How to Read a Research Paper [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/ReadPaper.pdf <comment><USER2> My father (PhD in Malacology) taught me when I was a kid, that a research paper should be read in the following steps

1\. Read title and abstract 2\. Read introduction 3\. Read conclusions 4\. If the content of the 3 previous steps makes sense, and the paper is relevant: \- Read the body of the paper \- Archive it and write bibliographic record card (yup... that old school).

Worked me wonders in my PhD.

<comment><USER3> I've spent a lot of time recently doing a deep dive into all the academic papers in a particular field of neurobiology, and I have a different approach:

1\. Read the title and abstract 2\. Read the methodology 3\. If the methodology isn't totally asinine, then read the rest

I discovered after reading hundreds of papers that most of them are total nonsense.

I found myself reading them and updating my "knowledge," then getting to the methodology section and realizing it was bullshit. I felt like I couldn't fully "un-update" my model when that happened, the damage was sort of done.

They make claims and they have "evidence" that sounds compelling enough to slip by some filter, but then the methodology is totally bunk. The n is way too small, or limited in some other fundamental way, the experiment design is idiotic cargo cult stuff. Obviously just going through the motions of publishing because they have to, rather than having some valuable insight. Then papers like that cite each other, and build this whole wobbly network, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.

I've learned to totally ignore any paper that I haven't read the methodology for first.

<comment><USER4> Critiquing the methodology section is the best part of reading scientific papers. However, it soon becomes bittersweet as when you implement your own experiments, you soon become aware of how difficult it is to design a good experiment. That being said, if journalists read methodology sections (or anyone, really) then the world would be a much better (and less sensationalised) place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On a related note, I just realized this week that there was an entire category of software dedicated to doing something I've been painstakingly doing manually for years, organizing your collection of papers.

They are called reference managers, and will extract the title/year/author/abstract so you can quickly glance at that obscure "iccp2012.pdf" you downloaded last month and know if it's relevant or not to your current task. Provide full text search on your entire collection, synchronization between home and work, etc.

Coming from an engineering background I had no idea these existed, but it sure will save me a lot of time and frustration.

<comment><USER6> Your OS doesn't support full text search of PDFs?

<comment><USER7> To badly paraphrase Star Wars, "your confidence in your friends is your greatest weakness". Pdf sucks, it's little more than a glorified 2d graphics api that happens to be used mostly for content that should be represented as text. Except that there are dozens of ways to make stuff look like text, but without the advantages.

<comment><USER6> This is true for some PDFs but not for academic ones produced by PDFLaTeX.

<comment><USER7> If you're really suggesting what I'm reading into your post, which is that 'academic pdfs' are somehow some sort of glorious special species because everybody in academia uses latex and all publications are typeset using that, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I ask my students to read this: [http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf](http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Looks good; I'll be doing the same thing and passing this on to the students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the overall advice here is pretty solid. I might add a couple comments:

\--- The time budget is extremely sensitive to how much you already know about the subject. If you're generally up on the literature in an area, it is often much easier to isolate the chunks that are genuinely new to you and thereby grok the paper very quickly. In a new field, even several hours to really read a paper might not be enough, depending on how much backtracking you need to do to understand core ideas.

\--- In physics, the conventional wisdom (which I agree with) is that the main thing to do when checking out a paper is to look at the figures. These are generally chosen to highlight the most important points of the paper and will often quickly convey what was measured/calculated, how the effect scales, etc.

</comment><comment><USER11> Then there's how to read a research paper _for hackers_.

I see each article as a patch. Our minds are both running operating systems and decentralized repos. Each of us are specialized and running a different custom OS, so may require different sets of patches.

Science is specifically concerned with our mental models of how the world works. Different fields in science are like different levels of abstraction in programming.

My specialty leans more towards higher levels, so subjects like psychology, philosophy, biology, are more relevant to my mental model than lower level mathematics, chemistry, and physics.

When I read research articles, I'm primarily interested in extracting an abstract high-level idea, which I can apply to my repo. I start with the end of the abstract, then discussion, conclusion, results, to find the main point, then only look at details if I can use them.

Once I have a simple idea, I merge it by connecting it to related ideas in a functional way. Each idea then becomes like a code snippet of a function, and my process of learning is like coding, where although you may copy/paste a snippet off the web, you still need to reason with logic to connect it into your code so it actually works.

If I can't make something work right now in my repo, it doesn't commit, so is temporarily stashed, where I may either forget about it, or come back to it if I find the missing pieces to fit it into the working directory.

<comment><USER6> I like this analogy, I find myself falling into a similar pattern. Particularly when I can't understand something because I lack the understanding of its mathematical basis for example. I put it aside and have found myself returning to those papers once other things I have coincidentally read allow me to have a better understanding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm afraid the one-page review assignment part at the end of the article won't give much satisfaction to the instructor who came up with it. A lazy student could simply paraphrase the paper abstract to address the first two bullets (summary, arguments, conclusions).

I think asking for a one-page detailed example and illustration of the paper would force a more careful read, and would be more interesting for sharing with peers.

</comment><comment><USER13> As the author mentioned that there will be follow up on how to skim a paper, anyone knows the link to that or how to write a paper?

<comment><USER14> Here are some references from "How to read a paper" by S. Keshav [1](found in a comment by tnhh above)

Writing Technical Articles [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing- style.html](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-style.html)

Whiteside's Group:Writing a paper: [http://www.ee.ucr.edu/~rlake/Whitesides_writing_res_paper.pd...](http://www.ee.ucr.edu/~rlake/Whitesides_writing_res_paper.pdf)

[1] [http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf](http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _But to really guage the scientific merit, you must compare the paper to > other works in the area._

Know what you read!

<comment><USER16> This is probably true in the hard sciences, but not necessarily in mainstream CS which is a mixture of empirical evidence, engineering and current best practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Read critically

surely that means accepting that a bulk of research papers are written exceptionally poorly with excessive wordiness and jargon, a lack of good paragraph structure and not very much real content.

if you have to tell people who can read how to read something, its probably written incorrectly.

<comment><USER18> No change in writing style will let the researcher who reads it get out of thinking about how the ideas might be useful in their own work, what the authors might have done wrong without realizing it, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> s/paper/code/g and you get a nice read about code review

<comment><USER20> Or it can be generalized to any persistent, human-readable and compressed form of complex ideas. Good papers and working good source code are in this category.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The person who needs instructions for reading a research paper probably ahouldn't even bother. I've seen way too many graduate (including doctoral) students need to be spoonfed how to do things. These people never turn into original thinkers who are capable of even slightly meaningful output (contributions to their field), in my experience.

<comment><USER9> I tend to disagree. Everyone has to do even the simplest of tasks for the first time and reinventing the wheel is often a waste of effort.

If you think that everyone just knows how to do this, take a close look at your last set of reviewer comments; were all of them pithy, accurate and demonstrating a close understanding of your work?</comment></comment>


Productivity in 2017: analyzing 225 million hours of work time - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rescuetime.com/225-million-hours-productivity/ <comment><USER2> Let me try to save you all a year of therapy sessions:

You do not have a time problem. You have an energy problem. We. Have an energy problem.

The reason you only get three hours of stuff done on Saturday and then you 'waste' the rest of the day is because you had three hours of energy. The rest of the day you're just filling time. Not because you're bad, or lazy, or selfish. Because you're spent.

The difference between productive people and you is not time management. Their skill is in dealing with taxing experiences. They avoid it, delegate it, or confront it on their own terms at the time of their choosing. Some shift their perspective to make it less taxing (not everyone hates weeding). And when they run out of energy they _engage in activities that recharge them instead of filling time_ or merely drain them slower (see also: me and video games or TV)

If you know where to look, we already know this subconsciously. A bunch of industry Best Practices are more time consuming but less energy intensive than the alternative. We balk at scheduling two difficult tasks in the same time interval even though they both "only" take less than half of your time. A task that takes four hours might leave you exhausted, and all you can do for the rest of the day is read email and code reviews and browse Hacker News. Nobody can rearrange your schedule or demean youbinto anything productive during that time. If you try you'll just make mistakes. Which is why you're trying to Do No Harm by "goofing off". You already know this you just don't have the words like "self-care" to express it.

<comment><USER3> This may be great for some people, but simply isn't true for others. I've found no difference on focus from working out, even heavily. Not from getting up and walking a mile and going back to my task.

<comment><USER4> I can relate to that. When I exercise in the morning I cannot get anything done during the day.

On the other hand I find it relaxing to workout after work. My mind becomes more or less empty afterwards. When I then do things that require more complex thinking the effect wears off pretty quickly though.

<comment><USER5> Lifting after work gives me something to look forward to.

It also wears me the fuck out - so I go to bed early, sleep really well, and wake up the next day feeling recharged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is a nice reminder that RescueTime keeps all your computer usage history (including site URLs) on their servers and can access it at any time.

But there are Selfspy[0], ManicTime[1] (Windows), and Qbserve[2] (Mac, my app) for private productivity tracking.

