African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard English with Mistakes (1999) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://web.stanford.edu/%7Ezwicky/aave-is-not-se-with-mistakes.pdf <comment><USER2> There is a very big aspect that people overlook in this conversation.

There is what is known as the "dialect of power" and in the US that is Standard American English.

It's not necessarily "wrong" to speak AAVE but in doing so, you will disqualify yourself from opportunities that could otherwise be open to you based on your education and/or experience.

If someone calls you to schedule a job interview and you don't sound the way you're expected to sound when you speak, they'll mentally cross you off of the short list before you ever cross the threshold of their place of business.

As an African American man, I'll admit that when I'm exclusively in the presence of other black people, I'll code switch and speak in a way that I never would at work or in mixed company.

I have a very Anglicized name and I speak Standard American English. As a result of that, people who haven't previously met me in person are sometimes surprised to learn that I'm not a white guy.

Being inclusive is a worthy goal but I think that education should stress the importance of speaking Standard American English because it's necessary to do so if one wants to be successful in this society.

<comment><USER3> You shouldn't have to.

I recently started a role where I work very closely with a guy from southern Kansas. He speaks with an accent that I would associate with hicks, farmers, non-intellectuals. And true to form, he was raised on a farm. But he's smart, hard working and great to work with. Every day that we work together, I'm learning things that I wouldn't have otherwise understood.

No one criticizes him for speaking with his dialect of English. He doesn't have to code switch. He speaks the way he speaks, he's understood and respected. That's what's different about AAVE. It's not just that it's not the dialect of power, it's a dialect people seem to go out of their way to not respect.

<comment><USER4> I'd disagree with you that speaking with a southern twang doesn't disqualify a person. I came out of deep East Texas and I have a bit of a drawl in my voice that comes out when I'm tired or stressed but for the most part, I intentionally speak as closely to SAE as possible. Because people do disqualify me and I think you may have judged your friend too. You say you associate his accent with people considered non-intellectuals? That's exactly what LordKano is saying he tries to avoid by speaking SAE in the business realm. Because he believes someone may make the judgement call that he is unintelligent because of the way he speaks, just like you associate speaking like a redneck to unintellicence.

I don't think this is about dialects being associated with any sort of people group. I think it's about having a standard way of speaking in a professional environment. And deviating from that may cause some people to have a negative bias against you.

<comment><USER3> > he believes someone may make the judgement call that he is unintelligent > because of the way he speaks, just like you associate speaking like a > redneck to unintelligence

That's a really great point. The very fact that I _do_ mentally associate my friends accent that way is part of the problem. It's a problem that I hope I am getting better at overcoming.

I'd rather by a hypocrite and say it's wrong than agree to the idea that it's okay to need to modify the way you speak to avoid being disqualified by society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Norwegians spend the late 1800s and early 1900s quarreling amongst themselves what should be the standard for written Norwegian. Should they take the heavily Danish-influenced written language common in cities, or should they use something closer to the dialects spoken in the rural areas?

Eventually, their parliament ruled that Norway shall have two official written languages and all government documents will be published in both.

For example here are their parliament websites in both Nynorsk ("New Norwegian") and Bokmål ("Book tongue")

[https://www.stortinget.no/nn/](https://www.stortinget.no/nn/)

[https://www.stortinget.no/no/](https://www.stortinget.no/no/)

Estimates vary, but maybe about 12% of Norwegians use Nynorsk as their primary language, and 88% are Bokmål users.

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

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokm%C3%A5l](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokm%C3%A5l)

<comment><USER6> These are writing systems, not languages. As I understand it all Norwegian speakers _speak_ the same language, they just represent that language differently when writing it down.

Interesting but not that similar.

<comment><USER5> > As I understand it all Norwegian speakers _speak_ the same language

I am not Norwegian so I might not get this entirely correct. The British have "BBC English" or "Oxford English" and the Americans have "Hollywood English", but Norway doesn't have such a unifying standard for the spoken language. People speak their own dialects, and the different dialects can vary quite a lot.

 _There is no standard dialect for the Norwegian language as a whole, and all dialects are by now mutually intelligible. Hence, widely different dialects are used frequently and alongside each other, in almost every aspect of society. Criticism of a dialect may be considered criticism of someone 's personal identity and place of upbringing, and is considered impolite. Not using one's proper dialect would be bordering on awkward in many situations, as it may signal a wish to take on an identity or a background which one does not have._

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a very revealing quote:

> No dialects in southern Britain (or America, which was settled from there) > have a _g_ after a velar nasal at the end of any word anymore. So it is true > that in the speech of Queen Elizabeth II, the _g_ sound that used to end > _sing_ has been lost. But no one calls the queen sloppy or mistaken in her > speech. Why? Because there is a double standard here. When Standard Southern > British English introduces a simplifying change in the rules of punctuation > (like "do not pronounce the _g_ sound after a velar nasal except in the > middle of a word"), it is respected as the standard way to speak, but when > AAVE introduces such a change (like "do not pronounce a stop at the end of a > word after another consonant with the same voicing"), it is unfairly > regarded as sloppiness.

I found this article as a whole to expand my appreciation for this dialect; there is a lot more logic to it than I had assumed. In particular, the negative concord (which had often bothered me) turns out to be the same as what I already use in French.

</comment><comment><USER8> Am I understanding correctly that this paper is making the argument that because AAVE follows an identifiable set of grammatical rules, it is a dialect rather than an aberration?

I don't have any opinion on that, I just wanted to make sure I understood the basic premise.

<comment><USER9> Sure, and many rules of AAVE are more consistent.

For instance take the following words in standard English:

        * yourself
        * myself
        * ourselves
        * himself
        * itself

One of these things is not like the other! All of these take the form of possive + "self," except "himself." And sure enough, in AAVE we have "hisself" instead. A more logical, consistent replacement.

<comment><USER10> You omitted 2 of the reflexive pronouns. Only the 1st and 2nd person forms use the possessive:

      * myself, ourselves, yourself.

_All_ of the 3rd person forms use the personal pronoun:

      * themselves, himself, herself, itself

Does AAVE also use "theirselves" ?

<comment><USER11> This article [http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/7610/volumes/v21/NA-21](http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/7610/volumes/v21/NA-21) claims that AAVE uses "theirselves".

A quick search on Twitter suggests that "theirselves" is indeed used by people who use "hisself", but perhaps half an order of magnitude _less_ than "themselves".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Social trends in America are never framed in terms of class. Instead, we have to reach for other dimensions, in this case race.

We could say it's plain racism that keeps AAVE down. But it's such an easy theory to falsify: it predicts that white non-standard English would be accepted at job interviews and in press rooms.

It isn't. So it looks like race is one explainer, but not the whole story. It could be a combination of things, except Ockham sneers at those, especially when the elephant in the room—class—gets us so much further than race.

<comment><USER13> Occam's razor can be a useful tool, but to conflate class with race ignores that in many ways, there is no economic status that can make black people as accepted and welcome as white people. Race is an important factor that can have more impact than class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's pretty hard to initially digest, but when you think about it, right and wrong with language is almost entirely just convention. The difference between what we consider 'bad' English and dialects of English is dubious at best.

<comment><USER15> Can you make a further argument for that? You're basically dismissing the article, but you're not offering anything to justify that.

<comment><USER16> By what logic could any convention of spoken language be objectively correct?

<comment><USER17> I did not major in linguistics but I had some very engaging linguistics professors at Rice. Linguists consider themselves to be descriptive and typical language teachers in grade school to be prescriptive. In other words, linguists take pride in describing what native speakers actually do in practice rather than what they are instructed to do. So if they catch a native speaker doing something the "wrong" way they'll classify it as an error only if native speakers will agree that the example in question was a mistake because it doesn't make sense in the dialect. If native speakers agree that whatever the speaker did actually does make sense to them, e.g. they're fine with the usage of "ain't" or split infinitives or whatever in everyday speech, then linguists will consider that to be a genuine example of the dialect. But linguists are quick to point out that what is correct changes all the time because words and phrases used by native speakers naturally erode and morph and new ones are adopted, and trying to nail down what is correct is futile.

<comment><USER14> Basically I look at it this way: in reality, the coordination of 'correct' language is a practical consideration, and it is an error to consider it a matter of prestige, as if it's decidedly unintelligent to deviate from the established norms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just finished the Audible version of The Great Courses' audiobook on linguistics, and they spent a chapter on this subject. A lot of the same elements in this paper are pointed out in the lecture, which may indicate the arguments in this paper were part of the foundational elements of that particular lecture.

One of the things I found fascinating was that several of these grammatical elements are similar to peripheral English accents of Ireland, Cornwall, or York. The lecture noted that many of the indentured servants from Britain would be quartered alongside slaves, and that the strongest language reinforcement comes from people you live and work alongside.

<comment><USER19> If you found that interesting, you'd probably also like "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell.

