Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail <comment><USER3> Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know"

It seems that everybody knows everything. Whatever the issue, a little bit of Googling and suddenly you know all there is to know. Even more wondrous, no matter what position you take on anything, some more search engine Kung Fu and you can find a hundred people willing to support you with arguments, surveys, facts -- whatever you need.

Everybody knows everything. It's quite amazing. And then when you take a tech team into an unknown domain, suddenly they find it very difficult to open up, admit ignorance, and reason about things.

I am reminded of some startup book or blog I read years ago. It was talking about the relationship between intelligence and startup success. The author said that there was a correlation. It was an _inverse_ correlation. The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know.

<comment><USER4> Why would I jump into a thread, on any site, just to say I don't know? There are thousands of threads just on HN that I just let scroll by without participating because I don't know enough to add to the discussion. Explicitly calling out my lack of knowledge on every thread would serve no purpose to anybody.

Online written communications will never follow the same patterns as direct communication, and that is a good thing.

<comment><USER5> It is absurd how people actually do this all the time in Amazon product questions. Will it work with my Samsung phone? "I don't know." Does it come with batteries? "I think it did."

<comment><USER6> I'm guessing that's because Amazon sends out emails explicitly asking people to answer questions on their past purchases. And for some reason, this makes some subset of people feel obligated to reply even though it makes no sense.

<comment><USER5> I think you're right. That sounds exactly like something amazon would do and how people would respond. I must have turned those emails off, which makes seeing the answers utterly stupefying.

<comment><USER7> To give customers the benefit of the doubt: Some may know exactly what's going on, and enjoy making Amazon look stupid by posting those replies.

<comment><USER5> That reply doesn't suit your handle at all ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A few years ago I co-founded a standing desk company without any experience in real world products in general. The plan was to source desks and sell them to companies. How complicated could it be? Well, the freight company requires a lot of information about the destination building. The destination building require a lot of paperwork in a very specific format just to deliver something. The paperwork is always a little different. Then actual delivery need to be scheduled on the phone. Every time. The pallets don't fit in the elevator after all, so need men to move boxes. Someone need to dispose of the pallets. The building doesn't have large item disposal. To assemble 60 desks we need men, tools, floor-plan, access to the building, etc. Someone has to clean up the packaging material. Then of course one of the 60 boxes were dropped, now damaged and needs replacing. Sending one box is a different game than sending 60. Even if you know what you are doing it takes a lot of emails and phone calls to outfit an office with furniture, and somehow everyone wants to communicate over phone or email, so automation is impossible. And that's how my e-commerce company turned into a service business wiped out all my profits :) (edited for typos)

<comment> le-mark If you're like my old boss, just tell the employees to assemble their own desks, and then wonder why all these developers who requested a standing desk, are still using their old sit down desks.

<comment><USER9> I'd be happy to assemble all of my office furniture if my company paid for it -- though paying $100+/hour engineers to do the work of a $15+ handyman seems like a bad deal for the company - especially when the guy that assembles desks all day will do it faster (and correctly).

<comment><USER10> Consider it a team-building exercise? Companies waste employee time in all sorts of other ways, so why not building desks?

<comment><USER11> We did exactly this where I'm an expensive consultant. The one who assembled his table the fastest won a prize. My workplace might be a little different but we also are responsible for moving the dishes in and out of the dishwasher. I'm happy to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?"

It's the _just_ that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair boards. They follow through with that and finish the rest of the stairs with the same attitude.

Now the stairs are finished and installed (shipped) - they look terrible, they're wobbly and too steep and everyone who walks on them in either direction trips. Then begins the never-ending process of in-place improvements: using a sander to even out the angles, grinding down the too- long screws that stick up, pounding on warped boards to straighten them out. We can't fix the angle or the poor spacing of the steps though, because everyone's gotten perversely used to it.

When the whole house gets built this way, you live in a perpetual fixer-upper, where each component is either under revision or you've settled for it being "good enough" until enough work has been done to make everything else a little less broken.

<comment><USER13> "they look terrible"

Well then don't do a shitty job? I mean if the budget is there, then yeah, _just_ build me some stairs.

<comment><USER14> Are you a product manager?

<comment><USER15> You might be saying this in jest but his statement is totally valid if he is a manager.

The level of abstraction you are working on matters. A manager can't _just_ build a great business either. But for example if he encounters legal trouble, he can _just_ hire lawyers to fix it.

His interface to the world is via delegation to people who can solve his subproblems competently and consistently. There's still a "surprising amount of detail" but at a higher abstraction level and solved with different tools(a really strong "biological" AI that can resolve and prevent the details from bubbling up :P).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _> Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive?_

The author mentioned bicycles and inadvertently missed an opportunity to show another "unknown reality" that beautifully illustrates his point.

Consider typical adults (not physicists) with 20+ years of bicycle riding. If you ask them, _" how does a bicycle turn?"_, they'd respond that _" you just lean into the direction of the turn and it turns."_

But that's not the complete picture of what actually happens.[1] If you were to capture the bicyclists with a high-speed camera, you'd notice that there's always a micro movement of _countersteering_ to make the bike momentarily lose its balance and "fall into" the turn. Then there's an immediate correction of the steering to match the turn. This all happens in the span of milliseconds.

Even though the human body "discovered" the countersteering by way of kinesthetic feedback, the bicyclists' brains don't explicitly communicate this intermediate step to others. (Tacit knowledge.[2])

It's not always the case that we "simplify" reality for innocent purposes of pedagogy. (E.g. we tell "lies" to children about "numbers", "functions", etc and as they get older, we successively remove the layers of lies as they get into high school and college math.) Instead, we often don't even _know_ the reality (e.g. bicycle countersteering) to consciously omit it.

That extra reality may not even be important. If one human is teaching another human, you can leave the "countersteering" detail out and it won't matter. The 200 years of people learning how to ride bicycles is evidence of that. However, if you're a robotics scientist and want to build a self-driven motorcycle, the reality of countersteering becomes a crucial detail.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llRkf1fnNDM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llRkf1fnNDM)

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

<comment><USER17> Have you actually tried turning a bicycle without countersteering? I have, the last time the topic was discussed on HN. I found I was able to turn without any perceptible countersteer. It's technically _possible_ that I do have to countersteer for a small number of miliseconds over a small number of milimeters, but my experience leads me to doubt it.

<comment><USER18> A moped (and I assume a motorcycle) is a lot harder to turn without countersteering. I'm not sure if that's because it's more massive or what.

Anyway, learning to ride a moped was when I first consciously discovered countersteering. It made things a lot easier after that point.

<comment><USER19> It could be based on speed rather than mass. Above 5-10 mph or so, you turn a motorcycle with pretty much total countersteering, forcefully pushing forward on the inside hand grip to get the motorcycle to lean over. The faster you're going, the further you need to lean the motorcycle.

<comment><USER18> That makes sense too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is an excellent example of this type of fiddly detail in Liz England's 2014 blog post about the problems of doors in video games [0]. She identifies about 20 questions you can ask about as a door (as a game designer) and then about 30 different roles (from sound designers [1] to monetization director[2]) who might be involved. Her post works really well because the example is so mundane but the questions are very valid.

[0] [http://www.lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door- problem/](http://www.lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/)

[1] "I made the sounds the door creates when it opens and closes."

[2] "We could charge the player $.99 to open the door now, or wait 24 hours for it to open automatically"

<comment><USER21> > Network Programmer: "Do all the players need to see the door open at the > same time?"

Brings me the question on wheter the "reality" is the same for everybody.

<comment><USER22> Perception of reality is not the same for everybody, but there is a single objective reality that we all perceive in our imperfect ways.

<comment><USER23> That is just speculation. Maybe the only things that exist are subjective perceptions and they don't all overlap. Then the objective reality only exists from god's viewpoint, so if there's no god...

<comment><USER22> If there is no objective reality, then what is the explanation for the overlap of our subjective experiences? By the way, you do bring up a good reason for the existence of God as the only one who knows all of reality. However, God does not know reality by perception. Rather, God is the source of reality, so he knows it because it begins in his mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've actually built a few staircases, and it's a _ton_ harder than it even sounds here. In fact, there's apparently carpentry competitions and building a stairway to code is the grand finale.

The way he does it, with the angle brackets? That's the easiest way, and by far the weakest. The strongest way is to notch out 2x12's (ideally at least 3, with one in the middle). Oh, and no step can be more than 1/8" difference in rise vs _any_ other stair. This much harder, though.

Combine this with the math to know how many steps you need, and what angle the stairs need to lean overall (this one he touches on), and it's a real pain. Fail, and people get hurt. Your body is pretty sensitive to stairs being perfect.

