How Different Cultures Understand Time  - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-understand-time-2014-5?IR=T <comment><USER2> I fit the multi-active category and living in Northern Europe and working with Americans makes it sometimes difficult.

Now that I read the article, it put the words in my mouth. I value encounters, discussions, meeting someone and time has not much to say in there. If someone has to leave because of his/her schedules, it does leave me with the feeling of business unfinished.

I don't have a calendar and I try to avoid meetings, just because something more important usually turns up at the same time and also because the meeting will typically run short and discussion is left unfinished, which makes me think of it as time wasted. I'd rather skip the next meeting if I can connect with the people in the first meeting, and drive things to a closure or properly finish the discussion.

I als o don't mind if someone's late because I consider it more much valuable if s/he turns up anyway and is ready for an in-depth discussion. Conversely, if I didn't really pay attention, I'd be late to everything, thinking that no matter what time, let's discuss the things once we're here now.

<comment><USER3> While I do have the Northern desire for punctuality, I have the same issues that you do with planning days ahead to specifically. Unfortunately, since most of the people around me plan ahead, they have specific times in their schedules to meet me, so I have to accommodate that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Brilliant article. The same is very much true of distance. I'm British, and I've always thought of 100 miles as a long way because I grew up in a (relatively) tiny place. 600 miles away was the other end of my country. That was a _really_ long way to me. Meeting an Australian colleague of my father who was happy to do a 600 mile round trip _for a day out_ was a revelation. How far away something 'close' is very much depends on your frame of reference.

<comment><USER5> I live in the western part of the US (Colorado) and 600 miles doesn't actually take that long to drive. I regularly drive to my parent's house - which is about 550 miles - in 8 hours. I'm essentially driving the speed limit the entire way with no slowdowns except for one or two gas/restroom breaks. I would imagine driving that distance in GB would involve a much lower average speed.

I have always assumed this is why distances in the US (reasonably far away from the coasts) are "not that far".

<comment><USER6> Judging by your road movies, most of those 600 miles you'd be driving in a straight line. In the Old Continent, roads are traced around old crop fields and other properties, so you need to pay full attention to the road the whole time.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, at least in my part of the US, that's very true. The roads do curve a bit of course, but they're straight enough that you drive 55 - 80 mph (88 - 130 kph) for almost the whole trip. And a lot of the time, there are at least two lanes to pick from -- common courtesy is that slower cars stay in the right lane so that faster drivers can pass them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As humans we primarily make time for what we really, really want to do over what we should. Before getting angry at someone for being late take a step back and assess the situation objectively. The person may have been late because they probably weren't that interested in seeing you, they may have had something more interesting to do or had an interesting conversation going on.

Walk away after 15 ( or 10) minutes because you should have something better to do with your time than wait around hours for someone, right? There needs to be a negative consequence of the bad behaviour and it should be communicated through your actions rather than your words. Words will always fall on deaf ears.

I remember a friend who had a problem with a very tardy friend from one of the warmer EU countries and started to leave habitually after 10 minutes of tardiness. After a couple of times he got the idea and even started arriving early to the meetings.

You don't lose anything by doing this. It's a good strategy since it reveals the nature of your relationship with that person. If you don't like the revelation, fix it in a socially intelligent manner or exit the relationship. ...

</comment><comment><USER9> It seems that one of the primary issues here is the productivity. Why you should be all the time doing something or being productive? If you have a train ticket or to somewhere. So what if the train is delayed 24 hours. You'll just go out, see the city, enjoy nice meal, book a hotel, etc. Arrive again tomorrow to see if the train goes or not. Who needs schedules, bus will drive this road roughly daily, schedule is quite open. After waiting for 48h on stop, it's quite probable that you're getting your ride. Problem doesn't seem to be the understanding of time, but the insane(?) need to be so productive. Is the time wasted if you're not doing business, but you're enjoying relaxed life? This is excellent question, because I'm obsessed with productivity, and at sometimes I really question if there's any sense in it at all? So what if I had tasks booked for this week. Maybe I decided that I'll watch my favorite TV show for this week and consider doing those tasks next week, or maybe I'll find something better to do before that time arrives.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, the non-western concept of time is so picturesque, laid-back and "non- linear", so different to that ugly "monochronic" concept of the western world. Until shit gets serious. Until a patient in an emergency room requires an urgent treatment and a punctual surgeon.

Important, critical things depend on a rational approach to time.

I was irritated by the author's romantic view of the non-western concept of time.

<comment><USER6> The point is that, if your treating all the appointments in your schedule as life-threatening events, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. I am able to separate critical and non-critical appointments, as I suppose most people can do. I am punctual to business meetings, class meeting times, doctor appointments, and such. I am perpetually tardy to things like going out to party, having a cup of coffee, or visiting a friend.

Being punctual is stressful, requires planning, forethought, and saying no to unforeseen circumstances. I can't imagine living being punctual in my non- business life. I would feel like a slave. I once lost a girlfriend because she was extremely uptight about punctuality and I wasn't. While that attitude might seem completely normal to an American, to me it was a glimpse into insanity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Overall a good read but I'd be interested to find out what happens in Italy or Spain when a someone with much lower social status makes someone with a higher social status wait for a hour to show. Bet it doesn't happen all that often.

Also, I've found that the idea of "circling around a problem" for several days until coming to a decision is standard practice in the US, at least if you're involved in any kind of development or creative task.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm Italian, my girlfriend is French. I always tell her it's not polite to arrive on time to dinner dates, because people will be embarrassed because they're not even remotely ready.

<comment><USER14> That's odd, we have a saying in France that one always ought to be a fashionable 15 minutes late, it's considered polite to do so..

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure 15 minutes are enough in Italy, though it wildly varies from north to south. Anyway I agree that the culture shock is not huge between France and Italy, at least not as much as with german speaking countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Spaniard here. I'll comment in a while, my stereotypical way of life won't let me do it just now, because.. yknow.

<comment><USER16> Finish your painting and let us know your thoughts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The difference between Northern cultures and Southern cultures is more fundamental. In Northern cultures, the people have a relationship to the rules. In Southern cultures, people have a relationship to other people. So using time as an example, people in Northern cultures value strict adherence to the clock as proper, while people in Northern cultures view person to person relationships as more valuable than adherence to strict time keeping.

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting and very useful seeing this discussed. The important thing here isn't that any one country is 'wrong', but rather that this is useful information to guide how we interact with businesses and divisions around the world.

Once area the article doesn't discuss at all is how middle east and Indian cultures understand time. Can anyone offer any commentary on this?

<comment><USER19> My personal experience in the Middle East: expect everyone to be at least half an hour late (you're stuck in a huge traffic jam anyway), don't be surprised if someone is 2 hours late, and don't view 11pm as an unusual time for a meeting (joking: there exists a time zone in which the meeting starts in time). I would classify it as "multi-active".

Personally, I like it that people are not angry with you when you're really late (again, traffic jam). I experience this as relieving.

<comment><USER20> Oh dear... I was looking through the comments of the top trending thread in HN now (6 hour workday) and this comment reminded me of your post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7839210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7839210)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not an anthropologist, but I have a hard time believing that different peoples have significantly different conceptions of time. Americans are a lot heavier than other peoples, but nobody suggests they have a different concept of mass.

They're really talking about culture - mutual rules for deciding when a thing will occur, and when it has ended. Or dominant metaphors for time. A lot of these are dependent on material conditions; what is locally scarce?

In a place where gasoline and vehicles are scarce and people operate on thin margins, people expect long voyages to be infrequent, and the bus is not going to leave unless there are enough passengers. Otherwise the bus driver can't buy dinner that evening.

In a place where human labor is cheap, materials are expensive, and enforcement of contracts is sketchy, keeping people waiting while you assess their character may be preferable to making a hasty commitment.

Maybe not every difference is explainable this way but I think a lot of them are.

If alien anthropologists arrived, they might look at our space programs and conclude that we had a different conception of time. There's a strange obsession with the exact moment of launch, and time is measured as starting from a negative number up to that point. Time can be, and often is, started and stopped relative to that moment. Launches may have a published, scheduled time, but everyone expects it to be deferred until consensus is achieved that conditions are right. We are also careful that each launch be carefully timed to use an auspicious window, dependent on the planets around us and other cyclical conditions.

The alien anthropologist, ignorant of how his powerful ship even works, notes that he takes off whenever he wants to and just goes in a straight line to wherever he likes. He attributes the humans' odd practices to their different conception of time.

<comment><USER22> >I have a hard time believing that different peoples have significantly different conceptions of time.

Me too. This is why it's so mind blowing to hear that other people perceive the world differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wonderful article, and quite insightful. While reading I was asking myself if it wouldn't be a good idea to provide tools to enlarge our possibilities of time perception:

The dominant time perception in North-America / EU is linear: the work day is segmented and tasks and appointments are scheduled. Calendar apps and project management tools help us with this. But what if I wanted to take, say, the circular time persepctive? I'm not aware of any tools or apps that would support such a perspective.