A major theme is how major elements of 'ghetto' culture actually derive from the North-Britons and Scot's these people lived near.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Xidnaf has a good video introducing AAVE from a linguistics perspective.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkzVOXKXfQk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkzVOXKXfQk)

</comment><comment><USER3> Languages change, evolve, and split into new languages. This has gone on forever- why would it stop now?

<comment><USER21> It causes segregation based on race; Black people speak this language, white people speak this one. We're trying to bring these groups together, diving their language won't help at all.

<comment><USER22> I'm from rural Arkansas, and from my perspective, the dialect that is spoken there shares more in common with AAVE than standard English.

The difference that I see is that I was expected to learn and speak standard English in a professional environment while _the perception among my peers_ seems to be that those who natively speak AAVE expect their dialect to be accepted in all settings.

Note that I was careful to say that this is my perception of the expectations of others. My experience shows that native AAVE speakers adapt their language in professional circumstances in exactly the same way I adapt my own.

<comment><USER23> I don't understand the "expect" part, but are you trying to describe code- switching?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code- switching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Discussion from last year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030097)

</comment><comment><USER25> The primary purpose of language is understanding. Forking a language to convey some sort of cultural distinction has the unfortunate side effect of making this more difficult.

<comment><USER26> not sure that's the primary purpose. It can also be a very strong way to reinforce / test the boundaries of a group. Do you talk like us or not? Are you one of us? There are a multitude of ways to convey understanding; the _how_ is sometimes more important than the content.

<comment><USER27> Conveying meaning is necessarily more primary than forming group identity simply because "do you talk like us" depends on "us talking to each other" in the first place. It's hard to imagine an evolution where intra-group communication happened as a result of extra-group communication.

<comment><USER28> Right, but here we're talking about understanding in a broader group - specifically, between groups - since that was what dukoid's post was about.

<comment><USER27> Dukoid said the primary purpose of language is not communication (conveying meaning), but intergroup identification. I don't see how this could be possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It is "wrong" because it is not the vernacular of the dominant culture. Just like baggy pants are 'wrong" just because they're not the clothing style of the dominant culture.

Differences arise as a result of segregation, and are then used to justify continuing that segregation. Perhaps "deliberate" is the wrong word here, but certainly expected.

</comment><comment><USER30> Alt-account for privacy. I'm one of the Ebonics kids (Titans where you at?!).

I'd like to add in some context. This all happened during the dot com boom in the late 90s, and things weren't unlike they are now -- massive economic expansion, uneven distribution of benefits, rapidly rising cost of living. Teachers were getting priced out and demanded a raise. The district couldn't afford it, so they asked the fed for ESL funds.

Long story short: funds were denied, teachers went on strike, many of the better ones left the district at the end of the year, and the quality of education received by myself and my peers suffered for it.

Do keep in mind that this is all from the recollections and understanding of my teenage self.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/20/us/agreement-reached-in- oa...](http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/20/us/agreement-reached-in-oakland- school-strike.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> I find it easy to pick up dialects, but most people I know (especially people who've learned English as a second language) have trouble understanding various Southern, various Northern New England, various UK, various New Zealander, various South African, and various Australian accents.

As a matter of efficiency, I figure everyone in North America should master Standard American English (hard r, cot-caught split, pin-pen split) in both speaking and listening, regardless of their home dialect.

<comment><USER32> IME the cot-caught merge is widespread enough that "split" can't be considered a requirement for standard. (Wikipedia says 40% merge, 60% don't.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is eerily reminscent of "Authority and American Usage", a 2001 essay by david foster wallace. The samizdat copy is here: [http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsag...](http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsage.pdf)

Quoting from a section discussing Standard Written English vs. Standard Black English (footnotes omitted):

 _I 'm not trying to suggest here that an effective SWE pedagogy would require teachers to wear sunglasses and call students Dude. What I am suggesting is that the rhetorical situation of a US English class---a class composed wholly of young people whose Group identity is rooted in defiance of Adult Establishment values, plus also composed partly of minorities whose primary dialects are different from SWE---requires the teacher to come up with overt, honest, and compelling arguments for why SWE is a dialect worth learning.

These arguments are hard to make. Hard not intellectually but emotionally, politically. Because they are baldly elitist.[^60] The real truth, of course, is that SWE is the dialect of the American elite. That it was invented, codified, and promulgated by Privileged WASP Males and is perpetuated as "Standard" by same. That it is the shibboleth of the Establishment, and that it is an instrument of political power and class division and racial discrimination and all manner of social inequity. These are shall we say rather delicate subjects to bring up in an English class, especially in the service of a pro-SWE argument, and extra-especially if you yourself are both a Privileged WASP Male and the teacher and thus pretty much a walking symbol of the Adult Establishment. This reviewer's opinion, though, is that both students and SWE are way better served if the teacher makes his premises explicit and his argument overt---plus it obviously helps his rhetorical credibility if the teacher presents himself as an advocate of SWE's utility rather than as some sort of prophet of its innate superiority.

Because the argument for SWE is both most delicate and (I believe) most important with respect to students of color, here is a condensed version of the spiel I've given in private conferences[^61] with certain black students who were (a) bright and inquisitive as hell and (b) deficient in what US higher education considers written English facility:

"I don't know whether anybody's told you this or not, but when you're in a college English class you're basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is called Standard Written English. [Brief overview of major US dialects a la page 98.] From talking with you and reading your first couple essays, I've concluded that your own primary dialect is [one of three variants of SBE common to our region]. Now, let me spell something out in my official teacher-voice: the SBE you're fluent in is different from SWE in all kinds of important ways. Some of these differences are grammatical- for example, double negatives are OK in Standard Black English but not in SWE, and SBE and SWE conjugate certain verbs in totally different ways. Other differences have more to do with style---for instance, Standard Written English tends to use a lot more subordinate clauses in the early parts of sentences, and it sets off most of these early subordinates with commas, and under SWE rules, writing that doesn't do this tends to look "choppy." There are tons of differences like that. How much of this stuff do you already know? [STANDARD RESPONSE = some variation on "I know from the grades and comments on my papers that the English profs here don't think I'm a good writer."] Well, I've got good news and bad news. There are some otherwise smart English profs who aren't very aware that there are real dialects of English other than SWE, so when they're marking up your papers they'll put, like, "Incorrect conjugation" or "Comma needed" instead of "SWE conjugates this verb differently" or "SWE calls for a comma here."That's the good news---it's not that you're a bad writer, it's that you haven't learned the special rules of the dialect they want you to write in. Maybe that's not such good news, that they've been grading you down for mistakes in a foreign language you didn't even know was a foreign language. That they won't let you write in SBE. Maybe it seems unfair. If it does, you're probably not going to like this other news: I'm not going to let you write in SBE either. In my class, you have to learn and write in SWE. If you want to study your own primary dialect and its rules and history and how it's different from SWE, fine---there are some great books by scholars of Black English, and I'll help you find some and talk about them with you if you want. But that will be outside class. In class---in my English class---you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call "Standard White English" because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people. [RESPONSES at this point vary too widely to standardize.] I'm respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is just How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it's racist and unfair and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I'll tell you something---if you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you're going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself. African-Americans who've become successful and important in US culture know this; that's why King's and X's and Jackson's speeches are in SWE, and why Morrison's and Angelou's and Baldwin's and Wideman's and Gates's and West's books are full of totally ass- kicking SWE, and why black judges and politicians and journalists and doctors and teachers communicate professionally in SWE. Some of these people grew up in homes and communities where SWE was the native dialect, and these black people had it much easier in school, but the ones who didn't grow up with SWE realized at some point that they had to learn it and become able to write fluently in it, and so they did. And [STUDENT'S NAME], you're going to learn to use it, too, because I am going to make you."

I should note here that a couple of the students I've said this stuff to were offended---one lodged an Official Complaint---and that I have had more than one colleague profess to find my spiel "racially insensitive." Perhaps you do, too. This reviewer's own humble opinion is that some of the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project of ever really changing them._

</comment><comment><USER34> Reminds me of this -

[https://twitter.com/ads_mdavn/status/890101529914560516](https://twitter.com/ads_mdavn/status/890101529914560516)

</comment><comment><USER35> [deleted]

<comment><USER36> "grammatically incorrect" is an arbitrary value judgment, no matter how much you might assert or concern-troll otherwise.

<comment><USER37> No, it's not. It's just erroneous here; AAVE has an internally consistent grammar just as any other language does. I know quite a few people who code- shift between AAVE and standard American English, just as I do between that and the (admittedly somewhat less different) dialect of my youth.

The remainder of Overtonwindow's comment flows from that error and one other, which is to assume that AAVE is a "degraded" form of standard American English. It is not; it has old and many-branched roots of its own, only some of which lie within American English.

But who knows? Perhaps Overtonwindow is a more accomplished historical linguist than those on whose statements I here rely.

<comment><USER36> Yes, clearly. I just meant "… in a vacuum" or "… with the implicit understanding there is some _true_ grammar". In one sense, yes, utterances/productions can be grammatically incorrect with regard to a particular grammar under discussion, but if those utterances/productions can be said to be a part of that grammar, eventually the grammar needs to change to accurately describe the state of the world.

