who are all about 10 years younger than me) with my > constant questions.

Are these technical questions or domain related questions ? If it's technical questions, I would highly recommend you to get books or videos equip yourself against these new challenges. I'd also recommend you to pick-up(ex:jquery) one area and go in-depth.

Its not hard to learn anything, If you put enough effort.

Honestly, I'll be annoyed with constant questions too, I expect others to do some basic google search or wiki and spend at-least 20 minutes before coming up with questions.

p.s : I'm more or less at your state, but i have different problem. Managers are telling me to 'go and ask questions to everybody' but I'm like 'I don't want to question without having basic understanding of what it is!' I'll spend my time understanding the problem first before I can seek them solutions.

<comment> J-dawg I possibly wasn't completely fair to myself when I said I constantly ask questions. I don't just blurt stuff out, I always use Stack Overflow etc first. I think the problem might be that where I work there is no technical management, we're just allocated work by a project manager so there's no discussion of what approach to take, and nobody reviews the code I write. My fellow team members, afaik, have never been told it's their job to answer my questions or mentor me. So it's understandable they might be annoyed. None of them have ever complained, I just feel like I'm probably pretty annoying.

I'd really like to work somewhere a with a little more focus on training and mentoring, with code reviews and someone officially assigned to mentor me. But I'm probably being naive to think places like that exist (or they do exist, but wouldn't consider employing me!)

<comment><USER8> Yes, there are lot of work places where code reviews are must. I think, you should suggest your team/manager to start using code review boards like [https://www.reviewboard.org](https://www.reviewboard.org) that should solve most of your problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "I feel exhausted, struggle to concentrate and find myself procrastinating.."

That sounds like the problem. Not that you are 33 or your co-workers are younger. You should find out what is up with the concentration and procrastination, take steps to address that, and forget about age. At 33 I don't think that is the issue.

</comment><comment><USER10> Check out this talk about giving & getting technical help: [http://blog.sashalaundy.com/talks/asking- helping/](http://blog.sashalaundy.com/talks/asking-helping/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I started when 28 (30 now).

Sounds like you might hate where you are currently working.

I approach software engineering with the mentality that I am always behind, and need to keep learning. Granted, I believe I've generally chosen my jobs well. My first one had me mentored heavily - later ones, I've took on more responsibility.

Remember this - as a junior developer, a lot of your role is to learn & develop. The company is investing in you in part (or it should be). Just focus on improving your craft, and be humble.

</comment><comment><USER12> You need a talk with your immediate manager.</comment>


Are TUI email clients dead in 2020? - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_(email_client) <comment><USER2> Drew Devault promotes using aerc as a text email client, especially for working with git patches - [https://aerc-mail.org/](https://aerc-mail.org/)

<comment><USER2> typo: "Drew DeVault" has a "V" not "v".

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Back in the days before the popularisation of webmail I used (Al)pine email client and found it way more convenient to ssh into a box to manage emails vs managing desktops email clients on different local machines.

For the past 8 years or so I've been stuck using gmail and have tried a few desktop clients, all of them feeling a little sluggish (especially electron apps).

Do pine/mutt have real users in 2020? Are they exclusively for the super nerdy who have complex configurations to enable them to manage their attachments on remote servers?

What email client do you use?

</comment><comment><USER3> Please don't editorialize titles because it is discouraged by the site guidelines.</comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to Slinkset - Hotaru, Pligg, others? - <AUTHOR>

We're currently using Slinkset for our "Hacker News for Healthcare" site (http://thehealthful.com). Slinkset is fairly limited in its ability to change the site layout, match RSS feeds to categories, etc.) What are good alternatives to Slinkset? So far, we've come across Hotaru and Pligg.<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> <http://noostr.com> is another one (my project, actually). The current version works and is customizable, but the upcoming 0.7 has a lot of new features. It should be release at the end of the week.

<comment><AUTHOR> How does this compare with Slinkset, Hotaru and Pligg?

