Are natural language specifications useful? - <AUTHOR> https://alastairreid.github.io/natural-specs/ <comment><USER2> I've never found natural language interfaces to be useful in programming.

The hard part of programming is specifying the problem in an unambiguous way.

If anything natural languages can make this harder to accomplish.

<comment><USER3> BDD test definitions are the one that really annoy me. As far as I can tell, they're written in "natural language" (i.e. a blessed set of specific parameterizable phrases) purely so that they can be written by PMs rather than devs. If that has ever actually happened in the entire history of anything, I haven't witnessed it.

<comment><USER4> I find utility in them being understood by PMs, even if not written.

Also, the overly-parameterized kinds of reusable statements like "Click on 'whatever' then fill in 'name' with 'stuff'" are an anti-pattern (they describe what not why, and they fail to provide actual reuse like a page object would provide so you get costly maintenance). They should read "When I log in" or "When I register as a user" they should interact with high-level objects provided in your test suite,they should be purely whole-system-user- interface integration tests, and you should have very few of them, just enough to answer "At the human level, what does this thing do for users, and why"

Any tool can be misapplied, poison is in the dosage, etc.

<comment><USER5> >They should read "When I log in" or "When I register as a user"

I _hate_ those kinds of stories. Half of the relevant scenario information is concealed in a mess of turing complete code. _Which_ user logged in? _How_ did you register as a user?

I've read tons of stories like this and they're often next to useless. You might as well just write the test in regular code and put a comment at the top of the file and get the PM to read that instead.

If it's something the _user_ does I don't want the executable spec to bury those details in turing complete code because writing it in the higher level language is "hard". I want them surfaced in the readable scenario.

The fact that Cucumber makes it difficult to write readable, terse, deduplicated, parameterized user stories is, IMHO, a problem with cucumber, not a problem with the people who write it.

<comment><USER4> If it matters what the user's username was or what button they clicked or what form they're on --- to the business --- then sure, describe those in natural language specs. If they only matter to the implementation, they should be in the implementation's integration spec suite (which, discussing technical detail, is not likely to be consumed or produced by business, and so has nothing to gain from being written in natural-language, can simply have natural language comments as you mention.

You shouldn't e.g. try to get to any coverage level with only a NL story suite, etc., that is a gross misapplication.

NL Story suite has a very simple utility: the customer can read them and say "yeah, this is an example of what should happen" or go "no, that's not quite what I meant" early on, before implementation. Being able to automate testing of that document as validated by the customer is just a bonus. 90% of the value happens before any code is written. If you are writing an executable natural language story and have no customers to read it, or if you are covering details they will glaze over while reading because they can't imagine or validate what is described, then you're using the wrong tool.

edit: Even a suite in code, for technical users, should strive to have more reuse than having each test describe exactly what actions are taken, since that's too hard to maintain. If your tests aren't DRY, you spend too much time updating the 50 places your login form selectors are reflected in the suite and the test suite acts as scar tissue that prevents changes instead of a protective but flexible skin and skeleton that helps the program adapt.

Over-using story tests and dealing with the maintenance burden / poor abstractions, overly-repetitive integration suites that make changes hard and inappropriate use of unit testing that makes refactoring difficult are all really common traps when people don't get the big picture of test automation, but they are entirely avoidable. A test suite is like any other piece of software and has to be designed (and factored) for the reality that its behavior will change.

<comment><USER5> >If it matters what the user's username was or what button they clicked or what form they're on --- to the business --- then sure, describe those in natural language specs

IME it's usually left up to the test programmer what to put in them and they often put vague stuff in there that looks _exactly_ like what you just wrote and that becomes useless both for PMs and non-PMs reading the natural language suite because it leaves out business critical details.

It's also a hack often done in order to keep the story suite short because (as I mention below), no inheritance in cucumber. There's a reason why the whole world has not yet flocked to BDD and I don't think it's an issue with BDD itself (I'm a big fan).

>NL Story suite has a very simple utility: the customer can read them and say "yeah, this is an example of what should happen" or go "no, that's not quite what I meant" early on

I think the idea that it has to be natural language so that a customer can read them is bullshit. This is the exact same mistake the creators of COBOL made, thinking that natural language naturally elucidates things. It doesn't. It's parses very ambiguously. That's a feature if you're flirting with a girl perhaps, but a bug if you're trying to write a precise executable specification.

I feel very strongly that the story suite should be written in a language that is easy to parse, can handle parameterization and inheritance but _isn 't_ turing complete. It ought to be readable for PMs and still maintainable as part of an integration test suite.

>If you are writing an executable natural language story and have no customers to read it, or if you are covering details they will glaze over while reading because they can't imagine or validate what is described, then you're using the wrong tool.

If they glaze over that might just be because they're a bad PM. I've had PMs that glaze over when trying to figure out business-critical edge cases with them because they liked to think of themselves as "big picture guys". That's fine, they just shouldn't be PMs.

I think that the divide shouldn't be between "important to business" and "not important to business" but simply "test implementation" vs "specification".

>edit: Even a suite in code, for technical users, should strive to have more reuse than having each test describe exactly what actions are taken, since that's too hard to maintain. If your tests aren't DRY, you spend too much time updating the 50 places your login form selectors are reflected in the suite and the test suite acts as scar tissue that prevents changes instead of a protective but flexible skin and skeleton that helps the program adapt.

This is actually the main reason why I think PMs typically shouldn't write executable specs. Inexperienced _programmers_ often don't yet have the DRY instinct and the ability to keep a strict separation between implementation details and specification. It's a rare PM that has those skills.

Then again, maybe they just need to be trained. I've also had the problem of massive headache inducing repetition and a blurred distinction between implementation detail and specification in huge word document specs.

>Over-using story tests and dealing with the maintenance burden / poor abstractions, overly-repetitive integration suites that make changes hard and inappropriate use of unit testing that makes refactoring difficult are all really common traps when people don't get the big picture of test automation

Yeah, well, repetitive code and poor abstractions are basically a problem writing code in any language. Poor tools make that worse, however.

It's one of the reasons why cucumber is a pile of shit: no inheritance. _Most_ stories in a business app are actually forks off existing stories. It's utterly inexcusable that it doesn't have this feature.

Integration test suites with high coverage and readable stories do not have to be repetitive. Mine aren't.

<comment><USER4> I think we're in agreement then.

