Fruit-sorting robot 'will disrupt the industry' - <AUTHOR> http://www.drivesncontrols.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/4938/Fruit-sorting_robot__91will_disrupt_the_industry_92.html <comment><USER2> Fruit sorting systems have been in production use for years. They're very impressive. Vision systems, AI, robotics, and the ability to handle huge quantities of produce.

Here's a production scale apple sorting and packing system.[1] The part of the video for "big plant" shows the most automated version.

Here's a system for sorting peas.[2] Each individual pea is inspected using computer vision. Each individual pea. Anything that doesn't look like a perfect pea is kicked out by an air jet. Take a look at the speed at which the system is running, as a wide conveyor belt feeds hundreds of peas per second through the machine, with the good ones coming out on one conveyor and the rejects on another. That one machine is doing a job a thousand hand sorters could not do.

Automated cherry grading.[3] This video has a good explanation of what's going on, as size, color, stem length, and defects are all checked by a computer vision system. That system can process over 700Kg/hour of cherries. "We're enabling our clients to massively reduce their sorting staff."

Tomato sorting machine.[4] This video has slow-motion sections so you can see the tomatoes being sorted. The machine is far too fast for humans to even see what it's doing.

There are vision-based sorting machines for almost every kind of produce, and they're in wide use all over the world. All this automated sorting means that customers no longer need to examine produce in the supermarket. The rejects were removed at the plant, and turned into animal feed or something. This makes services like Amazon Fresh possible.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cprDuf0ASzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cprDuf0ASzU) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyGR6A5MWG0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyGR6A5MWG0) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3jlq03Gviw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3jlq03Gviw) [4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz88nsWL4kw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz88nsWL4kw)

<comment><USER3> I think you underestimate the quality of a thousand hand sorters. That machine may replace on the order of a hundred hand sorters, but I doubt it's 1000.

<comment><USER2> 6 metric tons of peas per hour per machine. The machine examines the pea from all sides while the pea is in free fall. A human would have to pick up each pea to do a comparable job. A kilogram of peas is about 4000 peas, so 1000 humans would each have to examine 24,000 peas per hour each, or 6 peas per second, to keep up.

<comment><USER3> Okay, 6000 peas per second is more than a thousand people could do. I was basing my response off your original description of "hundreds of peas per second" while I know humans can sort at a rate of more than 1 pea per second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Once picked, the fruit can also be sorted by colour so that, for example, red apples can be separated from green apples."

So it can compare apples and oranges. Thanks I'm done

<comment><USER5> You beat me to that joke. Well played.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a bit off topic, but this GIF of a carrot harvesting machine never ceases to amaze me: [http://i.imgur.com/UkTalyS.gifv](http://i.imgur.com/UkTalyS.gifv)

<comment><USER7> But carrots are easier than fruit. If you go to apple or orange plantages, you'll often see the ground covered in perfectly good fruit, because it's too expensive to pick it efficiently. 20% doesn't even make it to the shop: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/04/un- says...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/04/un-says-europe- wastes-50-of-fruit-and-vegetables-and-america-isnt-much-better/)

In addition, being able to remove weeds mechanically, rather than chemically, is a big win for health and environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have some personal experience with applying computer/machine vision techniques to assessing rice quality. In India, rice quality assessment is a high value activity as the difference in per unit weight price is dramatic across different varieties of rice. The longer the grain, as an example, the pricier it is. Discoloration is also an indicator of bad quality rice. Since there is such a huge difference in price, there is naturally cheating, subjectivity and sampling driven errors. We had developed a device that would objectively and quickly measure the rice quality based on a multitude of factors. This was not just software because there had to be way to cancel out any variance due to ambient conditions and it had to be a device that was easy to maintain in a highly rugged rice factory environment. We did really well but where we failed was our inability to break through the powerful rice quality inspectors cartel and even the rice suppliers who were worried about being "found out". Manual inspection was strangely seen as way of having some control over the proceedings.

<comment><USER9> As an ag/tech startup, I'm very interested in this device. is there a way to contact you for more information?

<comment><USER8> This was 7 years back my friend. We built software prototype for measuring dimensions, classifying grain type and measuring color / brokenness. For hardware we had some initial designs where the objectives were - to easily put grains on a platform so they are separated from each other, easy cleaning and lighting uniformity. We had conceived some rotating or vibrating disks for grain separation. But the mechanical part of the hardware wasn't actually built. I have moved on. There is nostalgia around that was triggered by this thread, but nothing more at this point. Sorry to disappoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I toured a commercial apple orchard 10 years ago. They use massive parallel conveyor system with laser-imaging for quality and gates to sort.

I'd be surprised if this robotic arm+vision system could compete on cost and through-put.

<comment><USER11> Note this "can distinguish and selectively _pick_ fruit." Right now you either set up nets, have a machine bulk shake a tree and take what falls, or pay someone to pick ripe fruit. The conveyor system would then sort the collected fruit.

This system either replaces human collectors or significantly increases yields compared to shaking the trees. But, you would likely still need the bulk sorting at a later stage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm wondering what is so difficult about this task. I mean, all the "good" fruit looks almost the same, so recognizing it should be simple. Also, there's plenty of training material.

<comment><USER13> Fruit is not a uniform shape and it typically bruises easily so it can be difficult to design a robotic "hand" to consistently pick up fruit of irregular shape without bruising.

This article from Gizmodo does a good job of explaining the difficulties involved: [http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/10/why-is-it-so-hard-for- robo...](http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/10/why-is-it-so-hard-for-robots-to- pick-up-fruit/)

<comment><USER12> Looking from those images, I think they are using the wrong kind of hand. A better hand would simply be a "vacuum cleaner" end, i.e., gripping the fruit by suction power. If it can't be gripped like that, it is probably not fruit that needs to be selected.

<comment><USER14> Suction would bruise anything but the hardiest and greenest apples, same as a hickey except now it rots all your fruits. Some fruits are already ridiculously sensible to bruising as it is (pears from the family orchards bruise if you look at them funny)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Capital trumps labour, yet again. Talk about a brave new (terrible) world.

How is anybody without amazing talent, IQ, _and_ luck in the birth-location lottery, supposed to survive?

How are these awful machines helping to advance the wellbeing of humanity? By destroying livelihoods for a few pennies cheaper bananas to those who can already afford to pay more?

<comment><USER16> _How are these awful machines helping to advance the wellbeing of humanity?_

Hypothetically, by freeing humanity from hard manual labor and making goods less costly.

Machines have a long history of advancing the wellbeing of humanity. The fire bow, wheel, pottery wheel, bicycle, ox cart, lever, ramp, plow... I could go on and on, from ancient to modern.

The modern textile industry is a much closer advancement, that made clothing _manyfold_ more affordable and freed countless people from unforgiving constant manual labor.

<comment><USER15> That sorting fruit is "hard labour" is actually coincidental. The real skill is pattern recognition and dextrosity. Skills widely deployed by humans today. We're now on the cusp of destroying this, another whole class of human employability. I am not as confident as you that we can simply extrapolate the past ad infinitum (ie: the "we will adapt and flourish" dogma). It seems to me we're reaching some inflection points in the trend where real, painful adjustment will occur. Recall that the 19th century's "innovations" created vast misery then, and war for 50 years 50 years later, before we adjusted. For those of us (un)lucky enough to be alive today, the immediate future seems very bleak indeed. Thanks to thinking machines.

<comment><USER16> Well, first of all painful adjustment in the immediate future is worth the permanent advancement after the adjustment. Second of all I feel we have every reason to believe advancements like this are inexorable, so I would rather devote my thoughts to how best to handle them rather than how to stop them or to lament how unfortunate it is.

I would also argue that the greatest skill humanity possess is not dexterity, pattern matching, or anything else like that. But, rather, _adapting_.

<comment><USER17> Easy to say, Guy With A Job. Hungry people have other opinions. If we had, say, a Basic Income in place (or other hunger-proof social network) then I'd lean toward a Utopian view of progress as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cool. Robots. [http://www.fanuc.eu/uk/en/robots](http://www.fanuc.eu/uk/en/robots) "With more than 100 models, FANUC offers the widest range of industrial robots in the world."

</comment><comment><USER19> not sure if I buy this, while the idea sounds cool the complexity of that gripper tells me that there have to be simpler means to grip fruit without damaging it that would be faster, something along the lines of suction mechanisms where you can stack many of them; like on a roller.

What I am getting at is, besides the obvious complexity of the "hand" is how many can you fit into the area and how fast can they move the product? Identifying the good product from bad isn't hard, many food production lines do that and blow off items they don't want.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't know, people are really really good at things like this (picking fruit), which robots are generally speaking very bad at, and migrant labor is cheap. Why is this a disruptor?

<comment><USER21> For starters, not every country is the US, we don't all have vast hordes of illegals willing to work for next to nothing.

Secondly, and without wanting to start a political thread, the US might not either soon because President Trump.

Overall there's a point at which this becomes economical (just as there was a point at which automated harvesting of every other crop became economical starting with the 19th century) and it depends on labour costs in each country. It won't be super-soon, but it will happen eventually.

<comment><USER22> Never thought I'd see someone endorse trump on hn. September never ends I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> DISRUPT

</comment><comment><USER24> Automation like this is why I call BS on the "we need more immigrants to keep the economy going!" folks.