<comment><USER2> Noostr is missing a few key features right now - plugins, pagination (yep), customizable URLs, categories, etc., so it's hard to do a direct comparison between them all.

However, as Noostr is updated, things like Digg-style voting and front-page functionality will be implemented via plugin, pagination is coming in the next version, plugin hooks will be made available to authors, themeing becomes even easier (you get full control over HTML and CSS), configurable URL rewriting, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


The Temporarily Disappearing Estate Tax  - <AUTHOR> http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/12/temporarily-disappearing-estate-tax.html

<comment><USER2> The problem with the estate tax is that it was passed in the name of getting back at plutocrats but has worked over the years mostly to make it difficult to keep family businesses intact when the founder dies.

Insane as was the political compromise that led to this final 1-year "repeal" of the tax, this compromise likely will lead (assuming half-reasonable action by Congress this next year) to having a more lasting exemption amount that gives significant relief to many in the middle class beyond 2010. The family business problem will remain. Thus, one should be able to pass, e.g., a $3M estate to heirs without problem but, if you get to $10M and up, there will be a high tax hit.

Still a highly unsatisfactory situation for the public, and one that has the politicians squirming as well, especially since the estate tax (speaking in _relative_ terms only) does not really raise that much in revenue for the federal government.

<comment><USER3> _The problem with the estate tax is that it was passed in the name of getting back at plutocrats but has worked over the years mostly to make it difficult to keep family businesses intact when the founder dies._

From the article itself: "Currently, the tax applies to about _5,500_ taxpayers a year." (Emphasis mine.)

5500\. We're not talking about upper-middle-class family business owners. We're talking about people who are seriously rich.

 _Still a highly unsatisfactory situation for the public, and one that has the politicians squirming as well, especially since the estate tax (speaking in relative terms only) does not really raise that much in revenue for the federal government._

This is because the estate tax threshold has been getting higher in every year since 2001. If Bush had left it alone, this would not be the case. Also, there are good reasons for an inheritance tax aside from revenue generation.

<comment><USER4> > From the article itself: "Currently, the tax applies to about 5,500 > taxpayers a year." (Emphasis mine.)

> We're not talking about upper-middle-class family business owners. We're > talking about people who are seriously rich.

Actually, we're not.

The super rich aren't subject to the estate tax because they've arranged their estates so it doesn't apply.

For example, neither Buffet's nor Gate's estates will pay a dime.

You remember Buffet. He's the guy who pushes the estate tax while selling insurance to help people pay it.

<comment><USER5> Well, that's not really the gist of the debate going on here. Gates and Buffet have given away the vast majority of their money to charity. That's very different than attempting to work around the estate tax through insurance, trusts, etc in order to pass as much money as possible on to your heirs.

<comment><USER4> Want to bet whether their heirs benefit from those "charities"?

<comment><USER6> Sure. Why not? "Want to bet" isn't really an argument in any shape or form.

Edit: Interesting. After looking into the Foundation ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_&_Melinda_Gates_Founda...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_&_Melinda_Gates_Foundation)) I've actually become incredibly impressed by the transparency and general properness with which they have composed themselves. Given the track record of the foundation, I see absolutely no reason to suspect them of foul play now or in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is one of those evil taxes - you pay a life time of taxes and accumulate stuff, and then when you die, it gets dinged another 55%.

<comment><USER8> It seems like one of the least evil taxes to me. $3.5 million or more worth of assets are absolutely irrelevant to a corpse. So the great evil is that the descendants of someone who amassed a great fortune only get $1.5+ million that they did absolutely nothing to earn, after presumably having every conceivable advantage growing up? To me that seems much less evil than taking a fraction of what a living person actually worked to earn and might still need.

Of course, I usually reserve the word "evil" for killing, raping, arson, dragons, Satan and that kind of thing. Taxes seem to have a much less dramatic effect on their victims.