(Ultimately I have to think some of this comes down to "misperformance" where the speaker _knows_ their production is invalid. If enough speakers "misperform" but begin to hold the idea that these speech acts are not actually invalid, is that what tips the scales in favor of changing a grammar?)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why 21 Days? - <AUTHOR> India has gone into 21 days lockdown. Just curious, why 21 days? <comment><USER2> With three weeks time and enough testing India should be able to get reliable numbers. I guess the three weeks are the minimum time for the lockdown.

</comment><comment><USER3> In Egypt, it is 14 days, but I don't think it is based on any rational thinking :)</comment>


A collection of high performance c-string transformations - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/stringencoders/

<comment><USER2> Does it have UTF / other format support? I really have no use if it doesn't, and I don't see anything mentioning it on the first page.

<comment><USER3> Since it is doing bit manipulation, then probably not. I mean, the toupper function is treating (4) 8 bit chars as one 32 bit uint. Then doing math... so, I assume that it will miss the finer points of I18N.

However, the base64/85 en/decoders should work just fine.

<comment><USER4> And in the same vein as the nginx optimizations suggested in a comment yesterday, it fails on arcitectures that don't support unaligned access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny, but typing CString in google reveals some new interesting products.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great stuff, it's a shame it doesn't work on Windows (yet). Makes me want to spend the rest of my day trying to port it to MSVC.

<comment><USER7> Surely if stdint is all that's missing, <http://code.google.com/p/msinttypes/> will work?

<comment><USER8> We use <http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/pstdint.h> in house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been looking for a high performance toupper lately too.</comment>


In the Large - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2018/04/02/InTheLarge.html <comment><USER2> I often wonder if there's a subconscious bias against large teams that causes some of theee problems.

I know I get uncomfortable with the ineffectiveness of large teams and I've seen half a dozen people do some amazing work a handful of times and my own biases clearly favor moving heaven and earth to keep a dozen people plus support staff as productive as possible.

When someone asks me to work with more people than that, I drag my feet.</comment>


OpenBSD backdoor claims: bugs found during code audit - <AUTHOR> http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/43995-openbsd-backdoor-claims-code-audit-begin

<comment><USER2> Discussion from the submission 4 days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014649></comment>


Ask HN: Wouldn't greymode be better than darkmode? - <AUTHOR> I don't mean the greyscale option in OS, where the whole page is turned to greyscale.
Dark mode is tough to implement, you have to re-design the whole page and it doesn't render well in old type screens (Thinkpad Matte, LCD). To properly view darkmode you need Retina like display.
The strain part is the bright white light, why not just modify that? Turn the white to grey. Renders well on all screens, no need to redesign the page. Plus less strain on the eyes.
Wouldn't that be a better alternative than darkmode? <comment><USER2> You know what I'd like? Not to have to set this stuff individually for every client. I greatly miss the ability to customize my own machine and have most of what was on my screen look the way I liked. The web broke all that; publishers (especially commercial entities) started recruiting designers to make their offerings stand out, and all the good design work that used to go into software UI went towards publishing, turning the internet from the worlds greatest library into the world's largest magazine rack. Ubiquitous video has made it exponentially worse; 9 out of 10 moving images I see are noise trying to sell me something - probably more, in fact.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, that's a much better way. Give the data, the system will render it the way needed.

Even is darkmode, the issue is some rogue sites that manage to escape the browser extension to force darkmode on all sites and comes out all bright. That sudden flash of light just renders me blind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know. Would it? It's hard to answer without links to sites with the same thing rendered both ways.

For what little it's worth I got pushed into VS editor (which shouldn't have taken pushing, it's a great environment) defaulting to darkmode and on less- than-Retina-grade panels I'm enjoying it

</comment><comment><USER4> You'd have to make sure there's still enough contrast. The way book printers deal with the problem is to use unbleached 'natural' paper for long books, instead of bright-white paper. (Not entirely unlike the background color of HN).</comment>


Floor Plan Models - <AUTHOR> http://booktwo.org/notebook/reference-floor-plan-models/ <comment><USER2> My wife and I did this when we were renovating a kitchen. We laid out counters, cabinets and appliances using boxes to get a sense of how much space we'd have walking through the modified layout, and how both sight-lines and light-lines would work with cabinets hung on the walls.

It worked very very well, and the final layout achieved the exact "feel" we'd decided on when iterating over our potential layouts.

<comment><USER3> Brilliant. I'm due for a kitchen renovation soon, care to share your final layout?

<comment><USER2> Honestly, I'm not sure it's be all that much help. Each space is unique, with different challenges and requirements so I recommend you work with what you've got and what you want. In our case, we had a room with multiple entryways, a peninsula that was cutting off the space unnecessarily, and some specific appliance wants. By identifying those problems and design requirements, it helped us come up with the solution that was a huge improvement.

<comment><USER3> Ya, fair enough. I'm wondering if you found any isolated layout relationships that are working really well that could be applied in most layouts? For example, "we wanted the dishwasher behind the sink instead of beside it for XYZ".

I'll share one relationship that I've found I like... in my last two kitchens, I've had everything coffee/tea related in one section. All the coffee/tea kettle/espresso machines are next to each other. All of the coffee supplies and mugs are in the cupboards directly above them and all of this is either next to the sink for using the faucet wand to refill the Keurig or Espresso machine, or next to the fridge to split the water line and divert one water line into the Keurig machine (direct water line doesn't seem to be as big a need for the espresso machine since I'm the only person who uses that one).

One of the problems I'm struggling with though is that I'm thinking about doing two dishwashers in my next kitchen. It sounds straightforward enough, although I'm having trouble thinking through how to design it so it won't be confusing during those times when you only have enough dish volume for one dishwasher, yet still make it convenient for those times when you do need two dishwashers. Maybe there's also a desire to cycle the two dishwashers so one of them doesn't wear out much faster than the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I worked at McDonald's in high school and they've clearly revised the restaurants a lot since then, but they still have this mindset. I forget what they call it now, but the middle of any walkway is essentially a "fast lane" and nobody is allowed to stand there.

It's one of those things that seems obvious once you hear it, but few people do it elsewhere. I wish everywhere operated like this... malls, airports, etc. If everyone who is stopped just moved to the sides then everyone in the middle could go so much faster.

</comment><comment><USER4> Technically Oceans 11.

They built a to-scale model, robbed that vault, recording the whole thing, then played it back for the security room while they broke into the real one.

</comment><comment><USER5> A related, lovely comedy from Norway & Sweden: Kitchen Stories [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Stories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Stories)

</comment><comment><USER6> This type of analysis is common in Industrial and Systems Engineering and it has to do with time and motion study. The idea is that by analyzing the human and work process you can find efficiencies in the system and thus improve output. This was popularized in the industrial revolution with Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. In fact a famous movie was created about the Gilbreth's called Cheaper By the Dozen which talks about how they used their Business Management consulting with raising their large family.

</comment><comment><USER7> One real-world example of this comes from the SF-based Long Now Foundation. When they turned their (rarely-visited) museum space into a (now-popular) cafe and bar, they invited a bunch of people by to build a cardboard prototype and try it out:

[http://blog.longnow.org/02013/09/27/salon-prototype- night-a-...](http://blog.longnow.org/02013/09/27/salon-prototype-night-a- cardboard-proof-of-concept/)

I was there for that and it was a great experience.

</comment><comment><USER8> In philosophy, you sometimes hear an idea along the lines of "the least useful (or useless) map is that which has a 1:1 scale. This is a nice counterexample.

</comment><comment><USER9> One step up from this, courtroom construction projects sometimes have a full scale courtroom mockup including temporary furniture out of plywood or foam. There's a lot of important sightlines between different desks/seats at different heights and then it's all custom built out of nice wood, so mistakes are expensive.

That's probably done more in VR by now, I did some work in college at Penn State's Computer Integrated Construction Research Lab with 3D mockups (including their law school building which was why this came up). Back then it was on a 3x rear projected stereo screen so a whole room of people could put on glasses and see it, but with VR headsets being so affordable now (compared to that setup at least) you could just do that design meeting over the internet.</comment>


The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States [pdf] - tma-1 http://krueger.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/akrueger/files/katz_krueger_cws_-_march_29_20165.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The authors here are worth noting: Katz and Krueger are well known for publishing this[1] paper as well, which was one of the leading papers behind the idea that wage differentials are a function of skill-biased technology growth--that is, that automation and technology favors high skill workers and devalues low skill workers. This was an early paper that at least partially predicted the rise of wage inequality over the last decade where only high skill, high value jobs have really improved in wage growth, while low skill wages have stagnated.

[1] [http://economics.mit.edu/files/563](http://economics.mit.edu/files/563)

</comment><comment><USER2> "Alternative" rather presupposes a lot. The idea of full-time salaried or quasi-salaried employment by an abstracted company is fairly recent in the grand scheme of things and depending on how you measure has never or only for a short amount of time covered a majority of the labor market.