It's indeed nice to have a PM that could produce details that can be synthesized into a technical spec. It's nice when the PM can work with the customer to actually understand those details. It's nice when PMs can actually care about their products, and work with devs to weigh options. I don't usually have those PMs. Lots of organizations have JIRA Babysitters who show up at your desk whenever the political climate changes to let you know that you should drop the urgent thing he asked you to do yesterday, because there's an urgent thing he's got for you today.

The customer though, always wants what they want, and you can carrot instead of stick them, and I have found some cases where I can sit with the customer and do BA/PM with them despite the people with those roles, explain the idea of test automation, show them how it can drive the browser and ask them to describe the application (at a very high level) in natural language in terms of examples, which I translate into Given/When/Then as we are working. I can then explain in status updates "so, the 'simple' scenario for 'user submits an order' is implemented <point to CI output> but we don't yet pass the story for when a coupon code is used. Should we prioritize coupon code scenario or a different feature?" or "So, we have implemented this story according to the examples we were given in May, the behavior you described on this morning's call would read "Given..." instead of "Given...". I can update the story and prioritize that ahead of <whatever>, or should we ship with the original behavior and proceed with <whatever>?"

Is it my job or the customer's job to have to do that? Probably not. But it's a way to build a bridge from concrete stupid machines land into fuzzy people land where everything is negotiable, in the absence of the roles or skills to do so without such a tool.

Cucumber is indeed poor, the simple 1:1 of step definition strings to their functions and of 1:1 scenario blocks to test executions are unfortunate.

I'd like to see a natural language tool where I am specifying invariants to a property-based testing tool. "Given a user" implementation = what does a user mean, well, it has a unicode string 'name' etc. and those map to database model as follows, "when I am on the login page" here are the five pages that have login forms, "When I enter my username" find a field 'username' and fill it with the generated user name ... "Then I should be logged in" logged in users see log out, their username in the corner, have access to their models, logged out users do not, etc. Now this blows up into all the combinatorial options, I find out "hey, if a user has emoji in their password, several invariants are violated."

Generally I do not use NL tools or recommend they be used, I'd definitely prefer the environment where they are superfluous as there is a QA automation engineer working with a PM that is willing and able to elicit the necessary details from the customer. Worse yet, all the current implementations seem to be sorely lacking. Just, I don't think all hypothetical NL tools are categorically useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We started with everything in natural on our products, but rapidly I found myself wanting something more formal.

I have been working on formal specs for our products in Coq in the past but it took me too much time and outside solely software dev it got me stuck.

So lately I have been using TLA+ (I used it many years ago but did not find it formal enough in my then naive age and experience) and I must say it is great.

The learning curve is quite steep but not as steep as Idris or Coq (also less formal) and far more practical.

Think the author could have used TLA+ although I did not get a full appreciation about his executable specs from that article.

<comment><USER7> Can you share more about what kind of programs you're specifying with TLA+? Business applications, particular algorithms, or something else entirely?

<comment><USER6> Our firmware, encryption algorithms, app/web and deployments. I currently finished the firmware and deployments and working on the rest now. The firmware helped a lot as we cannot change that in the field so we need to agree on a non ambiguous way of communicating the specs for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Answering to the main point of the author:

Architectural intent can be expressed in a formal way, but it requires a formal language that allows you to define new abstractions.

And designing such a language is way harder than defining a small DSL with just enough features to formally express your specification.

<comment><USER9> Yes, that is a large part of what I was saying.

Also, some things are so hard to specify formally that we still don't know have any kind of formal spec. Memory concurrency semantics is an example. It is only in the last couple of years that we got a good spec of fixed size memory accesses. Then Peter Sewell's group drops the bombshell that if you have mixed size memory accesses then you can't make programs sequentially consistent even if you add a memory barrier after every single memory access. But we still don't know how to formally specify the memory orderings associated with atomic accesses, instruction fetches, page table walks or device accesses. So, until then, we use the best natural language definition we can and hope we will be able to formalise it soon.

Also, there are parts of the natural language spec that I had not seen any value in... until I started worrying about whether the spec itself was correct or could possibly be shown to be correct. And now that I do worry about that, I am seeing new value in those parts.</comment></comment>


Ask/Show HN: Heist8080: A 10-player museum heist for Ouya console - <AUTHOR>

Hi Everyone,
I'm developing a game for the OUYA console. More information about the game is here: http://heist8080.com
I'm trying to create a party game centered around museum art heists that supports at least 10 players in the same room. Everyone connects to the console via a smartphone, tablet, or other web browser.
I think there are three ways people could connect to the OUYA console
1) Connect via local network directly to the IP address of the OUYA
2) Download a native android/iOS app that connects to the console via bluetooth
3) Connect to an external site like heist808.com and enter a passcode to join an existing game
I feel like each choice has different advantages. #1 is the easiest from a development standpoint, but I think it is harder for non-technical users to make sure their devices are on the right local area network (as well as typing in a crazy IP address URL). #2 seems like I can provide the best UI experience, but it requires more development work as well as forcing users to install a special app on their phones. #3 seems like a nice way to avoid some of the setup frustrations for new users, but it requires that the OUYA has an internet connection every time people want to play.
Has anyone else developed a similar game or app? I'm wondering what sort of interface people prefer in these situations. Any advice or ideas is greatly appreciated!
Thanks, Nate
I also submitted it to the OUYACreate gamejam competition and would also appreciate anyone that likes this idea to help upvote my submission: http://killscreendaily.com/create/video.php?submissionID=189 <comment><USER2> The closest thing that comes to mind is Artemis (it's a spaceship bridge simulator where various people play stations on something akin to Star Trek's Enterprise). They had a PC version and now an iOS version as well.

Based on their manual they use a separate server and everyone hooks a native app to that. So they effectively went with option two.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first thing I'd do is prototype the game out on paper. I'm serious. That will inform you about data structures and interface options.</comment>


The BCPL Reference Manual (1973) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/bbn/tenex/TenexBCPL_1974.pdf <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this - BCPL was an integral part of the Amiga, and influenced many decisions on how it was implemented.

Coming from a C background, it was sometimes confusing, but it was a fascinating look into a completely different world at the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> An earlier version of the BCPL manual, from 1967, can be found here:

[https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bcpl.html](https://www.bell- labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bcpl.html)

via the late Dennis Ritchie's home page.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seeing C's predecessor in all its glory leads me to drop the obligatory reference:

"Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called "A." When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=P("_"+( _u++ /8)%2))P("|"+(_u/4)%2);

"To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other U.S. corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C!"