<comment><USER25> Don't forget stairs that land on surface that is sloped from one side of the stairs to the other. What height should that bottom step be? Will the inspector measure both sides? Do you shoot for the middle being right on and each side being a bit too high and a bit too low?

Watch the height on the first and last steps. The middle ones are the "easy" ones.

In bigger cities there are companies that only frame stairs. It is amazing to watch them - they can do it in their sleep. I watched one crew finish up some complex stairs in less time than our framing crew would have spent making a game plan.

There is detail in everything and until you've done that job you really don't notice it.

<comment><USER26> I've heard the "real fun" in stairmaking is spiral staircases where the radius changes throughout the staircase...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There's something of a connection here to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Two examples come to mind:

1\. The narrator thinks it's important to have in your toolset hammers of multiple hardness, because your hammer should be softer than whatever material you're hammering on at the time.

At least, that's how I remember it; I might well be wrong about -- well, about the DETAILS of that example. Please correct me if I am.

2\. A student gets and assignment to write an essay about a particular brick wall. He can't see how to fill the assigned length with anything interesting.

The instructor then says OK, write instead only about the left-topmost brick. The student has so much to say about it he has trouble making his essay SHORT enough to meet the assignment's requirements.

<comment><USER28> He'd been innovating extensively. He'd been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn't. They just couldn't think of anything to say.

One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five- hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.

...

It just stumped him. Now he couldn't think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: "Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman." It was a stroke of insight.

...

He was furious. "You're not looking!" he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn't looking and yet somehow didn't understand this.

He told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick."

Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street," she said, "and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don't understand it."

Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

He experimented further. In one class he had everyone write all hour about the back of his thumb. Everyone gave him funny looks at the beginning of the hour, but everyone did it, and there wasn't a single complaint about "nothing to say."

In another class he changed the subject from the thumb to a coin, and got a full hour's writing from every student. In other classes it was the same. Some asked, "Do you have to write about both sides?" Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's. Classes where he used that coin exercise were always less balky and more interested.

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn't have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.

\-- Robert Pirsig

<comment><USER29> Err, Bozeman doesn't have an opera house. Certainly not one with a burger stand across Main Street.

Just sayin'

;)

<comment><USER30> Maybe there used to be one? [https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/opinions/a-number- of-y...](https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/opinions/a-number-of-years-ago- the-old-bozeman-opera-house/article_12ce5147-0718-5768-9a0d-924bd73bf04a.html)

<comment><USER29> !

I learn the damndest things every day. Thank you for a slice of history of my own home town.

It _is_ a nice little park (and still there).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've thought about this too, and generalizing to one more degree, I believe it comes down to perspective. The details are what keep you locked in that perspective.

It's difficult, but invaluable, to truly see things from other perspectives. Once we begin learning the small details of one perspective, our minds seem to develop heuristics for quickly judging all things from that perspective. Attempting to see things from a different perspective slows us down and makes us uncomfortable.

Citation needed, but I sincerely believe our intellectual difference are just a consequence of viewing things through many layers of varied perspectives. So for people who have considered global warming and believe it to be false, it really is false. That _is_ reality. It's all subjective.

<comment><USER32> Hawking uses the phrase "model dependent realism" for the small subatomic world.

But of course it's perfectly valid for our highly complex human scale world too. And then why do we think the Sun is what we see in pictures? Of course it's that, but it's much more too, and since we don't capture a lot of that in our models (be them photos in various EM gamuts or neutrino counts or whatever numbers), but we only see the surface, we will never experience it up close.

And the same goes for our experience of others' experiences, be it scholarly undertaking in unraveling the mysteries of Earth or simple carpentry/masonry/woodworking/sports.

Even though hundreds of millions of people watch and tens of millions play soccer, no one really has the correct model about playing it on the professional (world cup, UK Premier League) level. Yet every one has a model of soccer, and of course that's their day to day reality. (And they of course do some imperfect subconscious belief update on their models as they go through life, but that's not much compared to an actual rational inquiry using the scientific method - but who has time for that for _everything_ in the world?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is an incredible read, very thought invoking.

I've never replaced stairs but I have learned enough of the "details" by repairing them (or being aware of them) to know it's a really hard to get right.

A single 1/4 inch difference between two steps can feel wrong; a 1/2 inch difference and people will likely stumble or tumble down them on their first approach. Our intuition and pattern recognition impacts how we solve problems. Some call it "muscle memory" but it's not just in our muscles, it's in our unconscious thought.

Like the author explains so well, once we move a detail into our unconscious it becomes part of us, transparent to us, "common sense"; and an unnoticed detail is completely hidden from us.

The details of reality can only be taught through experience, because once understood, they move almost instantly from hidden -> transparent.

<comment><USER19> A gif of what happens when one step is just slightly too high:

[https://imgur.com/hl3YWJD](https://imgur.com/hl3YWJD)

<comment><USER34> Also interesting how people speed up after tripping.

<comment><USER33> I had an over weight friend in highschool who could run really fast. He did this by basically by making his top half fall forward which caused his legs to move quickly to keep him from landing on his face.

I think this is a similar phenomenon where the people tripping up the stairs have an imbalance causing their top half to fall forward. As a result the unconsciously speed their bottom half up to catch the top half from falling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Here's what I think the most chilling takeaway is. People who have no appreciation for details _do not know anything_. They are dangerous people who will conclude incorrect things with certainty on a regular basis.

<comment><USER36> I would love to agree, because I always cared for details deeply. How can it be a bad personality trait? But later I started to reconsider that. The most effective high-level managers I know outrageously little care for details, as it seemed to me. When I was their subordinate it caused me a great deal of a problem.

But then it dawned on me. Things somehow play out well in the end. Why? Well, because there I was, to care for details, to find solutions for what it seemed like an impossible problem to solve. If they cared for details as much as I did — we wouldn't even begin anything, because the amount of detail was so overwhelming. The general plan wouldn't be born in the first place.

Now I sometimes wish I could care less for details and try to be... well, easier, I guess.

<comment><USER35> those managers had to care for at least the _existence_ of details if they allowed you to do what was needed to honor those details. A truly "I dont care about details" manager would ask you to do something, you'd explain it cant be done that way for X, Y, Z, etc., and they'd say, "I don't care, do it anyway". A manager might not know the details of the thing you are doing for them, but they need to have an appreciation that details _exist_ , which probably means they know about details from some other field they've been involved in, like sports, carpentry, art, or something else like that, such that they understand when someone says, "we need to do it this way because X, Y, Z", they know that those are details, you know them, and that's important to honor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This article points out exactly why even though I like to tinker with a lot of stuff my main hobby is always programming. Because programming is more akin to writing down maths than building a staircase. Algorithms don't warp because of humidity, algorithms don't have leakage current. Sure computers have their quirks (overflows, floating point issues, UB etc...) but it's still a finite amount of knowledge unlike the infinite amount of details of reality.

An other pleasant part of software development is that all you need is a computer and a compiler/interpreter to get started. No need to buy dedicated tools or supplies. And if you realize halfway into a project that you did something wrong (that your "staircase" is not cut right) then you can easily undo and redo anything without any mess or waste. No cleanup needed either. The only limits are your skills and imagination.

<comment><USER38> In fun, a contrary perspective: at least with woodworking tools, they don't become obsolete in 2-5 years just from laying dormant on the shelf!

Seriously, though, couldn't agree more, I've said some variation on everything you mentioned for many years. Especially the mess part. I would add the risk of personal injury, too.

<comment><USER39> Improperly cared for, however, and they will rust or worse.

Over longer time spans, the tools sometimes become outdated in terms of one's productivity while using, assuming non-artistic motivation for use.

Old motorized tools are more prone to this than mechanical-type tools. Which maybe gives some insight as to the factors that contribute to obsolescence. There are exceptions, of course, but generally my grandfather's hand tools are still perfectly serviceable while his motorized tools often have more drawbacks than benefits to use. A 50-year circular saw is as heavy as a boat anchor and is a huge pain in the ass to adjust and use compared to newer options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'd say "fiddliness" is a characteristic of happiness and focused work.

If you overlook most details you are basically just 'doing stuff to get objectives done', which is meager imho.

Getting acquainted with detail takes us away from the vast sameness that we experience when we are just running on automatic and helps us cherish and savor each moment as complexity unfurls.

<comment><USER41> I think you really hit on something here. Anytime I'm working on a hobby of mine, I like to actively get into the weeds (figuratively, occasionally literally). It's in exploring and learning about the depth of the unknown that I find the most enjoyment.