<comment><USER3> (You have a great username for making this comment, haha.)

You make a very good point that the current ideal of "employment" is relatively new. Interestingly, history may be repeating itself. Freelancers who specialize in one field or sub-field occupy a similar niche to craftsmen from earlier centuries. For example in colonial New England, it was common for people to specialize in one craft (blacksmithing, cobbling, etc) and train younger generations through apprenticeships. Nobody called this "entrepreneurship" or "freelancing," but that's effectively what it was. Small businesses and enterprising individuals traded their labor to the local market in exchange for currency.

Human beings and societies can adapt to market changes much faster than regulation or measurement can catch up to them. Hopefully the US government begins to realize the efficacy and prevalence of these "alternative work arrangements" (I'm also not a fan of the term), and implements policies that consider them. Some things I'd like to see:

1) Better tax treatment (freelancers who setup an S-Corp may end up paying more tax than if they were an employee, since they need to pay corporate income tax, personal income tax, and in some cases payroll tax)

2) Better / more nuanced measurement of "unemployment" in the country. It's an open secret that the unemployment models are a complete joke for a number of reasons. One is that they do not accurately consider contractors, and another is that they consider someone who has "given up" on looking for a job to be "employed." The models are designed to make politicians look good, which is fine... except when the market starts moving based on the models. That is bad.

3) NOT funneling contractors into employment arrangements. There are many advantages to being a contractor (flexible hours being the major one), and if government regulation forces companies like Uber to treat their contractors as employees, these advantages will rapidly disappear.

4) Better treatment of 1099 workers / freelancers / small business owners when applying for loans or mortgages. Banks are generally very unwilling to lend money to a "freelancer" and often want to see more years of history than they would require from a salaried employee. This seems like laziness on the part of the banks, who are unwilling to develop risk models for freelancers.

5) More willingness from employers, government or otherwise, to consider ex- freelancers viable job candidates. Many firms will throw out resumes from freelancers under the assumption that they are a "bad employee" (too independent, can't follow instructions) or the freelancing was an exaggerated description of unemployment.

There's lots of problems with how this class of workers is treated, and addressing some of the above will hopefully go a long way toward welcoming them into society.

<comment><USER4> An S-corp is pass through tax entity, you only pay personal income tax on the income.

<comment><USER3> That's assuming you pay yourself 100% of the profits, which is not necessarily true. You need to first pay yourself a "reasonable salary" (extremely subjective), and for any profits left in the company after that, you owe corporate income tax. If you want to avoid this, you can elect to file as a C-Corp but then you need to pay payroll tax on your salary.

<comment><USER5> Exactly backwards

S corp:

* reasonable salary

* only pay payroll tax on salary

* all income taxed at personal income rates no matter if distributed or not

* income above salary not subject to additional medicare tax or passive income tax

C corp:

* reasonable salary + bonuses + perks

* remaining income taxed at corporate rates, can remain in business as retained earnings

* distributed non-salary earnings taxed again at personal income rates

Disregarded/partnership LLC

* No salary

* All income taxed at personal income rates

* Simpler to operate + less restrictions than S corp

* Can make sense if you're going to pay yourself more than the Social Security wage base anyway.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


S.F. startup Aardvark personalizes searching - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/13/BUG116DNLI.DTL <comment><USER2> How can you write a 1,000-word article about a new search engine and _not include the flipping URL_?

"Using an algorithm program..."

"Ventilla said the service is more personal and reliable..."

Never mind. The author hasn't used it, doesn't know his ass from his elbow and is just parroting the CEO. Tech Journalism at its finest.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know the range of price for ReactJS freelancer per hour? - <AUTHOR> How much a ReactJS freelancer is payed per hour? <comment><USER2> Do you want a simple ReactJS freelancer, or a React/Redux freelancer? Webpack costs extra.

But seriously, the 'price-range' of a freelancing javascript developer that is acquainted with modern frameworks like React, is the full range that any freelancer, in any business can have.

Probably the very low (<10$/hour) and very high (200$+/hour) ends of the spectrum don't happen very often in this job, but still if I tell you 10$/hour to 150$/hour what would that mean?

Also it depends highly on the nature of the task. Short term will usually command higher price than long-term.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I want React/Redux. I'm driving my OpenSource project Structor. But it's free, and I need some personal income.</comment></comment>


Demystifying container runtimes - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/741897/5ba9c60a4f6747a3/ <comment><USER2> I think this is a great article that can be used as a way to shed some light on the container movement over the past couple of years to someone who is not intimately familiar with containerization.

Bookmarked and thank you to the author!

<comment><USER3> I watched this talk couple of years ago that made docker/containers finally click for me.

Cgroups, namespaces, and beyond: what are containers made from? - Jérôme Petazzoni,

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK5i-N34im8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK5i-N34im8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry, but it doesn't demystify things for me.

I'm still stuck at the 'I don't get it' phase, despite looking at Docker, and more recently Kubernetes, several times over the years, mainly because everyone around me evangelizes it so much.

Unfortunately, I don't even understand how to describe where I'm at with it. For instance, if I look at a WordPress[1], I'm lost. What's the platform? What user does it run on, I see that it is mostly only supported by Apache, but what if I wanted nginx? What if I don't want it to run on Alpine, but Ubuntu 17? etc, etc? Even comments like this:

"This image does not provide any additional PHP extensions or other libraries, even if they are required by popular plugins. There are an infinite number of possible plugins, and they potentially require any extension PHP supports. Including every PHP extension that exists would dramatically increase the image size."

Everywhere I look I always see the answer: "Well, just build your own".... but it's at that point I always give up, because I consistently fail to see the benefit of this rabbit-hole. This is especially an issue when security updates on WordPress, the webserver, or OS can change so quickly that it seems pointless to even want to make an image.

Clearly, there's something I'm missing.

Can _anyone_ explain it to me like a 5 year old, who knows how to set up and maintain his own server? (I typically run through a cheat sheet of things to do).

I also fail to see the benefits of spinning up an image for development purposes, when I already use VirtualBox and Snapshots for said purpose.

(I'm sorry If I seem dense, and seem trollish...but I just don't see it, and the article didn't do a thing for me)

[https://hub.docker.com/_/wordpress/](https://hub.docker.com/_/wordpress/)

<comment><USER5> > I'm still stuck at the 'I don't get it' phase, despite looking at Docker, > and more recently Kubernetes, several times over the years, mainly because > everyone around me evangelizes it so much.

This is me until a few weeks ago. After all the hype, I think some bulb turned on in my head and I'm finally starting to understand the point of all these container shenanigans.

> For instance, if I look at a WordPress[1], I'm lost. [...] what if I wanted > nginx? What if I don't want it to run on Alpine, but Ubuntu 17?

It might help not to think like a sysadmin for a second. You'd pull the wordpress container because you want to run Wordpress. Who cares what's underneath? It should feel to you as a blackbox that might as well be running on hamsters for all you care. And that's great for 99% of the cases, because wordpress is just a puzzle piece in a bigger picture and we developers shouldn't have to spend too much time thinking "ah, what were the required rewrite rules for wordpress again?" when there's more important stuff you should be spending your energy on.

If you really need to tweak the internals of the blackbox, yeah, write your own Dockerfile, but you'll find there's often no need.

I've been a sysadmin for years, and then a lone wolf developer, and never understood the point of Docker to manage my projects, now I find myself at the engineering helm of a company and need to juggle all the legacy pieces of software we have, and all the new stuff in the pipeline: MySQL, PHP 5 applications, PHP 7 sites, Elixir app, Node for SSR, Redis, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.

I jumped into the Ansible bandwagon immediately because configuring servers by hand is an irresponsible idea, but now I have to manage all these small blocks that have completely different runtime needs, and let me tell you, my goal for the first half of 2018 is to containerise everything and retain my sanity.

I don't know Kubernetes very much, seems to be the next hyped thing but still feels very complicated unless you're in the loving embrace of Google Cloud/AWS. I still believe in bare, cheap VPSes and in-house infrastructure. I'm still investigating Docker Swarm to orchestrate multiple containers across servers but it's hard to tell the real world performance for the hype.

Hope this helps!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't have a comment on the content of the article itself, though it will be interesting to see how the competing standards shake out in the longterm.

I did want to say that while I read through the article I was struck by how high quality the writing was. I'm so used to technical writing being relatively low-effort blog posts. This level of detail was a real breath of fresh air.

<comment><USER7> > _... I was struck by how high quality the writing was._

That's pretty par for the course, IMO, WRT LWN's articles. It's why I'm happy to continue throwing a few dollars their way every month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They seem pretty easy to understand to me. Mostly namespacing to hide things so that a container appears to be a separate instance of an OS. Hide the parent filesystem, process list, network interfaces, etc, so it "feels" like a separate instance of an operating system.

There's value in this, of course, but it isn't really complicated.