[0] [https://github.com/selfspy/selfspy](https://github.com/selfspy/selfspy)

[1] [https://www.manictime.com/](https://www.manictime.com/)

[2] [https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/](https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/)

<comment><USER7> I'm always skeeved out by reports like this. I know they're PR bits for the companies, but to me they're just another constant reminder that I'm just a data-point for any app that collects my data and all my data is theirs forever to use to build their product.

<comment><USER8> It's a weird constant feeling that no matter what I do on my computer or my phone that someone else knows what it is, is watching, recording, analyzing my activity. No stopping it now, but it takes away from the magic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's some potentially interesting data here but I found it disappointing that this article was mainly showing averages. I'd love to learn what distinguishes the most productive folks from the average. Are they more consistent? Do they check email a lot less? Do they tend to work more in the morning?

<comment><USER10> To this point, I'd like to know what distinguishes the _least_ productive from the average. Or more plainly stated: what are the traps everyone should avoid to maintain reasonable levels of productivity.

<comment><USER11> The least productive people I knew simply did not worked much. They did spend time in work, sometimes a lot of time, but ultimately most of that time was slacking around and then pretending that 10 minutes task actually was difficult and took whole day.

So like, avoid not working on the job.

<comment><USER12> They might have been burned out. At the stage before your body prevents you from getting physically to work your work output takes a very serious nose dive.

<comment><USER11> No, people I have in mind were not burned out.

<comment><USER13> How do you know? Sometimes it can be difficult for others to tell if somebody is burned out or not besides that their productivity, motivation etc tank.

<comment><USER11> Burned out people have history of producing a lot in the past or working on high pressure projects. Also, they don't keep doing nothing long term, they tend to seek solution.

Lastly, not sure how them being burned out would changed all that much. The impact on team would be all the same.

<comment><USER13> Regarding your second point, sure, it wouldn't have changed the outcome much, but most people have more sympathy for someone who is burnt out than for someone who is just lazy. Also, a burnt out person can be helped to recover while a lazy person probably should just be fired.

<comment><USER11> I agree with helping people, especially those burned out because your own management pressured on them. And it is also true that a lot of demotivation happen when management is bad and those people start working good once they are in better environment or more suitable position (it positions are not made equal and one can excel in one and fail in different one).

But sometimes, laziness is the thing.

My original point was meant to be that as long as you think about out productivity, have somewhere back in your mind that something should be produced today, you are fine and not in that worst performer category. Because you are trying and that will keep you away from such fall. It was meant to be reassuring in some way.

<comment><USER13> Absolutely, I didn't mean to imply that they weren't lazy in this particular case, I just wanted to make sure because I often hear people dismiss actual problems (eg recently I heard someone say that most people with anxiety are making it up...). Obviously that isn't the case here, but I sometimes feel compelled to defend people who might suffer from burnout/anxiety/depression/etc, so I wanted to be sure.

But, sometimes, laziness really is the thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From how they measure the productivity score: [http://blog.rescuetime.com/breaking-down-the-rescuetime- prod...](http://blog.rescuetime.com/breaking-down-the-rescuetime-productivity- score/)

"But the bottom line is that the productivity score doesn't tell you anything about what you actually produce. It's simply a number that can give you an interesting baseline of where your attention is, but doesn't tell 100% of the story. It's a way to understand your patterns, and not a prescription for how you should be spending your time."

So, this is basically an indicator of how much time you spend on an activity and not how "productive" you are. Like they say, productivity is a charged word. I wish there was a way to tag productivity and efficiency together.

</comment><comment><USER15> Holy crap. The stats about social media.

> It's not only time spent that's the issue, however. On average, we check in > on social media sites 14 times per workday, or nearly 3 times an hour during > our 5-hour digital day.

We're checking this stuff 3x an hour while we're supposed to be working!

I can't help but see the parallel to the incessant cigarette breaks of the previous generation. Social media might turn out to be just as bad for health/productivity.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like RescueTime, although I think it's good to use for a few months, get a baseline, and then move on.

More to the point, and taking out my axe to grind, all of this focus on productivity and being a "success!" is helpful, but also amusing and adisheartening. Please stick with me here, but if you look into sociology written over the last 20 years, it's tragic (but also inspiring) how Americans tried and tried to work harder, even though the cost of everything went up 3x and the amount of work needed to attain that same stuff also went up 3x, thus meaning everything required 9x more effort.

I love people working hard, but it's shocking when you learn that adjusted to BOTH population growth and inflation, an apartment in New York City should rent for about $900 today.

If linear trends continue (they won't fortunately, some kind of large crisis will reset them) we'll be talking about preparing kids to be a "CEO!" at 14 or earlier, maybe even there will be "CEO Camps". What a delight...

<comment><USER17> According to this, people are mostly pretending to work hard.

<comment><USER18> You already knew this though?

<comment><USER19> "Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."

(I watched this again three nights ago. Brilliance never dies.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would love to see an analysis of the productivity an hour before meetings. My guess is that it's generally much lower than the baseline. And especially half an hour before

<comment><USER18> 'And especially half an hour before'

Not related to productivity as such, but...

In a previous life I was a manager in the construction industry.

And, generally speaking, before every meeting there was another meeting that only a few people were invited to.

If you didn't know about this meeting then God help you...

I'm guessing this wasn't an industry specific thing?

<comment><USER21> Not sure how much it correlates with IT. I'm sure it does on higher levels. But on lower/mid levels, lot of meetings are just regular work stuff. Inter/intra team communication, talks with clients, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking at the plots, it seems obvious that it is useless to work on Mondays and Fridays. I cannot agree more.

<comment><USER23> If Monday and Friday were days off, would Tuesday and Thursday become the new Monday and Friday?

<comment><USER24> You're right. Maybe Wednesday-only work weeks is the optimal solution.

<comment><USER25> Nah, that's equivalent to no work at all.

<comment><USER26> The final solution.

<comment><USER27> HN needs a Godwin's law but for UBI instead of Hitler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "The biggest piece of advice we can pull from all this data is to be aware of the limited time you have each day for meaningful work, and spend it wisely.

Our days are filled with distractions, and it's up to us to protect what time we have."

To my mind it represents a failure of imagination to present this conclusion as if it might be an unavoidable reality.

I prefer to take it as a diagnosis of a solvable problem.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've always been curious how much work the average person does per day. It would be a very valuable metric to have for setting expectations - of course we're all different and listen to yourself, but just to have a ballpark...

I burned myself out at my last gig trying to be nearly 100% productive all the time since expectations are opaque. Sure, "nobody cares how much you work as long as your work gets done" but what about when the work is estimated poorly (and everything is always late...). Too nebulous of a statement.

The 12.5 hours number from the article seems pretty rough given that it's based only on time spent in app, but it's something.

<comment><USER30> I wrote [https://betterself.io](https://betterself.io) (open-sourced) to figure this out for myself. After analyzing a year's worth of supplements and habits -- meditation at the start of my day had the highest correlation of productivity beating out any supplement I bought (I tried about 70+ supplements last year).

<comment><USER31> Any other useful correlations? Also a note on the page linked: it's not clear to me whether I need another app collecting the data or if I will need to directly enter it in your app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> One trick I discovered last year is that whenever I feel like procrastinating I reach for my Kindle Oasis. It sucks much less energy than HN or browsing or aimless computer work.

</comment><comment><USER33> My pet peeve with all these time trackers is that... It's just a wrong metric, unless what you're doing is an assembly line equivalent, where you just need to put in the hours. And don't get me started on such trackers having 'leaderboards' where you're 'competing' with colleagues.

</comment><comment><USER34> "if you're a writer, time spent in Microsoft Word or Google Docs is categorized as very productive while social media is very distracting."

Just wondering how about those people whose job is to actually monitor social media sites, or are the social media personnel for some companies? Their time obviously should not fall under the _distracted_ category.

And also, even for writers, there would be occasions where you'd need a peek at social media sites to gather some inspiration. Or if you are writing about a topic, and social media becomes your source for relevant information, then that as well should not be construed as wasted time.

Will there be a way to have an objective measurement of every person's productivity? Collect all data based on outcomes desired for each task? At the moment, there's just too many variables at play to even consider measuring productivity.

<comment><USER35> These are just the defaults.

As someone who briefly used RescueTime, you can flag every website (and app) on a scale from "highly unproductive" to "highly productive." They can also be neutral or "in between" (as in, (un)productive, but not highly (un)productive). So in this situation, you would tag social media as being productive and move on with your work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The stats are a bit misleading maybe for software devolopers because we spend a lot of time reading specs on features and reading about solutions to possible problems on Google before we can implement them.</comment>


Loss of Coral Reefs Could Cost $1T - <AUTHOR> http://www.climatecentral.org/news/loss-coral-reefs-could-cost-1-trillion-globally-21347 <comment><USER2> This is a perfect example of how the economics of climate change and energy are totally messed up.