Maybe one should think of ways to open our management culture to other time perspectives, maybe even enabling us to shift between the perpectives and unify them. Something like a 'multi-cultural project management tool.' I can imagine that this could have quite some impact in globalized economy, and maybe even could be the basis for a new management philosophy

<comment> ryan-allen I grew up in Australia and at 19 started the 9-5 'grind' type job which I kept going for a few years.

When I started contracting and working from home, I found that I could not shake the association of the hours and what they mean. No matter how hard I tried.

If I started later than 9 or 10, I was 'lazy'. If I took the whole morning off and was working until 11pm it was 'a disaster of a day', even if I worked less hours. For some reason if I was working later than 6pm it seemed like something was wrong.

I have no idea how to reliably change the perception of time once it's ingrained. It's certainly a strange phenomenon.

<comment><USER23> Mayhap it's simply an artifact of social psychology: if you're working later than 6pm, everyone _else_ is off work and out having fun, and you're cloistering yourself with your work when you _could_ be out socializing. (Even if you'd rather not.)

If you get, say, stationed on a submarine doing night missions, the group you'll mostly be socializing with suddenly gets off work around 7AM. The urge to keep to a 9-5 fades quickly.

<comment><USER24> I think there is really something to this - I barteneded my way through college, and for a couple years after (in order to travel and take care of some youthful exuberance that was incompatible with a standard job). As a result, my "money shifts" were Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, and my days off were typically Monday and Tuesday. A lot of my friends and social circle were in the service industry as well. As a result when I decided to do the career thing, it took several years to get over "Tuesday is a day off" and "Saturday is super productive" type thoughts. Similarly, I still find evenings to be more conducive to work than mornings because my schedule was bar hours - 4 or 5 pm - 3am, and relaxing after work makes no sense, I prefer a relaxing, slow start to the day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Khmer proverb: "you have the clock, we have the time"

</comment><comment><USER26> Instead of the linear, multi-active and cyclic times paradigm, another approach I found interesting is the one proposed by Philip Zimbardo neatly presented in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg)

It presents individuals as being either past, present or future oriented. Apparently, the closer we are to the equator the more present-oriented we tend to be (because there are less seasonal changes).

</comment><comment><USER27> In my own experience, the traditional anthropological take on time seems more and more outdated these days. There are some differences. But I get the impression that almost anywhere you go people's senses of time are not all that differentiated by country, even if this might have been the case in the past. The main differences in perception of time that I have seen have been between different socioeconomic groups within a country.

</comment><comment><USER28> The Aymara people of the Andes also have a "future is behind you" vision of time.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aymara_language#Idiosyncrasies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aymara_language#Idiosyncrasies)

[http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.a...](http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.asp)

</comment><comment><USER29> This speaks to how useful email is as a communications medium on the Internet and it's likely one reason why, despite all the new modes of communication, it's still a widely used standard: people from different cultures all around the world can get back to you at their own pace and there's generally no expectation of an immediate response.

</comment><comment><USER30> Excellent article. I think distance and relationships can also be modeled in this fashion to show the differences between Eastern and Western philosophies. I'm definitely going to read this book named "When cultures collide''. It's important to be able to understand everyone's perspectives.

</comment><comment><USER31> For a deeper look into the topic, see _A Geography Of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist_ , by Robert Levine ([http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026427/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026427/)).

</comment><comment><USER32> The way the Malagasy see time really reminds me of the movie Memento. This entire movie plays backwards (from scene to scene) because the main character has no short term memory, the story is extremely well written. You should go and see it.

</comment><comment><USER33> What I see in Brazil, that is a culture that is reputed to tolerate late people: the same folks that want to be forgiven if they are late do get very angry if someone leaves them waiting for more than 30s.

</comment><comment><USER34> seems author wanted to write poetic book about understanding different cultures but instead wrote this b.s. article filled with worn out stereo types instead. Guess what, in nearly every business environment with an office people get upset when you do not show up to a meeting. I know this because I've worked in many of the countries this author listed. There are differences in cultures but this article attempts to turn these differences into a science, which in some way is just disgustingly racist.

</comment><comment><USER35> My perspective is as an East Coast American (the D.C. to Boston corridor) where punctuality is highly prized and dealing with South Koreans, who have a different cultural feeling about time.

Among the South Koreans I know some characteristics jump out

\- The 빨리빨리 culture (quickly! quickly!). Do every labor activity, no matter how trivial, at the maximum possible tempo. Koreans coming to the U.S. frequently complain about how slow their interactions are with Americans (particularly cashiers). The idea of pacing yourself, running a marathon and not a sprint is a foreign idea.

\- Everything stops for food. Fast food of course exists in Korea. But no matter what's going on, how critical it is, or how behind everybody is, my experience is that Koreans will drop everything during meal time and take a remarkably relaxed view of meal-time. This may have something to do with how many soups Koreans eat, but my American sensibility, of just powering through a garbage lunch as quickly as possible because it's getting in the way of my work day, had a hard time adjusting to this for years.

\- Koreans tend to be perpetually tardy. On the waiting end, I've noticed that universally Koreans seem to be mildly irritated by the tardiness of their peers. On the tardy-party end the reasons for being tardy are complex, with about as many reasons why it's unavoidable as reasons why it could have been avoided.

\- Planning group activities seems to be a group event rather than a leader- focused organizer's role. This means if a bunch of people get together to go do an activity, it means lots of waiting around until group consensus, and lots of questions from everybody if this or that scenario is agreeable to you ("sure", "I don't care", "I don't know", etc. are not acceptable answers, the consensus building requires your input). Then, much later than is necessary, and probably after a few internal rounds of "voting", a plan will suddenly crystallize and everybody will suddenly move into motion and execute. And the downside it seems like there's a lack of organization and planning for your day, on the up side, there's lots of variety.

With Americans it seems like a group will get together, everybody will ask for ideas, most people will say "whatever" or "I don't know", and eventually a leader will emerge who everybody follows for that day's activities. The consensus oriented activity planning Koreans do is a little maddening to me, even many many years later.

Some of this is rather recent. The 빨리빨리 culture in particular. Before the war, Koreans were generally regarded like Southerners in the U.S. are. Leisurely, taking their time, no reason to rush [1]. It seems that some of the characteristics above are from this older cultural attitude, but the quickly! quickly! culture seems to be the result of the reconstruction and industrialization boom.

1 - [http://gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com/2012/06/koreas-bbali- bb...](http://gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com/2012/06/koreas-bbali-bbali- culture.html)

<comment><USER36> > Everything stops for food. Fast food of course exists in Korea. But no > matter what's going on, how critical it is, or how behind everybody is, my > experience is that Koreans will drop everything during meal time and take a > remarkably relaxed view of meal-time.

This is actually a very healthy attitude. The best of both worlds would be to take your time with meals - there's really nothing wrong with having lunch and discussions with friends even for two hours - but _plan accordingly_. Don't schedule anything for two hours after lunch starts, and so on.

<comment><USER35> I actually agree and it's one of the healthier attitudes I've adopted. It's nice having a break in the middle of the day where all I meditate on is enjoying and savoring my meal rather than seeing how fast I can shove it into my stomach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's funny that the author associates variants of time to a culture or nation, instead of to an "environment" or "organization." In the US, I have been in companies where no meeting starts within 15-20 minutes of theoretical start time. It is typically because of two reasons: a) people are always late at a given company, or b) telephone bridge or technology does not cooperate.

This is what a meeting looks like many times: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYu_bGbZiiQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYu_bGbZiiQ)

Being on time does not mean being productive.

[EDIT: Comment to video]

</comment><comment><USER38> Maybe it's my Western bias speaking, but a lot of what is described as "just a different way of viewing time" sounds like "just a greater tolerance for jerks" to me.

When you schedule a meeting and one person takes pains to arrive on time and another person does not care whether they're late and shows up an hour later, that leaves the conscientious person sitting there twiddling their thumbs for an hour, whether they're in the U.S. or Italy or China.

I suppose it's more understandable in areas where transportation is unreliable, in which case it's hard for anybody to be consistently on time, but I have a hard time seeing how a culture in which no one is concerned with punctuality can be said to be merely laid-back, as opposed to plain lazy. It's possible to be both laid-back and punctual, after all.

<comment><USER39> Suggesting that certain cultural traits might be unproductive or even bad is frowned upon, in my opinion unjustly.

My family is Bangladeshi. One of the characteristics of the culture is a total inability to be punctual. Its always drove my dad up the wall, even though he grew up there. So when I read articles like this, I just think of people like my dad--the linear time minorities in these places. Pacing around waiting for guests who show up at 10 for dinner scheduled for 8.

<comment><USER40> Out of curiosity, where in Bengal is your family from?

I have a hypothesis about the nature of this particular trait.

<comment><USER41> > Bangladeshi

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Yes, all this cultural relativity is just wonderful. Kumbaya.

Except, who walked on the Moon, and who didn't?

<comment><USER6> That's only valuable if you prefer walking on the moon rather than looking at the moon in rapture.

<comment><USER43> I prefer having my children live to old age because of vaccines and farms. I prefer worrying about my weight rather than where my next meal will come from. I prefer being able to communicate with people around the world at the speed of light rather than the folks in my village. I prefer hot and cold running (and clean) water.