<comment><USER9> OFF-TOPIC - replying to an old thread

the original thread is locked because it's old so i can't reply there, but recently saw your comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425678](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425678)

> me: i need to generate avatars as a jpeg

> you: The jpeg requirement seems odd. Even if it has "jpg" in the url, you > can serve up a standalone SVG (with a jpg extension in the url) as long as > you send the right MIME type

i tried your suggestion and it worked - thanks a lot !

<comment><USER8> Great! Thanks for the thanks...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it just me or the "anything but Microsoft" crew is shrinking? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Personally I hope that crew is joining the "anything but proprietary" group. Sorry, I'm sure you were fishing for a more pro-MS response.</comment>


MIT cracks Tor anonymity network and recognises hidden servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmagazineuk.com/mit-cracks-tor-anonymity-network-and-recognises-hidden-servers/article/430931/ <comment><AUTHOR> ""Our goal is to show that it is possible for a local passive adversary to deanonymise users with hidden services actives without the need to perform end-to-end traffic analysis," wrote MIT researchers..."</comment>


Ghostly Plane Wrecks Found in Remote, Exotic Locations - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2013/04/finding-beauty-in-wrecked-and-rotting-airplanes/

<comment><USER2> Far more enjoyable once you learn they are "from crash sites where there were no fatalities and everyone was rescued"

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting project. It's just a shame that, after travelling all that distance to find the wrecks, his photography is so bad.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, neat pictures, but not very impressive for a photographer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even though the media made an explosive nonsense about missing planes, it's still something I personally find quite attractive to read about.</comment>


The Discovery of Statistical Regression - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-discovery-of-statistical-regression/ <comment><USER2> If you ever have a free hour, check out the wikipedia page for regression analysis.

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

It's by far the most approachable wikipedia page/section I've encountered for explaining a mathematical topic.

Regression analysis has a few things going for it over other topics.

1) It uses simple math. We aren't solving black scholes here and using Ito's lema. All the math you need to do least square regression you learned in high school.

2) Its graph-able. Some people are fine learning via numbers only, some people need to visualize the result. For the later, being able to show a line going through a series of points makes analysis super easy.

A few weeks ago my 7 year old daughter saw an R kniter doc with a grid of 25 plots on I was using for determining co-integration of various ETF's for the purpose of pairs trading.

She doesn't obviously understand linear regression though she was able to look at the plots and find the ones who had the best "fit".

2b) The results are dead simple in most cases to interpret.

I think one thing that trips people up with statistics is that up until they encounter statistics, most of the math they are introduced to is analytical, you take the numbers, apply the formula and get a definitive answer.

Then you encounter statistics and realize there is no black and white, you can get an average, but what about its standard deviation? Ok, now you have to analyze the standard deviation, and repeat to infinity.

You never really get a definitive, "this is the answer" style answer from statistics. Everything is "here is your result, but you should also apply this technique to analyze your result".

With linear regression, its often very simple to interpret your results, which makes it one of the more approachable statistical techniques.

3) It has well supported libraries in almost any programming language.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure about Wikipedia page on regression analysis being very understandable to everyone. I typically refer people to Chapter 11 Regression Analysis: The miracle elixir and Chapter 12 Common Regression Mistakes: The mandatory warning label of Charles Wheelan's "Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data" book with positive response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is an important piece of historical trivia involving Galton and regression. Galton documented regression to the mean. But why did it happen? In an era before genetics was understood the most natural explanation was that each species and race had "a natural type" that it was regressing to. This contradicted Darwin's theory of evolution, and lead to widespread doubts about Darwin's theory until Fischer managed to demonstrate why statistics + Mendelian genetics predicted regression to the mean, and provided a possible mechanism for Darwin's theory of evolution.

It is natural to view history as a steady march of progress to our current scientific consensus. But history doesn't actually look like that. And this is an interesting example where it doesn't.

<comment><USER4> Was that sudden switch from Galton to Fisher conscious or a mistake?

<comment><USER3> Conscious. Sorry for not being clearer.

Galton documented the phenomena of regression to the mean in inheritance of height in the 1870s. (The children of two tall parents tended to be tall, but shorter than the parents. The children of two short parents tended to be short, but taller than the parents.) Similar phenomena were documented in a wide variety of species, as well as more complex variations. All of this lead to a belief that there was such a thing as a "natural type" which a species or race returned to, which cast doubt on Darwin's theories for several decades.

After Mendelian genetics was rediscovered in the early 1900s, Fisher explained the phenomena from population genetics. Once the results of the breeding experiments were explained by genetics and statistics, we could reconcile field observations about inheritance with Darwin's theory.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the follow-up; I figured it was either a mistake and very simple, or not a mistake and with crucial information missing. The extra information cleared that up :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I enjoy articles like this which trace the development of familiar concepts with unfamiliar origins. I find they're a strong aid to understanding, and interesting pieces of conversation in themselves. However, I take issue with the author's depiction of Gauss as possibly appropriating some credit from where it was due and the emphasis placed on the conflict with Legendre. The history of science is filled with such incidents where a discovery was made independently by two or more scientists close in time, and the usual convention is that the first demonstration is credited as the discovery in textbooks (even if the concept has gone on to bear the other scientist's name). Regardless, this is one kind of content I like to find online.</comment>


The only American male weightlifter to compete at the Rio Olympics is vegan - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/758648/kendrick-farris-vegan-weightlifter-rio-olympics-2016/?utm_source=qzfb <comment><USER2> Amazing! All critics arguments regarding not being able to achieve top performance without meat go out of the window.</comment>


DNC warns 2020 campaigns not to use FaceApp 'developed by Russians' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/17/politics/dnc-warning-faceapp/ <comment><USER2> I was discussing this (faceapp) earlier today, and I really don't feel like its a big deal aside from the russaphobia it drums up. We shouldn't condemn all of the post-soviet countries because of some percieved boogeyman.

I'm not a hugely public person but I've certainly been on a lot of websites ([http://web.archive.org/web/20181001112852/http://www.ycombin...](http://web.archive.org/web/20181001112852/http://www.ycombinator.com/people/)) and I've been on TV and vlogs as well. If they're looking for facial data, they'll get it from that.

The TOS for the app is about the same as an Social Media site as well so unless you're going to become a neoluddite you probably shouldn't care.</comment>


Why Startups Like ZenPayroll Can Take On Giant Corporations like ADP And Win - <AUTHOR> http://blog.raddevelopment.io/why-startups-like-zenpayroll-can-take-on-giant-corporations-like-adp-and-win/

<comment><USER2> I've used Paychex and ZenPayroll. ZenPayroll is awesome. No reason to ever look back!

Great post on why startups can win.

Startups can win because the company cares more about their customers.

I'm sure plenty of people at large companies care about their customers. But a large company's org structure separate the decision-makers from the front-line employees. Any great customer-facing employee can add much more value to a smaller company.

I'm also sure there are plenty of counter-examples of startups that didn't provide great service. But that almost always past tense... small companies that don't care about their customers don't last long.

<comment><USER3> >Startups can win because the company cares more about their customers.

But you have to keep in mind the fact that it is rather easy to have that sort of attitude when you're small and have a proportional number of customers - it's much harder to be nice to a thousand people than to five. Scaling your service with the size of your consumer base is the real key.

<comment><USER4> True, but having up-to-date technology makes scaling service much, much easier. ADP's problem is their service scales linearly with the number of service reps on staff. That along with horrible communication across departments(this is a tech problem in this day and age), and they suffer because of it. Even if a tech-driven company like ZenPayroll gets the number of customers ADP has, they will have scaled better because (hopefully) their systems are prepared for the traffic from the beginning and they continuously improve them to handle the growth. There's a massive difference between tech- as-an-after-thought companies and the tech-driven startups like Zen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We're an ADP customer and I'm shocked at the state of their technology.

Not only is their customer portal IE only, they mandate the use of an ActiveX control from __1997 __. Proof:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiBRYxhCEAAWAg5.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiBRYxhCEAAWAg5.jpg)

Brutal. If this is the state of ZenPayroll's competition they're in a good spot.

<comment><USER6> I agree, they obviously don't test what they roll out. It is very amateur, updates look like they are pushed right into production given the obvious nature of the bugs we have seen. They have multiple interfaces, when we were testing it out we saw lookup data was inconsistent across interfaces, and there was no built in customer validation of data. All data validation is done by the end approver. They actually subcontract out most of the development work, definitely not a modern technology driven solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seriously I've been using ADP for a year and a half and they've fucked it up every time we've added an employee, we also found out at tax time that they'd failed to withhold New York City income tax for our New York employees. Considering proper tax withholdings is the primary reason to use a damn payroll provider in the first place this was insane. I'd have switched to Paychex (we have CA and NY employees which is why we needed a larger provider) but everyone I talked to hate them too.

Ack! Just noticed ZenPayroll is now supporting NY, unfortunately we might be moving all our HR to TriNet or I'd make the switch.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you've ever used Paychex or ADP then it's easy to know why ZenPayroll is killing it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can't wait until these guys are nationwide.</comment>


Google 'should be allowed in examinations' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/education-32531820

<comment><USER2> Imo open book/open notes is enough. The process of writing down notes is the main point. If people use google then there really isn't any learning going on.