I learned to love talking to strangers when I realized the richness and variety of human experience is so vast that no one person can feel or experience everything another person can in their lifetime. In retrospect, it's amazing I had to realize this at all, but we all start out self-absorbed.

<comment><USER40> It's probably when you're into those small universes, chasing down detail, that you are most happy and comfortable, even tho you might not be at that specific time your most productive self. After all, when 'flow' happens, We are not really caring about the passage of time, right? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Two things that came to mind while reading this essay:

\- The effect of a surprise when facing unexpected complications/details is because our brains tend to simplify things, or rather simplify the model of the world that we maintain. When you first hear that water boils at 100º your brain really really wants to assume it's that simple, no more than that. Simplifications are crucial for optimising the brain's power consumption, which it tends to minimize all the time.

\- The amount of detail in human built stuff, as well as in our understanding of the world is a result of many centuries of perfecting and improving those things. Go a few millenia back and look at the stairs we were building then, they were awful. Or the fact that the process of boiling is so complex is a result of relatively recent discoveries in physics, just a few centuries ago.

Funny thing is, the details of the reality around us will only get more complex over time. Suppose in a few centuries from now stairs will be so complex and so perfect that no individual will be able to build them on their own.

<comment><USER43> _Pure_ water boils at 100 ºC, _in an environment at standard temperature and pressure, with sufficient vapor bubble nucleation sites_.

If you're a cook, you don't really need to know all that, because you either live up in the mountains (at lower pressure) or you don't. You either have hard water (with more dissolved ions) or you don't. And your pots are never scrubbed _perfectly_ clean.

Suppose that in a few centuries, stairs will have to account for different numbers of legs, or wheels, or different foot types, or varying amounts of gravity, or track gauge, or crystal habit, or effect on convection and ventilation, or whether classical Earth-standard humans will ever be expected to use them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This resonates so well with Engineering in an unexpected way for me: the "production" version is orders of magnitude harder than the prototype. I kist expected it to be plainly harder.

I'm not talking just about programming. At my University I used to make robot arms and RC stuff with my classmates. Polystyrene, Arduino and a lot of duck tape were our friends, winning even a NASA competition. It was actually quite fun and fairly easy.

After finishing and while I was freelancing, I tried to take it to the next level. Once you get to rigid pieces and tight couplings, there is a huge amount of details and gears that I don't even know how to start searching for. What I learned at my University (Industrial Engineering) won't work as well, since I am not ready to order 10000s of pieces.

</comment><comment><USER45> This here is why estimation of tasks (in software) is IMHO futile hand waving. There is always unknown unknowns, snags and hangups which may surprise everyone.

Everybody who actually creates or makes something can agree that that stuff is hard, really hard but oh so rewarding!

<comment><USER46> the point of good estimation is not the estimation itself (which is not very reliable), but actually thinking about what the details of the task are. I think the estimation should be seen as an excuse to partake in this exercise

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Awesome post! Personally, I've experienced this in academia, with me being the culprit but also in a team setting. Fresh graduates, seem to be convinced that their narrow-scope textbook knowledge can conquer the world! I've _studied_ Electromagnetism, one would exclaim! How hard can the software implementation be? Why should I bother with technicalities such noise introduced by the cable setup?

The moment you take a step back, realize that a real-world project has so many details, that your team can get collectively stuck, and that you might be just flat out _wrong_ is really humbling.

</comment><comment><USER48> The suggestion to simply try and notice more detail seems tantamount to advising "just do it better".

Why not ask someone who has done it before, or who does it for a living. There are many domains of human endeavour, but few with no experts. Experience is not necessarily expertise, but the experienced know what details to look for even if they don't know how to fix them.

That to me is another problem of capitalism - people reserve knowledge in order to attract finance with its value; whilst the greatest good is to share that knowledge.

<comment><USER49> Agreed. But I interpreted part of his point to be: seek out the perspectives of others to help you notice new details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> > If your screws are longer than 2", you'll need different ones, otherwise > they will poke out the top of the board and stab you in the foot.

Actually nominal 2 inch lumber has thickness of 1.5" [1]. So your screws should be shorter than 1.5".

[1] [https://www.archtoolbox.com/materials-systems/wood- plastic-c...](https://www.archtoolbox.com/materials-systems/wood-plastic- composites/dimensional-lumber-sizes-nominal-vs-actual.html)

<comment><USER51> > _Actually nominal 2 inch lumber has thickness of 1.5 "_

And, as I've recently learned, two-by-four is in fact 1½ × 3½ inches.

How on Earth does that make sense? Why do people call things as if they were X, while knowing perfectly well they're not X? Is this an American thing?

<comment><USER52> 2x4 lumber is cut into rough boards in the milling process which are actually 2 by 4. These are dried (at which point they shrink) and planed (the wood will warp a bit during the drying process, jointing and planing will help correct this) so the resulting boards are smaller than their original 2x4 size.

Some more surprising detail in reality :)

<comment><USER51> Heh. I feel that reality is just that beautiful, never-ending fractal of annoyance...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> And this is the reason I'm somewhat skeptical of predictions of future superhuman AI. The world is complicated and full of all kinds of details we overlook. Creating a general purpose AI that's able to bootstrap itself to being better than all humans at everything seems like ignoring all the difficulties it will run into. It's easy to imagine when not taking everything into account, but extremely hard to realize.

And it's also why I think he paperclip maximizer and gray goo scenarios are silly. Maybe it's theoretically possible to create something that would eat the world, but in order to do so, it would have to overcome every obstacle the world throws at it. Again, easy to imagine, extremely hard to realize. All those details get in the way.

<comment><USER54> If anything it should make you feel the opposite. The brain is an extremely effective optimizer that solves these problems in a way that is opaque to us. We find it very difficult to solve them.

An AI is an "unlocked" brain. It can see all the things that it does and then see how it does them. If it learns to ride a bike -and if it's a humanlike AI, it will be able to- it'll be able to see exactly what it does and build a model from that. We would be able to do the exact same except we can't see inside our own brains and we have to study slow motion video and notice every little thing. The AI just sees oh, I turn the other direction slightly before initiating a turn. Voila, countersteering is discovered.

<comment><USER53> > An AI is an "unlocked" brain. It can see all the things that it does and > then see how it does them.

Except this AI doesn't exist. You're imagining there is such a technology, and this technology will just be able to see all the detail in the world it needs to learn, and presto it does everything better than opaque humans.

If you think deep learning is such a technology, then ask yourself to what extent ANNs understand themselves and you'll see they don't at all. They're just good at optimizing for certain problems humans are able to set them up for.

So, how will us opaque humans create such a transparent technology?

<comment><USER54> > Except this AI doesn't exist. You're imagining there is such a technology, > and this technology will just be able to see all the detail in the world it > needs to learn

Obviously I'm imagining it. Strong AI does not yet exist. It's also obvious that it _could_ exist, because humans do it. I'm only making two logical inferences here:

1: Future superhuman AI will have at least the capabilities of the human brain, because we know those abilities are possible, because we do them.

2\. A future superhuman AI will have the ability to examine itself in memory and identify things about itself in a way that far exceeds human introspection: we can barely examine out own emotions, much less the actual neuronal contents of our heads.

> And it's also why I think he paperclip maximizer and gray goo scenarios are > silly. Maybe it's theoretically possible to create something that would eat > the world, but in order to do so, it would have to overcome every obstacle > the world throws at it. [...] If you think deep learning is such a > technology, then ask yourself to what extent ANNs understand themselves and > you'll see they don't at all.

Well first off, they're quite good at it[1], but more importantly that's weak AI rather than strong AI. Arguing that weak AI is unlikely to be superhuman is plausible, but strong AI is definitely self-improving.

What I think you're saying is that you're skeptical of us being able to create strong AI out of current techniques, which is also reasonable. NN are not gonna evolve into skynet any time soon. But believing them to be categorically impossible requires the human brain to be special in some way- either beyond human comprehension or comprising a supernatural component.

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

<comment><USER53> I'm skeptical that strong AI will be superhuman in a way that allows it to do much better than the entire human race at any task.

In context of the OP, the issue is all the detail in the world that takes many people over ages to work out. Will the superhuman AI be able to recognize all the detail it needs to know to accomplish tasks better than us (all humans)? Notice this isn't the same issue as being transparently intelligent.

<comment><USER54> > In context of the OP, the issue is all the detail in the world that takes > many people over ages to work out. Will the superhuman AI be able to > recognize all the detail it needs to know to accomplish tasks better than us > (all humans)?