We will be struggling to keep our existing population employed. The last thing we want to do is import even more low-skilled labor who will soon be made redundant.

Increasing automation means a declining population is a godsend rather than a problem.

Policy makers must be aware of this. I suspect the call for increased immigration are politically motivated (replacing the existing population with a more reliable voting block) rather than sincere economic concerns.

This recent article is a great example. The author gleefully explains how replacing the existing white population with immigrants will reduce the NRA's base.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/19/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/19/the- nra-will-fall-its-inevitable/)

<comment><USER25> You had me agreeing until the part about the NRA base going down with increased immigration. Now I'm all for it.

<comment><USER24> Purposeful demographic replacement of white people to achieve political ends. Lovely.

<comment><USER25> > Purposeful demographic replacement of white people to achieve political > ends. Lovely.

Why is being white so important? What's the difference? If the difference is no NRA, sounds like a decent trade to me.

<comment><USER24> >Why is being white so important? What's the difference?

Replace "white" with "jewish" and you'd fit right in with holocaust deniers/apologist.

So just to be clear, you have no problem with ethnically cleansing a nation to change its political disposition?

<comment><USER26> I'm a bit confused about why you (seem to) think that is a good analogy?

One wrinkle that might be part of your idea is that instead of comparing the act of promoting immigration to the act of genocide, you are instead comparing the defense of promoting immigration to a denial or approval of genocide. Perhaps this is what the analogy is based on?

However, I expect that you are aware that many people distinguish between killing members of a group or preventing them from reproducing, against just outnumbering the group? Some people tend to distinguish between those.

Another thing, you use the term "ethnically cleanse". The association's people generally have for that term usually include an active eradication. Not just ending up being in the minority of the population. Similarly, due to the word "racial" in the phrase, people often interpret it as referring to an act of effecting in a targeted manner those of some specific "race".

most People would generally not describe the act of dropping fat man and little boy as being acts of "racial cleansing", though they did result in the drastic decrease of a population of a particular ethnicity in a region. People are more interested in the number of deaths that occurred, and other damage done, than they are on the impacts on the population of a particular ethnicity.

For most people to consider something to be intended as "racial cleansing", they generally have to consider the the intent behind the action to be motivated by "racial" things, not just the action to happen to have an effect on "racial" things.

<comment><USER27> Let's put aside the admittedly inflammatory rhetoric. Are you arguing that if the government decided to peacefully change the population's demographics in order to make a currently unpopular political goal more achievable in the future, that would be okay?

Because that's about the most anti-democratic thing imaginable. In a democratic society it is absolutely, unconditionally wrong for the government to do such a thing. The government serves at the pleasure of the people, not the other way around!

<comment><USER26> No, I'm not really arguing that.

I'm mainly just arguing against the comparison to racial discrimination/eradication.

I agree with your point that replacing the people so that some different things will be voted for is harmful and undemocratic, at least if done by the government.

But the problem would be in corruption, basically, not genocide, as the one I responded to claimed, and I think that is an important distinction to make.

Bad arguments for things one agrees with should be refuted as well as for ones one disagrees with.

Although, a limitation on my agreement: many potential actions by a state could influence the population in an area in a way that might change how the area votes. I think it would be generally not a good idea to forbid all such actions, because that would only make it such that the impact of how it is set up does not change, it would not make it so that it does not have an effect. That's not to say that there shouldn't be protection against changes that would cause a harmful change in voting population, just that not everything that incidentally would have a change to voting population would be inherently bad.

In the end, I think, it should be the choice of the population as to whether the govt takes some action which could impact the composition of the population, provided that there is no other reason which it is either obligatory or impermissible to take the action in question.

If the population freely chooses an action which will impact the way they make future choices, it seems to me kind of like a person , for example, drinking alcohol, or taking a mind altering substance, whether it is a medicine or a harmful substance.

Unless the action is forbidden (such as, for example, an actual genocide) or obligatory (not sure of what an example would be here.) , the population would choose whether to take an action which would change itself.

Edit:

Something I thought of just after sending that:

Consider woman suffrage. That was a decision which influenced the collection of people who constituted the voting population. I think it was a good decision.

<comment><USER27> OK, then. I think a lot of people here got weirdly hung up on the nature of the demographic change, as if the skin color of the people affected somehow affects its morality.

With regards to women's suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the constitution after extensive public debate, overwhelming approval by Congress, and approval of a supermajority of state legislatures, exactly as spelled out in the Constitution; it also had support among the public. That was the epitome of a change effected in the proper democratic fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think this would free migrant farm labor from having the burden of income, freeing them to be wondering poets. Reminds me a recycling sorting robot, which in my country is done by the mentally disabled. Just the kind of person you want to take a job away from.

<comment><USER29> Jobs are pretty shitty, they get in the way doing any real work. If we can have a functional society where robots deal with all the manual labor, the owners of the robots get half the profits and the other half get spread uniformly amongst the populace, anybody who wants to work on things that demonstrably unprofitable like writing linux kernel, or teaching their children to read, or advanced math or analyzing adventure time for asinine thematic story telling, well, who knows what we might get done.

<comment><USER21> And remind me why I, as a farmer (hypothetically) who spent millions of dollars buying a piece if land and millions more to buy robots to work on it, then spends all his time worrying about maintenance and shipping and prices and pruning and planting and weeds and so forth... remind me why I should consent to having my profits confiscated and given to other organisms for no reason other than that they happen to be of the same species?

Imagine the social unrest when a large portion of the populace is literally of negative value. It's not going to be pretty.

We need to start thinking now about how we're going to achieve a smaller but more elite population, so only useful people get born.

<comment><USER29> one: taxes are your subscription to the society plan that offers you property rights and other elements that allow an investment in farm equipment to be profitable.

two: the metric you use to determine the value of a person is highly arbitrary, based on GDP, divorces are better for society than marriages, despite the fact that children going through divorces suffer in school and later go on to accomplish less, capitalism is generally too myopic to actually address any existential risks to the human race.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do Your Managers Want Agility? - <AUTHOR> https://avivbenyosef.com/do-your-managers-really-want-agility/ <comment><USER2> Many developers don't truly want agility, either. Agility doesn't mean standups, sprints, and retrospectives; it's a commitment to a truly collaborative and customer-centric SDLC. It's a wonderful idea but it's not for everyone.</comment>


New US cybersecurity bill could threaten free software - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/new-us-cybersecurity-bill-could-threaten-free-software <comment><USER2> Ever since W started tacking "Homeland" onto everything he could find, the presence of that word on ANYTHING has been a guarantee that that thing a) sucks, b) is unnecessary, and c) is a grave threat to civil liberties.

Thanks for the useful shorthand, W!

<comment><USER3> Who or what is W? White house?

<comment><USER4> George W. Bush. I think people starting using W to differentiate him from his father George H. W. Bush.

<comment><USER3> Am I old fashioned in that I think it's disrespectful to call a president that?

<comment><USER5> Of all the ways that George W. Bush has been disrespected, calling him by his middle initial doesn't really register.

On the broader point, presidents are politicians, not gods. More to the point, they are our _employees_ , and they should be treated with the dignity and respect appropriate to that position. You don't bow and scrape to your employees, but you don't call them rude names and spit at them either, even if you disagreed with the decision of the hiring committee to hire this particular candidate for the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The bill might have changed since this was written.

Current I see "(1) IN GENERAL- The owners and operators of covered critical infrastructure shall have flexibility in their cybersecurity plans to implement any cybersecurity measure, or combination thereof, to satisfy the cybersecurity performance requirements described in subsection (c) and the first-party regulatory agency or sector-specific agency may not disapprove under this section any proposed cybersecurity measures, or combination thereof, based on the presence or absence of any particular cybersecurity measure if the proposed cybersecurity measures, or combination thereof, satisfy the cybersecurity performance requirements established by the Director under subsection (c)." ( [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi- bin/query/F?c111:1:./temp/~c111l3R...](http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi- bin/query/F?c111:1:./temp/~c111l3ROpa:e13057): )

Which seems to specifically state you can choose any approach you want as long as you secure the site.

Maybe there's something I missed.

<comment><USER7> They can simply require a security measures that is protected by existing IP, thus leaving network security up to the biggest patent-trolls with a lobbying budget. I would much rather entrust security to market-driven solutions, not some herp derp government agency.

<comment><USER8> Market-driven security is failing us. It's luck, not sound engineering, that is preventing catastrophe. I can respect that regulation would be even worse than catastrophe, but have a hard time dignifying the argument that there's no tradeoff.

<comment><USER6> Thom,

I think you're confusing market-driven security _levels_ with market-driven security _products_.

Big-website-taking-lots-of-citizen-data: I don't need security, the market hasn't demanded it.

The-State: I'm demanding it. Go buy good security, I don't care how.

Big-website-taking-lots-of-citizen-data: Ah, Ok, I think I've found it.

The-State: good, just give me outline so I know.

Big-website-taking-lots-of-citizen-data: here you go.

While the anarchist in me might just hate the state and the large corporations, here no one has yet shown how any of these are doing dastardly deeds. And that's a fine exception to the rule, really.

<comment><USER8> This bill isn't about "big-website-taking-lots-of-citizen-data". To save us a really pointless and boring argument, let's stipulate that it's about Exelon and not about eBay, and to the extent it isn't, that's a flaw that needs to be corrected.