"In any event, Brian, Dennis, and I have been working exclusively in Lisp on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion, and truly bad programming that has resulted from our silly prank so long ago."

EDIT: I forgot to reference B in this. It was BCPL -> B -> C. Doesn't make it better, though. ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> BCPL ran on the BBC micro and it was what eventually got me into C.

[http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/PRO...](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/PRODPIC-9770.jpg)

<comment><USER6> I had the Acorn BCPL cassette as well for my beeb circa 1984. To be honest I never really did much with it preferring instead to learn 6502 assembler (I wrote a modem controller sideways ROM for use with my home made BBS app).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I worked for two companies that made extensive use of BCPL. I also had an office next to Colin Whitby-Strevens for a while. The BCPL book was actually thicker than K&R, but was printed on more stout paper stock, and of course included a listing of the compiler source ;)

</comment><comment><USER8> Martin Richards still maintains a freely available BCPL compiler you can get from his web site.

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/index.html](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/index.html) [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/BCPL.html](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/BCPL.html)

<comment><USER9> I'm surprised no one has created a BCPL front end for LLVM. The grammar is probably pretty straightforward to implement.

<comment><USER8> I always thought BCPL would be a pretty decent language for the 8-bit generation (Z-80, 6502, 6800). I know something like that existed at the time, it didn't get as popular as maybe it could have.</comment></comment></comment>


I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ <comment><USER2> This SSC piece has influenced a lot of my thinking. Christopher Hitchens wrote about "the narcissism of small differences," concept as well.

There was another post on HN recently about a summary of Rene Girard, who extended this idea ("mimetic violence" in his style) with the inevitability of scapegoating neutral parties as an alternative to war. The rationalist community that SSC has represented may be walking right into that scapegoat role because they are viewed as compromised by the extreme right, and as a gateway drug by the extreme left.

I would argue critics like figures associated with the so-called, "intellectual dark web," are being scapegoated by social media platforms for precisely the reasons Girard describes for picking scapegoats. There is no point in tracking down the worst extremists because they don't have enough political traction to represent "something being done," but popular, relatively moderate critics are sufficiently high profile figures to make an example of in the hope that it provides some defusing catharsis.

I couldn't say how much predictive power that model has. Either de-platforming "works" because it delays sectarian conflict, or it delegitimizes discourse altogether and just accelerates it. We're going to find out anyway, and it appears we indeed live in interesting times.

<comment><USER3> _Either de-platforming "works" because it delays sectarian conflict_

Suppression doesn't work. It just reveals that the bosses who have control have you out-grouped if you're not one of their "faithful."

 _delegitimizes discourse altogether and just accelerates it._

One can think of Free Speech in this way: The whole purpose of Free Speech is to enshrine discourse. If there is Free Speech, then we can always fall back on discourse and talk it out. This is why, "Free Speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is bankrupt. "Free Speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences," is just another way of saying, "Don't say that, or we will use force on you."

It's a disappointment to see nonsense like "milkshaking" and "Punch a Nazi." These are just dress rehearsals to more serious political violence. These are signs of people being radicalized to the point, where they are going to abandon discourse and resort to violent conflict.

I remember when teachers used to talk about how the democratic societies and the USA were better than places like the USSR: Instead of using force against dissidents, we had Free Speech. Now, society's conception of civics is devolving into, "There is a right way to think, and if you don't agree, we'll force you to!"

<comment><USER4> I'd say the problem is really the expanding definition of 'nazi'.

Popper's paradox of tolerance is a thing, we can't tolerate actual nazis who would silence everybody in the name of 'openness'.

And the far-right types are still responsible for vastly more actual violence than the far left types. A couple nazis have been punched and antifa got out of hand in Berkeley once.. meanwhile, synagogues have been burned down, mosques shot up, a Sikh guy in Texas got shot because someone those he was one of "the arabs"...

The problem on the left side honestly isn't violence, it's suppression of speech. The far left in the tech industry has control of speech in a way that's pretty novel, and they need to be more careful and less righteous. It feels good to call someone a nazi and cast them out, but let's exercise some restraint and save that for actual nazis.

<comment><USER5> > The far left in the tech industry has control of speech in a way that's > pretty novel

When we talk about the far left which controls the tech industry to the point where it can control speech, are we talking about very effective capitalists who are somehow nevertheless economic leftists (and apparently have shareholders of the same bent), or are we talking about a socially oriented far left, perhaps even largely managed by historically disadvantaged classes (and also have shareholders who support them)?

Because I can't think of any good definition of "the far left" that matches the incentives, philosophy, and power behind the tech companies out there.

The closest argument I think could be made is that there's enough vocal users who are concerned about certain kinds of content that some companies feel compelled to respond to that concern. One can argue that has its own issues, but it's pretty distinct from control.

> It feels good to call someone a nazi and cast them out, but let's exercise > some restraint and save that for actual nazis.

I agree that nazi (like fascist) can be a term that's expanded to the point of dilution. But... what's an actual nazi? If we don't know the answer, will we be able to act effectively with our saved effort? If we're looking to history as a guide, do we draw the line at something comparable to 1943 nazis, or 1933 nazis, or 1923 nazis?

<comment><USER3> _Because I can 't think of any good definition of "the far left" that matches the incentives, philosophy, and power behind the tech companies out there._

There's a group of far left activists, who are also included within a lower tier of non-programmer workers for companies like YouTube and Google, as well as programmers and technologists who are sympathetic to their views. The impetus comes from the 1st group, who has sway with the 2nd group.

 _can be a term that 's expanded to the point of dilution_

To the point of a Bernie voting Korean American journalist (Tim Pool) being accused of being one of them, to the point of people yelling to have him mobbed and beaten in the street.

 _But... what 's an actual nazi?_

What's key, in 2019, an era when "brands" are easy to create anew, to the point where even kids and the poor have the resources to do so and organize around them, it is not the brand, but the behavior, the semantics, which is important. Who uses violence, intimidation, and vandalism to silence opposition and for political gain? Who dresses up in the same clothes, like "gang colors," and uses anonymity to get away with doing the above?

We need to be skeptical of this authoritarianism masquerading as "justice" and "openness."

<comment><USER6> > What's key, in 2019, an era when "brands" are easy to create anew, to the > point where even kids and the poor have the resources to do so and organize > around them, it is not the brand, but the behavior, the semantics, which is > important. Who uses violence, intimidation, and vandalism to silence > opposition and for political gain? Who dresses up in the same clothes, like > "gang colors," and uses anonymity to get away with doing the above?