These kinds of problems are not factored into the economics of energy so coal and oil will remain economically viable without getting any kind of penalty.

Governments will attempt to tackle these issues (too late most likely) and it will be largely public funds that go towards restoration but oil and gas and coal companies will pocket all the profits and contribute little to the repercussions.

If we factored in the total costs of our energy sources renewable would be even more attractive. Given the fact that the energy companies have known about climate change for decades [1], at what point is it expected that they use some of the incredible profits made at the planets expense to mitigate those costs? It is adding insult to injury that these companies are able to avoid a lot of taxes [2] that would at least contribute to public funds being used to combat climate change. That isn't even counting the millions (billions?) that have been spent on misinformation.

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew- about-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about- climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/) [2] [https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/03/07/27-g...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/03/07/27-giant- profitable-companies-paid-no-taxes/81399094/)

<comment><USER3> i agree. but you're also letting the other side of the deal - consumers of energy produced by polluting energy sources - off the hook. the consumers benefit from this state of affairs too.

<comment><USER4> That assumes that consumers have an active purchasing power in how their energy is produced. How as a consumer do you switch the source of your energy? You could maybe move to a cleaner energy state, but even then the grid is highly intertwined and the differences may not be worth the expense and carbon output of the move itself.

You could also protest/campaign/write-letters to your states public utilities boards and maybe make a small difference... but the states are incentivized to keep energy cheap for its citizens, first and foremost. They also have to listen to the various lobbies of the various energy producers.

You might, if you own your own home and have enough income and the right sort of roof and a home-owners association that allows (because some consider them ugly or anti-historic preservation and ban them), install solar panels on your home.

As an individual consumer there are many ways to control your personal carbon footprint (drive less/use less gas, eat less meat especially beef), but consumers don't have a choice for which energy they consume.

If you are arguing that consumers use less energy: the average household is more efficient than it has ever been... and any individual household is still a drop in the overall energy bucket compared commercial and industrial usage. (The energy expenditure of the average office building far exceeds the average home. Imagine if we could all work from home...)

<comment><USER5> In the UK at least, you can buy electricity from different suppliers though it all comes through the national grid and there is no difference between the electrons of course. The supplier you buy from is responsible for generating enough capacity to offset the needs of their customers (I presume there is some kind of acceptable fudge factor to take up the slack on occasion)

<comment><USER6> This is true in the US sometimes, but it varies wildly by state (and sometimes even city).

In places where you do have the option there are companies that very aggressively market w/ door-to-door salespeople to attempt to get consumers to lock in a static rate over X sum of years. Which, as far as I can tell... generally confuses/scares consumers so they don't even consider switching suppliers at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was snorkeling in Indonesia a couple years ago, and they didn't sell reef- safe sunscreen anywhere in the country, even in the national parks. It's insane to me that these sorts of locations that derive so much of their GDP from tourism don't even make it _possible_ to protect the resources driving their economy, let alone encouraging or mandating that people do so. Like you would think that if you were a hotel near Kommodo National Park, and the only reason anyone ever stays at your hotel is to go snorkeling and see the Kommodo dragons, then you would stock reef-safe products in your gift shop. But sadly that's not the case.

<comment><USER8> They don't sell sunscreen based on titanium dioxide or zinc oxide anywhere in Indonesia? Hard to believe.

<comment><USER7> I mean they probably do somewhere, but not in any of the hotel gift shops, convenience stores, pharmacies, or dive shops where I looked.

<comment><USER8> Well, you did say "anywhere in the country".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always dislike estimates of this sort, because they give the impression of a scaling argument O(trillion $) when they are never validated and they are seldom more than 'this could cause a huge impact'!

I'm speaking as someone who is horrified at the loss of coral reefs, both because of the ecological implications as well as the loss of a truly stunning natural beauty (I'm PADI certified and love Scuba).

<comment><USER10> Radiolab had a pretty good podcast explaining where these economic estimates come from and why they are important to have around. It's part 3 at the following link:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/worth/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/worth/)

Basically, if you do not make a monetary estimate of the worth of some feature of nature, it's assumed worth is $0 when governments are making decisions about policy and land use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ok, so now we care about the environment and the planet if we can set a price. If we estimate an animal race is worth a $10k we can extinct it.

I dislike very much to put a price on things just to be aware we need to protect them. Coral reefs have more value, it is not just about money.

<comment><USER12> The overwhelming majority of people in the world, even those living in coastal areas, have never seen a coral reef in real life. Some may have seen it on TV or in print media, but most people are aware of them only by name.

That's why the economic argument is a good way to communicate the importance of these resources. Someone who has never left Kentucky in their entire life may not care about The Grand Barrier Reef in Australia, but they may care about the global economic impact of losing it.

<comment><USER13> And what is to stop anybody from extending the economic argument to that very person in Kentucky. "This fella has an economic value of X... We could get on just fine without him/her". This is already being done to an extent with companies buying "dead peasant" life insurance on their employees [1].

The point is that is that people along with the environment and the species we share it with have value that is outside of their economic contributions.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/is-there-a-dead-peasant- life-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/is-there-a-dead-peasant-life- insurance-policy-out-on-you-2011-11)

<comment><USER14> What's wrong with putting an economic "value" on a human life? It is something we all implicitly and explicitly do every do. Implicitly, by deciding how much money to spend on increasing our own safety (e.g., how much extra to pay for a safer car). Explicitly, by things like insurance as you mentioned.

Burying your head in the sand and refusing to understand that the world is full of trade-offs, which can most easily be expressed via economics, doesn't help at all.

<comment><USER15> It's because they are most easily expressed via economics, but a far cry from most accurately expressed that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b Forget about the estimate, the loss of coral reefs is a disaster, period.

<comment><USER16> Why? The poor who benefit from cheap energy don't give a fuck about tourists loosing their fancy attraction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems weird to be talking about this in terms of Trillions of dollars of impact to the economy. I get it that it can be helpful to show people how bad it could be but I'm not sure it does a great job at that even.

It would be like saying: Lack of breathable air could cost $76 Trillion Globally

<comment><USER18> Some people only care about money.

<comment><USER19> How do you fix that?

We need some sort of karma for good deeds. I can up vote comments on hn without spending "votes", I don't run out of them. Using them as a sort of currency would be interesting. Would this solve problems that aren't profit making? Like fixing the climate.

<comment><USER20> And where would these magical "votes" come from? Would we be born with a finite amount of them, and get to use them periodically? Say, like an election and voting?

In addition, let's say I get lots of these "votes". What good are they to me? What value to they possess/represent? Do we treat them as magical brownie points that are monetarily value-less, in which case, only those that care for the prestige of having many of them would chase them. The rest would ignore it.

Do we punish individuals for having too little? How about punishing those individuals that misuse them? Sell them?

Anywho, playing a bit of devil's advocate there. But sounds like what you're suggesting is money. It's available right now, and yet people don't go around donating ridiculous-enough amounts of it to make an appreciable difference in "karma" regarding the environment. That's why we're having this discussion, even.

<comment><USER19> I am poor. I would like to fix the environment. How do I affect change? How do I go from helpless to helpful?

I have no money, I have little spare time, limited range of travel.

We see these unfixable problems with climate and no real way of tackling them.

I spent an hour picking up plastic from the beach, could I turn that time and effort into something? Like money or karma or something else.

I can't do it for free as I need money for food. No one wants to pay me to do it. How do we solve this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > "It would have been virtually impossible for this to have occurred without > climate change."

> "This isn't just an environmental issue. The Great Barrier Reef is one of > Australia's greatest economic assets. It's responsible for bringing in more > than $7 billion each year to our economy, while also supporting the > livelihoods of around 70,000 people."

The irony is that in order for these tourists to visit, they have to fly overseas in planes creating significant carbon emissions.

<comment><USER22> On the other hand, flying accounts for less than 5% of global CO2 emissions. Enviro-tourism arguably helps reduce the other 95%.

<comment><USER3> that'd be great if it were true, but i'm skeptical.

Even ignoring the CO2 produced by flying, what evidence is there that enviro- tourism itself reduces CO2 emissions?

<comment><USER22> Well, the stats are true and available online.

I admittedly lack evidence on the enviro-tourism aspect, but it seems logical that tourists from heavily industrialized 3rd world countries return with some desire to improve their home environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone who grew up in an area where tourism was the primary "industry" I don't think it's appropriate to count loss of tourism generated commerce as a "loss" here. It might be a local loss but it's a net win for society.

</comment><comment><USER24> >The loss of Queensland's Great Barrier Reef alone costing that region 1 million visitors a year, imperilling 10,000 jobs and draining $1 billion from the economy

This is terrible for Queensland, but it doesn't support the $1T global cost. Most of these tourism dollars will go to other attractions that are slightly worse on the margin--they won't just disappear.