Also, open-google tests make it way too easy to cheat</comment>


Show HN: Simple, quick game on smartphone - f-gergo http://spiniot.com

<comment> f-gergo A couple of weeks ago, we realized, that current smartphones lack 1 critical feature: we tried a few, but we could not make any of them spin. We remembered that some of the earlier phones were better at it, some worse, but most could be made to spin at least a few times.

Current idle lying smartphones are a nice piece of metal and plastic, but are useless when lying idle.

Instead of sadly admitting the truth, we decided we change that: we wanted to have fun with newer phones, just like we had with earlier ones.

We built a few prototypes from wood and pieces of plastic and realized, that it's actually doable. Spiniot was born.

3 weeks ago we decided we share the fun and prepared a crowdfunding campaign.

TL;DR Smartphones are bad at spinning. We wanted to change that, hence: Spiniot.

Please visit us at <http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/spiniot></comment>


SuperCollider – FOSS platform for audio synthesis and algorithmic composition - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider <comment><USER2> Supercollider has been around for many a year. Has there been a big update recently? Or has OP just discovered it?</comment>


Simon & Schuster, Hachette E-Book Accord Wins Approval - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-06/judge-approves-settlement-with-publishers-in-e-book-case.html <comment><AUTHOR> Agency ebook pricing is not long for this world and $9.99 best sellers will be back soon.</comment>


Snow Crash Revisited: Grokking a Satire of Mimesis - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/snow-crash-revisited-grokking-a-satire-of-mimesis-23de3ac05f47?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4 <comment><USER2> "Taken literally, this backstory might remind one of an arcane thriller written by an over-enthusiastic autodidact."

That's the rest of Stephenson's work.

I'm not sure Snow Crash is really a satire on cyberpunk per se. It's classic SF over-extrapolation of current trends in a funhouse mirror to shed light on things. The first of which is over-privatisation: everything in Snow Crash is a "franchise", including core parts of the government. When YT is arrested she's given a choice of privatised jail providers and justice systems, straight out of the libertarian playbook. The "burbclaves" are what happens when a HOA and gated community upgrades to an armed microstate. And so on.

The other of which is weaponised memes: if these things can be said to be "viral", can you produce a meme or image that's actually an exploit against human wetware?

The review criticises the book for "missing" Google, which I think says more about the reviewer's position in the world. Yes, the world of SC is not dominated by SV companies, but that's not important. The book does contain a souped-up realtime Google Earth, and a "gargoyle" who's a human version of the streetview car.

(Stross takes "weaponised ideas" in a different direction in the Laundry Files, which are essentially Yes Minister/Lovecraft crossover fiction)

<comment><USER3> Although Stross's default stance in the Laundry Files seems to be that _everything_ is a weapon, or could be one. Camera? Weapon. Smartphone? Weapon. Pidgeon's foot? Weapon. Your own brain? Weapon. Violin? At least one of them is a weapon.

<comment><USER4> Unlike I am mistaken the pidgeon foot is defensive/camouflage but cannot be used to cause damage to a target.

<comment><USER3> You missed some dialogue. You can relatively simply extend the HOG from an defensive weapon to an offensive weapon (all it takes is a mirror, IIRC). The pigeon foot is a HOG, and can be used in the same way. It's just that Bob rarely does so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reason I love books from Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Charles Stross, is that, for me at least, they're massive catalysts to my own thoughts and imaginations of what might be possible.

If I had to pick one book above others from Neil Stephenson it would be Diamond Age. I just keep going back to it. It's got a lot to say, and I wouldn't mind seeing a similar analysis by the Author of this post.

<comment><USER6> Stross next to Gibson and Stephenson... hmm.

I tried The Atrocity Archives but I couldn't get past the first half. It felt like a pile of nerd paraphernalia force-stuffed into a story line.

I mean... Neuromancer is a true masterpiece from the story to the concepts to the succinct writing, just perfect. Snow Crash is less perfect, but exceptionally enthralling nonetheless. What would be a comparable read from Stross?

<comment><USER7> > What would be a comparable read from Stross?

Accelerando [1] isn't in the same league as Neuromancer in terms of style and succinctness, but the idea-density is pretty high and it moves along at a nice pace.

[1] [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html)

<comment><USER8> I can skim through most sci-fi stories. But not this one. I had to slow down and focus on what Charles was saying. It's seriously dense reading, and worth the effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read Snow Crash when I was 13. Then I lost countless hours trying to "live the dream" with Active Worlds [1]

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

<comment><USER10> Likewise. I missed Lucasfilm's Habitat, but tried most of the virtual worlds after that, from MUDs via telnet in the early 90's, Worlds Chat in 95-96, Active Worlds right after (my company spent $1,500 buying a server copy), The Palace, Second Life, WoW, and more recently DK2/CC, etc.

We're getting close from the technology perspective, but the storytelling and the " _massive_ " portion of an MMORPG is still not there. Visually impressive, but the social interactions are dull and unsophisticated, without emotional depth.

It's funny to look in hindsight. What Habitat has apparently nailed in the 80's [1] is what is missing, 30+ years later.

[1] [http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html](http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html)

<comment><USER11> > _We 're getting close from the technology perspective, but the storytelling > and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there. Visually > impressive, but the social interactions are dull and unsophisticated, > without emotional depth._

However ambitious MMOs and virtual worlds get, I worry that they'll always run into the same barrier restricting their potential past a certain scale: the MMO experience is made out of people, and a whole lot of people are awful.

<comment><USER5> Snow Crash actually deals with this if I remember correctly. When you go out onto the street you're likely to encounter people in the shape of Penises (etc).

Most chat and social apps deal with this already by limiting your interactions to selected people that you whitelist.

That shouldn't be hard to replicate into VR.

<comment><USER10> I think you can solve this by limiting anonymity. You won't see people dressed in penises once you're connected to your FB friends.

I know there's valid arguments against forced real identities to be used, but it's always a trade off between signal and noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just finished Snow Crash and found it too pretentious and convoluted, like the turn that Diamond Age does towards the ending. Besides that, it introduces a few interesting concepts, but I feel that similar ideas are developed much better in DA.

For me, Stephenson's masterpiece is Diamond Age, hands down -- minus the ending, if that could be a thing. The last chapters are too obscure just for the sake of obscurity, I've read it three times and I can't get any "deep" meaning to it, just a bunch of wow-cool-but-irrelevant text.

Regarding Cryptonomicon, the first three books, they're straigtforward, interesting, and with a lot of references and trivia but it doesn't try too hard like the "Gods" part of Snow Crash. I really, really enjoyed them.

Unfortunately, I found the Cryptonomicon prequels a nice adventure book in the traditional sense, but the characters were too flat and un-relatable, and it bored me.

Anyway, that's my opinion. Diamond Age introduced me to cyberpunk and, to date, it's my favorite novel of the genre. I've recommended it to many people and they've always liked it. I still dream of the day when we have matter compilators, and victorians look like a bunch of hipsters to me, which is both funny and very realistic. In a world full of technology, rich people will want to go back to a more... simple and comfortable age. It blew my mind.

<comment><USER13> Have you tried Daemon and Freedom, a small series by Daniel Suarez?

<comment><USER5> Amazing books. I was pleasantly surprised by Kill Decision as well, not quite in the same league, but more interesting than I expected.

That, and Ramez Naam's Nexus, Crux, Apex are recent additions to my collection of awesome books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Downvote me: Infinite Jest is Snow Crash for adults.

(But seriously: similar vision of a corporate-controlled near-future; and IJ is great, read it.)

<comment><USER15> I've been trying to decide whether to bother with Infinite Jest or not. I've heard very good things about it, but also that it is a pretty tough read.

I think your comparison with Snow Crash has swung it for me; IJ is definitely on my reading list now

<comment><USER16> > I've heard very good things about it, but also that it is a pretty tough > read.

Give it 100 pages. If you don't like it by then -- or at least significant chunks of it -- then you probably won't like the whole thing.

<comment><USER17> Hehe, that is exactly what I did. By page 100 I was hopelessly hooked. It's not an easy book, but I thoroughly enjoyed how it was both intellectually stimulating and extremely funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What I find either funny or depressing (can't decide), are the number of younger people (as in too young to be using computers in 1992) who read "Snow Crash" before reading any other cyberpunk and 1) fail to get that it is actually is a satire of Neuromancer, etc. and 2) think that Stephenson was amazingly prophetic, not realizing that a lot of what he was writing about _already_ existed, albeit in simpler forms. 3D avatar environments are really just an aesthetic improvement over MUDs (Multi User Dungeons/Domains), which were multi-user text-based games that were all the rage in 1992.

<comment><USER19> I don't read _Snow Crash_ as a _Neuromancer_ parody. Stephenson has too many of his own ideas for that. When it comes to ideas, Stephenson is unusually playful. (See also the Enlightenment philosophers in the Baroque cycle.) He's not great on plot or characterization, or structuring a novel in general, but Stephenson can write one hell of a sentence, and he often keeps it up for a paragraph at a time.