... Proud Boys? Just sayin'.

<comment><USER3> _Proud Boys? Just sayin '._

Sure. A few of them are going to jail for criminal political violence. Then, also facing legal consequences are the members of Antifa who were looking for the Proud Boys, and ended up assaulting a couple of innocent Marines going to a dance. One of them was non-white, and the Antifa members apparently were spewing the most vile racist, toxic words the whole time.

Again: We need to be skeptical of this authoritarianism masquerading as "justice" and "openness."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Star Slate Codex is the only "armchair philosophy" site I read. I really love it.

Every time I click a link to some of the author's inspiration sources, or read the comments even, I'm appalled at how complicated and unattractive the writing is there. The contrast to Alexander's writing is simply so stark. I simply find myself giving up after a few paragraphs.

I recently read his enormous and lovely "Mediations on Moloch" essay, and was amazed by how hard I found it to follow the Nick Bostrom citations. I mean this is a famous bestseller philosopher. Is Bostrom's writing so bad, or is Alexander's writing simply so good?

This article is one of my favourites. I love how, like many of his articles, he doesn't actually change my mind about anything (at least not to my knowledge), but he does help me express, verbally, an itch that I had about something for a long time.

<comment><USER8> That feeling you talk about in your last sentence is one that's familiar to me as well, because I get it all the time when reading SSC, and we've got to be suspicious of it- that's exactly how people who read <religious literature, cult creeds, academic papers> that confirms their preexisting ideas feel.

<comment><USER9> Not every thing you read is meant to change your mind. I had this feeling with SSC too (more frequently in the past, in the Meditations on Moloch era, less so now), but I can clearly tell that I had pieces of those ideas developed on my own, and an SSC article only let me put them in a refined form.

(Having been brought up in a pretty cultish religion, I'm now painfully aware of cultishness works.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Highly recommend reading some of GK Chesterton. You may or may not like it, but his perspective is unique and he was influential among authors you are more likely to have read (like CS Lewis). Much of his work is now out of copyright and freely available.

You could start with _The Man Who Was Thursday._

<comment><USER11> I second this. I started reading a lot of his works a while back. He has a very unique point of view from what I know. He was also friends with or friendly with some of the leading authors of the day whom he criticized, notably Shaw. His use of paradox is highly entertaining too and he made it into something of an art form.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a fun read (he is notable for supporting distributism); his essays are very enjoyable too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The recent youtube purges provide an example of this mechanic in action. In order to prevent "discrimination, segregation or exclusion" of certain groups of people, youtube must discriminate, segregate and exclude certain groups of people.

We don't make peace with our friends, we make peace with our enemies.

<comment><USER13> Attention can be gotten with conflict but there is a cliff-like point after which it becomes counterproductive for ad revenue — see advertisers pulling out of YouTube (or some Fox shows for that matter) over not wanting their ads to show next to incendiary content

<comment><USER14> Where? Where can I see advertisers pulling out of YouTube? I heard all about the "adpocalypse" but I waited and, sure enough, YouTube's revenue from advertising grew by leaps and bounds during the time period of the "adpocalypse" when they were claiming that companies were leaving. It was, as far as the actual numbers reported in Alphabet's earnings, a total fabrication or at least extreme hyperbole. There simply never was a meaningful amount of advertisers pulling their ads.

<comment><USER15> "Where can I see advertisers pulling out of YouTube?"

Consider a situation in which you are selling a gadget, or software.

Do you want your ad run up next to a guy using the f _g_ t term to describe other people? Even in 'good spirits' or even 'in context'?

Maybe that's too abstract, given that you perhaps might not be selling stuff.

I do.

Frankly, I think it's all overblown, I think people should speak their minds and we should all be tolerant.

That said _I don 't want my products anywhere near your controversy_. No, way. We put a lot of effort in what we do, we're trying to communicate a message, we 100% do not want that anywhere near our message.

When we get up and go to work and try to do our jobs, a lot of this stuff seems academic and ridiculous. For the same reason we don't want our ads next to porn, we don't want it near ugly language. I love stand up comedians, but much of their (live) work is too off colour for many advertisers.

So, the decision by YouTub etc to pull ads, but allow the content to remain is actually quite reasonable.

<comment><USER13> Depends if you sell gadgets or if you sell a dream aka a strong brand (such as Disney)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What a fascinating read. I was constantly reminded of Girard throughout.

Also, you probably know more people of the other tribe than you think. They probably just want to deal with you as a person, rather than as a tribal identity. Granted, I don't think I know any creationists either, but I'm also slightly to highly skeptical of the 40% claim.

<comment><USER17> Probably because you don't live in a very rural area or the bible belt. I knew many creationists from my hometown and peripherally in college, but haven't had any creationist friends or active acquaintances since then.

A lot of creationists tend to be older and uneducated so working in tech in a larger city is kind of the polar opposite of where they congregate.

<comment><USER16> I do live in a rural area, just not the bible belt. There are plenty of intelligent design types- that is, God made the universe, set evolution in motion, etc., just not the 7 days as literal, evolution is fake kind that the article mentions.

There are a few Amish and Jehovah's Witness and Pentecostal types arpund, but nowhere near 40%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct > action of not giving people grief because they're a divorcee. You can have > all the Utility Points you want. All I'm saying is that if you "forgive" > something you don't care about, you don't earn any Virtue Points._

> _(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as > many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same > amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points)_

This is a great illustration of what I understand of Antisthenes' precept that _Virtue is the only good_.

<comment><USER19> I think that's just another way of saying "rhetoric matters more than logic". Greek philosophy was obsessed with this argument — which I think is still relevant today. I think the definition of Utility Points and Virtue Points map directly to "points acquired through logic" and "points acquired through rhetoric".

In a democracy, it's obvious that rhetoric _does_ matter. The masses will always be too uneducated (even if only contextually) to understand or care about the logic, thus rhetoric wins out. It was true for Socrates, and it's true today. I think it's pretty easy to see the same divisions in worldview present themselves around the world.