</comment><comment><USER25> If you do not want to wait for your government to take action about climate change, you do have an individual option; [http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/08/opinions/go-vegan-save- the...](http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/08/opinions/go-vegan-save-the-planet- wang/)

And heres how: [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vegan+what+I+ea...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vegan+what+I+eat+in+a+day)

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a perfect example of unwarranted alarmism. It links coral bleaching to global warming _without any proof_ , while making ridiculous economic claims. Locals [1] and local scientists [2] disagree with the claim that the reef is irreparably damaged. Here's the quote:

 _We've also seen reports that 35 per cent, or even 50 per cent, of the entire reef is now gone. However, based on our combined results so far, the overall mortality rate is 22 per cent — and about 85 per cent of that die-off has occurred in the far north between the tip of Cape York and just north of Lizard Island, 250km north of Cairns. Seventy-five per cent of the reef will come out in a few months time as recovered._

I also urge anyone who is sick of this kind of science scaremongering to follow junkscience.com [3]

[1] [http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/reef- tourism-o...](http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/reef-tourism- operators-find-less-than-five-per-cent-of-coral-dead-under-extreme- bleaching/news-story/)

[2] [http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/great-barrier- re...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/great-barrier-reef- scientists-exaggerated-coral-bleaching/news- story/99810c83f5a420727b12ab255256774b)

[3] [http://junkscience.com](http://junkscience.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> If you're concerned by this, a group of us tech folks will be marching with the Climate March on April 29th. Join us!

[https://techsector.peoplesclimate.org/](https://techsector.peoplesclimate.org/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I think the Fermi Paradox's great filter will probably filter us out. I don't regard humans as a very smart species. It's like an ape hacked on with a large computer

<comment><USER29> What is a species you would consider smart?

<comment><USER30> How about one that can engage in plans as a collective that consider long-term consequences over short-term gains? This is something we use when considering how well along a child is in development. It appears humanity as a collective isn't much smarter than a child.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a problem tech could solve. I don't see what stops us from monetizing saving the reefs via charging for eco-friendly tourism in pristine ocean.

</comment><comment><USER32> At this point anybody not calling for more nuclear power plants is just ignoring reality.

</comment><comment><USER33> Have the world's coast guards and navies already been deployed to protect natural resources within a country's borders? If not yet, I would be surprised if it didn't happen soon.

<comment><USER22> If you include food, yes. Multiple nations have shot at unauthorized Chinese fishing vessels trawling within their borders, however China hasn't defended those ships beyond political posturing.

As far as fossil fuels go, I'm not aware of states defending their internationally recognized claims against other states... but there is growing tension behind unrecognized claims.

The South China Sea issue is largely driven by China using their navy to project borders beyond internationally recognized limits. Their official justification is reclaiming historical territory, which suspiciously became a priority when oil was discovered in the area.

Russia may be in a similar position. They've been building up their Arctic military force, presumably with the intent of claiming Arctic oil fields as the Northwestern Passages opens up due to climate change. However, again, they haven't claimed anything officially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone else see massive opportunities here for entrepreneurs?

I like to say "climate change will create the first trillionaire". I can't help but imagine the powerful technologies and systems that will be developed out of this. Eco-friendly tourism, environmental sensors, synthetic biology reef protectants.

<comment><USER35> If we assume that governments and businesses start giving a shit then many forms of magic are possible.

<comment><USER34> A "Hacker's Guide to Climate Change" would be cool...equip hackers to make the magic :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> it would be great if people not just upvote it, but change their lifestyle, stop to overconsume, over-eat, over-everything, limit their car usage or at least not drive stupidly, stop having useless pets, stop smoking, etc..

I don't want to give lessons, but I have probably 5% of the average impact people do to environment in my country

</comment><comment><USER37> This number does not make sense at all. Yes, certain sites lost visitors because of loss of coral reefs, but how come this financial effect is global? Do visitors go to other places? Even if they stay home, don't they spend money on other things? Even if they don't spend those money, can the savings help them in the future? It is just ridiculous to claim losing certain visitors as global financial cost.

<comment><USER38> Tourism amounts to about 5% of the economic importance of coral reefs. 35% of all fish species spend a part of their life cycle on reefs. Pelagic fish predate on reef and demersals, the system is fundamentally interdependent. reefs protect coastal infrastructure, and so on.

Thinking that the loss of coral reefs only affects a few rich playboys is... naive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ah! the fear mongering. There is science and then there is stamp collecting. This report is more like later.

These reports must be taken with grain of salt. Not only the study is dubious but it essentially talks of all coral reefs across the world doing extinct. There is good chance that coral reefs will reduce in their size over next few decades but they are unlikely to totally disappear. Neither will the jobs and other opportunities disappear with it. A rare coral reef is a bigger tourism destination.

Also $1T is a figure I will totally ignore. If we have to protect coral reefs it is because it is an important part of ecosystem that I would like to conserve for my kids and grand kids (and I would like to pay for the conservation efforts too).

I think the probability that US will go into another recession over either war or some other government scheme gone wrong is much higher over next 30 years. We will likely lose lot more that $1T that time.

</comment><comment><USER40> To patch the allemende-bug, you would have to introduce incentives via politics, but incentives are either gambled around or with, or corroded away by cooperate-kapital not beeing busy. So to fix it, you need a law that is gambling waterteight - in all participating countrys- and you need to bind law corroding kapital.

Now its basically impossible to change this democratically - any initiative would be bend, distorted and defused long before it would reach the capital. The only feasible option - is to alter consumer behaviour. For this, the real economic footprint needs to be visible on all products, with the easy scan of a app. All of it. Meaning, you need to pay people all along the supply chain to spy on the origins and processes that produce something. You could then really see what in your life is destroying that reef - and what alternatives there are. And then you could vote with your feet. And to add incentive for those who do not care (we are all dead in the long term), some publicly visible environmental kharma point system, could be the final incentive. Maybe- something aking to jewelery- you only get, if you sacrifice part of your lifestyle for the planet.</comment>


On the Computational Complexity of MapReduce - <AUTHOR> http://jeremykun.com/2014/10/05/on-the-computational-complexity-of-mapreduce/

<comment><USER2> Nice article. I got too far into it before realizing I was essentially tricked into reading an academic paper :) There seems to be a tradeoff between clear presentation of an idea and the formalization required to usefully build off of it/publish it. Abstractions which do both (e.g. Turing machines) get more reuse, I think.

The sublogarithmic result is constructive, though, and my understanding of it is like this: We can split up a decision problem (take in a string, give a yes/no answer) over many workers by splitting up the input string into sqrt(n) chunks of size sqrt(n) each and using a shared working space. The first worker handles the first chunk with a blank working space, the second worker handles the second chunk with finished working space from the first one, etc. until the last worker handles the last chunk, with the second-to-last's working space, and gives a yes/no answer. This can be parallelized into a single MapReduce round by instead having every worker process their chunk using every possible configuration of the shared working tape. This sounds like a lot of work, but if shared working area is sublogarithmic in size, calculating such a table fits within polynomial time and sqrt(n) space. This means that one final "reduce" step can take the working space from the first input chunk, pass it through the second input chunk in constant time, and so on until it can make a decision.

I can't think of any practical sublogarithmic space problems off the top of my head but evidently there are some good ones in graph theory. If you tried to implement the above in practice, you could imagine that the final reduce step could be intelligent about combining the processing stages so workers don't need to calculate _every_ single configuration.

What is unclear to me is whether all Turing machine deciding languages in sublogarithmic space can be chunked in this way. The usual definition of an input read head is that you can go left or right whenever you want, but having access to the entire input means that the workers can't be cleanly chunked. You could say the input is one-way like a DFA/PDA, but is there a result that these are equivalent with sublogarithmic scratch space?

</comment><comment><USER3> So they are talking about how many MapReduce rounds it takes to express certain graph algorithms. (A single MapReduce round is of course O(n log n) with respect to the number of records.)

I wonder if this context is practical/realistic. One paper I thought was interesting is GraphChi, a graph processing framework that runs on a single machine:

[http://graphlab.org/projects/graphchi.html](http://graphlab.org/projects/graphchi.html)

Graphs can be encoded very efficiently; you need a pair of integer IDs for a pair of nodes, and maybe a weight or some other small payload data. A graph of say 7 billion nodes for everyone in the world will often fit in memory on a single machine these days, depending on the number of edges. GraphChi uses disk, so you have even more space, if you are willing to constrain the model (MapReduce is of course already heavily constrained, especially for graphs).

The raw source data is probably larger than a machine, but you could just run a MapReduce to copy it out into a bunch of (ID, ID) pairs, do your hairy graph algorithms on a single machine, then export the result back your data store with a MapReduce join.

You could use either something like GraphChi or just an arbitrary C/Java program working on a big graph in memory.

My hunch is that this is a lot more tractable that sequential MapReduce... I'd be interested in hearing if people have big graph problems where you couldn't use such an approach.

<comment><USER4> MR is a pretty inflexible paradigm, and doesn't really suit graph problems well at all. Most people I know prefer to use Spark (or in the case of graph problems, giraph). Of course this is for huge graphs that won't fit on a machine (petabytes). If it fits on a machine it's far easier to not muck around with distributed computing.