And I can still gaze in rapture upon the rocky sphere held in the sky by chains of gravitation.

<comment><USER6> Who says you need to "plan to discover vaccine at 11:30pm" to achieve all that?

<comment><USER11> Whenever someone finds a fault with the American way of doing things, there's always someone that shouts "but we're the most technologically advanced country on earth!", and the sound of people screaming "hurdur!" deafens everyone.

No wonder Americans stick to the imperial system.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Wolfram Language: Fast Introduction for Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wolfram.com/language/fast-introduction-for-programmers/ <comment><USER2> Programming in Mathematica is weird. I've done a whole course in machine learning using only mathematica (as opposed to more obvious choices, like matlab or python) and while writing small functions was very easy (and functional programming fun), compounding those functions without using global variables was very hard. I kept using the Module construct where each local variable has to be declared, and it ended up being a mess. I always have a running session of Mathematica running for quick calculation or plotting (easier imo than matlab+nupy / matlab), but I would never consider it for larger projects. But I've never seen a larger codebase so maybe there's some kind of design pattern essential for this language.

<comment><USER3> Module (and its dynamical scoping cousin Block) can be clunky to use because you have to declare the local variables you wish to use up-front. Other than that it's not 'weird'.

I write a lot of Mathematica code for my job. To make life easier I've built in a macro system that makes day-to-day programming a whole lot more pleasant. It will be available in Mathematica 10.4 in the GeneralUtilities package that ships with Mathematica.

One of the built-in macros is a construct that automatically localizes any variables that occur as the L-value of an assignment:

      Needs["GeneralUtilities`"]
      foo[x_, y_] := Scope[
        z = x * y;
        PrimeQ[z + 1]
      ]

This gets rewritten at definition time to be:

      foo[x_, y_] := Block[{z},
        z = x * y;
        PrimeQ[z + 1]
      ]

It's a small thing, but it adds up, especially for large functions, and indeed its silly this isn't a core feature of the language.

There are a couple other nice features of Scope, too, like the ability to use a single quote ' anywhere in the body of your function to Echo the value there to the current notebook without actually changing the behavior of the code -- essentially a very lightweight form of 'debugging print'. That also makes a huge difference.

And it has some more powerful variants, like "z '= 2 * 3" will echo a line that explicitly says "z = 6", rather than just "6".

Likewise '' means EchoHold, which prints the expression before being evaluated AND afterwards, so you'll see "z = 2 * 3 = 6" in the above case.

Lastly ''' means Tap, which is a higher-order form of EchoHold which instruments a function to echo its input and output (again without changing behavior). So Fold[Plus''', Range[10]] prints out all the intermediate steps in the fold.

There's a variety of features that add a very lightweight syntax for monadic and exception-based error handling, but that's not quite stable enough to advertise yet.

Same goes for debugging: there's some really powerful stack browsing, history capture and replay features, but again not quite stable enough to advertise for this version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess the mental block I have with Wolfram/Mathematica is that there's this feeling that you don't know how to do it until you know how to do it. As opposed to languages where you can learn a smaller number of principles and then use those principles to reason your way to how to do it.

Like, the third slide of the introduction:

Range[20]

Why not just something like List[1..20] ? Maybe List[1..20] works in Wolfram, but then it's weird that you have this Range function that serves no other purpose than to define a Range.

Same with NestList[f, x, 5]. I don't offhand know the way to create its output in something like Scala or Haskell but I imagine it's pretty concise, but meanwhile, in this case... if it's possible to get the effect without using NestList, then why use it? And if it's not possible to get the effect without using NestList, then how would you ever find out that you can use NestList?

It just seems like the actual programming experience would be a lot more about hunting-and-pecking through documentation and google searches, rather than reasoning your way to solution.

I'd love to hear from someone skilled with Wolfram to offer some clarity. Are you just basically thumbing through the documentation all the time to find that one perfect function call?

<comment><USER5> You are the target audience of this book. The Wolfram Language has gotten huge, making it harder for beginners to find their way around the basics via reference docs.

That said, WL is in fact based on pretty simple primitives. If you are familiar with functional programming, things like NestList are familiar and you'll start learning by finding the analogues of your favorite FP constructs.

WL also has a lot of functions that you might call "optional": those that could be restated as simple combinations of other functions. The rationale there is pretty simple: if there is a well-defined, commonly used chunk of computation, it should be given a name (and design). The fact that a fair amount of work is put into both the name and design of these things gives a higher sense of coherence (and predictability) than you might expect from their number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The Wolfram Language has about 5000 built-in functions. All have names in which each word starts with a capital letter."

Amazingly, I get the impression they say it as a point of pride, rather than as an embarrassing design decision. Don't get me wrong, having a rich, large standard library is great, but unless you use some kind of hierarchical namespaces, it's impossible to deal with.

<comment><USER7> You speak a language with three to six thousand "common" words and over one million total words. English speakers utilize no such hierarchical naming scheme, only practice.

Typical Mathematica notebooks (I won't say "programs") use a fair bit less than one hundred of the common functions, plus a handful of domain-specific functions from that the greater set of five thousand. At any time, you can enter ?FunctionName to access documentation far more comprehensive than most languages offer.

The UpperCaseForStandardLibrary and lowerCaseForYourCode convention actually makes a lot of sense in the context of Mathematica's primary use cases vs traditional software engineering projects. When I'm just trying to solve some problem in Mathematica, using my computer as a bicycle for the mind, I appreciate not having to putz with import statements or avoid name collisions.

<comment><USER6> There's no reason to expect a language like English which evolved organically to have an elegant or efficient design.

<comment><USER8> And thus, given the large amount of effective communication that occurs in English, there's no reason to expect that there is much of a downside in eschewing this particular language design approach that you propose.

<comment><USER9> > given the large amount of effective communication that occurs in English

I wasn't aware that anyone thought English was an effective language for communicating. It's horrible. Even native English speakers have problems communicating all the time.

<comment><USER10> Actually, English has a fairly high entropy/syllables ratio. [1][2]

Also, given that we can infer with decent accuracy what people are saying even in noisy environments, I would say it's really not too bad.

You could do better of course, but in a good spoke natural language you want a good mix of density (for efficient communication) and redundancy (for dealing with environmental variables). Optimizing for one comes at the expense of the other, and English strikes a pretty decent balance. [citation needed]

1: Pellegrino, et al. University of Lyons, 2011 <[http://www.ddl.ish- lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegri...](http://www.ddl.ish- lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_to%20appear_Language.pdf>) 2: There has been some valid criticism made to [1].

<comment><USER11> The issue is _understanding_ , not _transcribing_.

The existence of politicians (and politics) proves that it's easy to misunderstand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So the only implementations are Wolfram and the cloud Wolfram, both of which can go away or change incompatibly at any point, making my software worthless. I fail to see why I should invest a lot of time in this, given that I'd then have the Sword of Damocles hanging over my head in that fashion.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a computer science PhD, I love Mathematica, the language. Also I love the documentation it has, which makes hacking on it so much fun. However, I hate its notebook interface, which I think is extremely buggy and sluggish. That was the main reason I stopped using it a two years ago.

<comment><USER14> I actually think it is a fantastic idea, but a mediocre implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't really understand the point of the Wolfram Language. It feels like a language with a humongous standard library that tries to cover everything?

<comment><USER16> It's purpose is much the same as Maple or R a language designed with mathematics and stats. The standard library is just one of the peculiarities of how Wolfram decided to design his language. Instead of using libraries like R it's all built in. Beneath that it's not so terribly odd being a mostly functional language with a standard library that covers maths requirements.

<comment><USER7> Beyond surface similarities like an emphasis on data transformation over side- effects, I wouldn't call Mathematica a functional language. It's much better classified as a term rewriting language: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Term- rewriting_progra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Term- rewriting_programming_languages)

<comment><USER17> Then I guess you don't call Lisp a functional language either?

<comment><USER7> Lisp's evaluation strategy is based on a very particular category of rewriting systems known as the lambda calculus. Mathematica's is an abstract rewrite system with a broad set of evaluation strategies that are not easily represented in the lambda calculus (without first implementing a term rewriting system).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've only used it briefly, but _Mathematica: A Problem-Centered Approach_ ([http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1849962502](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1849962502)) is a pretty good resource for learning practical (mathematical) Mathematica programming.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can you use this language outside of Mathematica, or without purchasing Mathematica?

<comment><USER20> The FAQ[1] has this:

> How is it licensed?

> The Wolfram Language has multiple licensing models depending on usage > scenario. It is available free for certain casual use in the cloud, in CDF > Player, and on systems such as Raspberry Pi. It is available through site > licenses at educational institutions. It is also available in a variety of > subscription and paid-up product offerings. The Wolfram Language is also > licensed for OEM use, embedded in hardware or software systems.

The "casual use in the cloud" may be referring to this: [http://programming.wolframcloud.com/](http://programming.wolframcloud.com/) (requires sign-up, haven't tried it), and I'm not sure how you'd go about grabbing the Raspberry Pi edition.