Yes, if for no other reason than this: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita- brevis/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Nice story (the first one) about the "top-down" approach, where you discover new complexity and choices at every level. Note how the discovery of new detail ends when you choose to use existing building blocks with known properties, based on experience (e.g. screws instead of examining which of the many possible ways of attaching parts would be most suitable). How simple this would be if you could buy pre-cut boards suitable for stairs at just the right angles and with holes drilled at optimal positions!

Standardising and having a limited set of (appropriate, well-understood) choices at every level is key to building complex projects. Which is probably one of the reasons why software quality isn't really improving...

<comment><USER56> When it comes to my day job building software I choose opinionated languages and libraries because they limit the choices I have to make which makes me more productive.

But when I'm playing around in my off time I employee alternative ways of doing things with unusual or niche languages so I can explore details in more depth.

<comment><USER55> Same here. But I find code reuse problematic: people tend to build large libraries with complex APIs and too many options (typically also lacking sane defaults) instead of small, focused code "blocks" that can be well understood and tested and do one single thing very well. It's like having to fasten a nut and being offered 3 types of swiss army knives as your available tools. Same with operating systems, web development frameworks etc. ... Too many options, too little thorough understanding, stable interfaces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Related:

> Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one stumbles upon some obscure piece > of information—often an unfamiliar word or name—and soon afterwards > encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly.

It was there all the time, you just didn't noticd it.

</comment><comment><USER58> I am reminded of three texts: "Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy" by Wayne R. Moore[1], Tektronix's "Low Level Measurement Handbook"[2] and LTC Application Note 47 "High Speed Amplifier Techniques"[3]. All three deal with systems at the limits of precision, whether mechanical, electrical, or temporal.

Say you want to measure a length. Easy right? Just take a measuring tape or ruler and put it next to the thing to be measured. But what if you need really high accuracy over a reasonably long distance. Say, to within a tenth of a millimeter (100 μ) over a meter long distance or more. Now temperature matters: your scale will expand differently than the object being measured if they aren't the same material. Humidity has similar effects. Traditional length standards were metal bars, but metal bars sag under their own weight, changing the distance between the ends. Modern standards use interferometers to create a length standard, but those require very good mirrors and monochromatic light sources for proper operation. That's without getting into electronic measurement systems for the interferometers, and the required sensitivity there...

And you still need a way to transfer the accuracy from the interferometer to a practical measuring scale. That brings back concerns of temperature. Human handlers transfer heat, leading to local expansion. Light is absorbed differently by objects of different color, leading to different expansion. Etc.

The further you try to push the accuracy and precision the more details start to matter, and the more disciplines start to get involved.

[1] [http://mooretool.com/publications.html](http://mooretool.com/publications.html) (it can be found on Gen Lib, but is worth the price)

[2] [https://www.tek.com/document/handbook/low-level- measurements...](https://www.tek.com/document/handbook/low-level-measurements- handbook)

[3] [https://cds.linear.com/docs/en/application- note/an47fa.pdf](https://cds.linear.com/docs/en/application-note/an47fa.pdf)

<comment><USER52> Reminds me of the difficulty of measuring the heights of mountains like Everest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I really love the title of this essay. The essay itself and the comments are also delightful. I am going to start using this at my job (where I write embedded code for medical devices). This fact gets so much more apparent when code gets put in production devices, and you see the affect of tolerance stack-ups of hundreds of parts. I also think this is why i feel very optimistic about finding new and exciting things in the world. So many people accept the reality of things that someone has explained, while there are actually many variations yet to be revealed.

</comment><comment><USER60> Having never done any carpentry nor googled the answer, the first thing that's coming to mind is to place the board at the angle you want, then use a straight edge (like a level) extended out from the floor of the upper story to trace a line on the board. Cut the board, then flip it over so that cut side is on the bottom, and then repeat the process to cut the top.

Edit: I guess my first line will read as a disclaimer if I'm wrong (aka missing an important detail!) or a brag if I'm right; it's intended as the former!

<comment><USER61> I think you've got a slight problem with this approach, that a diagram should illustrate if you draw the board as a rectangle and not a line. Thought experiment time:

Let us assume that you rest the board in such a manner that the angle between the edge of the board and the vertical wall is 45 degrees. The edge of the board is tangential to the corner of the wall and the upper floor, and you scribe the horizontal line, then cut it.

When you now flip the board around so that the cut you made will rest flush against the ground, the other end will still be a line that's tangential to the 90-degree join between wall and upper floor; it won't be flush against the wall.

For a 45 degree angle, you could go "oh, I'll just scribe a vertical line upwards where the board is tangential to the corner, and cut it." When you do this, you'll find the board may be flush to the ground, but it extends past the first floor, because you basically cut it too long. You could, by careful repeated cutting, shave off enough from the bottom to get it to fit flush to the floor, and flush to the wall... but that's a lot of cutting.

Now, you could apply some simple (?) maths here, and realise that for a 45 degree angle, the answer is that the board has to be some multiple of square_root(2) long, but that's maths, and that's not allowed. :)

Back to the physical approach. What if we did that horizontal cut, then rotated the board so that it became a vertical cut? Well, now it should be flush against the wall, but the end on the ground is resting on the corner of the board, not a face. You could cut it so that the "back" (furthest from the wall) corner was flush to the ground, but now the top of the board will be a few inches lower than the upper story.

This is non-trivial :) It gets worse if you're not using a 45 degree angle which makes things symmetrical.

<comment><USER62> Another problem with reality: most wall-floor angles are not exactly 90 degrees! Anyone who has tried to build custom cabinetry and shelving can attest to this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> >If you're a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it's that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you're new, and in programming you do new things more often.

Wait, do programmers actually think that programming is fiddly? The fiddly part is always the concerns of the real-world domain; what's special to programming is the ability to use _abstractions_.

<comment><USER51> Abstractions are, in their way, new things, and introduce further fiddliness.

Consider these pieces of eternal wisdom from our industry:

\- [https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming- sucks](https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks)

\- [https://medium.com/message/everything-is- broken-81e5f33a24e1](https://medium.com/message/everything-is- broken-81e5f33a24e1)

The author suggests that similar problems are a feature of pretty much everything humans do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> >> If you're trying to do impossible things, this effect should chill you to your bones. It means you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can't see it.

I know this article is not about AI, even remotely- but, oh my dog, it so _is_. It's like, you can do really well if you carefully select the borders of your problem domain- ImageNet, Go, Phenix, AZ; but when you try to use the same super powerful tools in an unconstrained situation (imagine a self- driving car in Mumbai; or playing Warcraft) then all those little noisy, unpredictable, unmodellable details in the real world kick your models' accuracy to the curb.

In fact, I think most AI folks have figured this out by now and that this realisation is a very big reason why AI has advanced with leaps and bounds in recent years. But we're still up against impossible odds here.

And this should be put to the attention of the Singularitarians- you don't know what you don't know yet. It might look like things are about to go exponential, but you never know what's behind the next bend. As Solon said to Croesus, "Count no man happy until the end is known".

</comment><comment><USER65> "You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you've probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself 'man, it was so simple all along, I don't know why I had so much trouble'. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing."

This is a great point. It has another corollary that people who are good X approach aren't necessarily good judges of whether approach X is good. The standard answer to "that seems like an excessively complex way to do it" is generally "that because you don't have experience with doing it the right way" and that could be right or it could be wrong. Often, the experienced and the inexperienced have about equal chance to guess on the meta-level whether this is true.

When OOP was the next big thing, a whole array of people defended against objections with arguments around those not liking it "doing it wrong", which we now, mostly, know were ridiculous right? Of course we know...

</comment><comment><USER66> Super interesting!

I feel like most programmers have it easy. For the most part the first step of a program is "take the universe and project it to some fixed structure". The entire universe of complexity gone.

The box has to be the right shape, but even if it's not things can mostly work.

You forget to account for wind and suddenly your New York skyscraper is falling over. Forget a field in your database and you just have a slightly busted thing.

<comment><USER67> In light of some memorable software design failures (which includes not just code but UX design, usage scenarios, compliance etc) I would kindly disagree. And the people of Hawaii would too I am sure.

It really depends what the software is used for. Software is just peoples thoughts and intentions codified for quick access/evaluation.

If they are used for a game it might not be important, if they are used for something important it also becomes important and exactly because the complexity of real life is difficult to account for ahead of time.

<comment><USER66> Sorry, I didn't mean to minimize the consequences.

There are massive failures, and now, more than ever, software interacts with other software in unpredictable ways.

I was just expressing the feeling that things are _even worse_ in other domains. Though sometimes automating a huge unstructured mess is difficult, imagine having a huge unstructured mess and dealing with it by hand!