<comment><USER18> > _I think that's just another way of saying "rhetoric matters more than > logic". Greek philosophy was obsessed with this argument — which I think is > still relevant today. I think the definition of Utility Points and Virtue > Points map directly to "points acquired through logic" and "points acquired > through rhetoric"._

I might note that in the example of; _a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points_ , no rhetoric is required.

edit - regarding; _The masses will always be too uneducated (even if only contextually) to understand or care about the logic, thus rhetoric wins out. It was true for Socrates, and it's true today._ In Phaedrus, Socrates makes the point that knowledge of a subject beats rhetoric, by showing that to deceive with rhetoric consistently, requires knowledge of that which you are trying to misrepresent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This was a superb article. I was riveted from start to finish. I feel like I've gained some nuance into American political and cultural self-segregation.

<comment><USER21> "All debates are bravery debates" from SSC is also brilliant. Really anything on there is going to be worth the read.

Different vibe, but if you want another highly interesting take on political segregation, this is a favorite of mine:

[https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart- pt-1/](https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This article was great and I resonated with it. I grew up in Texas, lived in New Jersey commuting into Manhattan for about ten years, then moved back. Anecdotally the differences do seem to be regional. I have friends on both sides of "red" and "blue" on Facebook and in person. I'd probably side best with "grey", but can run in both groups (standing out no matter where I go).

What's interesting to me is the severe level of misunderstanding of each group to the other. I generally avoid media, don't have TV service, avoid Facebook, etc. But in some rare life instances it gets forced on me and I see what seems to be a media portrayal of what is just a characterization of the "other side", whichever side that may be. In my experience, both sides have good motives for the most part and truly care for and love other people. And in my experience, both sides think that the other side doesn't love people or have good intentions because they don't agree with X, while fully misunderstanding or dismissing the issue. It's almost like when you hear some distant relative who's overtly racist and you leave your nice peaceful sphere of influence and realize that there are people who really hate others on a regular basis. And of course, there are jerks on both sides and loving people on both sides.

All of that said, I see the polarization growing. It's to a quite scary level and my wife and I have discussed that it wouldn't be surprising to see another civil war within our lifetime. Not that we expect it...but not that we don't expect it either. The confirmation bias is strong everywhere and it's only getting worse. There seems to be no real communication going on at a national level, only talking heads who don't really represent their side well. Any conversation I do see seems to fall back into political rhetoric spouting party lines, and never seem to get to the heart of people or issues. Media complicates this, parties complicate this, and people just wanting to fit in complicates this.

I don't know a solution...but I do feel like there needs to be one soon.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think having an outgroup is avoidable, but it requires ongoing vigilance, and an awareness that it is easy to slip into building your identity partly by deciding who to hate.

If we're careful I do think it's possible to maintain an attitude that we're basically all in this together, and we may have significant disagreements on all kinds of things, but at the end of the day we're still all humans and worthy of kindness and respect.

<comment><USER24> If you care about some people more than others, then you have an ingroup and an outgroup. Would you really want to not care for your own family members any more than you care for a random person on the other side of the planet? That's what striving for no outgroups entails.

I think that's a horribly misguided mindset. A better approach is to _tolerate_ the outgroups and facilitate live and let live arrangements. Then you can focus more on appreciating your tribe and less on fighting the others.

<comment><USER23> I was taking outgroup to mean a set of people that we find so abhorrent that they're unworthy of any level of consideration or respect, and that we even wished didn't exist. The term has a pretty specific meaning, and it goes beyond just a group other than our own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > I need to remind myself that when they are bad people, they are merely > Osama-level bad people instead of Thatcher-level bad people.

Best line, right there. The full meaning requires calling back to the beginning of the essay, but the complexity of this is amazing, even on the off chance it was quick attempt at a humorous callback.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's almost as if human communities are inherently driven to splinter, like a living cell

</comment><comment><USER27> tl: dr;

1\. Observes that groups can be more critical of groups that are similar to them than those that are starkly distant

2\. Supports point 1 with the example that his liberal circle felt more comfortable reveling in the death of Margaret Thatcher than Bin Laden. And that Russel Brand claimed "Fox is worse than ISIS."

3\. Observes an apparent self-criticism in liberalism as evidenced by criticism of America relative to Europe, criticism of whites (by whites), and maybe even blanket criticism of "intolerance."

4\. Observes the hypocrisy of being intolerant of intolerance, and proposes that Americans criticisizing America are actually criticizing a different class of Americans, rather than being truly self-critical.

5\. Notes that America seems to have 3 "tribes" that roughly align with politics "red" (loving football and such), "blue" (loving higher education and such), and "grey" (being bothered by war on drugs + NSA).

6\. Concludes by acknowledging his own hypocrisy, in that his this piece targeting is alleged-in-group (Blue)'s intolerance wasn't truly self-critical. Observes he did the same form of non-self-criticism that he dislikes when Blue-tribe does.

</comment><comment><USER28> >Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things.

so much for that

<comment> reading-at-work At least HN is a step above Reddit, right? Right?

Funny enough, I actually first read this article when someone in a deep Reddit comment thread linked to it. So yeah, so much for that.

<comment><USER29> It depends on the subreddits you subscribe to. Communities with a single place to interact will vary depending on time of day and topic. One day you get upvotes, the next you get downvotes for the same kind of thing.

Hacker News _is_ Hacker News. Reddit is the communities you subscribe to. A negative view of Reddit as a whole makes no sense. The defaults and other big subreddits only reflect society at large, so any problem you have with Reddit is really with society.

/r/slatestarcodex, /r/pics, and /r/DaystromInstitute have nothing in common other than the platform.

<comment><USER30> >A negative view of Reddit as a whole makes no sense

I tend to think of "reddit" when used generally as meaning r/all for an account that isn't signed in. You won't find many "red-tribe" beliefs here, so I don't think you can say it reflects society at large. Anecdotally, I'd say the subreddit that most consistently gets something that looks a little like red tribe beliefs to the front page is r/unpopularopinion. Reddit is definitely not an even cross section of America.

<comment><USER29> If voter turnout is to be taken as a measure, red/blue tribes aren't representative of society. Voters (at least in the US) are a highly-motivated minority with firm opinions. Turnout peaks in Presidential elections, but still barely breaks 50%. Most people don't even pay attention until the debates start.

Consistent Voter Tribe people don't believe me when I tell them the most popular prime time cable news program barely has enough viewers to fill a few large stadiums. What you see on /r/all reflects the interests of people who watch TV shows with tens of millions of viewers, not the minority of people extremely tuned in to politics.

This is why I stopped watching cable news and following most political media. I realized they gave me a twisted view of how popular my opinions are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really liked this perspective and I think I learned a lot about my own rejection of my heritage (it's "red group") and hometown friends and family. It's true, I hate'm more than ISIS. Pretty silly, but I think it's good that I'm chewing on this now.