[1] [http://www.wolfram.com/language/faq/](http://www.wolfram.com/language/faq/)

<comment><USER21> > I'm not sure how you'd go about grabbing the Raspberry Pi edition.

Easiest way is probably to start by buying a RPi.</comment></comment></comment>


Kodak surges 1,900% in 2 days after securing a $765M loan to make drugs - <AUTHOR> https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/kodak-stock-price-surges-765-million-government-drug-loan-2020-7-1029444079 <comment><USER2> This decision to give a tax payer funded loan to a company that's basically been unable to adapt to changing market conditions for 30 years really puzzles me.

Why does Kodak think they can pivot into an entirely new industry? Wouldn't the money be better spent on a true startup in this area? Investing in several startups would provide some risk mitigation that at least one of the companies could make it in the market. A new company wouldn't be saddled with all of Kodak's over bloated management and legacy. It's also likely that such a company or companies would create more than 300 jobs.

<comment><USER3> > Why does Kodak think they can pivot into an entirely new industry?

It's not an entirely new industry for them. Kodak's roots in the photography industry built up a good bit of institutional knowledge and capital infrastructure around chemical synthesis, and they've already been leveraging that expertise/infrastructure for hire (including for pharmaceuticals) through their Advanced Materials division[1].

So it's not entirely new to them, nor a complete unknown on their ability to execute. This contract just elevates it into a substantially larger and more important chunk of business for them.

Between the existing expertise and facilities, Kodak makes a much safer and faster-to-market bet than seeding a bunch of startups from scratch.

[https://www.kodak.com/en/advanced- materials/page/specialty-c...](https://www.kodak.com/en/advanced- materials/page/specialty-chemicals)

<comment><USER4> They sold off most of their chemical company to Eastman Chemical about 25 years ago.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Definitely a pretty surprising announcement for most, who haven't heard of Kodak in years, aside from perhaps their bankruptcy and delisting earlier this decade.

Interestingly enough there was apparently quite a bit of information leaked on this yesterday, which is why the stock spiked yesterday as well, prior to today's announcement. (e.g. [https://old.reddit.com/r/pennystocks/comments/hyxxce/kodak_k...](https://old.reddit.com/r/pennystocks/comments/hyxxce/kodak_kodk_supposedly_making_a_big_announcement/) or [https://mobile.twitter.com/Eric05205725/status/1287866490000...](https://mobile.twitter.com/Eric05205725/status/1287866490000089088?p=p))

</comment><comment><USER6> Volume was up something like 30x the day before the announcement. Clear insider trading on a massive scale occurred.

<comment><USER7> Supposedly there was a leak by a news person. I cannot find the original tweet, but there is this reddit thread from 2 days ago: [https://old.reddit.com/r/pennystocks/comments/hyxxce/kodak_k...](https://old.reddit.com/r/pennystocks/comments/hyxxce/kodak_kodk_supposedly_making_a_big_announcement/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The stock price has gone up so much they could literally do a secondary offer to pay back the loan and come out ahead. Crazy.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll never understand how the SEC can ensure there was no insider trading in situations like this.

<comment><USER9> I don't think they can. Even if they could, whoever made THAT much money can litigate with them for decades and suffer no real repercussions.

<comment><USER10> A judge would not allow them to litigate for decades. This is a silly idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Undoubtedly a deal meant for Trump friends and family to take in millions of insider trading profits.</comment>


California has the USA's highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living - <AUTHOR> http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/chad-mayes/true-california-has-nations-highest-poverty-rate-w/ <comment><USER2> A challenge with poverty rates in the US is that they often essentially proxy for "what proportion of the population recently immigrated from low-wage countries"; immigration from e.g. Mexico to the US often causes the poverty rate in both countries to rise and every actual human to be better off. California has ~10 million immigrants; many of them arrived rather recently.

(I think this is a variation on Simpson's paradox.)

<comment><USER3> Is this really true for Mexican immigration? The stereotype is that the US gets Mexican peasants and Indian doctors, at least. Everything you say is true for the Indian doctor or Chinese software engineer.

Thus their departure would raise incomes in Mexico while lowering it in the US. So your point is mostly right, at least as it relates to this story.

<comment><USER4> It's possibly the middle class Mexican citizens who have the resources to make the journey across the border in the first place.

<comment><USER5> Middle class Mexican citizens can live good lives in Mexico, so they don't need to risk dangerous border crossing to end up a poor illegal immigrant in the US.

<comment><USER6> That's incorrect. As domestic wages rise in a poor nation, emigration rises because the burgeoning middle class is better able to leave. That's why the US saw such a dramatic increase in immigration from Latin America since 1980, as wages have soared (relatively) there. The US now sees more immigration from Latin America every ten years, than it did in a century from 1880-1980. The desperately poor aren't the primary source of emigration around the world, they're mostly unable to move from their location. It's overwhelmingly not the Chinese or Indian poor (a billion people earning sub $5 per day) that are emigrating to the US, it's their middle class and higher - the truly poor can't move from their spot.

One of the most obvious examples of this - for generations, health care professionals in low-development nations have been emigrating, seeking higher incomes in the developed world. That's despite the fact that they're almost always middle class or higher in their own country. You could see this in action over the last 50 years across poor nations in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Currently the middle class is flooding out of various poor Eastern European nations, seeking a better life in eg Britain.

There were about a dozen articles posted on HN about this concept when the Syrian refugee crisis was peaking.

<comment><USER7> I disagree with regard to Eastern European part. Most of the emigration was unskilled labor. They were not below poverty line, they could organize move to UK, but they were never middle class in Poland, etc, and they usually aren't middle class in the UK. The second batch of emigrants is graduates entering the job market sometimes with degrees irrelevant in current market. So they decide to start their career in another country, because they don't have much to lose. In another country they focus on climbing up, often in a career not related to their education or previous aspiration.

The doctors, etc are a minority. A visible minority, because their move harms their country of origin more than a loss of a builder from a social perspective but still a minority.

<comment><USER8> What you say is mostly true in the UK and what OP said is mostly true for the USA. The USA gets better immigrants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Urban areas in California, where most of the people live, such as the Silicon Valley have extremely high home ownership and apartment rental costs. The article notes this briefly and somewhat obliquely, but it is worth emphasizing.

The median home price in San Jose, CA is about $850,000 at present (March 12, 2017) according to Zillow.

The average rent for a one bedroom apartment in San Jose is about $2473 per month ([https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-jose-rent- tre...](https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-jose-rent-trends/))

The US Census lists a median home price for the United States as a whole of $221,800 in 2010 ([https://www.census.gov/const/uspriceann.pdf](https://www.census.gov/const/uspriceann.pdf))

Median monthly gross residential rent in the United States was $934 in 2014 according to the Census ACS survey. ([http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/](http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/))

Other living expenses are often 10-25 percent higher in the major urban areas in California where most people live than other parts of the United States. (personal experience)

It is housing and rental costs that dominate the disparity with much of the country however.

<comment><USER10> The direct negative effect on the quality of life of high housing costs is astonishing. Yet there's no real public uproar. When the price of gas goes up, seemingly everyone is up in arms. But housing?! People complain, but no where near as much as they should. In areas with high housing costs, this should be the primary political issue. I guess nepotism just wins the argument...

<comment><USER11> It's a split issue. Renters want prices to go down. Owners want prices to go up.

Who wins the political clash? Are there more voting owners, or voting renters?

Generally there are more owners, though California has one of the lowest home ownership rates at around 53%. Cities draw this average down -- most suburbs have higher ownership rates.

With this in mind it shouldn't be a surprise that owners outvote renters.

<comment><USER12> > Are there more voting owners, or voting renters?

Doesn't matter. Owners win because we live in capitalist society, and capitalism means you must be an owner to get full rights. Non-gentry are second class citizens (no free movement, no access to clean water, no right to work the land, no right to build shelter).

No free movement: I can't travel to many places without a car because property owners decided only people who own cars should be legally allowed to access a place.

No access to clean water: water is a resource owned by corporations, the people drink at the corporation's pleasure.

No right to work/shelter ones self: all land has been sold off, new people born into this world must first serve the gentry until the gentry decide to pay them enough to buy some land of their own.

<comment><USER13> >Owners win because we live in capitalist society

NYC exists under the same capitalist system as SF or LA or wherever.

Nothing you have described (need to drive, no clean water, etc.) applies to NYC.

Therefore, your gripes aren't caused by the capitalist system you are blaming.

<comment><USER14> I guess one can say it's a similar system. But, while definitions might differ, I'm not sure how capitalist I would call one of the largest government run subway systems in the world [0], half century long water tunneling projects [1] or the longest running rent control system in the US [2].

[0] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2012/06/03/infrastru...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2012/06/03/infrastructure- socialism-and-the-new-york-subway/) [1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/nyregion/10tunnel.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/nyregion/10tunnel.html) [2] [http://www.tenant.net/Oversight/50yrRentReg/history.html](http://www.tenant.net/Oversight/50yrRentReg/history.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem with the way poverty is measured in the US is it measures relative income. Being poor relative to other people sucks, but consider the following. You can be poor in the US, and have:

\- Clean running water \- Electricity \- Heat \- Phone, now plus internet access \- Paved roads \- Access to basic health care (for now, thanks Obama!)