<comment><USER5> Do you know of a group using Spark on petabytes (or even a terabyte(s)) of data?

<comment><USER6> The scalability of Spark is certainly not as established as that of Hadoop. It's entirely anecdotal as I'm not in a position to share verifiable details, but I know of several installations that run Spark on several-hundred-node clusters. They're certainly well into terabytes, if not in the neighborhood of petabytes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Email is dead. Long live Email. - <AUTHOR> http://laserlike.com/2008/08/25/email-is-dead-long-live-email/

<comment><USER2> I totally agree with the premise. What is the market share of Outlook? Outlook sucks. I stopped using it a few days ago and feel like a crack addict who just kicked the habit. I can think clearly now!</comment>


The Chevrolet Bolt Is Exactly What Tesla Motors Wanted - <AUTHOR> http://jalopnik.com/the-chevrolet-bolt-is-exactly-what-tesla-motors-wanted-1751470440 <comment><USER2> It looks like a small cheap gasoline car from the outside, so, in comparison, it's easy for fancier electrics to look good.

Don't mean to lessen the car, long range for a relatively reasonable price is probably a lot more important than sleek looks if you want to sell a lot of them.

<comment><USER3> From the photos I've seen, it looks cheaper on the inside than the outside. The inside looks like the interior of a $12K car, not a $30k (after rebates) car.

But as you say, if you only have $30k and want a EV, this is your best option right now because of the good range.</comment></comment>


They Live - <AUTHOR> https://whispersystems.org/blog/they-live/ <comment><USER3> Have been thinking of something similar lately: A fictitious newspaper with headlines that illustrate the propaganda aspect of our news orgs. Headlines like:

\- Foreign leader lacks dignity

\- US institutions solid

\- Life in the 3rd world is horrible

\- Life in the 3rd world is meaningless/scary

\- Something some politician said was important.

\- Politician's legacy is important

\- Foreign institutions/economy shaky

\- Foreign unemployment soars

\- Life in foreign city dangerous

\- Election in foreign country rigged

\- Arcane details about silly political spat matter

\- US institutions beyond reproach

\- Firms are not beyond reproach

\- Sports matter

\- Storm with name nears

\- Three cheers for successful US company

\- You know buzzwords so you are informed about science

\- You know buzzwords so you are informed about technology

\- Token story about the EU

<comment><USER4> Isn't that called "The Onion"?

As they say about programming, the best way to complain about software is to write software. If you don't like what the media is reporting then start your own news organization of whatever kind, including satire. To complete the exercise, put years of your life into building circulation, attracting talented writers, dealing with technology costs and issues, creating and maintaining relationships and generally doing the things necessary to scale a business. Then after all of that investment, make the decision between "listening to your customers and giving them what they want" and "sticking it to the man".

The majority of media organizations don't select stories on the basis of what will be the most effective form of propaganda, but based on what they think people want to read about and discuss. Any business that has the mindset of telling it's customers what they want instead of listening to them and responding to their needs is going to have a rough go of it, including media businesses. You may not like the results, but any fault that you perceive lies more with your fellow citizens than it does with the organizations that deliver news to them.

<comment><USER5> > _As they say about programming, the best way to complain about software is > to write software. If you don 't like what the media is reporting then start > your own news organization of whatever kind, including satire. To complete > the exercise, put years of your life into building circulation, attracting > talented writers, dealing with technology costs and issues, creating and > maintaining relationships and generally doing the things necessary to scale > a business. Then after all of that investment, make the decision between > "listening to your customers and giving them what they want" and "sticking > it to the man"._

This seems to me like a very American conception of the issue (culturally I mean).

The "continental" idea is that the Press (news) is not supposed to be a business first and foremost, but a kind of service to the republic first, and a business second.

The business aspect (ads, etc) is tolerated in the degree that the Press is independent, informative, helps decocracy and transparency, etc.

If a news outlet owner can't make money off of it, he can always not do it. Doing it badly, untruthfully, link-baity etc, is not something that's really OK (e.g. because "they have to make money" \-- pimps have to make money too, that's no excuse), but something that is an example of a sick Press.

> _The majority of media organizations don 't select stories on the basis of > what will be the most effective form of propaganda, but based on what they > think people want to read about and discuss._

That's also not 100% accurate. Will a lot of stores are run like that, other aspects (like their stance in foreign politic issues, bills etc) are more often than not based on the interests of the owner or sponsors of the outlet, and in lots of cases downright propaganda (from the crude Operation Mockinbird ways onwards to today: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird) ).

<comment><USER6> > The "continental" idea is that the Press (news) is not supposed to be a > business first and foremost, but a kind of service to the republic first, > and a business second.

This is dangerous because it is a lie. If the newspaper can't sell itself as a business, it can't buy ink and paper, and it shuts its doors. The business aspect is inescapable unless it's owned and run by the government, which is even more dangerous to press freedom. If you deny the business aspect, you can't analyze it, and you can't see if it biases coverage.

> If a news outlet owner can't make money off of it, he can always not do it. > Doing it badly, untruthfully, link-baity etc, is not something that's really > OK (e.g. because "they have to make money" \-- pimps have to make money too, > that's no excuse), but something that is an example of a sick Press.

Except they _do_ have to make money. If you think of that as a sickness, all Press is sick.

<comment><USER7> >> The "continental" idea is that the Press (news) is not supposed to be a business first and foremost, but a kind of service to the republic first, and a business second.

> This is dangerous because it is a lie. If the newspaper can't sell itself as > a business, it can't buy ink and paper, and it shuts its doors. The business > aspect is inescapable unless it's owned and run by the government, which is > even more dangerous to press freedom. If you deny the business aspect, you > can't analyze it, and you can't see if it biases coverage.

"Continental" press is highly subsidized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I liked the documentary version of this post better: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOINEXp0B8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOINEXp0B8)

<comment><USER9> Agreed -- no attribution given to Žižek either.

<comment><USER10> Attribution for the premise of They Live?

<comment><USER11> First line of Moxie's post: " _The 1988 film They Live is one of the last great masterpieces to come out of the hollywood left._ "

First sentence spoken in Zizek video: " _They Live from 1988 is definitely one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left._ "

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the great advantages of having supreme mastery of any field is - <USER2> gain the ability to not partake in that field of your own volition. Others still in the apprenticeship stages don't have that luxury, because they need to learn - they need to absorb as much information as possible, and they can't afford to simply opt out of learning more.

In terms of a specific symbol that identifies hacker/privacycare types there is things like the glider symbol. Also, loose and informal groups like Telecomix, and Anonymous are usually a sign someone has opted out of the matrix and knows the game is rigged.

Cory Doctory makes the analogy that general purpose computers are going to get inadvertently infected/compromised no matter how hard you try. Once a computer is connected to the public Internet - it is a sitting duck, and exposed. We can lock it down, but it is still speaking to the packet switched net, which, by design - is going to be toxic.

I don't know how to protect my devices. A lot of the problems are too systemic, and need massive changes in policy and law to get systems trusted again.

Worth reading/watching:

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

Telecomix: [http://telecomix.org/](http://telecomix.org/)

Redesigning a Broken Internet: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J_9EFGFR-Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J_9EFGFR-Y)

Hacker Emblem: [http://www.catb.org/hacker- emblem/](http://www.catb.org/hacker-emblem/)

<comment><USER13> Its a economic war. Sitting on the switch and sniffing cleartext is easy and cheap. Compromising every enduser point and the aggregating all the data is much, much harder. More risk of detection, less reliablity and it needs constant uptake because of software and hardware updates.

The NSA is not able to do this at the moment and they do everything they can to avoid having to do it thatway. Keep with the words of Snowden "Secure crypto properly developed", if we can make that happen we can increase worrying about end user devices.

-Prio 1: Secure Crypt

-Prio 2: Good secure, crypto code

-Prio 3: Secure Enduser devices

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love whispersystems and use there products. This post gives a real inside into the mind of of many hackers, specially in the last couple of years. You spend so much time with Alice and Bob and because its intresting you think about it even when talking to normal people and this might be a harmful way to think when actually trying to build a relationship.

Moxie has probebly felt this more then most, and I want to take this change to thank him and the rest of the people working on these systems.

I hope that we do meet on that beach and that classical liberals are equally welcome even if we do support global capitalism :)

</comment><comment><USER14> "They Live" is a fun movie, and like Marxism, it certainly taps inot the vague, nearly universal "everything is wrong" vibe that affects nearly everyone but especially young adults. Other examples: The Matrix. Philip Dick and Stanislaw Lem (perhaps the most underrated SF author ever) made careers out of this emotion. For a modern incarnation on Netflix, check out Black Mirror, particular "15 Million Merits"[1]. Powerful stuff.