<comment><USER6> ... orthogonal to my earlier argument...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just remember this, kids: Did any of you imagine TSA would lead to crotches being grabbed in the name of "national security"? There will come a day when all computing purchases will be "routinely" reported to DHS. And every member of IT staff will need a Fed license.

<comment><USER8> Instead of resting on "government is bad, m'kay", how about taking a crack at suggesting something to improve the bill? That's something people can actually debate productively.

<comment><USER10> Bills are not written by people on discussion boards. They are written by lobbyists, and then adopted by legislators who rarely even read the bills on which they vote.

<comment><USER8> What's your point? Presumably, you're commenting for a reason.

<comment><USER7> It appears OP doesn't trust lobbyists to ensure security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I skimmed the bill but couldn't find any reference to "specific proprietary software". What are we talking here, Cisco routers or something?

<comment><USER12> I presume it's a reference to the Common Criteria certification requirements. So:

<http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/products/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Both the FSF and CNet's sources are making the same complaint about the proposed bill: that it allows DHS to designate private networks as "critical national infrastructure", and that the terminology in the bill is so broad that it would allow (say) eBay to be declared critical infrastructure.

The reality is, while the bill sucks and the language is fuzzy, the intent is clear: critical private national infrastructure means air traffic control and the power grid. _Maybe_ , under the broadest interpretation, they might call the NASDAQ ECNs part of the "nation's information infrastructure".†

The bill makes no mention of proprietary software or hardware. The FSF is apparently reacting to the notion of DHS having _any_ authority over the operation of networks; the notional concern is, "if they can dictate operational terms, they can dictate Cisco and Microsoft". They could just as well dictate Linux or Apache.

It is a fair critique of this bill that DHS has virtually no expertise in this area (despite repeated appeals to US-CERT, which, respectishly, doesn't have the requisite expertise either).

Personally, while virtually everyone else on HN is going to disagree with me, I think it's less fair to criticize the notion of FedGov nationalizing the security of private networks in an emergency. I have several reasons for arguing this:

* * * It is simply the truth that vast amounts of our critical infrastructure are privately owned and operated, and while reasonable and mostly hands-off regulation may enable utility operators to serve the public good using their own best judgement, that same regulation does nothing to deal with malicious adversaries.

* * * The government already has the "shadow" authority to accomplish these goals. Does anyone seriously believe the President lacks the ability to nationalize power grid security in the event that an attack makes the midwest go dark? Of course he can. It's better to be explicit about that authority now, when we're not panicking over an actual technological attack, than it will be for us to create _de facto_ new rules in a crisis.

* * * There is a real risk that companies managing critical infrastructure might not realize that their networks are critical infrastructure, or, worse, might not care. We have decades worth of track record for companies not disclosing horrible incidents for fear of economic consequences. It's one thing when a retail chain delays disclosure of credit card leaks; it's another when a grid operator gets owned up.

† _Systems can be designated if "the destruction or the disruption of the reliable operation of the system or asset would cause a national or regional catastrophe"; specific factors that must be considered include whether an attack would cause "a mass casualty event with an extraordinary number of fatalities", "severe economic consequences", "mass evacuations with a prolonged absence", or "severe degradation of national security capabilities, including intelligence and defense functions"._

<comment><USER13> > while the bill sucks and the language is fuzzy, the intent is clear

Is it so hard to believe that a bill could be interpreted in such a way that unexpected and undesired consequences happen? Rather than waving off criticism by claiming "intent is clear", I think it's best to make the language clear.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately, courts do not decide on the _intent_ of legislation. Courts decide on the language of the legislation and the facts of the case. The fact that this legislation has such broad language is something to be feared, regardless of its intent.

Perhaps an analogy is in order. The _intent_ of intellectual property legislation (specifically, patent law) was to promote innovation. However, the _outcome_ of the legislation has been almost exactly the opposite when such legislation has been applied to computer and information technologies. How can you say that the same thing will not happen with this legislation? As the aphorism goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

<comment><USER8> How would you improve the language? _Nobody here_ is sticking up for the language as it stands. Don't be boring! Improve the language!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's true, but the headline is am understatement. This line of legislation will kill Silicon valley. Who can afford $100k/day when you are just two guys in a garage? Or even writing cyber defence plans and submit them to DHS?</comment>


Why do routers need to be reset? - <AUTHOR>

Every one of my clients, home or small business, have ONE device at the center of their operations.  Whether dealing with the ubiquitous Linksys WRT-54G or a Netgear FVG318, it never ceases to amaze me how often a reset will solve a problem.  The question is, why? <comment><USER2> Beside obvious reason of existing bugs in software there is a thing that we are dealing on hardware level such as changes in the memory due to cosmic radiation and noise (popular problem in high altitude observatories for example) and since int can change any memory including working registers, adress pointers, etc. it means that gradually memory in your device turns into noise. Professional devices often have a watch-dogs basically a circuit that have to be reset. In some cases when there is extreme availability is required such as fire alarms on petrol and chemical facilities or process control boards two spare modules constantly monitor each other and reset if needed. There is also a parity bits, ECC and lot of other options.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The problem is, I have clients who aren't about to plug/unplug power cords. I have set up a few with wireless appliance switches. Even that is far from elegant imo.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because they're not willing to pay for reliable firmware.

<comment><AUTHOR> The FVG318, while inexpensive, is supposed to be "business class."

<comment><USER3> The really reliable stuff is called enterprise-class or carrier-class.</comment></comment></comment>


Everyone Hates Martin Shkreli. Everyone Is Missing the Point - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/everyone-hates-martin-shkreli-everyone-is-missing-the-point <comment><USER2> I think he's a rude despicable human being, but he's an American citizen with rights, and he has no obligation to answer to Congress. Congress could legislate drug price if they want, but they won't.

<comment><USER3> Or at least let the medicare bargain for drugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Martin is the living embodiment of the ethics of Wall Street. He smiles as elected representatives remind him that he will cause people to suffer. We shouldn't blame Martin, we should blame ourselves.</comment>


IOS Developers: get iPhone app marketing help from AppLaunch - <AUTHOR> http://www.designboost.net/save-time-and-money-on-iphone-app-marketing-with-applaunch/ Bootstrapping your app? No money to spend on marketing? I interviewed AppLaunch CEO Chris Maddern about their service that helps app devs get their apps reviewed - and for a reasonable price too -- <comment><USER2> Great find - thanks for sharing!</comment>


Tools that helped Neovim succeed - <AUTHOR> https://waffle.io/blog/2014/06/24/waffle-and-bountysource/

<comment><USER2> "succeed" is a very relative term...is Neovim even installable at the moment?</comment>


LIVE: MPs Are Debating the Investigatory Powers Bill in the House of Commons - <AUTHOR> MPs are debating the Investigatory Powers Bill in the House of Commons for the first time. The debate's expected at 12.45 (GMT).<p>http://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/82b15581-2db8-4ecd-b1f1-c136bf3e5f2e <comment><AUTHOR> Details about the bill are available here:

[https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/investigatory- powe...](https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/investigatory-powers-bill- resources/)</comment>


Hacker takes 44h to bruteforce last 4 seed words from Bitcoin private key - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/alistairmilne/status/1273134625112686601 <comment><AUTHOR> Mildly interesting, this guy [0] setup a giveaway with 1 btc where he would drip release the seed words for the private key on his social media accounts. Somebody has managed to bruteforce the last 4 words in around 44h according to the authors twitter post.

[0] [https://alistairmilne.com/2020/05/29/1-bitcoin- giveaway/](https://alistairmilne.com/2020/05/29/1-bitcoin-giveaway/)</comment>


Web Startups Are A Commodity - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/10/web-startups-ar.html

<comment><USER2> Lose.

"Paul Graham... argues that... web startups themselves are commodifying."

Uh, no. He says they are hugely increasing in number. In fact, I think if anything that will increase the gap between the best and the worst of them. They are becoming even less of a commodity than previously, which was not at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> The thing keeping them from becoming a true commodity is an effective aggregation service. (Not yahoo pipes, which is just for rss feeds)</comment>


Show HN: Terminal Cheat Sheet – get started using terminal - <AUTHOR> https://terminalcheatsheet.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks! This idea came to life after a friend asked for a guide to get started using the terminal on their MacBook. Though there are sites/pages that are workable, none quite matched the goals of approachability, accessibility, great UX, and performance that I was aiming for.

 __Terminal Cheat Sheet __is the result of the collaboration between me and my friend [1] to try to meet those goals.

It maximizes approachability through straightforward content and localizing, accessibility through best practices like WCAG [2], and performance through the use of static content. It's also meant to complement, not replace, options like man pages or detailed user guides.

We started with the most essential commands and a few guides for now, and we're really looking for constructive feedback. Would this help folks get up and running on the terminal for the first time? What additional guides would help with that? Are you interested in helping us translate to other languages?

If you have any questions or ideas, please comment, reach out, or add an issue to the repo. PRs welcomed [3].

\- - - - -

[1] For more of his work, check out [https://medium.com/@dontcallmebigguy](https://medium.com/@dontcallmebigguy) and [https://github.com/dontcallmebigguy](https://github.com/dontcallmebigguy)

[2] [https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards- guidelines/wcag/](https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/)

[3] [https://github.com/devadvance/terminalcheatsheet](https://github.com/devadvance/terminalcheatsheet)

</comment><comment><USER2> I appreciate the mini demos for each command. Plus, more resources in Arabic are always welcome!