Gibson, whose books I also adore, has basically nothing at all to do with Stephenson. The only thing connecting them is that some of their books are set in dystopian near-futures. Gibson at his best is bracingly bleak. Cyberpunk was a marketing term for publishers and critics who couldn't get their heads around him. Early Gibson is pure punk. Even more than _Neuromancer_ , read the stories in _Burning Chrome_ for their hard, angry edge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like Stephenson, but I guess Snow Crash was late to the party for me, having already read Neuromancer and a bunch of other cyberpunk books as well as a lot of cyberpunk-themed movies before finding it.

I enjoyed Snow Crash, but I am more a fan of Cryptonomicon and Anathem. I stumbled upon Cryptonomicon in the bookstore, because of the intriguing title. That and the Perl script for Solitaire in the back of the book.

I wish Cryptonomicon had been made into a movie pre-Bitcoin and Snowden; I hope they still make a movie of it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I can see that a lot of thought went into this review, but I have to admit I can't see what came out of it. Perhaps someone with a clearer understanding than I might lend a hand?

<comment><USER22> The book, or the review?

The book outlines a world where franchisers run everything, including jails. It's a cookie-cutter world; instances of each franchise are very standardized, and this is a plot point. The hero delivers pizza for the Mafia run pizza franchise, when he's not hacking code. The heroine is a 15-year old skateboarding courier girl with a really good skateboard.

There's a big virtual world, run partly by the Special Interest Group on Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery. The VR world is a lot like Second Life but with VR and better graphics; you can buy real estate and build. The hero spends a lot of time in there, but that's not where the plot happens.

The Big Bad is a mega-preacher who has a visual data pattern which allows him to take over, or at least crash, human brains. This involves info from ancient gods and such. He's trying to take over the world.

It's a great exercise in literary world-building; the plot isn't much and there's little character development.

A movie was in development, but it didn't happen. It would be great to see it done it today, now that the graphics are good enough. Would definitely have been better than Tron 2.

<comment><USER3> Heh, yeah. Tron 2 was disapointing to day the least.

Stephenson's novels in general are like this, although Cryptonomicon for one certainly has better character development than Snow Crash: they're a disorderly jumble of whatever ideas Stephenson thought were interesting at the time, wrapped in a skin of plot, and enfleshed in the characters that surround, encounter, and explore them. Stephenson sometimes jumps the rails entirely, writing long monologues, dialogues, and digressions that barely refer to the characters or plot at all, just because he thought the ideas were neat (most of Randy and Pontifex's discussions in prison, The mathematics of Alan's bicycle chain, a good stretch of Hiro's discussions with the Librarian (although nowhere near all of them), and Hiro's adventures in Flatland on the raft (you can just _feel_ the seeds of In The Beginning Was The Command Line, struggling to get out)), or for reasons known only to him (probably because he thought it was funny) (the TP memo, the stockings/Van Eck... thing). To some people this may be seen as a disjointed, overhyped, overcomplicated mess, but to the right sort of mind, it's an almost magical experience.

Curiously, these sorts of people tend to be heavily into computing, which is why Stephenson pervades that culture.

Or that's wrong, and I'm just completely mad. That's also a possibility.

<comment><USER23> I think you are right, and I've at times struggled to explain why I enjoy his books as much as I do. I think ultimately he leans regularly on a facet of SF that in that genre, ideas and abstractions can be the equal subjects of character development. Cleverly developing an idea (e.g. mind virii) and circling back on those ideas, exploring how different facets connect in different ways, is the kind of thing one does with a human character, but can also do with an "idea character" in SF.

Obviously the craft and virtue of that kind of thing is in the relationships of the concept to other elements of the tale, both human and non-human. This I think Stephenson does very well, but I can appreciate that for someone who doesn't extend subjectivity largesse to abstractions, it can be tedious to read wikipedia-like explositions, no matter how well done. :-)

<comment><USER21> Just a heads up - if you're looking for a concise way to convey this idea in future, the phrase 'high concept' captures it neatly.

<comment><USER3> Well, that's always nice to know. Although I don't know how many people know what it means, and I don't think it encompasses all of what makes Stephenson Stephenson, anymore than "satirical fantasy" comes close to encompassing Pratchett's Discworld's writing style.

<comment><USER21> Certainly not! And I hope I haven't given insult. If so, it was entirely unintentional on my part, and I apologize for my carelessness in so doing. I'll put more thought into my words next time.

Don't get me wrong - I don't mean to say that all of Stephenson can be encompassed in those two words. Were that the case, he wouldn't have had to spend time writing books. I mean only that, if you're looking for a handy way to convey a primacy of idea over character in what an author chooses to explore, "high concept" is an adjectival phrase commonly understood to carry that meaning. Might save you some time, is all. (And, on the Internet of 2016, a dictionary is never far away...)

<comment><USER24> Ah but you see my adjectives are better...

<comment><USER21> More convenient, perhaps. It's like programming in a way - why reinvent a wheel you don't have to?

<comment><USER23> Thanks, that's a useful phrase!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> i love lots of _bits_ of snow crash, but i do not like the book as a whole. i did not feel like the (admittedly excellent) ideas and snippets were stitched into a coherent whole in a particularly satisfying way.

on the other hand, "diamond age" is truly a masterpiece, and i strongly recommend that one to any of stephenson's fans. it's the book of his i'd rate the highest, though my favourite is "cryptonomicon" just because that's comfort reading.</comment>


The best way to eliminate the gender pay gap? Ban salary negotiations - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/21/the-best-way-to-way-to-eliminate-the-gender-pay-gap-ban-salary-negotiations/?hpid=z3 <comment><USER2> "best"? That is a strong word that the article does not back up. It just offers the one option, without discussing alternatives.</comment>


Winklevoss twins on their Bitcoin bet: 'Money is the oldest social network' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/11/tech/winklevoss-twins-crypto-sxsw/index.html <comment><USER2> "What do you hope your legacy will be in 20-40-50 years?" And the first word out of his mouth is "Money."

I dunno. I don't get the sense that these guys actually know what they are talking about. This interview is mostly buzzwords, sound bytes that sound rehearsed, written by someone who has whispered in their ears.

<comment><USER3> It's them who whisper stuff to lower ranking Silicon Valley wannabees not the other way around. Unless you are not familiar with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "'Money is the oldest social network'"

The really said that? I don't think that the Winklevoss twins know what a social network is, then.

<comment><USER3> I super highly doubt you know better than them

<comment><USER4> Oh? Based on what?

Or, let me ask you, how is money a network at all, let alone a social network? Money is more like a token. It can be moved and exchanged using networks (social and otherwise), but it isn't itself any sort of network.</comment></comment></comment>


The making of PlayStation VR - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/9/11174194/the-making-of-playstation-vr <comment><USER2> In my mind, the PSVR will undoubtedly be the first VR experience that achieves critical mass this generation.

Working in their favour:

\- A massive hardware share in living rooms already with the PS4

\- The ability to sell VR hardware as a loss leader and make money back on software, undercutting the competition

\- The already announced games look great and have large fanbases, for example Gran Turismo Sport, Tekken 6, Ace Combat 7, Until Dawn, and Psychonauts. If the rumoured No Man's Sky VR comes true, that is a massive boost to the PSVR library.

<comment><USER3> No doubt about it, I haven't thought of buying any other VR seriously. The PS4 version is the only one I would consider right now and I don't even know the price. I'm most hopeful of a two VR one console setup at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > PlayStation VR features a smaller field of view and lower-resolution screen > than the Rift and Vive, for example (though Sony staff tout their unit's 120 > Hz refresh rate as an advantage).

The 120Hz refresh rate is not an advantage, because they use a frame doubling technique to accomplish it. They worded that carefully to tout the refresh rate vs FPS to obfuscate that difference. The games will run at 60fps but the headset will "upscale" to 120Hz. I've read and watched reviews saying this works out surprisingly well, but still doesn't hold up to 90+ _real_ frames per second.

<comment><USER5> Actually the system supports "real" 120 Hz as well. Some of their demos have been using it. It's a tradeoff each developer can make for themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anybody else thinks that the future depicted in "Ready Player One" is probably going to be our real future???

</comment><comment><USER7> I was kind of ambivalent about the whole VR deal and Sony's attempt in particular.

And then... Rez Infinite.

Then I was like SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.

</comment><comment><USER8> I really think Vive has a really interesting niche market at hand by focusing on tracking the player in a fixed box in a room and two sticks to manipulate hands.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWproPHhHd0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWproPHhHd0)

Rift is falling behind new upcoming players and the space is definitely heating up...but I just don't think Facebook players are going to be playing Animal Farm or whatever it is they play now on Rift...more likely that Steam and console gamers stands to gain from this competition.

I think that Oculus Rift was the first to start but Sony, HTC, Valve, all these companies with direct access to gamer markets will be poised to grab the torchlight from Rift.

I just have a hard time visualizing Luckey getting lucky twice when VR hardware is vastly improving at speeds that are now starting to outpace the Rift.