Programmers might have many problems, but at least a subset of the work happens in a purely mathematical space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I've worked with academics over the years - people who are much smarter than me.

During that time, I've heard on more than one occasion a phrase that goes something like this "a month in the lab saves an hour in the library".

My response, was usually quote the Car Talk guys "Reality often astonishes theory"

The irony, and subject of endless entertaining remarks on the show was that Tom Magliozzi had a PhD.

</comment><comment><USER69> I'm reminded of the coastline paradox.

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

"The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal-like properties of coastlines."

</comment><comment><USER70> People are surprisingly unimaginative about the richness of reality.

</comment><comment><USER71> One thing I'velearned is that a bad design becomes more complex as you progress through it. Sometimes, the complexity grows to eventually make the whole design unfeasible, and you have to abandon it.

In rare moments, designs become simpler as you progress. Irrelevant or neurotic features seem to melt away. That is bliss!

</comment><comment><USER72> Great essay. Basically, they say that surprise doesn't tell us so much about the world but more about our model of the world. The degree of surprise can essentially be seen as a measure of our ignorance about some aspect of the world. As such surprise can serve as a guide for improving our understanding. However, it would be a mistake to see ignorance necessarily as a shortcoming. A simplifying model of the world is preferable if it gets the job done. In contrast to that, a perfectly accurate model of the world would render decision-making computationally intractable and is therefore not desirable.

</comment><comment><USER49> Excellent points and very true to my experience. I like this. I like it so much I'm wary of it being the last word. Accounting for details & getting perspective elsewhere is incredibly important for solving problems.

But with details alone in mind it's easy to fall into the trap of "there must be 1 _more_ detail I'm missing" ad infinitum.

 _If you do anything where you have to solve problems in a fixed period of time, it 's important to decide when to pivot to a new, more productive problem_ (depending on the scale of your problem and freedom to change).

Take this advice or learn it the hard way.

</comment><comment><USER73> > you're a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a > special feature of programming, but really it's that everything is fiddly, > but you only notice the fiddliness when you're new, and in programming you > do new things more often.

I disagree. With physical objects there is elbow grease; a reality mistake on the level of a typo is minor compared to a programming typo which is as good as having no program written at all.

</comment><comment><USER74> Tieing knots. A lot more to it than diagrams suggest, if only because the hands have to learn the complicated movements while maintaining grip.

</comment><comment><USER75> This actually has parallels to how I recommend finding startup ideas: observing the reality and noticing anomalies and surprises. Here's my writeup: [https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas- look-f...](https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas-look-for- anomalies/)

</comment><comment><USER76> > The important details you haven't noticed are invisible to you, and the > details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through > them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing > something important

This. And how you could be pointing out something so self evident and it falls on deaf ears.

</comment><comment><USER77> > I've mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: > seek detail you would not normally notice about the world.

> Reality has a surprising amount of detail

You can't have it both ways. The amount of details, relative to your ability to perceive them all, is no-where near "mostly".

</comment><comment><USER78> I can't begin to count the number of times I've worked with an idea person who can't comprehend the details; or a product manager who can't work through high-level corner cases and expects that the computer can read his mind.

This is a good read for either of those kinds of people.

</comment><comment><USER79> Re boiling water in a metal pan: it's boiling when it stops making steam- cavitation noise.

</comment><comment><USER80> The term we use at work is "Reality has fractal complexity".

</comment><comment><USER81> So intuitively we have a tendency to make models of everything around us. And now we are encouraged to smash those abstractions to pieces, so we can find better ones. Does that sum it up?

<comment><USER82> From a software perspective at least, my rule has always been "know that what you're looking at is an abstraction, and know that there's details underneath". Most of the time you can get by using the abstraction (e.g. walking up and down the stairs), but once in a while you're going to have to peel the abstraction back and look a bit deeper to understand what's going on (e.g. replacing a cracked stringer).

I personally took this to an extreme... I learned to program at quite a young age, and dual-majored in EE and CS specifically so that I could understand the systems that ran my software. I'm happy writing Python, but if I need to dig into the CPython run-time to figure out a bug I'm ok with that. And if I need to run tcpdump to figure out why a TCP stream is stalling, I'm good with that. The abstractions are beautiful and work 99.9% of the time, but if you don't know how the abstractions are built, you're going to have a hard time figuring out what's wrong when they break down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> My answer to this problem is the same as it always was. Put it down, go take a walk. Come back with a fresh mind. The brain evolved to do this. Engineering is older than the human race.

</comment><comment><USER84> Everything is fractal. The more you zoom in on a detail, the more details appear. Therefore it is impossible to get anything done, there is always something to do beforehand

</comment><comment><USER85> This was a great read, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER86> Brilliant AF.

One of the hardest things to do is make difficult processes and systems accessible. This article achieves that with a simple discussion of building a staircase (no mean feat, first time) to step up to the springboard for a much larger idea. It's almost as if observing the staircase details renders a scaleable model fractal that gets to measurement of a learning curve.

I wonder if, by observing the details of one's own most difficult task, focusing on the time to learn each detail and assemble one's own model, an overall speed for learning ANY difficult task, done by a particular person could be calculated. That could be a valuable tool for measuring human potential, particularly in apprentice-type learning.

The value of the time and the effort put into the apprenticeship -- to both the apprentice and the master craftsman -- could be assessed before hand. Achievement baselines could be set closer to reality; or it could be decided that the apprenticeship would not be worth the time and effort. But that last decision could be made on firmer ground, data-wise.

Da Vinci, I would suggest, was a great observer of detail; he was also pretty good at math, science, engineering, and architecture. But it all started with drawing -- observing the most minute of detail, in all it's imperfection, then transferring that to paper. As an artist, he also learned to sort of standardize many of the imperfections -- or at least the use of the tool to represent those imperfections on paper or canvas. The painting method he galvanized, sfumato, eschewed hard lines in nature, and worked hard to achieve the soft edge. I wonder if da Vinci saw the irrationality of pi as evidence that a circle has no true "edge," but that a circle was instead equidistant points stretching out in a small infinity, particular to a specif object

The downside of observation might be wrapped up in this last, though. Because the casual observer of a circle, presuming that there is a definite, finite edge to a circle could lose their faith in the dimensional space we've grown up perceiving (four dimensions.) This might be okay for a mathematician, a scientist, or an artist. To a suburban husband with a mortgage and a minivan, it might be terrifying. The observation might completely unmoor him, and send him drifting off.

Nature is like that. The infinite diversity of nature, at say, the class, order, genus, species, or individual level can be maddening to try to take in. Looking above, at "animal, mineral, vegetable" compounds that exponentially. How those pieces work together to build a staircase, or a giraffe, or a seam of granite, or the savanna of Africa, is the heart of scientific -- and artistic -- inquiry.

Thanks, John Salvatier, for a provocative and insightful article.

</comment><comment><USER87> TL:DR; Hofstadter's law.

<comment><USER20> Hofstadter's law [0]: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Interesting, Hofstadter's original motivation for the law was the observation (published in 1979) about the then delays in computers beating grandmasters at chess (first in 1997 and now routinely_. This gives us a data point about 'just how long' things can take (in addition to the numerous examples from software projects). Nuclear fusion is still out there...

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law)

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> TLDR: The curse of knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER89> I've always thought the whole idea of virtual reality is strange. Why would I want to experience the world through VR when I can experience reality instead? I suppose there are exceptions where it makes sense. Maybe if someone is physically incapable of having an experience, or the risk is too high, but for the most part I derive more joy from actually going outside and doing stuff than playing a video game equivalent.

To each their own, as they say.

By the way: great post.

<comment><USER90> > physically incapable of having an experience, or the risk is too high, but > for the most part I derive more joy from actually going outside and doing > stuff than playing a video game equivalent.

Or financially incapable of having the experience, or time constrained - <USER2> everyone is mortal and therefore time constrained.

I don't anticipate using VR to experience a walk in the local park, or (personally) mountain biking on the local singletrack because those are things I can do in real life with much more fidelity and have a much better experience. However, I could understand taking a walk in a park on another continent (or six other continents in one afternoon), or advising a friend whom I've raved about mountain biking to try the trail in VR before buying expensive equipment.