شكرا لهذا المشروع</comment>


Making Time for Side Projects - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bgilham/making-time-for-side-projects-22fbee546b45#.4ncedu481 <comment><USER2> Regarding accepting meetings, etc. Robert Heinlein has a great quote...

"Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect. But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants "just a few minutes of your time, please—this won't take long." Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time—and squawk for more! So learn to say No—and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you. (This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.)"

<comment><USER3> But the article is about side projects, i.e. projects being done at home or otherwise outside of work. Who the heck struggles with juggling meetings outside of work? Do people have conference rooms in their house or something?

<comment><USER4> Do you have friends that invite you to things on a regular basis, or groups you belong to that ask you to host or present? It's possible for that to take up all of your spare time if you let it. I kinda did for awhile, I've been trying to reign it in a bit lately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the main issue on side projects is managing your own expectations. You have to be realistic and think that as the name implies is something you do on the side and it's not your main priority. So try to work on it as much as you can but don't blame yourself if you can't work on it for a day or a few days. We all have lives and have stuff to do that are more important then side projects otherwise they wouldn't be called that way.

I'm devoting a single our per day on an android app and i'm having a great progress, i'm doing a tiny feature every day. And that's fine, it's done when it's done, i'm the one doing it and managing so there's absolutely no problem.

If you start looking at the side project in a very serious way, you'll end up with guilt , frustration and remorse and that just kills the fun out of it.

<comment><USER6> How, with just an hour, do you manage to get anything meaningful done?

I've tried that and I have to spend 10 minutes figuring out where I was, 15 minutes researching how to do the next bit that I want (esp. for a project in a new dev environment), 10 minutes upgrading various libraries or other stuff that is needed/needs updating, and then maybe 25 minutes of actual coding. I progresses very slowly.

Maybe my side projects are too ambitious, at least relative to my skill in their respective areas.

<comment><USER7> There are some methods to figure out where you were - I will not prescribe one, but a few are; leave work unfinished, manage a trello board with small functional pieces and prioritize the list, write lots of comments, write non- passing tests, etc.

Also, if you're putting in an hour a night, why are you updating packages?

<comment><USER8> I find that writing myself a note with the next couple of things I need to do or try out (if I'm stuck) really helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The question is how, after working 40+ of the best hours of your life on other things, spending another two hours in traffic and another two hours with your family. Then somehow you need to get out of the tv chair and to your desk and put in another two to four hours of side project work. The question is not about understanding that consuming != producing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Also:

\- spend less time at work (nobody cares about those stupid TPS reports anyway)

\- work smarter, i.e. produce more per unit of work.

\- focus only on the stuff that actually matters.

\- commit to task. I now set a goal (completing a small task such as fix a bug, implement a feature etc) for everytime I plan to work on my projects. For example next weekend: saturday -> setup webdev environment, sunday -> redesign my personal webpage.

<comment><USER11> Setting up bitesize tasks is the best way to make progress. Add a new div to my page today, set up a function to handle it tomorrow, clean up a page after, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how many hours that would have otherwise been productive have been spent reading about productivity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh. That's why I called it out in the post too. It's definitely something I've fallen into.

Reading about productivity can be useful, IF you use what you read. Most don't.

<comment><USER13> If you don't act on what you learn you're just escaping.

I think many many are in a similar boat. I try to tell myself the above and realize that I should spend my "reading" time on things other than "productivity." I.e. planned procrastination isn't a bad thing. Just don't fool yourself that you're being productive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For me (and I'm guessing a lot of other developers) the hard part is balancing time between side projects and the other passions in life. I love diving in to a new technology and building things when I get home from work, I have seemingly bottomless energy for that. The real hard part is ensuring that you're not neglecting all the other responsibilities in life: partner, kids, friends, chores, etc.

The thing about the software industry is that there is always so much to learn. I always wonder how field leaders manage their personal lives whilst remaining sharp and current on emerging technologies and methodologies. That's the real challenge, staying abreast on the state of the art while not becoming a hermit.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder who can afford to say no every time they are not thinking HELL YEAH !

I think HELL YEAH ! probably twice a year...

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't totally buy the "Stop doing things you hate" advice. I've learned over the years that anything worth doing is going to walk you through the valley of drudgery at _some_ point. Doing things well always includes aspects that you may not enjoy, but many times it is worth working on it anyway to get to the goal.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm on board with all his points except for "Stop doing shit you hate." Lovely idea, but completely unrealistic.

<comment><USER18> Depends how wealthy you are I guess. If you have a billion dollars, I doubt you need to do ANYTHING you don't like.

As your money scales down, you may have to do a few more things you hate ;)

However I think it might be easier to find joy in things you hate vs just hating them :)

<comment><USER19> > it might be easier to find joy in things you hate

That is arguably the key to happiness :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Taking action is probably the best advice one can get out of that post.

I have a small side project I have been working on over the past couple of years. If I am lucky I get a hour a day Monday to Friday to work on it. You really have to push yourself if you want to make progress on something.

</comment><comment><USER21> It seems as simple as make time for yourself and your ideas and your actions, then actually use that time with intention and focus.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's simple, but not necessarily easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "...But every second you spend learning about productivity is a second you aren't, well, being productive..."

</comment><comment><USER23> Just make sure you realize that there is a life out there.

You're missing out. How much longer do you have left to live? You need to hang out with your kids and GF. Life is really short.</comment>


How We Got 31k Pageviews in a Day by Pretending to be Obama - <AUTHOR> http://blog.crowdtilt.com/post/47543189901/how-we-got-31k-pageviews-in-a-day-by-pretending-to-be <comment><USER2> Only 24,853 UVs and 31,097 PVs for a fully designed and built out microsite (a clever one I might add)?

Just from my blog post (<http://www.brokentone.com/blog/2566/>) that made it to HN front page the other day (with really no other promotion) I got: 21,893 UVs, 23,094 PVs.

Not phallus measuring, just providing some reference and cost/benefit.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's amusing how the article focuses on the pageview numbers, which aren't that impressive. A catchy rant making it near the top of HN will easily give you similar numbers.

The number of social shares seems more interesting (3k Facebook likes isn't that bad, better than what I would have gotten), but if it didn't lead to more pageviews, I don't really see the point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think you're right, the 3k Facebook likes were great to see.

Unfortunately the page was modded off of HN (like all the other April Fool's jokes) after rising to the top super fast... I think if that hadn't happened we would have ended up with quite a bit more traffic.

<comment><USER4> One nice thing is that you probably got a diverse group of PVs rather than a homogeneous one you would see from just linking to reddit or HN.

For a service like yours where you need random people finding out about it, I'd be really happy with your numbers and the fact that the traffic came from unique sources.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Agreed. The page was on HN for like 18 minutes. The cool thing was to see traffic coming in from all over the place and getting tweets saying "Best April Fool's prank this year!" :)

It was a scrappy, last-minute fun project that managed to exceed expectations. The Crowdtilt founders thought it was sweet too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Except 30 of the largest corporations paid little to no taxes over the past few years. There would be little debt if you actually got them to pay and stop offshoring jobs and profits.

General Electric paid an effective tax of TWO PERCENT over the past decade!

We are being looted from the inside out and people still fall for this.

<comment><USER6> Last year's corporate tax incomes amounted to something like 200 billion. The last four years have seen deficit spending over 1 trillion per year.

Even if you managed to alter the tax code and bring in five times as much corporate taxes, you would only get us out of deficit spending, assuming no other drop in revenue or increase in spending. We would still have 15 trillion in federal debt.

<comment><USER7> What conclusion do you draw from this?

<comment><USER6> I try not to draw conclusions about what would happen in D.C. given X, because Y is often something I never would have guessed, but here goes (all that follows is IMHO).

I think if you managed to increase corporate tax revenue five-fold, we would spend more, because political capital now via spent dollars is more effective (politically) than long-term doom and gloom over an increasing debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is the real form to help pay down the debt just in case anyone wants to -

[https://www.pay.gov/paygov/forms/formInstance.html?agencyFor...](https://www.pay.gov/paygov/forms/formInstance.html?agencyFormId=23779454)

<comment><USER9> In what cases would it ever make sense to "donate" to this? I ask this not to be silly, I really am genuinely curious if anyone actually does this, and for what reasons.

<comment><USER10> Is your question why do people care about the public debt? Or why they bother making a contribution that is small relative to the problem?

<comment><USER11> Slightly different - why do they think that there money is better distributed by faceless bureaucrats where they could themselves direct it to the causes they think need it the most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "We support this idea. would definitely be sweet to get paid back. -Chinese > President Xi Jinping" "Man, this is a great idea. I bet this was Biden's > thing, am I right? Joe, call me. -Bill Clinton"

Genius.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Because he linked to the site in his article: Why the 100% spike in donations to the public debt in 2012?

</comment><comment><USER14> How much money did you make off of the traffic?

</comment><comment><USER15> Pretty decent traffic... good idea though.</comment>


Eight pricing strategies - <AUTHOR> http://www.smallbiztrends.com/2008/08/8-pricing-strategies-you-can-implement-right-now.html/ <comment><USER2> Better title would be "eight pricing tricks". It would be neat to read a blog post on fundamental pricing strategies, like price points, value pricing, cost-based pricing, loss leading, and so on.

It's a fine blog post --- except for the Arby's part --- but if someone has something more substantive, I'd love to read it.