Disclosure: I went through bankruptcy and foreclosure, so I know exactly how much not having money sucks in this country, but I would take being broke in the US over being broke almost anywhere else, with one important caveat, if you have a long term physical or mental disability and do not have family to support you, then you are truly fucked (but that would be true anywhere outside of northern Europe or Canada as well).

<comment><USER16> Everything you state is true, but are we really supposed to use third world countries as our baseline? If Michael Phelps used Terry Schiavo as his competition, I doubt he would be as good as he is.

In the US we should be comparing ourselves to the best countries with the least amount of poverty, the highest socioeconomic mobility, and the healthiest populions.

We can't and won't improve if we always look for the lowest denominator then pat ourselves on the back because we are better than that.

<comment><USER6> Should we be comparing the US of 330 million people versus tiny nations that have artificial advantages due to their small size and homogeneous culture? Which pushes further into how you compare such dramatically different examples in the first place.

Consider Finland. Five million people, 82% white, extremely anti-immigration, and they don't have to defend themselves for the most part. The US military shield has mostly taken care of that for them (thus their 1.3% of GDP military spending despite having a frequently hostile Russia on their doorstep). So you want to compare their outcome, to the US?

Comparing a wildly diverse nation of 330 million against Sweden, Norway or Finland type nations, is absurd. Those are the absolute elite outcomes of the world and Europe in particular.

Compare Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Minnesota, Virginia, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, etc. to those nations. They all have median incomes equal to or higher than Switzerland (and that's before adjusting for the better cost of living in those states vs a Switzerland type nation) and are much closer on a population basis. Those are the elite outcomes of the US collection of states.

Or would you rather compare various of the bottom 25 US states to the relatively impoverished half of Europe nobody ever wants to talk about? Bulgaria, Belarus, Russia, Moldova, Hungary, Ukraine, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, etc.

The fact is, most developed nations struggle to match the median incomes of the poorest US states. Japan as one example has a median income 20% below Mississippi and Louisiana (and it's likely to continue losing ground to those states). Germany is about on par with Kentucky.

<comment><USER17> >Japan as one example has a median income 20% below Mississippi and Louisiana

Can you provide sources for that? What are you comparing? Median disposable income? Median household income?

<comment><USER18> Median household income. From a couple seconds worth of Googling:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Gallup_gross_med...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Gallup_gross_median_household_income)

> Japan: 34822

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

> MS: 40037

<comment><USER19> Does that include health insurance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I look around at approaches for reducing poverty in CA, almost everything I see is proposals for additional government subsidy programs. What I don't see is proposals for increasing the supply of the things that make COL so high in the first place.

How do you make things like housing, health care, and education more abundant, cheaper, more competitive in CA?

No one seems to know.

<comment><USER21> Fixing Housing supply is relatively easy: we just need to legalize construction. And maybe density too, such as the missing middle: [http://missingmiddlehousing.com/](http://missingmiddlehousing.com/)

There's a reason the poor have been migrating out into the sub-suburbs: that's where houses can actually get built.

<comment><USER22> They're called exurbs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not a surprise to me given that LA has the least affordable rent in the country (a measure of average percent of income spent on rent --- not absolute rent). But in both cases, my intuition is that this just means California is a very desirable place to live. If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it has greater intrinsic value (weather, culture, community, etc).

<comment><USER24> > If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively affordable housing but you choose > to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you > think it has greater intrinsic value

Or because you were born here and can't afford to leave; the share of California's population that is native born Californian has been growing for the last decade or so.

<comment><USER25> For many people, having family nearby saves so much money that a much lower cost of living elsewhere won't offset it. Having to pay for childcare (vs. having Grandma do it) alone is enough to wipe out the savings of moving to Dallas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This headline gets repeated a lot, but it is extremely misleading. Due to it's huge size, California has communities and cost of living that are vastly different. I don't understand how you can assign a single cost of living measure to the entire state. A cost of living adjustment that is true for coastal California will be wildly off base for people living on Mojave desert. A better study will reflect supplemental poverty rate broken down by their cohort regions.

<comment><USER27> Absolutely. California is wildly divided into places you want to live but can't afford (SF), and places you can afford but don't want to live (Barstow). $100k in SF is $33k in Barstow ( [http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of- living/san-francisco-ca/ba...](http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/san- francisco-ca/barstow-ca/100000) )

<comment><USER28> Except they all face the same tax burden which, as a California resident until recently, is quite high: sales tax, property tax, income tax...they tax everything there, and there are few exemptions. Even at $60K the taxes in CA will eat you alive. Great weather (in SoCal), but the sunshine tax, it seemed to us, was perhaps as much as 50%!

<comment><USER29> To be fair though, its not like the tax money is going into the pockets of corrupt politicians (well maybe not all of it). California is the most progressive state and spends that money on its residents via education, healthcare, scientific research etc. I would be willing to pay more taxes if the State made good use of what I pay them.

<comment><USER30> California's public education system is below average. It is not what it used to be before Prop 13.

California's public funds are increasingly going towards paying public employee pensions. Given how generous these pensions are and how they can be manipulated for maximum payout I would consider it corruption.

<comment><USER31> >California's public education system is below average. It is not what it used to be before Prop 13.

That has nothing to do with Prop 13 or money, though. You pay more in taxes today than you did pre-Prop 13, and in constant dollars we spend double what we spent on k-12 education in the early '70s.

>California's public funds are increasingly going towards paying public employee pensions.

Yes. By and large this is where the money is going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> After reading many mental gymnastics excercises of varying creativity in this thread that try to explain why the supplemental poverty measure is irrelevant and/or misleading, I'd like to know, how would _you_ define a measure for poverty that's both objective and gives a realistic account of the quality of life in the measured area?

<comment><USER33> Following Julian Simon, I'd use "how much X can you buy with an hour's worth of work", where X can be food, a basket of goods [1], precious metals or whatever seems more appropriate. I think the official basket of goods can be taken as a good first approximation.

[1] [http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/basket_of_goods.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/basket_of_goods.asp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is something very important missing - the SPM poverty measure is _relative_ poverty, not absolute. All this means is that CA has many rich people.

<comment><USER34> And all the the pretty money you earn as a software engineer in SF is sufficient only for a _kommunalka_ : [http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/10/tech- workers-live-40-to-a-...](http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/10/tech-workers- live-40-to-a-house-in-high-rent-san-francisco/)

We had one in town when I was a student. The thing had a name. It was called _Schweinebunker_.

<comment><USER35> So, living in places like that and paying that much is _definitely_ not normal.

For 1900 $/mo, you can get a bedroom in a really nice 2 or 3BR place in the desirable neighborhoods or a studio/1BR in the undesirable neighborhoods (sunset/richmond). I don't understand why the people in that article are living like that (Poor credit? Desperation to find a place fast? Ignorance of the existence of Craigslist?), but they're very, very far from being representative of SF real estate.

<comment> jon-wood I think you making that an example of a great deal just shows how skewed the SF housing market is. I'm in the south of the UK, just within commuting distance of London, and for $800/mth less than that rent a 3 bedroom house with a garden in a well connected area, and that's a bit expensive for the area because its well located. The housing market in London is just as ridiculous at the moment and I'm so glad to have got out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is California a good place to live for your typical person? It has an enviable economy with Silicon Valley and whatnot. Places all over the country are trying to recreate that. But it doesn't appear to have particularly good schools, infrastructure, or public services to show for it. Does the vaunted economic engine really translate into prosperity for the middle 50% of Californians?

</comment><comment><USER37> Not surprising as california also has one of the lowest minimum wages in real terms. For all this talk about progressive politics and a 15/hr minimum wage, 'backwards' states in the south have real minimum wages well above 15 CA USD/hr. Some even surpass 20/hr. Mean while California wages would be the equivalent of around $3.50/he in their terms.

So much for progressive politics

</comment><comment><USER38> karma automotive told me only 10% cost of living increase from michigan. i told them to fuck off

</comment><comment><USER39> Oh my my. Makes me want to leave everything and move to Alabama. Does it?

<comment><USER40> Huntsville has a strong tech presence due to aerospace and defense, or so I've heard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> $30,000 a year

"poverty"

[https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about- global-p...](https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global- poverty)

"more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day."

<comment><USER42> Maybe try restating your point in units of food and shelter. Dollars have no intrinsic value.

<comment><USER43> So perhaps move those poor americans to the third world. They'll feel like top 1% with those dollars.

<comment><USER3> Please don't - here in India we don't need a bunch of people too lazy to make their way in America.

<comment><USER44> Says the person who wants them to all come to the US.

"I agree with that [immigration is a net benefit to nearly everyone] and support more or less open borders" \- yummyfajitas

<comment><USER3> I should have caveated that statement with the fact that immigrants must be good people who sell labor to willing buyers and don't victimize innocents. I thought I made that clear by mentioning comparative advantage.