I'd rather have a compromise of some vast array of experiences across the world in low-detail VR, and also enjoy the limited amount of experiences I can enjoy in real life in full resolution, than to constrain myself to the small slice of the world that I can afford to physically experience.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best referral bonus you have ever got? - <AUTHOR>

Recently I heard from my friends that companies started giving referral bonus of $10k for eng hires. I used to get $5k per referral. Just wanted to know what's the cost of hiring today and how referrals save money to the company? <comment><USER2> Referrals save money in a few ways. External recruiting agencies can cost somewhere in the range of 15-25% of the candidate's first year's salary. You can see how referrals would make a lot of sense from just a financial standpoint. There are other benefits though - for one, referrals have a higher likelihood of responding to outreach, making it through the interview process, fitting in, and sticking around. I'm sure the referrer doesn't mind the extra dough either :)

In terms of referral bonus amounts, my company (PagerDuty, YC S10) offers between $5K and $20K depending on the role and priority. This includes engineering roles as well. The cool thing is we pay out for external referrals. Anyone can send a referral our way and if a hire is made, you'll get paid the full amount. Not too many companies do that :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on industry, location, etc. Every single time I've almost gotten a referral bonus something changes or goes wrong so I've never gotten one but I know a few folks who have received $10k for developers who are fully cleared in the Annapolis / D.C. area. Getting cleared is costly so if you can refer someone who is already cleared they'll give you nice bonuses (sometimes even higher if they're in an urgent need).

</comment><comment><USER4> Many companies in the Valley give $10K referral bonuses, for technical, design and product roles. It's cheap for them to offer that, compared to paying 20% of first-year's salaries to external recruiting agencies.

It's less for other roles.

(Source: 10 years in the valley. Made several hires, set recruiting processes at my last company, and now I run a bootcamp for technical interview prep: [http://InterviewKickstart.com](http://InterviewKickstart.com))

</comment><comment><USER5> Referral... bonus? These are things? Seriously, though. Every referral I've made in my career has flaked out at some point. It doesn't matter if it's a person I've known for years, or someone I recently met at a meetup or over coffee.

I've made it a point to refer not a single person again because I'm tired of my and my employer's time being pissed away, when we can just dispense with the bullshit and get back to doing real work.

</comment><comment><USER6> Where I work it's 5k for some positions (or maybe even only 3k?), and about half that for most positions. I've also worked places where the rules kept shifting and/or were always overly complex, like we were doing door to door vacuum sales instead of sw development. It's one of those things I'd probably never count on getting, like performance based bonuses.

</comment><comment><USER7> i worked a company that had great referral program, i referred two employees. when the topic came up of how i go about getting my fees, i was basically laughed at and told to leave HR's area.

has anyone ever actually been paid out for a referral?</comment>


Show HN: I made a site that aggregates local police/fire/ems calls - <AUTHOR> http://KalamazooPoliceCalls.com

<comment><USER2> Cool, where are you getting the data from?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the local Public Safety department... in Kalamazoo they have combined the police and fire departments into one and have done so for over 20 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> ads ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I'm trying to find a less intrusive way of doing some of the ad placements on the site.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My 24 hour project SpendStudy.com  - <AUTHOR>

I could complete this project from idea to release in under 24 hours as I had most of the screens and code required for this from an earlier project.
The idea came from a friend of mine who had been talking about his need to manage/track expenses of his company's sales executives on the road.
I would love some feedback
link: http://www.spendstudy.com/ <comment><USER2> Wow this is an amazingly well-done site for 24 hours. Simple design, good UI/UX from what I can tell, and it is clean and neat. Not really spending much so I didn't get into the 14 day free trial, but still cool.

Perhaps make it free for a limited time? I mean, allow everyone to come try it out for the next 2 months or something. You'll be able to gain traction and maybe get the word out / get people hooked on using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Not really spending much" lol, same here.

Its a good idea to make it free. Completely free maybe.

SMS is the only thing that costs me real money so I am thinking maybe that could be included in the paid version.

I was rushing through the coding and domain setup so much that I didn't think through the free option at all. Thanks for pointing it out and thanks for commenting :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice site. I did receive an error when I placed a decimal in the amount field which is preventing me from doing anything else on the site. May want to do some simple type conversion before you accept what people enter. If there is a way to break it, people will find it.

invalid literal for int() with base 10: '500.00'

<comment><AUTHOR> I have fixed it. Your dashboard should load now. Sorry about this

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clickable: <http://www.spendstudy.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment>


Britain resists extraditing hacker Gary McKinnon - <AUTHOR> http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/united-kingdom/101202/gary-mckinnon-extradition <comment><USER2> I met Gary in 2001. I didn't actually know who he was until about 2 years ago after I met his mother Janis briefly and a friend pointed the meeting out. He seemed like a fairly jittery guy at the time, but overall a nice chap (as far as the London 2600 crowd went at the time).

Much of the resistance like many things is not borne out of rational cold hearted logic, such as the kind that permeates through tptacek's comments. It would be great if we had directly comparable systems where we could guarantee that a US citizen would not be sent to Cuba for hacking if we (the UK) wanted to extradite them and vice versa, but the fact is we don't. The guys doing the extraditing are not the same guys handing down sentences, therefore they're not necessarily going to be able to guarantee a deal.

The bottom line is that Gary did some very stupid things, has admitted to them and deserves to serve some time for those things. I don't think anyone can dispute this, not even him or his mum, as lovely as she is (she's just trying to help her son, what mother wouldn't?). The question is where it gets served, for how long and under what sentencing guidelines.

In the UK this is fairly clear. Gary would be sentenced under the Computer Misuse Act, plead guilty and face close to the maximum amount of time permitted under UK law (which would probably see him free tomorrow).

In the US this is less clear. Is this an act of vandalism? Terrorism? Espionage? Is he ideologically motivated? Is he the same as Al-Qaeda? All of these uncertainties cause problems. The inability of the Americans to say, "If he comes here, he will be given X" is the biggest stumbling point. I'm not trying to say that tptacek is right or wrong, I'm not trying to say that the extradition is right or wrong, I'm simply highlighting the common aspects of the sentiment towards his extradition. This is a man who is clinically depressed and is a suicide risk even here, let alone when faced with the uncertainty of gitmo (unlikely but possible) or a long term espionage sentence with no parole.

Ultimately I think he should serve time, the question is under which juristiction and which law. If the US can lay it out and say what they're going to go for I think it would go a long way towards cooperation.

<comment><USER3> Hold on a second.

It's not the case that the UK simply can't say what McKinnon would be charged with. He's under extradition demand after being indicted for _specific crimes_ in a US civilian court, just like the vast commanding majority of everyone else the US prosecutes.

This "is he the same as Al Qaeda" thing is simply a smokescreen. He was indicted for a specific crime. Here's the indictment:

[http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/cyberlaw/usmck1102njind.htm...](http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/cyberlaw/usmck1102njind.html)

Can you find the references to "terrorism" or "espionage" in that indictment?

Or is the case being made here that we're demanding extradition under false pretenses, and that we're simply going to bait-and-switch the UK government and lock the guy up in a military brig? Because, fine, that's a viable argument for a message board, but I think making it requires surrendering some credibility: you can't cite that specific thing ever having happened before, and if that could be true, so could _anything else_ about the US.

<comment><USER2> You've actually exactly made the popular case (from the UK point of view) why he shouldn't be extradited. There's a substantial belief here that the US is demanding extradition under false pretences and that there will be a bait and switch resulting in him getting an orange jumpsuit and (to paraphrase Harold and Kumar go to white castle 2) a cock meat sandwich. What needs to be understood is that what the people think is not the same as what the government of the day signs up to or even future governments of the day may have to deal with.

Thanks for posting the indictment. That's actually exactly the sort of info that needs to be posted here for people to understand what's really happening. It's easy to get it wrong. Just look for the indictment of Moazzam Begg. There isn't one. It makes it really easy to paint a story that the Americans do not respect the rule of law when you quote that case. Bear in mind that McKinnon was around the same time. It's a case of fear. Whether it's deserved fear or not is irrelevant, the fact is that those wanting McKinnon to stay in the UK can capitalise on it.

I'm reminded of the Louise Woodward case. This was a case where someone had been accused of doing something horrific but was British and as such portrayed differently in the British media compared to the US media. IN the eyes of the US media she was a child murderer. In the eyes of the UK media she had just accidentally committed acts that resulted in Matthew Eppens death. The fact is that her actions may or may not have led to his death, but when the death of a child is involved no-one stands up and says 'maybe we should all take a step back and think rationally about this'. Likewise with this case, it's not going to happen, there are too many vested interests involved.

<comment><USER3> I acknowledge that the fears of UK citizens are based on good faith concerns. What I don't acknowledge is that they are reasonable.

In this case you have a clear-cut instance of someone who has all but confessed to the crime --- a crime recognized by both jurisdictions --- and an extradition demand made under the aegis of an actual criminal indictment in a US civilian court; an extradition demand that would probably have passed muster even under the egregiously unfair terms of the 1970's extradition treaty the UK held with us.