<comment><USER3> Apparently, people perceive different numbers differently with respect to their value. I'm not sure how to say this, but the point is that something that costs 99 cents appears cheaper than 1 dollar. The number for which the difference is greatest and most beneficial for the seller is 77, according to Chicago Business School.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _A latte at Starbucks has a higher perceived value than a basic coffee with cream._

I'm not sure that that's the reason. When I pay for Starbucks what I'm paying for is the infrastructure that allows for a consistent coffee/muffin experience wherever I am in the world. I can walk in and describe my drink according to the protocol and get it. I'm happy to do that but the coffee itself is just coffee.

<comment><USER5> When I pay for McDonalds what I'm paying for is the infrastructure that allows for a consistent burger/fry experience wherever I am in the world. I can walk in and describe my food according to the protocol and get it. I'm happy to do that but the food itself is just food.

<comment><USER4> There is a good deal less scope for customization in the McDonalds experience. Can you even add or remove components for your Big Mac?

<comment><USER6> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article makes mention on several occasions to the perceptions of customers (i.e. quality/value, small/large payments, etc). While it's good to try to understand the way a customer perceives your price, I caution people against trying to play too many tricks with their customers heads. From #6:

 _Think QVC (the shopping TV channel) offering items for 4 easy payments of $29.99 which is more appealing than $119.96._

I would much rather pay for something advertised as $120 than "4 easy payments of $29.99", because the latter seems like they're trying way to hard to trick me into paying a price I don't want to pay.

<comment><USER8> Wait, you just said you'd pay $120, so how are they tricking you into a price you DON'T want to pay? Do you think its a bad practice because it increases the conversion rate, or because it might convince people to buy something they can't afford? After all, its the same price, just presented differently. If you would buy at $120, paying 4 payments doesn't matter. If you wouldn't buy at $120, but can afford it, and are convinced by 4 easy payments of $29.99, its not like you can't do math.

At what point does a psychological trick become dirty? That one seems pretty basic, any idiot can add up the payments and know what price they're paying. Should we yell at gas stations because they convince dumb people to buy at a penny more by pricing it 1/100 of a cent below a higher price?

<comment><USER7> You're right the price is the same - my gripe is how they attempt to obfuscate the true price by breaking it up into installments. When something is priced as X payments of Y (as opposed to the actual price, XY), there's an underlying assumption that I wouldn't purchase it at 1 payment of XY, otherwise why bother with the "installments" mindgame at all? Maybe I'm a overly sensitive to these sorts of indirections and concealments, but having to constantly expend energy to figure out how much something really costs can become wearing.

And yes, I do find the fact that gas stations price at tenths of a cent to be very dishonest - especially when they ALWAYS round up to the nearest cent.

<comment><USER8> Have you read Robert Ciadini's book? You should, it explains all the tricks marketers use to persuade you to buy something or buy into something. Most successful companies use some form of persuasion to get you to do something. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When trying to figure out pricing another thing I have done in the past is preserve your premium pricing. It somewhat adds on to #8 and how "Everyone Loves a Bargain".

You can use this in the beginning phases of selling a product or service. Give an intro price. Make sure you let the customer know that this is a special so you can preserve your premium pricing. Give a "Special" 15% discount for the first purchase... or for the first month. Then as business rolls on, you can go to your premium pricing.

No one likes a price increase, but it's not seen as an increase if you are removing a discount.

</comment><comment><USER10> I find pricing mechanisms fascinating. I'm at An Event Apart right now, which (with a price tag of $949 for two days) CLEARLY uses the Prestige Pricing strategy. Interesting stuff!

<comment><USER11> Also note that the prestige only comes when people _know_ that you paid that much. So thanks for letting us know!</comment></comment>


Filenames and Pathnames in Shell: How to Do It Correctly (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html

<comment><USER2> One of the reasons I like zsh is its copious expansion flags. If you aren't wedded to POSIX or bash syntax, consider zsh for this reason alone.

In the case of the first example he shows, the cat -n problem, you can do the following in zsh to expand the results of the wildcard globbing automatically:

        cat *(:A)

This will give cat full paths. Not significantly different from the PWD referenced with ./* in his example, but more universal in applicability, particularly when you start to use things like the file type filters:

        cat *(.:A)

giving you only files, not directories, and also expanding to absolute paths, while

        cat **/*(.:A)

does the same for plain files in the working directory and all subdirectories as well.

Remember to test your patterns with a print statement first:

        print -l **/*(.:A)

before passing them to a command.

<comment><USER3> >Remember to test your patterns with a print statement first

ZSH has an option to expand globs onto the command line the first time you hit return, and issue the command the second. I don't remember what it is.

<comment><USER2> By default zsh will expand globs if you hit tab on the command line.

However if you have more than a handful of matches it's going to be a suboptimal method of eyeballing the glob results.

I prefer to use `print -l` as it will break the glob results on separate lines.

An additional benefit of ZSH is that it will normally return each glob result as an independent item (this avoids the problem bash has with just returning strings that in turn are broken on IFS characters). Using that flag with print will give you a clear sense of the actual results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Today I learned globbing happens after word-splitting.

Can someone explain the following:

       for file in ./* ; do        # Prefix with "./*", NEVER begin with bare "*"
         if [ -e "$file" ] ; then  # Make sure it isn't an empty match

1\. Why prefix with a "./" ? Is that just to help avoid the `cat $filename` scenario? (i.e., that $filename will be "./-n" instead of "-n", and that

      cat -- *

is perfectly valid?)

2\. What's the -e check for? It says "an empty match" — -e means that the file exists, but * would only return files that exist, so -e must (with some caveats) be true. (The caveat being that there's a race condition between the globbing and the test, but with the added test, there's _still_ a race condition between the glob, the test, and the command execution. Are we just attempting to minimize the amount of race-condition by testing?)

<comment><USER5> 1\. That's my understanding from the article.

2\. I think this is for the situation where the glob doesn't match, and the nullglob shell option is not set. Without that option, a non-matching glob is processed as a regular word. e.g. In an empty directory:

      $ for file in ./*; do echo $file; done
      ./*

Note the glob pattern is printed by the echo statement. The -e test catches this condition.

</comment></comment><comment> white-flame The original strength of Unix also ends up being such a commonly frustrating feature: Everything is marshalled through strings.

With human-manageable strings comes ambiguities, especially in concatenative situations like commandline expansion and SQL injection susceptible code.

There's really no good universal solution. Judiciously adding explicit boilerplate as the article describes, or using less open-ended syntax which ends up adding common syntactic overhead as well, are both more painful to the user in common cases.

<comment><USER3> The solution is actually pretty straightforward: don't do everything with text. The actual content you want to manipulate, sure, do that with text. But there's no good reason to _structure_ with syntax except that that solution is compatible with even the most arcane computer interfaces.

 _How_ you replace syntax-based structuring is the hard part, but it's not impossible.

<comment><USER6> What can you structure with besides syntax? Even data structures in memory have a (binary) syntax

<comment><USER3> >What can you structure with besides syntax?

At the interface level, nested navigable fields.

>Even data structures in memory have a (binary) syntax

No, they don't. Syntax is the expression of structure through the arrangement of the contents of a single sequence. Data structures as they are typically realized express structure through the relationships _between_ several sequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note also that some[1] commands will have a "\--" (dash dash) flag indicating "end of flags", so (eg): "cat -- -n" really would cat a file called "-n"[2].

[1] on my BSD system, many internal Tcl commands honor this convention. Damned if I can find a section 1 shell command that uses the convention, but I'm sure I've seen them.

[2] my version of cat doesn't have a -- flag, so my example is contrived; not sure if GNU cat differs.

EDIT: typo, perl(1) supports "\--". See perlrun(1) for details.

</comment><comment><USER8> Shellcheck will find a broad variety of unsafe shell operations, including most (all?) of the issues on this page: [http://www.shellcheck.net/](http://www.shellcheck.net/)

</comment><comment><USER9> First step for doing things correctly:

      import shutil

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to know if there's a Windows equivalent to this.

<comment><USER11> Windows's parameter switch is clever. It use slash, like

dir /s

Since / can not be in filename, so it avoids the problem compeletely.

<comment><USER12> I couldn't find a link, but a few years ago there was a problem with a virus checker and a game that (errantly) triggered it (I read this in the game's support pages). It turns out that the given virus checker would quarantine executables to a holding file called "c:\program". This game's launcher was quarantined by the virus checker to that location.

So, it turns out that when Windows wanted to launch things, it would find the first exe it could, then apply the rest of the command as args. "c:\program" comes before "c:\program files\", so every time a user went to launch a program, windows would find the "c:\program" exe first, and apply the rest of the string as args (" files/and/rest/of/string"). So the launcher would fire up, and it ignored the args. For some reason I can't recall, Windows kept looking for the right program and eventually it would launch as well.

So the end-user, on trying to run any application, would get that application plus the game's launcher, all because of the crazy way Windows searches it's path... well, when combined with a crazy virus checker behaviour.

Unfortunately I can't recall the checker or the game, sorry.

<comment><USER13> That's a scenario more common than it should be actually:

[http://www.commonexploits.com/unquoted-service- paths/](http://www.commonexploits.com/unquoted-service-paths/)

There's even a hint of privilege escalation there (but not always: writing to C:\ still requires root in most cases).