Unfortunately most poor Americans refuse to work, commit disability fraud and otherwise exploit the taxpayer, and commit disproportionate amounts of crime. (Far more than Indians - I've never felt unsafe in any slum here, unlike in the US). You don't get any comparative advantage from people who refuse to trade and merely take things from you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Americans waste enough food to end world hunger

[http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35884-on-the-news-with- th...](http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35884-on-the-news-with-thom- hartmann-americans-waste-enough-food-to-end-world-hunger-and-more)

<comment><USER45> This is a meaningless metric. Food can't be magically shipped to the regions that need it. A better measurement would be waste per capita or farm land utilization.

<comment><USER46> The other thing of course to remember is just shipping food out of the US and into the developing world is how you break local farming economies. Who wants to buy food from the local farmer when there's ample free food from relief programs.

Development is hard.

<comment><USER41> Most of the food wasted is "ugly" food. It's not putting farmers out of business. It could keep starving people alive though.

<comment><USER45> Which completely misses the point. To summarize what the parent is suggesting:

"Teach a man to fish..."</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How can small town techs get out to tech hubs? - <AUTHOR>

I seem to have a bit of an interesting quandary here. I'm a fairly recent graduate (December '12) with 1.5 Years experience as a Ruby DevOps (I was allowed to pick my language) in an area where RPG and COBOL are some of the most heavily used languages.
I want to be able to find mentors or find a way to relocate to a more tech-centric area, but I keep on running into issues of "3-5 years of experience plus" whenever I have the skills necessary to perform the job if not more.
How does a small town tech head get out into the wide world? I want to find more senior mentors so I can grow instead of being likely the most senior person in the area in Ruby.
I want to find an area that's passionate about technology, where people unabashedly sing praises of the latest hacks in clojure and lisp, where people enjoy their jobs. Not where people don't want to ever touch a computer off of a company dime.
The big question here is how do people from small towns get out into tech hubs?
Thanks for your time in reading. <comment><USER2> If you are serious about it pack up and move to NY/NJ or the valley. Find a family or friends place you can crash at for a couple months during your job hunt. Or room with students living around college campuses, cause that's a great network you can tap into, to figure out where the jobs are at. It's what I did. Wasn't easy but once you get that first job it definitely pays off.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I'm employed full time already and making well into the 90th percentiles of College Graduates, I don't particularly think this is a good idea. Minor in business means that I know how to plan these things, have contingency funds, and know what happens if you jump off a cliff. Too many risks and variables, and right now I have every right to be picky given my position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> where are you at? even just roughly. simple answer is move to CA/NY if you want the biggest markets.

Aside from that you can do a ton of stuff right from where you are if you are happy there otherwise. I am in a small area, town of 50k people or so, and definitely not tech heavy. There are tons of ways to get involved. Get into an Open Source project, people will mentor you on those. Go to conferences, meet people etc. Basically think of all that as investing in your own sanity and future, not "oh damn that cost me 2k for that conference".

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently on GitHub and ramping up into some OS projects under <https://github.com/baweaver> . Now that I have enough of a skillbase to be useful I feel a lot more comfortable in submitting and joining in.

Located in Joplin, Missouri. I would go to conferences but I have a 40 hour work week and no vacation until this coming February which makes it extremely difficult. Work won't send me to conferences either, I've tried to play that one a few times.

<comment><USER3> Yea, the vacation time sinks the week long conference idea real quick.

Open source is definitely a good way to start, and you are in the middle of the states so you are in a good place to be able to get places. Not sure what kinda of drive it is to Kansas City or Oklahoma City or even St Louis, but you could do weekend trips there and find a meetup to go do. Find a hackathon in one of those cities and meet some people that way. See if you can find a startup in St Louis or KC and go see them, talk to them, we all work over weekends at least some. Usually I find people pretty cool with letting someone stop by for a short time and learn something. Hell, all they can do is say no, just keep asking around till you get a yes.</comment></comment></comment>


The Mysterious Mental Side Effects of Traveling into Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcoexist.com/3036887/out-of-this-world-the-mysterious-mental-side-effects-of-traveling-into-space <comment><USER2> I wonder how different this is from the feelings you get from traveling to somewhere very different from the place where you normally live.

This is pretty corny:

Every year I go to Burning Man. It's the only "real" vacation I really take. I _completely_ detach. No phones, no television, no news from the outside world, and except on days when I have volunteer shifts, no sense of "time".

It's pretty amazing how much you end up detaching from "default" world (which is burner parlance for the world outside of Black Rock City). By a few days in, default just feels impossibly far away, like none of it matters whatsoever, and you are completely detached from it. BRC is on another planet, and Default Planet doesn't matter.

All of the social conventions are different, all of the interactions or somehow (although indescribably, at least for me) different. Everything just feels _different_ somehow.

Do most people get that feeling on "normal" vacations?

<comment><USER3> The following statement is not meant to be snarky.

Do you think that feeling of difference in interaction and being detached from "default" world has anything to do with the drugs? Either yourself taking them or just the masses of people around you?

I ask, because I noticed that same sense of difference and detachment myself while I lived in a lovely commune after college, but attributed it mostly to heavy drug use.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's the drugs.

I used to do cross-country backpacking. The kind where you go on multi-day trips out in the wilderness, well out of the range of any technology (except GPS). What is remarkable about such trips is exactly the type of detachment that the parent describes.

It also gives a profound sense of perspective. You kind of realize how inconsequential your day-to-day concerns are. You know, stuff like trying to not be late to morning stand-ups or vertically centering the text inside some div. You realize how small _you_ are in the grand scheme of things. The forests and rivers and mountains existed long before you were born and they will continue to exist long after you die. In their eyes -- if they _had_ eyes -- you don't matter. You're less than a speck. You're nothing. Then when you lie down in your tent that night and the only thing you can hear are the sounds of nature around you, what happens is that you stop giving a shit about your "default" life.

Several days later, on your way back to civilization, your phone beeps and you realize you're now within range of a cellular tower. Annoyed, you punch in your passcode to silence it. Oh, what's this? Your friend texted you two days ago, inviting you to a house party on Saturday. Better respond real quick so he doesn't think you're ignoring him. And maybe check email while at it, too.

And that's how you get sucked back into bullshit.

<comment><USER5> This is really insightful.

I feel like a lot of the heavy drug use in our society comes from the fact that so few people get to get away from the nonsense. The promise of drugs is that your time between "real world mode" and detachment is 15 minutes instead of several days. Of course, most of these drugs have supply-integrity and dosage-certainty issues on account of being illegal, and are unpredictable at best and dangerous at worst. I don't intend to say "drugs are bad", because I think that research into the therapeutic potential of these compounds is 50 years behind where it should be, but most people don't know what they're doing and are using them irresponsibly.

I've noticed that as I've gotten older I'm better at dropping into a detached, almost Zen state... and ignoring the bullshit in "the real world". I've learned that you can't let yourself get sucked into the bullshit, even if you have to be at work. There's an almost sociopathic skill I've cultivated of playing the role without caring. I need to be the subordinate? Fine, I'm a paid actor. I've also worked to cultivate that ability to just focus on the moment, in order to make weekends more useful or effective. A long (15+ mile) bike ride can have that effect, or an outdoor meditation session, or just having a purring cat sleep on top of me. Even if I get just 30 seconds of that detachment, I consider it a success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I immediately had to re-watch this pretty awesome video after reading the article:

[http://youtu.be/2aCOyOvOw5c](http://youtu.be/2aCOyOvOw5c)

It goes from liftoff to space and back to earth in a handful of minutes, and the enhanced (but real) audio is pretty creepy.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a phenomenon that is fairly well documented and known among high- altitude mountain climbers, in which climbers high on the mountain develop a strong sense that they have a companion with them. They don't see anyone when they look around--it's not a visual hallucination--they just sort of know that there is another person there with them. The only reference I can think of off the top of my head is Greg Child, who wrote about it in his book "Mixed Emotions."

<comment><USER8> I wonder if that is related to what happens to people that wear the "god helmet". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet)

<comment><USER9> This sounds a lot like the theory that humans used to have more separate brain hemispheres (pre- corpus colossum), and thus had a higher prevalence of schizophrenia (messages from the right side of the brain to the left, perceived as coming from "outside the self") which was interpreted as a voice of God.

<comment><USER10> Ah, bicameralism. I reposted a paper on that topic to HN a few days back that you might find interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Dissociation isn't just some feeling that you feel "separate" from everyone else. Rather, it's a very alien, unsettling mental state. If you want to see what it feels like, one way I know of that sometimes induces it is to stare at yourself in a mirror for a really long time. The effect is only temporary, but in some people it becomes permanent (in which case it becomes a psychological disorder).

<comment><USER12> If anyone intends to try mirror gazing to induce a dissociative state, please be aware that it can also produce disturbing visual apparitions, particularly in low lighting: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20866001](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20866001)

<comment><USER13> Wow had no idea this was a studied phenomenon. I remember be g a preteen and this was a popular party trick to freak people out (effective too, so I heard).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here is an excellent video about the overview effect: [https://vimeo.com/55073825](https://vimeo.com/55073825) (best watched on a (very) large screen)

</comment><comment><USER15> There was a moderate amount of speculation in mid-century SF on the possible psychological effects of space travel, the most extreme being "the Great Pain of Space" that figured in an early Cordwainer Smith story: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain)

When it turned out nothing quite so dramatic happened to the first space travelers, the idea was dropped, but it's certainly worth considering that less dramatic effects might yet have practical import in the future of human space travel.