The arguments being made against it basically amount to taking every bit of anecdotal evidence about the unfairness of the US criminal justice system, in the absence of any countervailing evidence about the unfairness of the UK criminal justice system, and then attempting to apply it to this case.

This case, mind you, that will almost certainly end in a guy serving 1-3 years in minimum security, as one of the most closely watched inmates of the US prison system. Again: it's not like people haven't been accused and convicted of breaking into our fabulously insecure DoD networks in the past.

<comment><USER2> But surely that's the point, that their good faith concerns are unreasonable.

It's completely clear cut - the guy broke into systems that no normal human being would go at. The level of security is irrelevant - if you commence a military act, surely a military response is appropriate, no?

Your points are completely valid but you're missing the view that is brought forward, that he's one of ours, he's not that bad a guy, and doesn't deserve the same as people in gitmo.

I don't agree with the view and I think that all things being equal he should serve a small amount of time in the US, but thats not going to happen. Either he's going to serve a large amount of time in the US (from the perspective of the Brits) or he's not going there.

It's especially interesting for me because this happened before with some inside traders at natwest. It'll be interesting to see if this happens again.

<comment><USER3> I worry that we're talking past each other, because I don't think the US thinks he deserves the same as people at Gitmo either.

<comment><USER2> I think you're right (that we're talking past each other).

The UK perception seems to be based on a lack of assurances that he won't end up in an orange jumpsuit, as fetching as he may look in one.

The US is unable to provide said assurances because the people looking to extradite him are not in a position to make that type of a deal (as far as I know, if I'm wrong please say so).

Bear in mind that at the time he committed said acts the US would have generally considered it an act of hacking, whereas now it could be considered an act of terrorism or even an act by an enemy non-combatant. The grey area seems to be the thing that's causing the block. If the US said, "He'll serve 5 years in a minimum security jail for hacking" then I'm sure the resistance would be over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _"The American legal system is bullying the British legal system and there are a lot of British lawyers who are angry about it."_

Bit unclear on where the "bullying" is occurring. The UK signed a treaty with the US that requires them to extradite McKinnon. The idea that public outcry in the UK --- a venue where advocacy of the US's counterclaims are obviously disadvantaged, despite appearing to be officially/formally/factually undisputed --- could preempt the UK's obligations? It seems like the "bullying" is in rather the other direction.

If the US penal system was so inhumane as to make it impossible for any high- functioning people with mental impairments to be housed there, why have an extradition treaty at all?

One expects the same argument to cut the other direction as more countries try to indict Bush-era officials, like Nigeria? is with Cheney.

<comment><USER4> The general feeling was/is that the US is able to choose who they wish to extradite (or kidnap, depending on country) whenever they wish. However, when your own nationals are being held, like Guantanamo Bay, you can't do anything about it. The Extradition Act of 2003 is one-sided: the US can request extradition for any UK national operating in the UK _without evidence_ , while there is no such reciprocal agreement. The British legal system != the British government, and pretty much everyone hates that Act. It should never have been signed into law.

Much of the McKinnon trial took place during the Bush years. British people were deeply uneasy that McKinnon wouldn't serve his sentence somewhere proportionate to the crime, but instead would be put in a maximum security prison and treated as a vicious terrorist in order to make a point.

<comment><USER3> This seems like a red herring on a bunch of different levels.

First, the evidentiary standard for extradition under the new treaty isn't "on a whim". Prior to the treaty, the US was required to provide evidence sufficient to make an entire case for the offense, while the UK only had to provide probable cause --- in other words, it seems, the US had to make a criminal court case, and the UK only had to make a grand jury case. That's now changed; the US now needs to demonstrate "reasonable suspicion". Note that the UK _apparently never had to provide "prima facie" evidence_. The previous treaty was unfair, and more egregiously so, in exactly the opposite direction. It feels to me like that blunts your argument, like, a lot, but I'm listening.

(There's an interesting Chatham House writeup that documents a debate as to whether perfect reciprocity even matters; many treaties aren't reciprocal, and what does it matter to citizens of the UK whether citizens of the US are harder to extradite? The terms for UK citizens are either reasonable or they aren't, independent of parity.)

Second, extradition isn't the same thing as conviction. People are extradited to stand trial. Evidentiary standards are there so that another country can't harass your citizens with frivolous charges that create tremendous hardships (having to argue your innocense in a venue overseas). That's not what's happening here.

Third, it's hard to argue that the evidentiary standards really matter in this case, since McKinnon has already asserted more than enough details publicly for the US to make a case. The evidentiary standards of the new treaty _aren't the point_.

So I'm back to my original point, which is that the arguments in favor of not extraditing McKinnon seem to boil down to "the US legal system simply isn't trustworthy". That's what they're saying when they claim McKinnon is headed straight for Gitmo. It's a smokescreen. If you believe that about the US legal system, you shouldn't be extraditing _anyone_ ; we're running kangaroo courts, after all.

<comment><USER5> In this case we're talking about crimes that were committed _in the UK_ , and handing a mentally-ill person over to a foreign government where he has fuck- all chance of receiving a sentence that the UK would consider proportional to the offences.

The UK government does have a burden of responsibility to its citizens, even ones who have committed crimes.

But again. The guy was sat in his bedroom in the UK throughout the assumed criminal activity. From where I'm standing this fails even the 'reasonable suspicion' test unless the State Department is alleging that McKinnon somehow made a trip to the US that isn't currently in evidence to perform his attacks.

<comment><USER3> This argument suggests that it's impossible for someone "in their bedroom" in the UK to commit a crime that warrants a trial in the US. That's not how UK law works and it's not how US law works. Note that the UK is also a signatory to treaties with the rest of Europe that stipulate the same thing as the US stipulates.

If that's what you believe, that's fine, but there's no middle ground for us to come to, no understanding for us to build here. I'm willing to entertain the issue of hardship (hardship is something taken into consideration in US sentencing, after all), but the idea that crimes are unreal or have special jurisdiction simply because they occur on computer networks is hard for me to even consider.

Meanwhile, the rest of your argument boils down to, "I believe the UK criminal justice system is so much better than the US criminal justice system that we shouldn't extradite there". Uh, ok. For over 100 years your country has been a signatory to a treaty that disregards any such belief.

Who's to say this is even a factually viable argument? The rights of the accused in the US and the UK are different. In particular, criminal defendents in the US are protected by the 5th Amendment (courts in the UK can make negative determinations based on your refusal to testify against yourself) and the 4th Amendment (the US has a formal presumption that searches are unreasonable unless shown otherwise). Sentencing in the UK may be more lenient for computer crime offenders, but McKinnon may also be easier to convict there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I do hope they resist. The US prison system is an abomination to human rights. Prisons should be safe places - the punishment should be the restriction of freedom, not fear of rape or murder.

<comment><USER3> Prison rape is absolutely a major problem in the UK as well. This seems like another red herring.

Here's a very telling example:

 _According to Shaw's report, prisons are failing to conduct investigations. His comments are made in an official report into the case of "Mark", a 21-year-old man_ with Asperger's syndrome, _learning difficulties and a history of self-harm, who was remanded to Altcourse prison in Liverpool in 2007. It was recommended that Mark, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, be remanded into a psychiatric unit, but there were no places available._

 _Despite his vulnerable nature, he was placed on a wing with sex offenders and was allegedly raped by a cellmate who had attempted to assault him several weeks earlier. He attempted to throw himself off a prison landing shortly after the alleged incident and is now in a psychiatric unit._

<comment><USER6> Thanks for bringing this to my attention, gonna look into it. Agreed, shocking - but much less common than in US.

<comment><USER3> Wait, what? How do you know that? Are you making an inference about the absolute numbers, or the per-capita? And how does it apply to McKinnon, who isn't going to end up in high-security prison anyways?

(Note that McKinnon is destined for federal prison, not state prison. With very few exceptions, incidence of sexual misconduct in Federal prisons is _much_ lower than in State prisons, which themselves house the majority of violent offenders).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Structure and Algorithms Implemented in Go - <AUTHOR> http://www.golangprograms.com/data-structure-and-algorithms.html <comment><USER2> In C++.. [http://www.techiedelight.com/list-of- problems/](http://www.techiedelight.com/list-of-problems/)</comment>


We have just launched Giveaway portal, feel free to give us some feedback - <AUTHOR> http://www.giveawaycube.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We have just launched our new Giveaway portal, would love to get some feedback from fellow startup developers/designers.</comment>


Price quotes of Braintree - <AUTHOR>

What are the price quotes for Braintree payment processing? I can't find it anywhere <comment><USER2> "If you have to ask, you can't afford it." ^_^

Seriously, the last time I checked (a few months ago), they're only interested in customers who process 6 figures per month.</comment>


Virgin presses 747 jumbo into space action - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35002459 <comment><USER2> I wonder if they will sell seats on these flights for people wanting to watch a launch? Can't see Branson wanting to miss any opportunity to turn a few quid..