<comment><USER12> A much better explanation, thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


CMU Researchers: Nearly Half of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Bots - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/20/859814085/researchers-nearly-half-of-accounts-tweeting-about-coronavirus-are-likely-bots <comment><USER2> I went bot hunting a few weeks ago and it was incredibly insightful. What's interesting is you can just drill in deeper and deeper by looking at the followers of bot accounts, which are very likely bots themselves. Many created in Feb and March 2020 with thousands of tweets already. I had a lot of fun thinking about the heuristics to detect a bot. Some common ones seemed to be they follow a bot, they have inflammatory bio, banner, or profile pictures. Many tweet really polarizing things.

Here is a thread I did about it. I actually tagged a suspect account and the troll started commenting in the thread, DMed me, reported random tweets, and a bunch of other stuff.

[https://twitter.com/elamje/status/1259691257724579841?s=21](https://twitter.com/elamje/status/1259691257724579841?s=21)

The first bot seems to launch ad hominem attacks on organic users via retweets with comments saying something terrible about them. When it doesn't do that, it just retweets other accounts that do the same strategy.

<comment><USER3> >Some common ones seemed to be they follow a bot, they have inflammatory bio, banner, or profile pictures. Many tweet really polarizing things.

Perhaps many are real people who get banned often and create new accounts, hence the recent account created dates and inflammatory bio, banner, etc. I often hear about bots and their influence on the internet, but I don't seem to see them that often. Granted, I try not to spend a lot of time on social media, nor do I actively search for them. I suppose I have never seen a clear definition of what makes a bot a bot.

<comment><USER2> Sure. In the thread I elaborate that they typically have already cranked out thousands of tweets. Some seem more innocuous. Some seem to have already gained 50 followers in a month or two. That's possible, but hard without a viral tweet. Some might be real users.

<comment><USER4> You'll probably like the tools from the U of Indiana's social media labs: [http://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/](http://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who spends way too much time on Twitter (been using it since 2008), I see these kinds of articles often and have hardly ever encountered these types of bots.

Additionally, I've had my own account locked and shadow/ghost banned on twitter for having the words coronavirus or COVID-19 in tweets. It took weeks of never tweeting those words to undo it.

I've even had my personal and business twitter accounts suspended all at once for "Violating Twitter rules of using multiple accounts for targeted harassment." They restored some of these accounts after filing an appeal and they said "We're sorry, but our systems mistakenly flagged your account." They never restored all of them and the ones restored have been locked permanently again because one account logged into the app used the C words again. One of the suspended accounts never to return was a 10K follower image bot for tech and old school computer images. Another was an account for my main business to announce news and server status updates.

Whether bots are mucking up Twitter or not, Twitter itself is a horrible platform and company. I can't wait for the service to disappear into oblivion.

<comment> throwaway-2020 >Twitter itself is a horrible platform and company. I can't wait for the service to disappear into oblivion.

You can always walk away from a service. If you are waiting for the next "Big Thing" to ditch your problems you will find that even this new shiny platform will (eventually) have the same or worse problems.

The internet is a rabble that needs taming. Services automate a lot of stuff to try to tame us, but nothing is perfect. Innocent users get banned.

If you are building a business on these services don't rely on just one. Build redundancy into your marketing, use many channels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is part of the problem I have with the narrative that you must allow completely unfettered speech on any platform. That you should fight lies with the truth.

That sort of argument ends up going completely out the window when you have bot accounts spun up by the thousands designed to artificially boost certain narrative for the sake of profit or to sow dissent. Much like managing your lawn, you can't let the weeds grow and expect other plants to simply out- compete them when the weeds choke out everything else around them. Unfortunately that seems to be an inevitable problem on any platform that prioritizes userbase growth above all else.

<comment><USER7> Did you just make this analogy up? I ask because it sounds a lot like "Well- kept gardens die by pacifism".

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well- kept-...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens- die-by-pacifism)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how many of these are actively trying to influence the conversation, as opposed to just piling onto a trending hashtag with irrelevant material. As an example, I picked the currently trending hashtag #YouKnowYoureASidePieceWhen and immediately found this spam: [https://twitter.com/DebtReliefLoans/status/12637033931193712...](https://twitter.com/DebtReliefLoans/status/1263703393119371268?s=19)

</comment><comment><USER9> I know a few people who do Twitter bot detection as sort of a hobby, and I would say you have to be skeptic of these numbers from both directions.

Obvious bots are, well, obvious. Novice or careless implementations lead to accounts that tweet at the same time or based on the same trigger words. Tweets made on a routine basis are the easiest to detect (e.g. Tweets at 5PM CST every day)

But things go much deeper. There are even companies that now develop bots tools essentially, increasing the randomness or human-like qualities of bots. These are much harder to detect with the standard methods.

There are other proxies, like not getting organic replies or having no friends. But the sophisticated bot networks have already figured this out. You have to realize that sometimes human labor even goes into the effort, where someone will maintain hundreds of fake accounts, and attempt to make them look organic.

From these points, it's easy to underestimate the number of actual bot accounts.

On the other hand, these same methods don't usually control well for a certain type of Twitter user. There are actually some really obsessive twitter users who will spend 12+ hours a day active. They typically produce a ton of content, and a lot of replies. I notice this on celebrity/political accounts especially. (Apparently people are calling this the 'reply-guy' now)

Those accounts are susceptible to appearing as bots because they deviate far from what one might imagine the 'average' Twitter user looks like. Speaking anecdotally, I think this relates closest to politics, and hot topic issues (Hence the topic in this research). Take a Tweet from the US President for example. You will notice the same few dozen accounts reply to _every_ Tweet of his. Some may be bots, but others are most definitely human.

But these often get classified as bots.

If I had to make a guess, I would say the bot detection models fail more often to account for the true number of bots.

At this point, it's an arms race. Obvious bots are becoming increasingly less obvious. Overall, I think bots are only going to get better, and it worries me for the fate of social networks. The thing most frightening is finding an obvious bot and seeing a large number of organic users interacting with it as if it were real.

Edit: One more thing I forgot to mention. An increasing number of bots are getting verified now. I have no idea how the verification process works, but apparently the botters have figured out how to game it successfully.

<comment><USER10> 'Reply-guy' is subjective, and a bit reductionist and has a somewhat negative connotation. It's used to describe unwanted attention from a specific person or a specific type of person, which is also subjective. It goes further than simply replying a lot and generally being active on Twitter. Not to be a lexical prescriptivist, just aiming for clarity of description of usage and NPOV.

[https://twitter.com/sbarolo/status/1036685010869407744?s=20](https://twitter.com/sbarolo/status/1036685010869407744?s=20)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view)

<comment><USER9> Appreciate it. I've just been hearing the term thrown around a lot lately in context of someone who replies to every single one of someone else's tweets.

<comment><USER10> I would say that's proper usage based on context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Although not a fan of exposing real identity on social media i wonder if there is a mechanism where twitter can acknowledge that an account is real based on some behind the scenes Zk-snark like validation.

</comment><comment><USER12> why don't Twitter require a capcha before tweeting? it would reduce the number of bots by a large factor...

it could also have a way for legitimate bots to be registered and easily identified as such

<comment><USER13> Irritate all the twitter users every time they want to give twitter free content? That would kill twitter.

I'm all for it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You cut out the rest of the title! "... Down from the normal 78% which it's normally at"

</comment><comment><USER15> Twitter needs to be a lot better at detecting bots.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is bizarre to the point where there are a bunch of questions raised.

> Among the misinformation disseminated by bot accounts: tweeted conspiracy > theories about hospitals being filled with mannequins or tweets that > connected the spread of the coronavirus to 5G wireless towers

> We do know that it looks like it's a propaganda machine, and it definitely > matches the Russian and Chinese playbooks

What exactly is mental state of the Chinese or Russian propaganda departments that they would be doing this? How could the Russians possibly benefit from US citizens aged 60+ dying off at 2-4 times the normal rate? How could the Russians possibly sow more division amongst Americans vs. the normal state of American politics? Just this week Pelosi called Trump morbidly obese, and she is the underdog of childish name-calling in that pairing. How could foreign agents trolling on twitter top that level of incivility?

And who are the idiots who are looking up random twitter accounts as their information source?

<comment><USER17> The foreign intelligence services don't care about left vs. right; they care about competent vs. incompetent, and destroying the American capacity for foresight and competent, proportional response. Every time a competent person says something correct the partisans don't like and gets fired, they win a little more.

There is no way that Russia could sink the _USS Theodore Roosevelt_ ; their own carrier practically sank on its own during a recent sortie. They're not responsible for the mass infection of its crew either - and it may not have been possible to prevent. But what they _can_ do is make the firing of its captain a partisan issue, and of course ensure that the acting secretary of the Navy is operating in an environment where partisan loyalty to Trump is more important than empathy with the crew, so he gives a morale-destroying speech.

An early, solid lockdown would have been short and contained the virus. A relaxed, fragmented one ensures it remains in the population, damaging the economy longer.

Coronavirus isn't a biological weapon. Partisan stupidity can be weaponised, though.

<comment><USER16> That is a totally stupid strategy that relies on a series of connections that don't make any sense and could just as easily be good decisions for America that result in the country doing better than normal. And it isn't Russia making partisan issues partisan - it is the action of the partisans themselves.