I wonder how long until we begin to see haptic devices for all of our senses not just visual but olfactory, tactile, sense of gravity.

Then it's only a matter of time before all these human experiences are digitized and serialized into separate haptic channels and replayed in synchronous format.

Imagine a future where you can experience anything anywhere anytime as if you did these things yourself. Will it be augumented reality with holograms being beamed into a room with ultrasound wave generators simulating tactile sensation?

The race for virtual reality sex is on.

<comment><USER9> > sense of gravity

and inertia. Any idea how they could do that?

<comment><USER8> yeah I actually thought about this and what I came up was like a circular cage with the person strapped in. It's digitally controlled unlike noisy hydraulics I don't know how but maybe lots of dry ice and superconductor they use for hoverboard.

Then you could generate inertia and g-forces by creating a centrifugal effect. For instance, to simulate a negative g maneuver in an airplane, you'd flip the user upside down and then rapidly spin the occupant towards the direction that creates the g-force due to centrifugal effect. Since you are constantly spinning at a very fast rate of speed, and wearing a helmet and headset you are unaware of this fact.

I'm not quite sure how safe this setup would be (spinning people for hours and hours at very high speeds)

<comment><USER10> I'm sure cardiovascular issues would arise from spinning people for extended periods of time with high g-force. It would probably be acceptable in niche applications (i.e. flight training), but I can't imagine using this method as a daily driver at all healthy. xD</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Anatomy of a Crime Discovery After 25 Years: A Case of Book Theft (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10.18352/lq.7874/ <comment><USER2> There's a real need to be able to 'fingerprint' a rare book, either through photographs of identifying pages (which could be removed or defaced rendering it useless), or even an x-ray of the book.

<comment><USER3> Maybe just do something destructive. Just take a Sharpie permanent marker and write "ROYAL LIBRARY" on the bottom plane of the book pages.

Granted, that's a flippant proposal. And it wouldn't work on certain books, where the edges of the pages are gilded. (I wonder if many/most books from those days had gilded edges?)

The Sharpie is just one idea. I'm sure there are much more clever, simple, obvious permanent methods that could be used in appropriate circumstances. The main point is to permanently and clearly mark the entire book.

Yes I know this would destroy the "value" of the book in many people's eyes. But I'd like to ask the Royal Library this question:

       Would you rather have in your possession the Louvain
       edition of Thomas More's Utopia, with "ROYAL LIBRARY"
       written in Sharpie on the bottom, or would you rather
       that the book had been sold at Christie's for 140,000
       GBP, and you have nothing?

I know which I would choose. But I'm not an art historian.

<comment><USER2> Maybe an ultraviolet sharpie? That could be practical.</comment></comment></comment>


Start Fund Inspired, New World Ventures Offers Chicago Excelerate Startups $50K - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/31/inspired-by-the-start-fund-new-world-ventures-offers-chicago-excelerate-startups-50k/ <comment><USER2> Congrats guys!</comment>


Sam Altman complains political correctness (gay) "Free Speech is dead in SF" - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconbeat.com/2017/12/15/sam-altman-complains-political-correctness-san-francisco-says-hurting-innovation/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised Sam said this. However I do applaud him for it.

The point being is you can argue against speech you disagree with. "Gay people are evil" can be met with "That's ridiculous, and most people find that incorrect and offensive." And leave it at that.

Shutting down speech is the problem. Why? Because once you've made it acceptable to shutdown speech that is offensive, suddenly the definition of offensive gets expanded and it's used to bludgeon any ideas that don't align with current thinking. That's dangerous.

<comment><USER3> At the point where you think China's doing better on an issue than California, you're not talking about free speech anymore. People getting mad at you for saying things they don't like is not "shutting down speech," it's... speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We have several "modern problems" that make completely-free speech potentially naïve.

One, the sheer magnitude of _easily accessible_ information is far greater than it has ever been, and this quantity not only overwhelms us in terms of how many headlines we will read but also how _deeply_ we are willing to read. At some point, we are mostly reduced to headline-skimmers that trust far too much about the first few sentences of whatever is posted, and we place great trust in "something" to help us filter it out (and so far there aren't a lot of great ways to determine what makes an online source valuable).

It is also _incredibly_ easy for people to set up their own online echo chambers now, which means that people can saturate their input with whatever they want to hear and leave it at that. People have shown that they're clearly not responsible enough to intentionally diversify what they take in, which almost ensures a very skewed perception of reality, especially when combined with massive quantity and low quality.

And, perhaps controversially, I believe that people are not being educated very well at all to recognize and adapt to these problems. (It's learning about critical thinking, statistical significance of sample sizes, etc.) Indeed, young people are able to easily access online material from almost anywhere with no friction but all of the echo chamber.

<comment><AUTHOR> >It is also incredibly easy for people to set up their own online echo chambers now

You nailed it. Look at the elections _ Hillary was winning in almost all online conversations (certainly in my limited social circles = echo chambers)...then the reality proved otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is disgustingly biased against him. Why does the author think it's alright to add these little snarky comments? I don't care for her opinion, just tell me what's going on.

<comment><USER6> Welcome to Journalism in 2017. Impartiality is dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As an outsider looking in people in the bay area can be way too damn sensitive. With all the social justice warriors running around I am really put off in moving to that area (even if it weren't so damn expensive).

<comment><USER8> Well, if you want to refuse to refer to married gay people as married, or call transgender people by their pre-transition pronouns, AT WORK, you're going to get fired. If that's a problem, you probably shouldn't work at a company where the HR manual says you should treat co-workers with respect.

On the other hand, if you're OK with being respectful to people even if you disagree with their very existence, you're pretty much good to go in the Bay Area.

As an example of this in action, I have a gay friend who eventually moved to New York City with his husband. He works in a big bank in a mid-level job, you'd recognize the name. His manager constantly refers to my friend's husband as his "partner". My friend thought he was going out on a limb when he corrected his manager with "Actually, he's my husband." It's fine to be forgetful; it's not fine to be disrespectful. So far nothing bad has happened, but who knows how it will turn out.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure I must be exhibiting some form of hetero-privilege here, but I never got offended by any of the people who referred to my wife as "my partner".

<comment><USER8> That's nice for you. I suppose you didn't notice that for a while gay people were only allowed to become "domestic partners", not married? I hope that now you don't now refer to your gay co-workers who are married as having "partners".

Because it's not about you. The Golden Rule is not "call people by the name you are ok with if you were them", it's "call people by the name they want to be called by". If you like, I can pull out my Miss Manners book and quote that rule to you, from the 1950s.

<comment><USER2> I was going to say something like "is everyone taking crazy pills?", but I'll aim for a more serious response.

The problem is that people read way too much into what other people say. It sounds like you hear "partner? this person is clearly insensitive to the history of discrimination again LGBT people."

Instead try "I don't like the word partner, but it is a pretty standard term for not only the unmarried, but also married people. This guy probably doesn't understand it bothers me, but I'll give him the benefit that he meant no harm."

<comment><USER8> Actually, I'm with the second, not the first.

And so is my gay friend in NYC. It's just that he's scared that his boss is actually a passive-aggressive homophobe and he's going to get fired for politely insisting on "husband".

<comment><USER2> Does he have evidence his boss is a passive agressive homophobe beyond his use of the word "partner"?

<comment><USER8> No, and he's not accusing his boss of anything.

He's just scared.

Keep in mind that he spent the first decade of his career working in places where he could be legally fired for being gay.

And there are lots of parts of the US where he could still be legally fired for being gay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can only talk like this when you are wealthy since you can/will survive the beat-down from the SJWs and others who demand you only talk in their approved way. Sad...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's funny how trying to stop closed mindedness towards anyone/anything aggressively, ends up over time creating another version of closed mindedness as a reaction.

<comment><USER8> There's nothing new here. The same thing happened in the civil rights era; if you didn't like black people, you were expected to keep it to yourself at work.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tim Ferriss says that there is a "a peculiar form of McCarthyism" in Silicon Valley

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937836)

</comment><comment><USER11> The title here is neither the original not even coherent. If the issue is space limitation, "Sam Altman complains SF political correctness hurts innovation" would be a natural shortening of the source title.

</comment><comment><USER12> > "I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in > Beijing than in San Francisco."

I don't follow Sam's life, but has he lived there for at least a few months to be able to say that? Or he just went to a conference or two there?

Even so, it may be easier for an _American_ or other foreigner to "speak their minds" in China, especially if they are known to have a lot of money. But if he was a Chinese, I think there's a much higher chance something like this would happen instead:

[https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articl...](https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articles/jailed- for-a-text-chinas-censors-are-spying-on-mobile-chat-groups-1512665007)

The only thing you may have to fear for in SF may be your reputation, but not that you will go to prison for saying the "wrong thing". Not yet, at least.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think he is just using an extreme example (China) to point to the fact that SF should be much - much -much easier to for "discussing controversial ideas".

I think your link connects the dots of using China as an extreme example.</comment></comment>