<comment><USER9> This looks at the tax from the perspective of those who will inherit, and concludes that since spoiled kids don't deserve big inheritances, the estate tax is fair, just and moral. But what about where the money goes? Does the government deserve it? I don't think so. One might be able to make an argument that the money should go to society, because the system is what made the creation of wealth possible. But that's not what the estate tax does, the estate tax takes the money to the government. Arguing that spoiled kids have not earned it is a lot easier than arguing that the government is deserving.

What about looking at the tax from the perspective of the individual who created the wealth? What the tax does is encumber the creator of the wealth from deploying it as he/she sees fit. Why do we want to encumber creators of wealth?

TO CLARIFY: the gift taxes that are part of the estate tax complex encumber creators, not just corpses. If you remove the gift tax, I have no problem with the estate tax because nobody would ever pay it.

<comment><USER10> > "Arguing that spoiled kids have not earned it is a lot easier than arguing > that the government is deserving."

Isn't "the government is deserving" the crux of the Gates/Buffett argument? That government has provided them, as wealthy people, far greater services than the average person? (In the form of providing safety, protecting property, supplying an educated workforce, enforcing market rules, etc)

The general idea being that you simply _can't_ become fabulously wealthy via anything short of barbarism without government, so the government _does_ deserve something more to further these services that they're providing?

<comment><USER9> If Gates/Buffett really believe that the government is deserving, why have they arranged their affairs to pay as little tax as possible? Including (but not limited to) essentially zero estate tax?

Forgive me if I'm not convinced by an argument that suggests that others should be compelled to do something the proponents of the argument relentlessly avoid.

<comment><USER10> To be fair, I think their argument is more accurately phrased: the government is _more_ deserving than the heirs (after a reasonable threshold, natch). Or, more generally, _society_ is more deserving.

I don't see a logical conflict in their preference for private charity over government redistribution.

Honestly, I don't think _any_ proponent of the estate tax would mind if the practical result of a high estate tax was that the rich just gifted their estates to private charity to spite the government. Government is just the only group with a sufficient cudgel to enforce the practice and sufficient reach to ensure that otherwise-undirected estates do give back to society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The estate shouldn't be taxed at all, but the beneficiaries should pay tax on what they receive: at 0% for charities, a low rate for otherwise poor beneficiaries, a high rate for already rich beneficiaries.

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't a lot of people establish a living trust to avoid it anyway? It would be interesting to see what percentage of people who qualify to pay an estate tax actually pay the full amount.

<comment><USER13> Article says 5500 average per year fall into current estate tax. Estates taxed at 45% beyond the $3.5 million threshold (2009).

2010, tax is 15% of all assets without further action by Congress (or retroactive action).

In 2011, 55% tax beyond $1 million. Which impacts significantly more (cite?) than 5500 estates. $1 million includes property, fixtures, assets, cash.

Shame that tax code will (no doubt) impact decisions of quite a few terminal patients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _One wealthy, terminally ill real-estate entrepreneur has told his doctors he is determined to live until the law changes.

"Whenever he wakes up," says his lawyer, "He says: 'What day is it? Is it Jan. 1 yet?'"..._

I've never felt so comfortable calling a dying man an asshole.

His only concern is whether he can hand off a cozy life to his spoiled progeny. Amazing. May he live into 2011.

<comment><USER14> That's an interesting take on it.

I read it as a father desperately trying to make sure his affairs are in order so his children can have the benefit of what he worked for.

My father (a teacher, so not a rich man by anyone's standards) made quite a few unusual financial moves, quietly, before he passed, to make sure my mother was in a safe place financially (who, given the social norms of their time, never really dealt head-on with the family finances prior to his death). The rest of my siblings and I had already moved on to build our own lives, he wanted to make sure his wife was cared for when he couldn't do it himself.

That you'd so easily begrudge a dying man looking out for his family at the end of his life without reading more than a soundbite in an article like this says more about you than about him, I'm afraid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The obvious conclusion:

The Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead.