It would be cheaper and more effective to bribe key officials in government. There was a conspiracy about Jeff Epstein running his paedophile ring in aid of ... Mossad or the Illuminati or whoever. It would be a bit more expensive and a lot more effective to make that conspiracy theory a reality rather than rely on bots to 'sow division' \- whatever that is supposed to do that the politicians can't manage on their own.

<comment><USER17> > It would be cheaper and more effective to bribe key officials in government

Undoubtedly that has been going on as well: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina#Involvement_in_U....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina#Involvement_in_U.S._politics) plus some of the people on this fine list: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_investigations_int...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_investigations_into_Trump_and_Russia_\(2019\))

Butina's involvement with the NRA is a perfect example of this; it's the ideal place to ramp up the partisanship and nobody can question its patriotism.

> could just as easily be good decisions for America that result in the > country doing better than normal

But they're not. The point of chaos propaganda is to encourage people to make stupid decisions for the wrong reasons, to focus attention and energy on the wrong priorities, and to waste time and effort debunking nonsense. Lengthy investigations into misconduct that go nowhere are also a good waste of time that prevents governments from achieving anything.

It's not directed at specific outcomes, it's just starting as many fights as possible and getting people to bind their partisanship to ideas that are unsupported by evidence. Or supported by fake evidence from fake sources.

It's so cheap because you can use partisans as amplifiers. Just as Stalin could use American communists as "useful idiots", modern foreign propagandists can get sincere-but-misguided partisans to fight on their behalf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The study hasn't been published, so what's the story doing here? Tell me when I can read an actual paper.

</comment><comment><USER19> When in doubt, blame the Russians and Chinese

"We do know that it looks like it's a propaganda machine, and it definitely matches the Russian and Chinese playbooks, but it would take a tremendous amount of resources to substantiate that," said Kathleen Carley, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who is conducting a study into bot-generated coronavirus activity on Twitter that has yet to be published.

<comment><USER20> Surely you understand why it's ironic to register a new account just to post this comment.

<comment><USER21> it would be ironic if he/she is a bot. you think so? more likely, they wanted to avoid looking like straying from the usual groupthink</comment></comment></comment>


Beginner Tips from PHP Masters - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/10/21/php-tips-for-beginners/

<comment><USER2> I'm definitely not a master, but I'd add another tip: learn something else. Not instead of PHP, but in addition. I just wrote a post (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1822306>) about how I use PHP for client projects, but I've spent a good portion of this year learning Objective C and Python, and I'm a better programmer for learning a few different languages.</comment>


The (Real) Hot Girl Effect and Networking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shrewple.com/post/2520650113/the-real-hot-girl-effect-and-networking <comment><USER2> Ultimate Hot Girl Effect Evilness:

My 30-year-old uber lawyer buddy has a gorgeous blonde fiance. She's in med school and is crazy smart. She's awesome.

My buddy decided at 27 that he wanted to get into chess. He got really into it, hired a teacher and by 29 or so was moving his rating up pretty well.

As a newcomer though, he often finds himself competing against 13-15 year old boys at his weekend tournements. In fact he's often the only person over 18 playing in some of these tournaments.

He has a good sense of humor about it, but some of these kids, he says, are just total turds to the other kids they compete against.

When he learns he has to play against a kid who's mean to other kids, he calls in the Fiance and has her sit behind him while he plays, just reading whatever she has to read for med school. She'll spend a whole Saturday sitting there behind him while he plays, her nose stuck in a book.

It just destroys the kids. He catches them trying to steal glances at her all the time during the games. Just breaks their chess mojo.

For the cool kids, kids who are struggling to figure out women at that age, he introduces them to her and she knows to treat them like the coolest guys in the room. Meanwhile, the mean bully kids get ignored and seethe in the corner.

<comment><USER3> Bullies aged 13-15 are not, in general, bad people deep down. Especially not the ones who go to chess tournaments. It is, in general, not really their fault. Children this age have little control over their lives, so even if they had some good ideas to fix their situation they might well be prevented from doing anything. You can't really blame people for stuff they aren't in control of. So have a bit more sympathy and stop being actively mean to them.

<comment><USER4> That's liberal crap. Everybody is in charge of exactly one thing, and that's themselves. The difference between good people and bad ones is dependent upon exactly one thing, and that's how they treat others.

The idea that there's some truer "deep down" person vs what you see, is also crap. Sure there's potential in everybody, but your true, real self is what you show to everyone every day. That cool deep-down person you never show? That's the imaginary you, not the real you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been told by people who've been sent on corporate junkets to Gartner shindigs/what-have-you, that they have lots of "high-status" (hot) women wandering around. It was the same with that french psychologist who had the Madison Avenue types eating out of his hand in "The Century of the Self" documentary. Having beautiful women around is a signal of dominance. People who want to project power use this, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Film-makers use this whenever they want to portray someone with power.

The flip side: when you are hanging out with the other geeks, realizing you're at yet another sausage fest, does this make you feel powerful, or not so much?

To paraphrase the opera Carmen: if you want any enterprise to succeed, be sure you have women along!

<comment><USER6> What you don't see here is the inherent double standard in this conversation about women as accessories. The awesome blonde med school girl at the chess game? Accessory. Hot Russian immigrants, accessories. Are women just decor?

What I find aggravating is needing to fight to get men to take me seriously and see me as an intelligent, capable, human being. As long as we have an environment like this thread, we won't have that many women in tech.

<comment><USER7> In my experience, I have seen that very attractive women who want to be taken seriously by men will have a man as a business partner. This seems to take the edge off for other guys who may be too intimidated to approach the beautiful girl or who assume that someone so beautiful cannot also be intelligent and capable of doing business.

As a woman, what bothers me is that we have to constantly tow the line between being beautiful and not taken seriously or being average/butch/unattractive and judged to be too serious. It's a problem because even the most open-minded men are still heavily influenced my a woman's appearance and will make assumptions about her business acumen and character based on that alone.

<comment><USER4> As a man, I never, ever worry about being beautiful at all. And it never, ever causes any problems in my working life.

If you worry about 'towing the line' between beautiful and anything else, maybe its your own priorities that are the issue? Why is 'being beautiful' even in the equation? Because you put it there. So you have to deal with it. But its absolutely not other peoples' problem.

<comment><USER7> Written from a truly male perspective. Even girls who choose not to make attractiveness a priority find that, eventually, it becomes a priority that society imposes on them. Or at least a topic that's constantly brought up when talking about a woman's abilities. How many articles talked about Elena Kagan's "mannish, butch" looks when she was appointed to the SC? Or Michelle Obama's fashion sense when she became First Lady?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This post depresses me. I'm a man and certainly no feminist, but posts on the usefulness of attractive, female RoR developers leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. I was going to comment on the nature of our field, but it's probably the same almost everywhere, from banking to bricklaying to hacking.

I'll be in my terminal.

<comment><USER2> That's how the world works. Deal with it.

I have a friend who works in the call center at a day trading firm in Chicago. He's a sailor and the owner/founder of the firm has a boat so he gets long stretches of unfiltered time with the guy outside of work. The guy regularly affirms that they intentionally try to hire only HRI's ("hot russian immigrants") when they hire women because it boosts morale, makes hiring ambitious men easier and apparently exploits a small dip in the local hiring pool where the the immigrant women have a slightly harder time getting jobs at most places than the non-immigrant hotties they go up against elsewhere. My friend's firm found that going the extra mile to help them with visa status stuff meant they could get better looking women on staff than their competition.

<comment><USER9> > That's how the world works. Deal with it.

Really?

When I see any argument start with this sentence, I immediately mistrust it. I suspect that world works in mysterious, complex, and ever changing ways, and that I get to be a part of shaping it.

I prefer:

"That's how things seem to be going right now. If you don't like it, there are probably others out there who feel the same. You could work with them to make it a little better. As you're working folks will tell you to just deal with it. Smile politely, ignore their advice, and keep working."

<comment><USER10> I think you're being blindly optomistic. The only way to "make it a little better" is to:

a: make it so that ANYBODY can get a hot woman, which makes having lots of hot women about useless

b: flood the industry with women. This is happening slowly, but you can't force it. Of course, if the balance tips towards women, then we'll just have the opposite, and having hot powerful handsome men around will replace hot women.

c: (myriad of ridiculous examples about fundamentally changing our species and the nature of sexuality)

You have to remember this isn't _about_ sexism. _It may well be sexist_ , but all it's about is having what all of your peers want but can't have makes you look powerful. It just so happens the most common want-but-can't-have is attractive women. "making it better" can only be achieved my removing the want.

<comment><USER11> Slavery wasn't about racism, it was about cheap, unregulated labor. Pure economics. It doesn't absolve the moral dilemma inherent to it, or negate the racism that frequently underpinned public support for it. For what it's worth I'm sure people defended human slavery by saying "that's just the way the world works" then as well. You're not ethically tantamount to a slave owner by glibly justifying using women as ornaments or pawns in your little networking game, but it's a bit troubling that "treating women with the same respect you'd expect from your peers" doesn't factor into your assessment.

<comment><USER10> If you _treat_ them and _see_ them like pawns, then shame on you. (though odds are if you see them like pawns, you see _everybody_ as a pawn, female or not. An equal-opportunity exploiter, if you will).