When I step back and look at the world, for all of our terrible mistakes, we (the western capitalist states) really _are_ the good guys, because personally and politically, overwhelmingly, we really do despise the despots, and the racists, and the needless violence and barbarism that rises to power in too many places in the world. More than once we've spilled blood and spent money not to benefit ourselves, but to stop something evil from happening to others. And no, this doesn't excuse the fact that we've spilled _even more_ blood for our own selfish ends, be they resources or the assertion of misguided idealism.

Consumerism, unlike unjust war, is a trickier beast to slay. Why? Because it's good in one important way! Consumption really _does_ drive an economy, which is good for people's bellies, and well-fed people are pretty happy (watch Triumph of the Will[2] and notice how often Riefenstahl shows food and people eating). The urge to consume, and all the messaging that goes into it, are manipulative, but it manipulates us into wealth. (Heaven help us all when even the elite can't ignore the externalities of this approach, particularly WRT climate!) We will soon see if virtual goods can thread this needle.

 _> Once we've put on the glasses, what do we do? Where are the aliens, and how do we start killing them?_

As anti-authoritarian as I am, I still can't get behind killing anyone. Maybe it's naive, but I really believe in non-violent (not passive) resistance. Ghandi, MLK, Aung Yung Suu Kyi - they show us the remarkable power of patience, love, and unyielding persistence.

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

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHs2coAzLJ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHs2coAzLJ8)

<comment><USER15> > When I step back and look at the world, for all of our terrible mistakes, we > (the western capitalist states) really are the good guys, because personally > and politically, overwhelmingly, we really do despise the despots, and the > racists, and the needless violence and barbarism that rises to power in too > many places in the world.

The history of western capitalist states has largely been one of rampant colonialism. [1] Post-WW2, the U.S. has overthrown countless governments, often democratic ones, to install regimes that would carry out U.S. policy, and serve western national and corporate interests. [2]

> As anti-authoritarian as I am, I still can't get behind killing anyone.

Except for the covert coups and the mass genocides. Those are nothing to worry about and can be written off as "misguided idealism", since we "really are the good guys".

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Hope-Military-Interventions- Si...](http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Hope-Military-Interventions- Since/dp/1567510523)

[2] [http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.pdf](http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.pdf)

<comment><USER14> I am not a cold war historian. Let's take something more recent, like the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There was a great deal of killing in that war, and all of it under false pretenses in the service of the neocon idea that overthrowing Saddam would have a domino effect in the region, and create a democratic, liberal middle east free of it's oppressive dictatorships.

It was wrong, it was stupid; but the _goal_ was right. The various Arab Springs proved that. Governments in the middle-east are terrible and oppressive. And sure, these sick states _exist_ because of historical western imperialism and the aftermath of WWI, and are more recently maintained by oil revenue. Fine. The fact remains that democracy is better and ideally there would be democracy (and yes, capitalism) in the middle east.

Maybe I'm totally wrong. But my personal experience here was good, and it doesn't seem evil to give other people the same benefits I got. My parents were poor high school graduates who created a small business that put me through college and made them wealthy. Western capitalism gave them that opportunity. It also gave them the ability to worship how they wanted, and encouraged them to tolerate, and appreciate, people of other races, creeds and religions. If there's a nation or a system of government that gives those benefits without any of the drawbacks, then I'm all ears, programmarchy! The incompetent and frankly evil ways in which we've tried to protect and spread that system are shameful, but it doesn't undermine the value of the system.

(This assumes, of course, that our goal is to spread our way of life throughout the world, and not just consolidate control of natural resources for the Fatherland's inordinate consumption, a la Rome).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> they live is one of the best john carpenter films, and that includes the epic 10-minute on-concrete wrestling match before keith david will don the glasses.

being extremely entertained to see a blog entry about they live aside, making privacy simple is super hard. similarly, making people care about privacy is super hard. killing the aliens is even harder.

ubiquitous surveillance has a pretty obvious response in the long run: ubiquitous encryption.

<comment><USER17> I've not seen the movie (yet) but reading the description on the blog was enlightening for me.

I don't fit into Western Society at all - I couldn't care less for consumerism, sports, mass media, smartphones, etc. etc. and I've always thought it's because I can see the truth behind stuff, where other people just see the glitter on the surface covering up the ugly truth.

Now I know I've just been wearing a pair of these sunglasses my whole life.

<comment><USER18> You sure are a special snowflake. Thank you for sharing your insights with the rest of the world. Do you have a newsletter? I would like to subscribe to it! Your fresh, humble insights are a beacon to us all, who have to contend with the dumb sheeple on a daily basis.

<comment><USER17> newsletter? no. Blog about driving around the world following my dreams and passions? yes. [http://theroadchoseme.com](http://theroadchoseme.com)

(yes, I know you were joking. I'm not :) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >years of avoiding products from Google

I found this passage quite confusing as TextSecure is wholly reliant on proprietary Google services. Is there any chance that will be resolved soon, Moxie?</comment>


Foxconn Hopes to Staff New Wisconsin Plant with Robots and Chinese Workers - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/scott-walker-2018-foxconn-plans-to-staff-wisconsin-plant-with-chinese-workers.html <comment><USER2>
      cut his state's K-12 education budget by nearly $1 billion dollars (sic)

... then gives a link to Politifact which _directly contradicts_ the claim. Politifact posts a miscalculated figure of $600M, claiming inflation-adjusted (but their amount is inflated, based on 2019) but is _not_ adjusted per capita (enrollment has dropped).

</comment><comment><USER3> At least the robots aren't from Mexico</comment>


Just How Profitable Are Healthcare Insurers? - <AUTHOR> http://larrycheng.com/2010/03/08/just-how-profitable-are-healthcare-insurers/

<comment><USER3> I highly recommend reading this short piece. Even though the profit margin is so small for Health Insurance Companies, "the better measurement is not profit, but return on invested capital (ROIC). " One more line from the article: "If I had a business that consisted of people giving me $100 bills and me paying them back $96, it would be silly to describe that as a very low- profit industry."

Source: The Economist

Link to Article: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/03/he...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/03/health_care_reform)

<comment><USER4> Profit margin is the important metric to look at in the context of moving to a socialized system. The stats in the linked article say that even if a public entity could run as efficiently as a private insurer there is only 3.7% surplus value to capture.

<comment><USER5> You are assuming that a public entity couldn't run _more_ efficiently than a system of private ones, which is exactly the point -- or one of the points -- at issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All this means is that the insurance companies spend most of the money they take in. They could hire x more employees and then they wouldn't be profitable at all. That doesn't mean they are tirelessly working to save you money, it just means they aren't profitable. I wouldn't read too far into this data.

<comment><USER7> Don't have a cite offhand but insurance industry employment has gone up by quite a lot (close to double if I recall correctly) since 2000.

Let's say I'm an insurance CEO. You tell me, that by spending 20 million on increased claim scrutiny, we'll net 1 million in total savings by disbursing 21 million fewer dollars.

What do I do there? It's obvious, I go for the 1 million. So I just spent 20 million in order to hand out 21 million fewer dollars. The policy holders are worse off, the country's worse off, and the insurance company only got a crappy 1 million out of it, compared to the 21 million they're no longer disbursing.

All perfectly rational given the incentives -- which is why the system's broken.

<comment><USER8> Insurance companies are, however, subject to "the law". Govt agencies mostly aren't.

Feel free to compare Medicare's dispute process with that of an insurance company. And remember that some people can switch insurance companies while no one can switch Medicare.

We can make switching insurance companies easier. Switching "single payers" is, by definition, impossible.

<comment><USER7> The government is indeed subject to the law, much more stringently than insurance companies in fact. Try doing something nominally illegal in a government agency.

The government can pass laws, of course.. but the insurance industry can hire lobbyists. Seems like an awful uphill battle to beat those guys, based on the last 60 years of healthcare reform history. Harry and Louise can be pretty influential.

Medicare's dispute process with that of an insurance company? Well, I'll tell you one thing, Medicare doesn't spend the 20 million to deny 21 million dollars in claims like I outlined above.

We should make switching insurance companies easier, but that doesn't get us anywhere if they're all embracing the same bad practices. I don't have the option of starting an insurance company out of my garage like you could with a tech startup -- if the incumbents consist of a broken oligarchy, that's what we're stuck with, absent government action. There are so many classic incentive problems in play here, tragedy of the commons, free-rider problem.. it's frankly a wonder that things aren't broken even worse.

With government run healthcare you get the benefit of proper incentives at the cost of government-run bureaucracy, which will always be a little less efficient. That's the tradeoff.. as far as which is more effective, we could look at every other industrialized country which gets better outcomes for a fraction of the cost, or we could appeal to ideology, fears of vague things like "socialism", and absurdities like "keep the government out of my medicare".

<comment><USER8> > The government is indeed subject to the law, much more stringently than > insurance companies in fact. Try doing something nominally illegal in a > government agency.

You're talking about rules for employees. I'm talking about interaction with clients. When the DMV says "no", you're basically hosed.

> Well, I'll tell you one thing, Medicare doesn't spend the 20 million to deny > 21 million dollars in claims like I outlined above.