One thing I strongly disagree with:

>When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn't see anything wrong with it. "I can tolerate anything except intolerance," she said.

>"Intolerance" is starting to look like another one of those words like "white" and "American".

>"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup." Doesn't sound quite so noble now, does it?

If Eich had gotten fired for arguing that healthcare should be a capitalist free market system in America, or that guns ownership should have no regulation, or some other red-group position that doesn't involve the oppression of others, I'd defend him.

But, intolerance can't be tolerated. Paradox of tolerance, sure. Arguably, making me intolerant (ARGUABLY).

There's a difference between conservative political views and intolerant political views. The fact that a shitload of red group values coincide with intolerance (or that a lot of intolerant people are red group) is sure unfortunate for red groupers that are tolerant, but that's life. (and no, blue group "intolerance of the intolerant" does not equate to "bad people on both sides" for me)

<comment><USER32> Let's look back at the original quote of Karl Popper:

 _Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant._

You think that Brendan Eich and people like him would meet you with fists and pistols if you didn't suppress him by force? Or are you merely, contrary to what Popper recommends, suppressing all intolerant philosophies?

<comment><USER31> I appreciate your approach here. Then again, while Karl Popper invented the term, his initial quote around it doesn't for me define law.

But, to your point:

> You think that Brendan Eich and people like him would meet you with fists > and pistols if you didn't suppress him by force?

Eich? No. Persecutors of homosexuals? Yes. Homosexuals have been thrown in prison, tarred and feathered, and subjected to physical and psychological torture masked as "medicine" in the past. I would not be surprised to learn of a weaponized gay uprising somewhere like Utah, particularly in the last century or two. It was literally war for survival for them. Still is, in parts of the world and even parts of America. The stories I could pass on to you, and you can easily find on your own, stretch straight into 2019.

Eich was a member of this persecution class, even if he would be one saying "guys guys, we shouldn't HURT them for their gayness, even though their gayness is bad! Now here's another 1000$, feel free to spend it on tar."

> Or are you merely, contrary to what Popper recommends, suppressing all > intolerant philosophies?

There's ambiguity here, around what "suppress" means, "suppress the utterance," "keep them in check," etc. Anyway, Popper's word isn't law, and he himself contributes to this ambiguity:

> We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to > tolerate the intolerant.

To me, Mozilla is perfectly justified saying "we do not tolerate the intolerant, please leave our organization." Nobody at Mozilla (that I remember) was saying "put a ball gag on that man, he should not even be allowed to speak." The argument was "Mozilla doesn't tolerate this. By having him at the organization, we appear to tolerate it. We implicitly tolerate it. We pay him a salary and some of that money he spends on oppressing gays. He must go."

<comment><USER32> _Eich? No. Persecutors of homosexuals? Yes. Homosexuals have been thrown in prison, tarred and feathered, and subjected to physical and psychological torture masked as "medicine" in the past._

But the ballot Eich voted for passed, and the homosexuals weren't met with fists in pistols in California afterwards (at least not any more than everyone else). Thus, in the Karl Popper's original view of the paradox of tolerance, he'd argue that we shouldn't suppress the intolerant ideology of the people who voted for that ballot, especially as we could successfully counter their intolerant ideology with rational arguments, right?

Look, for me, your ideology of suppressing all ideologies you deem intolerant, regardless of the actual actions of the followers, is very much intolerant, in the original sense of Popper: _" it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols"_. We're already at the "fists or pistols" stage, with mainstream media praising the milkshaking and excusing the Berkeley rioters. Please, ask yourself, are you completely sure you're not one of the baddies?

<comment><USER31> > especially as we could successfully counter their intolerant ideology with > rational arguments, right?

No. It is not possible to convince someone that doesn't want homosexuals to have the same rights have other humans, that they should have the same rights, with "rational argument." First-hand experience. Sometimes introducing them to confident gays who are proud of their personhood works, though that could just result in an attempt to "save" the homosexual from their sinful actions. Another way is peer pressure via zeitgeist, which is happening now.

> But the ballot Eich voted for passed, and the homosexuals weren't met with > fists in pistols in California afterwards (at least not any more than > everyone else)

Systemic implementation of dehumanizing laws results in a cultural approval of acts of violence. If tomorrow the state of California said to you "your race (whatever it may be) can no longer marry," how would that feel? It'd feel like fists and pistols time to me. Sometimes that happens, and we get black panthers. What else is someone to do when they are treated as sub humans? Kowtow? "Please, oppressors, hear my rational pleas. I don't mean to be intolerant of your viewpoint, but I argue that I am human."

>We're already at the "fists or pistols" stage, with mainstream media praising the milkshaking and excusing the Berkeley rioters.

I don't speak for the mainstream media. I blame them for the rampant gun violence and uptick in suicide in this country, for what it's worth. At the same time, there are good investigative outlets exposing the hypocrisy and crimes of oppressive government officials. Like all human institution, it's imperfect.

> Please, ask yourself, are you completely sure you're not one of the baddies?

I ask myself this nearly every day. So far the answer is still "no." Pretty easy to say so: I don't do things that support intolerance (insofar as intolerance of intolerance doesn't count as intolerance in my value system, which is the direct representation of my view on this discussion).

<comment><USER33> > No. It is not possible to convince someone that doesn't want [X's] to have > the same rights [as] other humans, that they should have the same rights, > with "rational argument."

Depending on what you mean by "rational argument", this is extremely wrong. All known expansions of our moral circle to encompass other humans and even other sorts of sentient beings, going as far back as Stoic philosophy in antiquity, have occurred precisely via (more or less overtly stated) moral/ethical arguments of this sort. Even OP's blogpost is itself such an argument!

There _are_ people that your basic contention applies to - people you _can 't_ convince via such a 'rational' appeal to morals; consider the Christchurch killer, whom I just discussed in another comment in this HN-thread. And if hate content turns out to _systematically_ , with relatively-high probability, offer up pretexts that such individuals can trivially use to justify, publicize, glorify etc. their murderous acts, that's definitely something which should be of grave concern to us; and a meaningful, perhaps even a decisive challenge to the usual arguments for maximalist free speech. But that's a very different argument indeed to the one you are actually making here!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> In this 7,340 word exposé on his discovery that "Democrats dislike Republicans," Scott determines that judging people for their beliefs and actions is basically the same thing as judging people for their sexuality or skin color. In passing, he also manages to assert that homophobia is genetic, which perhaps you should keep in mind next time he is conspicuously silent while his fans talk about the genetic basis of the racial IQ gap.