</comment><comment><USER16> I immediately thought about this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQenNw2s1cA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQenNw2s1cA)

(continued here) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIJRoj2qwsc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIJRoj2qwsc)

When James May returns to the Earth it's obvious that he's had a very special experience.

"If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything."

</comment><comment><USER17> Not to be a wet blanket, but there doesn't seem to be anything mysterious about this side effect. I was expecting something different as a result of the sensational-sounding title: something truly hard-to-explain, not just having one's perspective expanded (quite literally).

</comment><comment><USER18> "From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" -- Edgar Mitchell

Maybe we should be sending politicians into space.

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't tell if this article is mostly genuine, or whether it's meant to push all the buttons to sell more tickets for potential space travelers.

</comment><comment><USER20> the last video seems promising, except they skipped the landing part :)

</comment><comment><USER21> Mysterious, eh. How long have you spent on an airplane? 12hrs, 27hrs? Imagine how awful living in a space station must be.

<comment><USER22> If you read the article, you'll see that isolation and claustrophobia aren't necessarily involved.</comment></comment>


5 rules to get customer support right - <AUTHOR> http://alwaysnewmistakes.wordpress.com/2008/03/13/customer-support/

<comment><USER2> There are 6 rules here, and with text like "In the end you won't get nothing out of a confrontation", I find this quite hard to read and take seriously. There may be some gems in here, but it's in need of editing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Paul, probably a bad translation as my mother tongue isn't English ;) About the 6 rules, the last one isn't really a rule but an additional point. Maybe I should separate it so it doesn't creates confusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have found you really just need one rule: Care about the customers problem. Just care. It is important to be clear that you can't fix every problem. It is also important to fix the problems you can... but I have found that whether you fix the problem or not, you will win customers over if you actually just care about them and their problem.</comment>


Firefox now tells Mozilla what your default browser is every day - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/firefox-now-tells-mozilla-what-your-default-browser-is-every-day/ <comment><USER2> I really wonder why Mozilla employees think it is acceptable to do that without informed consent for users running Windows. No one would tolerate Mozilla installing a binary in ~/bin/ and configuring it to be run via user crontab on Linux.

Oh well - time to go clean up my Windows installs. _sigh_

<comment><USER3> Does Firefox collect so-called "telemetry" data with real, informed consent, and with the default setting being "private?"

Or has Mozilla adopted a dark pattern where all the privacy-violating checkboxes are automatically "chosen" by default?

<comment><USER4> Not only do they collect telemtery by default -- and even send them telemtry data when you disable telemetry! -- they can also remotely change your Firefox settings and/or install "experiments", at any time, without any notice to you!

Hell, if you have a "clean" host/VM, I encourage you to install Firefox, start a packet capture, launch Firefox for the first time, then just sit and wait for 30 seconds or so -- not doing anything or interacting with it in any way -- before closing Firefox. Then, go take a look at your packet capture. I think you'll be quite surprised at all of the connections it makes...

This is really not the Mozilla Firefox I envisioned or expected way back when I first started supporting and advocating for it (when it was first announced!).

<comment><USER5> Are you telling me Firefox is not better than using edge/chrome in terms of data collection? Are they using to improve their service or serve ads? Still with Mozilla because I'm trying to back this against the Goliath Google.

<comment><USER4> > _Are you telling me Firefox is not better than using edge /chrome in terms > of data collection?_

Did I mention Chrome, Edge, or any other browser? No, I said nothing of the sort.

Is t as bad as Chrome or Edge? Absolutely not. It's starting to look like Mozilla is actively working towards that goal, however.

I still prefer and use Firefox over any of the others but it's to the point where I'm using it not because it is the "best" browser but because it "sucks less" than any of the others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I had always assumed that Firefox didn't use telemetry.

This is worrisome. Is there a modern browser available that doesn't try to spy on you?

<comment><USER7> Pretty much every time I've installed a fresh Firefox, all the telemetry is enabled by default. Opt out instead of opt in. Surprising considering what they sell themselves as.

<comment><USER8> edge seems the safer choice at the moment.

<comment><USER9> No, firefox is still the most private browser out of the big three.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Instead of copying and pasting the registry entry into a text file, merging ("running") it, then deleting the text file, the following (PowerShell) command should do the same thing:

      New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox" -Name DisableDefaultBrowserAgent -PropertyType DWord -Value 1

To disable the scheduled task (if you simply delete it, it might "reappear" after Firefox is updated):

      schtasks.exe /change /disable /tn "\Mozilla\Firefox Default Browser Agent 308046B0AF4A39CB"

Or, you could simply disable the telemetry altogether and tell Mozilla that all this "opt-in by default" telemetry is bullshit.

Note: The above are untested as I don't run Windows (partly because of all the spyware -- excuse me, "telemetry" \-- bullshit!).

(Edit: Sorry, changed forward slashes to back slashes.)

<comment><USER8> spyware that firefox seem to emulate quite well given these news.

BTW, your suggestions do not in the firefox I have:

New-ItemProperty : Cannot find path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox' because it does not exist. At line:1 char:3 \+ New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:/SOFTWARE/Policies/Mozilla/Firefox" -N ... \+ <comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment>~ \+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox:String) [New-ItemProperty], ItemNotFoundException \+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : PathNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.NewItemPropertyCommand

ERROR: The specified task name "\Mozilla\Firefox Default Browser Agent 308046B0AF4A39CB" does not exist in the system.

<comment><USER4> Sorry,

      New-Item -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox"

might be neccesary first, if Firefox didn't already create it. Or it could be because I originally used forward slashes instead of back slashes (now fixed!).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Taste of Linear Logic (1993) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/lineartaste/lineartaste-revised.pdf <comment><USER2> Here's a great talk by Simon Peyton Jones on integrating linear types into Haskell: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0mhvd3-60Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0mhvd3-60Y)

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the most amazing things about linear logic is that "classical" linear logic has a direct constructive reading.

This has some interesting applications in constructive mathematics ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.07518](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.07518)) and programming ([http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/multiparty/multi...](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/multiparty/multiparty.pdf)).

<comment><USER4> The Shulman paper was the first instance I've seen of someone properly using Par in their logical modelling

I've been slowly working on some applied linear logic stuff for my day job the past two years. I definitely think a lot of work has missed out on what happens if you have both implication and par native to your system. You get a really nice kernel for a concurrent functional programming language. With nice resource safety.

<comment><USER3> I couldn't agree more, classical linear logic leads to surprisingly concise definitions.

Your day job sounds fascinating, would you mind expanding on it a bit?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Linear logic is the shit. I've been reading up a lot on linear logic and certain things I have a hunch it closely corresponds to and I'm convinced it's the formalism for 21st century.

Basically, it's like classical logic but with two players. From player 1's point of view, player 2's AND has different semantics than his own AND.

It's the logic of state developing over time. In classical logic a statement can only be true since negative eternity and it will be true until eternity.

On the other hand, linear logic deals with statements like "I have a dollar" which can be spent on an ice cream. Therefore, at some point, "I have a dollar" was false, then it became true, and then it became false again.

It's also the logic that captures the difference between a reference and a value which is weirdly important. Unix's "everything is a file" should actually be recast as "everything is a reference".

The Rust borrow checker is based on a subset of linear logic and it's the secret sauce of said compiler. It can reason statically about dynamic systems.

I'll make some claims that I can support with papers if need to be so ask if you want proof. Currently, probability is based on measure theory however linear logic can also be used (Vovk bases probability on game theory which is essentially linear logic).

Generative adversarial networks (which are based on minimax) are based on linear logic as minimax is very linear logical.

I would go as far as to say that mathematics, in addition to axiom of choice also needs an axiom of adversarial choice. Axiom of choice assumes that you can always pick the best possible option, however you need to be able to account for your worst possible options as well. All mathematical optimization falls outside of classical logic.

The funniest thing is that this idea, the duality of things is very old. Dialectics is very firmly rooted in Western philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, you know the usual suspects) however no one ever extended it to a formal logic.

Karl Marx (I hate Marx but realize that his ideas might have influenced people so knowing why he was wrong is worth something) also talked about a similar idea ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism)). In particular Engel's summary is work exploring [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism#Engels...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism#Engels's_dialectics)

They are essentially talking about linear logic, however the third rule is very much wrong, negation of negation is not a part of a logic of two opposites.

It can also be used as the foundation of probability instead of the more traditional measure theory.

I can talk about this for hours.

<comment><USER6> Be careful in mixing popular culture and mathematics.

<comment><USER5> I've heard this before however I disagree. In fact I would argue that most of the people I really admire don't put mathematics on a pedestal but instead treat is as just another human endeavor and as such can be compared with other human endeavors.