(Yes, I'm aware of the safety implications of the method of launch!)</comment>


Stack Trace Art - <AUTHOR> http://thehumbleprogrammer.com/stack-trace-art/ <comment><USER2> Fun. Follow up project idea: stack trace concrete poetry. You could even get some neat intertextuality stuff going between the program source and its stack traces

</comment><comment><USER3> The author is a friend of mine and I remember seeing it for the first time. The original is being implemented in C# and I just had to port it to JavaScript. If anyone is interested, the "JS port" (more like a demo of it) is here: [https://github.com/selectnull/stacktraceart](https://github.com/selectnull/stacktraceart)

</comment><comment><USER4> Just Released! FB Messenger with end-to-end encryption, implemented via stack traces!

Don't be left without friends - Upgrade Now!

Seriously, though, this is a pretty cool diversion.

</comment><comment><USER5> The page doesn't scroll nicely on iPhone. No inertia.

</comment><comment><USER6> this is awesome. ascii art is a beautiful thing in the terminal lol. I've randomly embedded ascii arts to pop up when i run certain commands in my machine. had a giant image pop up in code review and was like yeah, i'm cool like that!</comment>


Live market prices and stats for Stellar (STC) - <AUTHOR> http://stellarvalue.org/

<comment><USER2> Which 'exchanges' is the price data coming from? And which block explorer is the total supply data coming from?

<comment><AUTHOR> The site is specifically referencing Justcoin as the exchange.

[https://justcoin.com/](https://justcoin.com/)

I'm sure there will be more following suit; early adopters are first out the gate.

I myself have been on the forums and the exchange rate is pretty consistent with what's happening. From yesterday to today alone things went from 1000STC/$1.00USD to 1000STC/$2.50USD and I see a few folks going higher than $3.00USD. Sellers have smartened up as well and seem to be pretty keen to the supposed "market rate".

<comment><USER2> Ah nice, appreciate your response. I am sure more exchanges will pop up soon. Also, just realized there's [https://www.stellar.org/stats/](https://www.stellar.org/stats/) for basic stats about Stellar and its distribution so far.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Is there a Submissions/Comments cap? - <AUTHOR>

I was browsing http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=nickb and his comments/submissions are available for only 41 days whereas my own limited postings are available in whole. Can someone explain if there is a cap or other system in place for users with massive karma?<p>The cap seems to be at 180 submits (I've checked maybe 4 users with 2000+ karma) and variable comments. <comment><USER2> The software that runs this site is open-source, included in Arc as news.arc. I don't know the answer, but maybe you could find it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've poked around the Arc code (Arc1) and the HN release therein, but couldn't find the answer. But thanks for the idea. I'm betting this is an 'optimization' feature....

<comment><USER3> <http://searchyc.com/submissions/by_date/nickb> (213 result pages)

<http://searchyc.com/comments/by_date/nickb> (70+ result pages)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> (= caching* 0 perpage* 30 maxend* 200)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This saves me some work!</comment></comment>


Agile is Dead - <AUTHOR> http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/janusz-gorycki/agile-dead <comment><USER2> I still don't understand what Agile is :( Good thing I sling code better than I sling adjectives :)

<comment><USER3> Agile(n): a buzzword used preemptively on a project to remove accountability when things inevitably go wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny.

The author is as bad as those he makes fun of -- he has a list of things that obviously CAN'T be agile and uses that as a discussion point. Agile RUP? Been around for years. The true-blue RUP guys will tell you RUP has always been agile, it's just never practiced that way and the corporate pointy-heads make it into a monster. Agile Maturity Model? Lots of companies already have one. Maturity model just means some way of measuring how well the teams are doing. Certification? Heck, this certification bandwagon has always been lucrative, and now it's just getting worse.

Agile works because _agile has always worked, even before there was some lame- ass marketing phrase called "agile"_. That means your grand-dad working on the Apollo moon shot probably used some agile techniques, as did guys on the Manhattan project.

He's absolutely right that corporate America is killing agile. But they've been killing agile for so long it isn't funny. This is a problem that has to do with really smart people and their desire to measure and control. It's really a problem with, guess what, us. As technology wonks we're the first to want to create a new metric or standardize something that doesn't need standardizing.

As for the proliferation of certifications, do what I do: just say no. I'm not going to play that game. When you ask me about agile, I'll happily share the actual projects and work I produced, but I'm not going to spend good money buying useless pieces of paper.

<comment><USER5> What book would you suggest as a good starting point for good Agile techniques?

<comment><USER6> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#Agil...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#Agile_methods)

You don't really need a book. The Agile page on Wikipedia and links to the descriptions of the different flavors are all you need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is true, agile may not sound innovative anymore. Nevertheless, the principles are sound. If you care about your craft, keep practicing it. edit:grammar

</comment><comment><USER8> In short: everyone has co-opted the names! That's not doom. Just chalk up another victory and let's come up with some more names. Pair those with versions of the practices that big companies will be too corpulent to implement, and let's have another go!

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know if I've ever been wholly convinced that certifications do more good than harm, especially in Soft things like Product Management (as opposed to something more clear, like plumbing).

<comment><USER10> Certifications (well, depend on the cert) for "soft things" are generally used by companies to get everyone talking the same language.

I'm a code/architect guy, with a make-it-work-now personality, so I'm more used to say "let's get Bob to fix this shit".

But my girlfriend is into IT process, and we're getting an ITIL certification together, because where she works (HP) they do a lot of ITIL. So she and her team talk about how the "Service Desk" should scalate "Change" to a "Problem" or "Incident", which I think are all funny words, but helps everyone to get into the same flow together and makes communication easier.

I like my way (d'uh), but that's because my way of doing things have worked so far for my things that needed to be done (pretty philosofical statement!), while obviously her ways have worked for her. In the end, if it's delivered, and the client pay and he's happy, I could care less what's the terminology.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should Mozilla Follow the EFF Out of the W3C? - <AUTHOR> In order to more fully understand the situation I would like everyone's opinion on why this should or shouldn't happen, and what the potential consequences might be. Thank you. <comment><USER2> On the one hand, standing for the "right to general purpose computation", or however you'd like to phrase the idea, has a strong moral case behind it. Like it or not, the philosophies and ideas of RMS and his successors who believe in Free Software and liberated computing have been prescient time and time again. The kind of lock-in that was predicted in the 90s came to pass on smartphone platforms and requires a continual and ultimately wasteful effort on the part of hackers and developers just to enable us to use our privately-owned devices to do what we want to with the bits flowing through them.

DRM is one of the biggest challenges to that, and as such has been in the public consciousness for nearly 20 years, with the EFF standing strong against it all that time. Their fight should really be thought of as being as a digital adjunct of the fight for free speech and others that are constitutionally protected in free nations.

Walking out of the W3C is a powerful signal, but one that will ultimately not bring about the EFF's victory. In order to maintain the moral high ground, it was a necessary act; they could not stay true to their mission otherwise. However, it remains to be seen what the next concrete step they can actually take on said mission will be.

Now, if Mozilla were to join them, what would it mean? Would it mean that Firefox and other Mozilla projects will not support playing video from sites that go ahead with DRM video? If so, the loss will be on Firefox's part if video sites do go ahead with the change. Obviously not all sites will do it, but those that intend to monetize highly popular content will, as they continue to believe that it's worthwhile to spend their efforts valiantly fighting the losing piracy battle.

This may be enough to cost Firefox even more share of the browser market, which is going to be a hard sell for Mozilla even as they try to succeed in their own mission for a free Web.

I'm not sure walking out is the right idea. Rather, I like the techniques that have shown to work ever since I posted my first comment railing against DRM in the 90s.

1\. Separate the non-free from the free, without preventing it from working entirely. Mozilla shouldn't stop DRM from working in Firefox, but they should ship it DRM-free and never make it a compulsory component.

2\. Make alternatives that "the rest of us" can use. Friendly tools to encode and share video using free, decentralized tools can undercut the effective monopoly of Youtube and other sharing sites.

3\. Personally avoid DRM'd content, and focus on content from producers that understand the freely-distributed, value-for-value model. Support content creators directly rather than forcing them to rely on advertising-based models. This helps make artists more free to produce without worrying about corporate approval, and cuts out a host of parasitic middlemen.</comment>