Still, I'd observe this is tied to basic human nature & sexuality. Unlike slavery, as best I can tell it _cannot_ be done away with, short of making it illegal for a man to have a hot woman/entourage of women present ( _totally_ not a sexist law, btw)

<comment><USER11> Fair enough, but one can justify racism and ethnocentrism by appealing to our animal instincts as well – we may very well be predisposed to seeking power over others and reserving trust for those we perceive to be our own kind. Now granted, I have no way of proving that there isn't some kind of misogyny gene. But legally, slavery was done away with by passing a constitutional amendment that makes no direct reference to race. Culturally, there was a large precedent of underground and increasingly popular outrage against the practice, founded in principles of human equality that had to be actively argued for.

I bring up the parallel, again, not because it's an equivalent situation, but to illustrate what I think is a common ethical trap we can fall into: what good is it to see an injustice and wave our hands, saying that it's just the way the things are?

You suggested that the grandposter is blindly optimistic for wanting to change the way men relate to women in the workplace (or something like that), but think about how much has changed culturally, that we can have this conversation in 2010 and have it be basically a given that human bondage is morally wrong? It took a law in 1865, and it was controversial at the time. Today you have to be on the fringe of society in order to believe that it was ever morally defensible, presumably. That's not a triumph of law, it's a triumph of active social change.

<comment><USER10> I had typed out a long and careful argument, but I think I'll just leave it at this:

I believe this issue is fundamentally rooted in sexuality, and I am deeply, _deeply_ fearful of the day we attempt to legislate the nature of sexuality.

<comment><USER11> On the latter point I agree with you, and I'm certainly not advocating that, merely suggesting we can do a lot more on our own to be agents of social change with the force of our moral convictions than would otherwise seem possible.

As for the question of our fundamental nature, we'll just have to leave it up to the philosophers. I appreciate your good natured debate, nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone else find it comical that the author spends so much of his post talking up the virtues of not being a people user, while simultaneously offering advice on how to use women?

I guess if you're dating her that's one thing, but as a general strategy? Replace "girlfriend" with "hot secretary"(or "athletic looking black man", feel free to get creative here) – I honestly don't see how is this somehow more tolerable than pitching to a potential investor without getting to know them first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably no one else has found it comical, because I haven't offered any such advice. The only thing I have done is highlight the apparent good will conferred by being associated with attractive women. The girl in question was not coerced or cajoled into doing what she did, she did so completely of her own initiative.

Also using the help of someone you are dating someone is completely different to 'pitching to a potential investor without getting to know them first' or 'being a people user' and I object to that. One does what one can to help a SO, there are many ways in which favours are returned.

<comment><USER11> I have to concede here – by the time I wrote this comment I was responding more to the general tone of the thread than to your article. I apologize for making you sound like a douche. Touchy subject for many.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man, I appreciate it.

S

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> He keeps people in his "repertoire" and gets to know them via the amazing mutual interest in "hot women", then protests that he is completely different from all those networkers because he doesn't use people and has shared interests. Riight.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ha. I'm a hot girl who went to an ivy school with 4yrs in startups (yes I code), and got completely dissed by Dave McClure when I tried to introduce myself.

Do not approach this man cold. He is mobbed at every networking event being one of the more visible people in the valley. Try to find one of his zillion advisors in the valley, get them to know you, and make an intro. He's completely different if you've been introduced by someone he trusts. Case in point is my co-founder meeting him in Japan and having the best meeting ever.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was at the same party and Dave was not surrounded by baying mobs of nerds, far from it. In general, he had a couple of people from his entourage (who arrived with him) that he spoke to most of the time. In fact, at one point he was clearly looking for more conversation, as I saw him wandering through the crowd alone and finally arriving at our group and joining the conversation.

Perhaps the baying crowds of nerds were in the author's mind.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would argue there's a difference between this example and the original.

With someone like McClure or Arrington, the people approaching them want something specific. Their businesses are on the line, and the unwritten protocol is that you walk up to one of these men, give them your elevator pitch, and they make or break you. (If you were desperate to keep the metaphor going- maybe they're prostitutes? By this, I mean that when you walk up to them, you know what you want and they know what you want: 5 minutes of their time. Sure, they may be a hot girl, but it doesn't matter because it's a business transaction.)

The CFO, on the other hand, is more like a girl you would potentially want a relationship with. Very little good will come from pitching the CFO (or a movie star, etc). An example for me is Tim Ferriss- a bunch of people were standing and watching him outside at a conference he spoke at. I walked up and introduced myself, and he was one of the nicest guys I've ever met. If Tim Ferriss could make or break peoples careers, he'd have been mobbed, too.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow. By far the most sexist thread on HN since I joined, huge props to us!

</comment><comment><USER16> mirror: <http://blog.shrewple.com.nyud.net/>

</comment><comment><USER17> I would say that the rule one should live by is to utilize the talents and physical attributes God gave you to the best of your ability, but use them in the most humble of ways. At the end of the day you will taste true success.

</comment><comment><USER18> "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care"

</comment><comment><USER19> Brilliant observations and use of the "my guy." Made me feel all warm and fuzzy.

I find that this is much more the norm for how successful networking. No one's going to argue with the babe.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm reminded of Socrates quote in "The Great Dialogues of Plato".

"Because in your talk you do nothing but lay commands on people, like young society beauties who are regular tyrants as long as they are young and good- looking. And perhaps you have found me out already; I can't resist the handsome!"

The notion of young beautiful women in our society as having less attention than certain less attractive ones is completely wrong. Socrates was calling these beautiful woman tyrants because all men around them were showering them with whatever they wanted. Nothing has changed in the last 2000 years. The only hope for men is to join arms and completely ignore women, but this will never happen, until then they will call the shots until they get old, then they will be married to you, and then they will still call the shots.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=WMbS85Ijg2oC&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=WMbS85Ijg2oC&printsec=frontcover&dq=great+dialogues+of+plato&source=bl&ots=hN5JL2x40o&sig=I1x9ngBntD0Y5JC19a4Jhp2zyFc&hl=en&ei=BP4bTYnAB4aBlAeh54jPCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&sqi=2&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=young%20and%20good- looking&f=false)

<comment><USER21> > Beautiful women have the world by the balls, when I meet one of these women > I remind them that they will get old and be in for a rude awakening.

That makes zero sense to me. Everybody gets old, beautiful women too, and for _all_ of us it is a rude awakening. The relative difference between being young and old and being beautiful and average is smaller for 'beautiful or average' than for being young or old.

Do you berate the young too for 'being in for a rude awakening'?

Whatever you've got use your body to the best of its abilities, you'll never be able to recover time that you've lost and don't begrudge others the bodies they've got, after all you could have been even worse off, possibly lots worse. It's just a giant lottery.

To berate people for attributes they did not choose is just another form of jealousy.

edit: parent has removed the quoted passage

<comment><USER22> It is a rude awakening for all of us, but I think the point is that one who heavily depends on looks has a much tougher time than someone not dependent on looks. Naturally not every beautiful woman has a heavy dependence on looks, but in general people tend to flaunt whatever extra-ordinary attribute they have, be it a natural and short-lived or learned and life-long.

<comment><USER21> I'm pretty sure that those that are beautiful are well aware of how fleeting it is, I just can't see it is a justification to put them down like that.

Should people that are born in to money discard it so they can live an average life in order not to offend? Should those that are beautiful spend their lives in burlap sacks lest they give offense to those less fortunate (Burka's?).

People don't 'depend' on their good looks, people simply use the tools that they've got and beauty in a society so focused on beauty is a very powerful tool.

The interesting thing here is that everybody else makes it in to a powerful thing, not the person having it, they just use the power granted.

<comment><USER23> It is well known that people rate the opinions of those that are taller/prettier higher than others. So, to adjust for that natural bias it might make sense to treat attractive people's opinions with greater scrutiny.

But maybe attractive people have better minds too? That's a possibility - however (IMHO) outward attractiveness is more to do with genetic fitness (in the procreation sense), than creative fitness (in the meme generation sense). The evolution of ideas is whether the action is now... (at least that's what I'd like to believe)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This guy has it all wrong.

Here's a possibility: author feels especially confident when beautiful women are around him. This confidence/happiness projects to other people (via mirror neurons / the amygdala / etc.). People find him more enjoyable and approachable.

To clarify, I don't claim that being surrounded by bad chicks isn't going to make you feel better about yourself. I suspect that possessing other kinds of cultural capital can do the trick.

<comment><USER2> That's also a factor, I think. But it doesn't negate the argument that seeing someone with an attractive woman deferring to them sends a strong signal to people around you.

<comment><USER24> I know plenty of club promoter douches who are "surrounded" by attractive women. They seem to be the counterexample that destroys the rule.

Dating an attractive woman certainly implies that you have something going for you. Social proof and all that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "I was introduced to the "Hot Girl Effect" by a girl I dated once. This girl is an absolute knockout, and very smart too."

Pics or it didn't happen.

<comment><USER26> I have no idea how to give you a negative rating (i only see a ^ button) but yeah, -1

<comment><USER27> I don't understand why you guys are downvoting him.

Other than the "Pics or it didn't happen" meme, he is raising the issue that the article is hugely anecdotal even though it seems like common sense. That is a valid point.

<comment><USER28> > I don't understand why you guys are downvoting him.

Maybe they don't want HN to become Reddit; after all, we've already got one Reddit, we don't need another.

<comment><USER25> I think the "I am totes dating a hot chick check me out" submissions have already beat me to the chase.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>