[a man puts a body on the cart]

Large Man with Dead Body: Here's one.

The Dead Collector: That'll be ninepence.

The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm not dead.

The Dead Collector: What?

Large Man with Dead Body: Nothing. There's your ninepence.

The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm not dead.

The Dead Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.

Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is.

The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm not.

The Dead Collector: He isn't.

Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.

The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm getting better.

Large Man with Dead Body: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.

The Dead Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.

The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I don't want to go on the cart.

Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, don't be such a baby.

The Dead Collector: I can't take him.

The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I feel fine.

Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, do me a favor.

The Dead Collector: I can't.

Large Man with Dead Body: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.

The Dead Collector: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.

Large Man with Dead Body: Well, when's your next round?

The Dead Collector: Thursday.

The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I think I'll go for a walk.

Large Man with Dead Body: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?

The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I feel happy. I feel happy.

[the Dead Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then silences the Body with his a whack of his club]

Large Man with Dead Body: Ah, thank you very much.

The Dead Collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.

Large Man with Dead Body: Right.

</comment><comment><USER16> Estate taxes are retarded to begin with, this is just ridiculous. Why don't these people just give as a gift all their stuff to their kids while they are alive? Canada might have a 5% GST tax, but we don't have any of this nonsense.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the US, all you pay is the inheritance/estate tax - you don't get double taxed on the actual inheritance that you file. In Canada, while there isn't an estate tax, you get taxed on the gain as if it is income and so you pay the income tax.

If you're going to compare apples to apples, the top marginal tax rates are about 45-50%+ in Canada ([http://www.aurorainternational.net/Maximum_Personal_Marginal...](http://www.aurorainternational.net/Maximum_Personal_Marginal_Income_Tax_Rates.htm)) - and given the estate taxes in the US apply to anyone inheriting above a million, it's relatively equivalent for those people while it's considerably worse in Canada for everyone else given that considerably more people inherit less than a million. Another point of comparison - highest marginal tax rates start at 126K (Canadian) while you have to make over 370K USD to start getting charged the highest marginal tax rates.

Addendum - re: gifts - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States> \- "the gift tax prevents avoidance of the estate tax should a person want to give away his/her estate."</comment></comment>


Modern Language Wars: A Look at PHP, Python and Ruby on Rails - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/19396

<comment><USER2> This "article" is just a repost of infographics from <http://www.udemy.com/blog/modern-language-wars/> (Nov 16, 2012). The infographics are pretty but of questionable value.</comment>


Hate those pesky config files in your project root directory? Try this - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/karagenit/.ls <comment><USER2> This is like those code obfuscation contests for project structure. Personally I have enough to keep mental notes on, but it does sound like a great prank to play on my brother.

In fact, now that's my new litmus test for 'is this a good solution'.</comment>


Divine Madness (a.k.a. Crazy Wisdom) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_madness <comment><AUTHOR> > These behaviors may seem to be symptoms of mental illness to mainstream > society, but are a form of religious ecstasy, or deliberate "strategic, > purposeful activity," "by highly self-aware individuals making strategic use > of the theme of madness in the construction of their public personas".

i found this bit really interesting...</comment>


Cryptography That Can't Be Hacked - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-evercrypt-library-creates-hacker-proof-cryptography-20190402/ <comment><USER2> Ok, so the title is misleading.

There's no new crypto here, so it's susceptible to the same attacks as rsa,ecc, etc.

The claim appears to be a formal proof of no side channel leaks. I'd need much more time and interest to try and understand the mechanisms they use to prevent such leaks :)</comment>


Modern JavaScript features you might have missed - chupa-chups http://www.breck-mckye.com/blog/2019/10/modern-javascript-features-you-may-have-missed/ <comment><AUTHOR> I actually really enjoy coding in modern JavaScript. All these little conveniences have really added up. It's not perfect, but no language is.</comment>