Actually, it does. More to the point, the rules are such that it doesn't have to spend much money to deny and there's almost nothing that you can do about it.

> We should make switching insurance companies easier, but that doesn't get us > anywhere if they're all embracing the same bad practices.

Competition results in better customer service in every other industry, why is health insurance different?

> I don't have the option of starting an insurance company out of my garage > like you could with a tech startup

Actually, you do. All it takes is some money and a decent risk model, and you can bootstrap by providing services to companies that self-insure, which significantly reduces the money required.

> That's the tradeoff.. as far as which is more effective, we could look at > every other industrialized country which gets better outcomes for a fraction > of the cost

Not on comparable populations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can we get past the fact that "healthcare insurance" isn't really insurance?

True insurance essentially "insures" against catastrophic loss and policies are underwritten on a personalized basis.

"Health insurance" often covers routine care, medications, diagnostic tests, etc -- hides the actual costs behind devices like "co-pays" and distributes cost inflation across the "group" instead the high risk/sick individual.

How expensive would your car insurance be if it covered oil changes, car washes, body repair and then lumped you, the driver with a clean record, with your neighbor with his 5th DUI?

<comment><USER10> And what makes you think you aren't lumped in with your neighbor?

Every rational form of insurance relies on distributing risk over groups of independent risks to obtain the benefits of the central limit theorem. There are some very specialized policies, and the Lloyd's syndicate, but anyone wishing to avoid ruin will diversify their risk.

<comment><USER9> You missed the critical point...health "insurance" in the traditional workplace is not UNDERWRITTEN on individual basis like life or car insurance.

22-year old single, marathon runners pay the same rate as a 37-year old, single, lazy, 300lb HackerNews commenters.

That and the fact that routine care/services are "paid" for by so called "health insurance" is why it's bogus to compare it to standard insurance.

<comment><USER10> I have no idea what definition you are using for "standard insurance." Health insurance does cover routine care, but that's actually a loss control mechanism in the longer term.

Health insurance sold on a group basis is underwritten on a group basis. That does not have anything to do with whether it is "real insurance." Health insurance sold on an individual basis is underwritten on that basis, but rate differentials may be severely constrained by statute or regulation.

These do not affect whether financial risk is transferred. The routine care issue does impinge on a valid consideration of whether the transferred risk is "insurable", but since these are short-term contracts it is not fatal.

<comment><USER9> Does your auto insurance pay for your defensive driving courses? Your homeowner's policy pay for additional smoke detectors? Your life insurance policy pay for a treadmill?

What would those policies cost if they did?

<comment><USER10> To some extent, they do in the form of a premium rebate, though it is unlikely to be large enough to be a substantial reimbursement for a single policy period - perhaps over the life of the policy the cumulative rebate might cover the up-front cost. I haven't worked in casualty, only health, so I can only speculate.

The better comparison would be with Worker's Compensation insurance, where the loss control mechanisms are ongoing.

As far as what the policies would cost, I don't know. Even if routine medical care is fully covered, a lot of people won't take advantage of it for whatever reason. An insurer's actuarial models will build that expected frequency into the projected cost.

If it bothers you sufficiently, you may consider most health plans to be the sum of a "real insurance" policy and a routine health discount plan. There are health plans that truly avoid assuming substantial risk, although they do so by getting providers to assume the risk. Those plans do retain the risk of providers in their network going bankrupt where prepaid capitation would be lost.

<comment><USER9> Do the insurance companies pay for safety equipment or training in their customer's workplaces? No.

Employers pay those costs themselves in return for rate reductions. Not sure how that differs from any of my other comparisons (auto, life, homeowner's).

I think you have to admit that one's health care premiums have nothing to do with that individual's "actuarial" risk to the insurance company. There is not a single form of insurance that follows that pattern. NONE.

<comment><USER10> They forego revenue in exchange for the loss control. It's economically equivalent. This is like those discussions of whether taxes that are charged directly to businesses are paid by the business or by their customers.

As for the other, I admit health care insurance has its own peculiarities that make it a distinct field of insurance. And, no, your last assertion is incorrect. I have the advantage of having actually worked in the group pricing department of a major health insurer, so I'm not just speculating here. In lieu of further banging my head against the wall, I'll point out that the syllabi for the SOA's actuarial exams are available to the general public - just look in the "education" section of their site.

<comment><USER9> "They forego revenue in exchange for the loss control."

You obviously don't understand insurance outside of healthcare, if the insurance companies' underwriters and actuaries do their job right - <USER2> profit/revenue of all policy types is the same regardless of risk.

High risk=High rates, Low risk=low rates. Revenue/risk is balanced.

We all suffer spiraling healthcare costs because there is little correlation to what you pay for healthcare insurance and your overall risk to the insurer.

"Group underwriting" only exists in the healthcare industry - no where else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another important factor here is the amount of reserves that are held back from each $1 of premiums input into the system.

For a single payer system, the idea of reserves is non-sensical (similar to the farce of the 'social security trust fund' which makes zero sense from a macro economic perspective). I would make the point that reserves are a waste product of an insurance based system.

<comment><USER8> > Another important factor here is the amount of reserves that are held back > from each $1 of premiums input into the system.

You're forgetting that insurance companies invest that money.

There are times when claims payout exceeds the premiums, yet insurance companies still manage to make money because of the investments.

As always, if you think that you can do insurance better, go for it. If you're right, you get rich and drive them out of biz.

<comment><USER12> I work for an insurance company.

The company makes an operational loss, but it makes a killing in the financial market, and is thus (very) profitable.

Claims don't exceed the premiums, but it's narrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. I don't think anyone would complain about health care if it was handled well by insurance companies. However, health care, by and large, is suboptimal in this country. <http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php> shows the price to outcome outlier that we are.

2\. We need to look at profits in the health care industry as similar to a VAT. If you have a profit margin at the end of the line, even if it's 18%, it's not that big of a deal. However, if each segment along the line adds a VAT, even a 5% tax of every segment can add up to a third of the cost, depending on how deep the pipeline goes. Each segment of the line is taking a profit. 3% of the health care industry, x% of the hospital (less than you would think because they subsidize so much of the uninsured) y% from the pharmaceutical industry, z% from the individually owned clinic... The end result is a disproportionately expensive system in this country.

</comment><comment><USER14> Their profit is irrelevant to me. The important number is their medical loss ration: how much of my premiums go into actually paying for healthcare. In the U.S., shareholders get antsy if insurers pay more than 80% of their premiums on healthcare, and some insurers pay less than that. In France, Germany, and Japan, private non-profit insurers spend over 95% of premiums on healthcare. (Source: The Healing of America by T.R. Reid)

One expense for U.S. insurers is medical underwriting - the army of people they employ to find reasons to deny you coverage. The reason they have to do this is that their competitors are doing it. Anyone who provides better coverage at a good price will be swarmed by sick people and go out of business, so they are in an arms race to provide the worst coverage they can get away with.

Level the playing field by, eg., requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions (as the countries I mentioned do) and this arms race goes away.

</comment><comment><USER15> If a business makes a profit by serving its customers, I'm ok with that. At this point, given how messed up the health care system is (law, super expensive EOL care, high entry cost for doctors and nurses, poor non-emergency care situation), can you really do the right things. Given the failure of Indian Health Service in serving its customers (to the point of pinning a note that says "we won't pay" on a person transferring to a hospital), I know the government can't even on a loss / non-profit basis.

I almost think the government should start with tuition incentives / loan relief for doctors and nurses, and create a government cataclysmic insurance fund that covers stuff over a $100K (think flood insurance).

<comment><USER8> > this point, given how messed up the health care system is (law, super > expensive EOL care, high entry cost for doctors and nurses, poor non- > emergency care situation), can you really do the right things.

Which of those factors are due to insurance companies?

If you don't fix them, how likely is it that any "new" system will be any better?

<comment><USER15> Those factors are the landscape the insurance companies operate in. The biggest problem is that I don't see any of the actual legislation doing anything about actual input costs to the system or increasing competition.

<comment><USER8> > The biggest problem is that I don't see any of the actual legislation doing > anything about actual input costs to the system or increasing competition.

Not to be rude, but where have you looked?

Besides, if that sort of legislation is what is required, how does its absence justify doing something else?

<comment><USER15> Well, the last time it was on one of the senator's websites. I admit I was skimming to look if some things were changing for certain currently funded programs, but I kept my eye out for other stuff.

Politics are political. Each party is funded by people who want parts of the current system to stay the same or change for their benefit. Trial Lawyers (D) and Drug Companies (R) for example have huge stakes. I ignore what a politician says and look at the actual documents. I admit, lately, it has been really hard to get ahold of bills. I worry about the urgency that doesn't let a bill be posted and reviewed before voting.

<comment><USER8> > Well, the last time it was on one of the senator's websites.

That's better than nothing, but if you looked at a Repub senator's website, you're unlikely to see all Repub proposals, let alone Dem proposals. The reverse is also true.