"Hacker" "News" nods along, agreeing with Scott's view that the world is basically fine as it is and there's no point in doing anything to change it[1]. This of course has nothing to do with the fact that they are mostly highly-payed white guys getting a great deal out of the current system.

Scott includes an epilogue in which he realizes that his argument is self- refuting. Unfortunately, he misses the part where this generalizes to his entire political philosophy.

[1] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses- clinton-j...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton- johnson-or-stein/)

</comment><comment><USER35> This is kind of like the "science is just another religion" argument.

If you're going to believe in something awesome that you don't fully understand then believing in the one that gives you vaccines, self-driving cars and Xboxes seems like a good choice.

Similarly, if you're going to irrationally hate another group then irrationally hating the people who irrationally hate other people seems like a much better choice than the alternative (possibly even a rational one), since those people are almost certainly causing you direct personal harm by voting for psychopaths and generally holding back progress across a million different areas, even if they don't specifically hate you irrationally, just most of your friends and possibly your children (but probably you as well if you don't join in with the irrational hate).

When I follow the news recently I wonder about the pure-blooded Aryan Germans in the Nazi era who weren't complete idiots or psychopaths and how they felt as their country was flushed down the toilet of history by the others in their own "in group". They weren't directly targetted for who they were but I'm sure that was little comfort as they bled to death in Frozen Russia or had firebombs dropped on them by the British.

(Edit: I also recently discovered the author thinks recycling is a conspiracy, which I guess moved him out of my in group as I now am far less charitable in how I read some of his stuff)

<comment><USER36> Could you point me to where he thinks recycling is a conspiracy? I wonder what his arguments are...

<comment><USER37> The parent poster might be referring to this article: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened- to-90s-e...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened- to-90s-environmentalism/)

Specifically section 5. I wouldn't characterize the author's view as "recycling is a conspiracy", though. More like "we're not going to be up to our necks in garbage anytime soon, like we thought we were in the 80's" which the author mentions has affected the priority society has given to recycling as a whole. If indeed this is what they were referring to.

<comment><USER35> It was that article, but not specifically the bit about landfill. He at least attempts to back his opinion up on that in some way, though frankly that seems suspiciously contrived in a similar manner to the "scientists used to argue the earth is cooling," malarkey. But it was the casual way in passing that he praised and linked to the two articles by John Tierney as if they were the last word on the economic and environmental benefits of recycling that staggered me.

The first line of the first article says "recycling could be America's most wasteful activity." Remember this is the source he's using to bust a myth and poke fun at people who believed it as being ridiculous.

The other is introduced with this spectacularly factually incorrect summary by SlateStarCodex:

"Recycling remained inefficient and of dubious benefit, and never really caught on".

I don't always agree with what he says but I've always thought he'd done some research before coming to a conclusion. This revealed a blind spot where he was so sure of something that he could mention this in the middle of an article about crazy things people believe about the environment and not even notice the dissonance.

It doesn't help that the articles themselves are almost the antithesis of what I like about slate star codec ("smug, rich people like doing it" and "what we teach preschoolers about this isn't totally correct" are not what I consider a solid economic argument against something).

This totally shattered the SlateStarCodex brand for me, just as if he'd casually linked to a flat earth believer or climate change denier as if everyone knew what they were saying was true.(He had actually linked to climate change deniers in the same piece but I had assumed at that point he was being ironic).

edit: just in case anyone is wandering in from whatever "gray tribe" bubble SlateStarCodex picked up this nonsense from, here's an overview of the recycling conspiracy's talking points. I know it looks like a through review of the academic literature analysing the topic but that's just what they want you to think:

[http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Environmental_benefi...](http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Environmental_benefits_of_recycling_2010_update.3b174d59.8816.pdf)

 _" This report reinforces the key conclusion of the first report that recycling of paper/cardboard, plastics and biopolymers for most indicators assessed provides more environmental benefits than other waste management options. For wood and textiles, more studies are needed to be able to make firmer conclusions regarding the environmental benefits of recycling for these materials.

It is disappointing to note that there are very few LCAs which include an assessment of more innovative technologies such as gasification, pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion. This probably reflects the requirement for a lot of process data to model a particular option, which can be sparse in the case of the newer technologies. However, the results of the few selected studies that included anaerobic digestion and pyrolysis are very encouraging.

There needs to be a stronger evidence base on certain materials (textiles, biopolymers and wood) and the more innovative EfW technologies. LCA studies need to focus on a larger set of indicators rather than only on climate change potential or energy demand. There are also LCA methodological issues that need clarification, such as the treatment of biogenic carbon and the time period considered for landfill impacts; greater clarity on these matters will help in the comparison of waste management options."_

<comment><USER36> "here's an overview of the recycling conspiracy's talking points"

Wait, are you saying this paper you linked and the part you quoted is made by proponents of the idea that recycling is a conspiracy? It looks rather pro- recycling to me... The first sentence you quoted states outright: "recycling of paper/cardboard, plastics and biopolymers for most indicators assessed provides more environmental benefits than other waste management options". I didn't read the whole thing though.

<comment><USER35> That was an attempt at humor.

The link is to a very long and boring PDF that summarises the various pros and cons of different waste management approaches based on hundreds of Life Cycle Analyses. Overall recycling is often the best choice and landfill invariably the worst.

It doesn't really mesh with the worldview presented by the linked article(s) where it would appear to be claimed that the only ones to ever take a calm, logical view of the matter were professionally contrarian journalists, who concluded it was all worse than doing nothing 20 years ago and still believe that today.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A visualization of Malbolge programs, try playing with the m parameter - <AUTHOR> http://c0d3.attorney/0.1?m=966 <comment><USER2> This [1] claims that the random text on those pages does not actually constitute Malbolge programs. However, that does not preclude that there is some additional layer of encryption over it, or something else... :)

[1]: [https://esoteric.codes/blog/a-malbolge- mystery-c0d3-attorney](https://esoteric.codes/blog/a-malbolge- mystery-c0d3-attorney)</comment>


Show HN: Prope.rs - An API and dashboard for customer testimonials - <AUTHOR> http://prope.rs/

<comment><USER2> Getting a 500 error when trying to redirect back from twitter.