<comment><USER7> If it's Marx's thought that's being referred to as "popular culture", that's a pretty inaccurate characterisation. It's bona fide political philosophy and/or political economy.

Even a soft, humanities subject like political philosophy, can, unexpectedly, be a topic for mathematical study, e.g. Arrow's theorem.

You're right not to believe in policing disciplinary boundaries.

I think the problem here is more that you haven't demonstrated just how Marx's thought resembles linear logic, so the idea might seem a little crazy, maybe a product of an idée fixe. If it's not something mathematicians would be impressed by (in terms of rigour or depth), and not something Marxists care about (in terms of philosophical implications) it's not going to lead anywhere.

<comment> s-shellfish It's pain to learn one must take care to avoid confusing math with everything else. Unexpectedly, sure. Safe languages...sentimentality. Thought processes... everything it can be compared against. Here be dragons, tedious caution required.

<comment><USER5> > It's pain to learn one must take care to avoid confusing math with > everything else.

Why not?

<comment> s-shellfish It's easy to get them flipped around. Inside of mind versus the outside.

Axiom of choice, choosing the right thoughts to have versus to speak.

If you don't understand, you don't want to. It's a perpetual type of terror that often has nothing to do with reality, but you can never be sure.

<comment><USER5> I have no clue what you are talking about I'm sorry.

<comment> s-shellfish Yup. That's why.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Getting Used to Not Being the Boss - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/jobs/08pre.html <comment><USER2> Does he have a reason for why he sold the company? He said he wanted a change, but what change was he looking for? This article seems half done.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do entrepreneurs need more pats on the back for success?</comment>


Ask HN: How Do You Deal With Companies That Balk On Guarantees? - <AUTHOR>

Recently booked a trip on Expedia when my wife discovered a lower price on Priceline. She then discovered that Expedia had a "Best Price Guarantee". Supposedly, with this "guarantee" you get the difference back, plus a $50 travel voucher.
After submitting the claim form, we quickly received a canned response from Expedia that stated we'd used a guest checkout to make the purchase, instead of being signed-on to an Expedia account. Supposedly, per their terms, only the latter qualified for the guarantee.
I first pointed out that I actually have an Expedia account under the same e-mail address with which we booked, but just didn't happen to be signed in. No dice.
Then we noticed the real problem: This supposed restriction is actually nowhere to be found on their site, including the very specific Terms & Conditions of the guarantee:
http://www.expedia.com/p/info-other/guarantees.htm (click Terms & Conditions link on that page)
When we pointed this out over a couple subsequent e-mail exchanges, some guy named "Luther" just kept copying and pasting the same reply:
"We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you. We are unable to process your Best Price Guarantee request, since we are only allowed to process Best Price Guarantee claims for reservations that was booked under regular Expedia.com account. We do sympathize with your situation and wish we were in a position to do more; however, we need to comply with the rules and restrictions of the Best Price Guarantee program."
It seems that this program and their handling of it is specifically designed to enrage customers by offering something then reneging, with exclusions and undefined "gotchas", then repetitive responses, clearly intended to frustrate.
Has anyone else encountered this with Expedia or similar with other companies' "guarantees"? How did you deal with it? <comment><USER2> If you deem it worth your while and are confident you are in the right, I think the best attempt at getting a response here is to voice your concerns more publicly. Be this through twitter or a blog (they need decent visibility), Expedia is more likely to act if they are risking bad pub.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Especially Twitter, which also made me think of FB.

Funny part is that I expected this (i.e. that it would be somewhat scammy and fraught with loopholes) and didn't deem it worth my while. But, now that I've filed (at my wife's request), I'm more determined. This is especially so, since they are deliberately trying to frustrate me so I won't deem it worth my while.

Even funnier is that I run a consumer-facing online business and am well aware of the pub issues from their side. We set out to treat our customers right, however, and don't have to deal with this kind of thing from earnest, reasonable customers.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I guess some may take this as MS bashing, but I've had a bad feeling about Expedia from its start. That being:

 _Expedia was started by Microsoft and later spun off as a multi-billion dollar company because it was "no longer about software intensive technology" and they were "concerned that they would not do their best at this."_

per

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedia>

Whenever MS ventures away from OS, tools, and Office -- and, I guess for some people, games and, oddly enough, accessory hardware -- it's a bad bet.

In short, don't do business with them, again.</comment>


How New Autoworkers Became Second-Class Employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-05/uaw-automakers-contract-tier-2-workers-are-hot-issue?hootPostID=af766ca3cef8bb6c124283adbd5c9843

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately this article probably won't get much rise out of the SV crowd. It's easy to say that more education merits more salary or that the US is moving to a service economy, etc. Further, it's even easier to ignore when you're not living next to a stamping plant.

My uncle is a factory worker for the Ford Mustang plant, and he easily clocks in 60 hours a week. I won't compare the specifics or 'toughness' of his job with anything myself or many of the other HN readers do, rather instead touch on the corporate culture. The best way i can describe it, as it's been describe to me (yes, yes..i'm aware this is hearsay), is a lack of control.

Imagine you are taking the bus to an interview, but it's running late..really late. There isn't an Uber or Lyft or Sidecar ride that'll get you in time. You call and no one is answering, the receptionist must be out. That sinking feeling that you're going to blow it is soul crushing. You later make contact and your heart is racing to try to explain, but they picked someone else already. It's over.

While the union represents the workers, it also creates a very 'us versus them' attitude, and when contracts are negotiated then that's it...those are now the rules. Many of the Tier 2 workers have to sit and wait for that bus, no matter how late it's going to be, each day until a new contract is in place.</comment>


Military spending around the world is booming - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/international/2019/04/28/military-spending-around-the-world-is-booming <comment><USER2> Are those numbers inflation-adjusted? If not, +76% 1998 => 2018 isn't that impressive when inflation accounts for +56% already.</comment>


Free eGuide: Adding two-factor authentication to your network - <AUTHOR> http://www.wikidsystems.com/learn-more/two-factor-authentication-white-papers No reg req'd. Includes examples for Cisco, Juniper, Linux, AD via NPS etc. <comment><AUTHOR> So, we get a lot of questions about how to implement 2 factor authentication. You can do it quick and simple, but it is more secure to run it through your directory (AD). This eguide shows you how to do it end-to-end using standard protocols, so it works with any 2 factor solution, not just ours. Enjoy.</comment>


Amazon, Kickstarter, Reddit and Mozilla staging a net neutrality online protest - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/06/amazon-kickstarter-reddit-and-mozilla-are-staging-a-net-neutrality-online-protest/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-technology%3Ahomepage%2Fcard <comment><AUTHOR> NB: Title edited for space.</comment>


Yes/No: Time tracking for a small software startup dev team? - <AUTHOR> I manage a small 4 person dev team in a healthcare software startup (2 week Agile sprints). Some stakeholders want time tracking. Pros and Cons? <comment><USER2> In our outfit (operating for some years already) we were pondering the same question in regards to tracking support.

In the end we did a comprehensive analysis of how much time each client actually uses and the results were surprising. The vast majority of clients actually are not abusing the support channels with a few outliers.

So the takeaway for us was clearly to set up Basic and VIP support packages and spare our people the braindead overheads of time tracking.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do they want time tracking?</comment>


Ask HN: Apple Battery Technology? - <AUTHOR>

I just saw a live blog on the Apple keynote and one of the things that struck me was the battery lives of new Apple products.
It's like they are continuously packing something better in a smaller space while using Li-ion technology. What I don't understand is how the hell are they sustaining this? What technology are they using? <comment><USER2> I do not think they are doing anything special. They just are using everything they can buy (at the right price, and in the right quantities), to make lots of small improvements, one at a time. Some ways to get better products are:

\- Software optimizations mean less power usage. \- Moore's law means fewer chips, means more room for batteries. (example: AFAIK, the iPad does not have RAM outside of the CPU) \- Better batteries lead to higher power budgets. \- Cooler operation makes denser packaging possible (I bet those new iPods will feel really heavy in the hand) \- Non-replaceable batteries allow denser packaging. \- Custom chips for e.g. audio or video decoding may use less power than doing the same on the CPU.

They also are doing quite a bit to make their stuff look smaller than it is. The iPad, for instance, is about twice as deep in the center than at its edges. A custom-designed battery that is not a rectangular slab makes maximum use of that extra 'hidden' space.

What makes them hard to beat at this game is a) they are really good at it and b) they ship stuff in sufficient numbers to make the added costs of custom designs bearable. For example, that built-in mains adapter in the new Apple TV means that the device itself must be tested several times. It is way easier to buy an external adapter that already has passed those tests.

</comment><comment><USER3> Supposedly batteries are improving at 8% per year according to Musk's Law. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple aggressively adopts the latest battery chemistries rather than just buying commodity cells.</comment>


Kepler-442b more habitable than Earth, according to new scale UK - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/kepler-442b-more-habitable-earth <comment><USER2> While that may be an interesting fact, it's got no more practical advantage to us than the old myth of the moon being made of green cheese.

Unless there's a magical way of going faster than light, that new planet is thankfully forever out of our grasp.</comment>