> I ignore what a politician says and look at the actual documents. I admit, > lately, it has been really hard to get ahold of bills. I worry about the > urgency that doesn't let a bill be posted and reviewed before voting.

I agree with all that.

<comment><USER15> You know, I really don't remember which party, it was a pointer over to the full house's site. This hiding of bills has to stop. It is the information age and I had a lot easier time getting the full text of a bill ten years ago.

I'm just worried everyone is going to have the same "end of fiscal year no money for you" that has plagued the reservations under IHS. The sad part is the coverage of the news media is so poor on these, that the few stories that have gone out are thought of as aberrations instead of the day to day reality. I just wished the gov (both parties) would prove they could get it done with the limited population already served before moving on.

<comment><USER8> > I just wished the gov (both parties) would prove they could get it done with > the limited population already served before moving on.

I agree. In fact, that's exactly my proposal - try out nationalized healthcare on federal employees and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem for healthcare insurers is that healthcare is a product often obtained while under duress. Patients have to trust their doctors, so they'd much rather call their insurers greedy than the people to whom they entrust their most valuable asset.

If you want to look for greed in healthcare, look at medical schools, hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers. Insurance costs are a simple reflection of the incomes of those parties. State regulators (for small group and individuals) and shopping around by sophisticated consumers (large groups) assures that.

</comment><comment><USER16> If they could figure out how to get rid of their sick customers they could increase their margins. I wonder if they've thought of that.

</comment><comment><USER17> Most Americans (probably 80-90%) conflate corporate greed with _profits_ , which is the wrong way to look at the problem. Most of the asshole greed we see today is not in profit _per se_ , but in back-scratching compensation deals for top management. Note that CEO pay is not profit. It's an expense. Most Americans either don't make or are unaware of this distinction. Managerial overcompensation is strictly _worse_ , because at least one can invest in a company that is "profiting too much".

I'd like to see the data for other years. Recessions are bad for health insurers, because when people get fired, young and healthy people tend to drop their insurance while those who are older stay on the plan (with COBRA). So adverse selection sets in and insurance companies lose.

<comment><USER18> _Most of the asshole greed we see today is not in profit per se, but in back- scratching compensation deals for top management._

Citation, please? I'm _very_ skeptical that pay for top execs amounts to a really significant part of corporate expenses, or that corporate profits could be increased substantially by cutting these expenses.

<comment><USER17> Executive pay may be small compared to the corporate balance sheet, but the level it's at allows for and encourages bad behavior.

1\. The extreme disparity between CEO pay and other vital executives encourages people to backstab in order to ascend the hierarchy. So "work" for those who are in line to be CEOs is more about jockeying for position and trading favors than about building a company.

2\. In addition to (1), such disparities are bad for morale, especially when the CEO is a "hired gun" instead of someone who has been part of the company for a long time.

Except in athletics, where talent is objectively measurable, the "star system" tends to piss off everyone but the stars, and let's be realistic: non-stars are 99% of people, and probably 3/4 of those who would be considered objectively the most competent.

3\. When the CEO makes $500,000/year, he's drawing a good salary but still has the incentive to build a legitimately strong company for the long-term. When he has a "performance bonus" that will give him fuck-you money in 12 months if he plays his cards right, his incentives are in the short term.

4\. When there are massive discrepancies in pay between the bosses and the people they are managing, the social class and lifestyle disconnects become problematic and can damage morale. This is why the best CEOs try to appear middle-class in terms of dress and work habits.

CEO pay is at such a level that it actually brings _lower_ quality of management. This is what's truly alarming. Decades ago, when CEO pay was much lower, American companies were well-managed and produced great products like (imagine this for a second) cars that people actually wanted to buy. Now, big- company CEOs command stratospheric salaries and generally such ass. This is because executive pay is so high that it has pushed these people completely out of touch with reality.

<comment><USER4> Companies are much better managed now than they were a few decades ago. Think about the fact that corporate raiders were able to buy large companies in the 80's, split them apart and sell their constituent lines of business for more than the companies were previously worth.

CEO pay has simply increased in line with the market capitalization of the largest public companies.

<comment><USER17> The stock market is a poor arbiter of whether a business decision is good for the long run. Traders are good at outguessing each other in the short term, but have no sense of the long term.

<comment><USER18> Again, how about a citation? On what basis do you believe that they're not reflecting the long term?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes, and Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc don't get to decide if their customers get the heart transplant they so desperately need.

These companies need to be operating as not-for-profits, or coops. Their motivations between decisions should be driven by what's best for their members, NOT what's best for their pocketbooks. No matter whether it's a profit margin of 1% or 10% or 1000%.

<comment><USER20> That's not an argument, it's just an assertion of taste.</comment></comment>


Meet Tim Cook: Apple's Possible New CEO - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/08/24/meet-tim-cook-apples-possible-new-ceo/

<comment><USER2> s/Possible//</comment>


California Announces Statewide 'Stay at Home' Order to Stop Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://time.com/5806990/california-stay-at-home-order-coronavirus/ <comment><AUTHOR> Country by country, state by state, one by one...</comment>


Is that Facebook and Twitter are growing as news sources? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Remember the notice board of your college that used to be at main entrance - the common notice board?

In my college, the notice board was the best source to know what is happening in various departments of the college. Who is winning in cricket, which dept is participating in which tech fest, the new books arrived in library, which dept will be conducting the next quiz and the like.

Did other notice boards of different departments lost their significance because of the main notice board?

I think no. The main notice board use to highlight some key news from different dept. In order to dig deep, we gotta go to the dept itself.

Similarly, Twitter and Facebook are a kind of notice board where you can get the key news that are trending but in order to dig deep you have to go to the main website itself.

This is it. These websites are great way to get your content distributed. I don't think they gonna become content generator anytime soon.</comment>


Java is not JavaScript - tell your friends - <AUTHOR> http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/01/16/java-is-not-javascript-tell-your-friends/

<comment><USER2> Sometimes I feel like the idiotic marketing decision to name it "JavaScript" is never going to stop haunting us. The only ways out are for 1) Java to die (not going to happen), 2) JS to die (not going to happen), or 3) everybody to start calling it ECMAScript (probably not going to happen).

<comment><USER3> Never is a long time. Java is in a strange, precarious situation already, and JavaScript won't last forever as the only option for client-side scripting. It'll slowly fade from relevance once there's a better option.

<comment><USER4> Java is in no way in a precarious situation! its one of the most popular enterprise language. Just because the cool kids these days think java is lame because they've got their ruby and node.js, doesn't mean java is dying at all. And i m saying this even tho i dislike oracle.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but java applets ARE in precarious situation and they rarely work at all.

The only time I have seen a java applet recently was on a website with ATARI emulator (I guess it still wasn't ported to JavaScript and/or Flash).

<comment><USER4> you are correct. I also have mentally struck applets from memory, and so to me they no longer exist ;)

...except that there are stock trading software that is written as java applets...sigh...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tell recruiters, I keep getting calls for Struts jobs and I have to tell them I know nothing about that.

<comment><USER7> Oh God the recruiters. What types of Java Scripts do you know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Disabling Java slightly reduces my security risk when browsing the web.

Disabling Javascript slightly reduces my security risk when browsing the web and greatly reduces my privacy risk. It's just that tracking people across the web is common to the point it is ignored...and it is amazing how many websites are better without it.

<comment><USER9> Most websites aren't very good without JS...

<comment><USER10> I use NoScript in Firefox. You can white-list the sites that want you to use JavaScript, and deny the ones that don't. I'll white-list HN, Reddit, Gmail, etc. but if I go to a site that isn't Facebook which suddenly requires me to enable Facebook's Javascript code, for who knows what reason, I'm not allowing that code to run in that session.

To more directly answer your question, yes, many sites will not be very good with JS turned off, but I can decide whether that site is using or not.

<comment><USER11> I prefer a solution like <https://disconnect.me/> \- disables Facebook/Google/etc JS scripts but lets the site use JS otherwise.

<comment><USER12> Nice one. I didn't know about this. Looking now at the video they link to: <http://youtu.be/BK_E3Bjpe0E>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have to explain this difference to my dad about once a week.

Can't we just start calling javascript awesomescript?

</comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately, many of my non-developer/computer science friends make this confusion disturbingly often. All things considered, it's pretty understandable mistake. Look at Clojure/Clojurescript; though not a great analogy, it shows that such a name similarity definitely implies a relationship other than "it has similar syntax."

</comment><comment><USER15> It's actually surprising how many technical people think that they're either the same, or javascript is closely related, perhapx a "lite" version. Then there are the JS frameworks that try to make coding in JavaScript more like coding im Java...

<comment><USER16> This reminds me that they did deliberately try to make JavaScript look like Java, but again it is for mostly marketing purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's just hope Go! doesn't suddenly become popular...

<comment><USER18> Only an issue if Go becomes popular as well.

EDIT: Must have missed the headlines where Go was the new java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I my view, most non-technical people thinks 'Javascript is Java'.. not 'Java is Javascript' as given in the title.</comment>