<comment><USER3> We took a look at this and it should be working. Did you give it another try?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Props for prope.rs</comment>


As Bike-Sharing Brings Out Bad Manners, China Asks, What's Wrong with Us? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/world/asia/china-beijing-dockless-bike-share.html <comment><USER2> I am currently living in Shanghai and I use Mobike, Ofo, or 赶赶单车 to get to work everyday. I have logged over 250km between the services.

This article is largely unfair. The city has large swaths of sidewalk established as bike parking zones. I can almost always find a bike zone within 10-50m. Furthermore, there are almost always parking attendants and security guards outside of malls and subway stations ensuring that bikes are parked correctly. Even when these people aren't present, I rarely ever see bikes anywhere but the bike zones. And as much space as the bikes take up, it is NOTHING compared to the parked cars along the streets.

Furthermore, I see company trucks collecting and relocating bikes multiple times per week. They are constantly shifting bikes of high supply to areas of demand. There are certain times of day (eg Saturday night at the Bund) where there are untold legions of bikes, but car traffic is flowing well.

Many of the trips that I've taken on a Mobike were out of convenience. In American cities the fastest mode of transportation is almost always a car. However, because the bikes are essentially door-to-door with no delay, I can almost always beat a hired car because there is no delay and I can zip between waiting traffic.

Chinese cities are being strangled to death by the crazy growth in car traffic. There has been insane immigration to cities and average income has gone way up. The net effect is a lot more car usage. Every taxi driver I have complains about the ever-worsening traffic conditions, year-over-year trip times increasing etc.

Bike sharing does A LOT to alleviate this by providing a convenient, quick, and cheap ($0.10-0.20 / 30min) method to travel. This is all ignoring the obvious ecological impact of the many tons of CO2 not released by the saved hydrocarbon fueled trips.

<comment><USER3> Living in Shanghai, closing on 2000km on mobike only. Try going to the flower market on wanhangdu lu and you'll get an idea of the abuse of both bikes and pavement. I love the service and I think it's a fantastic alternative to pubic transports/taxi/DiDi but you can't deny the absolute lack of care of a lot of users.

I regularly see: * Bikes locked with a separate lock * Bikes parked inside compounds you can't access * Bikes parked inside a building on any given floor (it's normal here for people to park their bike or electric scooter just outside their door even in high rise) * Bikes parked on the street in the middle of traffic

Even with those behaviors, those companies have completely reshaped the way people move in Chinese cities.

<comment><USER4> This mirrors my experience in Berlin. In nice neighbourhoods you see the bikes parked nicely, in rougher ones like where I live you often see them scattered on the road, half broken. Being Berlin, I bet there's also lots of anti- capitalist rage against them - I see a lot of them around my train station with a flat back wheel and I suspect it's from the same angry person, and all this started happening when they got rebranded from DB-bikes (DB is the national train company, someone correct me if it's actuall private) into Lidl bikes and got rid of the requirement of parking at docking stations at the same time that more companies started appearing. I bet also if you go to Frankfurt or München you don't see this kind of carnage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having just travelled to Beijing, these bikes literally are everywhere, frequently stands of 20-50 or more from the many many companies that offer them outside a subway station, so I can see the pushback about cluttering up the place.

Most of the people I talked to are pretty positive on them - it's fairly easy to find one, and they're dirt cheap to ride (most are sub-$0.10/hr if my math is right).

I like to think of this as closer to Uber's driver-free endgame - manage a bunch of rentable objects that provide transportation, except in this case they're taking advantage of public parking areas and that's a public bad.

<comment><USER6> The amount of space taken up by car parking makes me generally unsympathetic to complaints about bike sharing "taking up too much public space" \- though perhaps there is less car parking in china.

<comment><USER7> Space taken by car-parking is typically in dedicated parking lots: out of the way and doesn't impede public rights-of-way - compare to having bicycles ridden on sidewalks and interfering with car traffic.

<comment><USER6> Also "interfering with car traffic" is silly. Bikes are traffic too and have just as much right to being in the road as cars.

<comment><USER8> Many bicyclists are afraid to be on the road, and many drivers believe roads are for aggressive car/truck drivers only. There is some basis for this, as novice bicyclists can have difficulty maintaining 25mph for miles, and many drivers are eager to prove their engine is stronger than a pair of legs.

<comment><USER9> > as novice bicyclists can have difficulty maintaining 25mph

That's 40 km/h. Are you trolling or is that a typo?

I've been bicycling nearly daily for >45 years and I've never gone that fast.

<comment><USER10> It's not terribly hard for a fit male to maintain 40km/h for a while on a nice racing bike. But I think 25km/h is a more reasonable top speed. It's also the speed where electric bicycles stop supporting the driver, at least here in Germany.

<comment><USER11> 40 km/h average is crazy! I can get slightly above 20 km/h sustained average for about an hour. There's no way I could double that, and I'm pretty fit.

My 20 km/h includes a few stops and normal traffic so it's probably closer to 30 on a flat straight with no traffic. Perhaps a special bike with narrow tires could help, but that's less versatile (and I need to ride on dirt roads too).

The highest I've measured is 54 km/h, on a big down hill pedalling full strength on top gear. I regularly exceed 30 km/h but not for sustained periods.

<comment><USER10> Of course 40km/h does not include traffic, hills, or wind. It is also pretty crucial to have a bike with a racing geometry so that your head is low and air resistance is reduced.

<comment><USER11> 40 km/h is not impossible by any means but as a sustained average speed it takes a special bike and a person with pretty mighty athletic background. Definitely not something for the average commuter. Even 20 km/h sustained for an hour is more than most people can do.

I could _probably_ do 40 km/h for 15-30 minutes if I went all-in and had a racing bike. But my commute includes dirt roads and pathways through the forest so a racing bike is out of question and I don't want to take a shower every day arriving to work.

I don't really have to share the road with cars at any point on my commute so driving too slow isn't an issue. A part of the way is shared with pedestrians (and slower bicyclists) so going too fast is more of a problem.

<comment><USER12> 1999 was the first year Tour de France cyclists managed to get 40km/h on average for the whole 3200 km and three weeks long race. According to [http://bikecalculator.com/](http://bikecalculator.com/) 40 km/h requires between 260W and 450W from the rider, doing 40 km/h on avarage will be even more extreme.

I've used a good recumbent bicycle and I could actually hold 35 km/h easily in that one, in the same place I usually average 23 km/h upright with an ordinary ~$700 city bike.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We have three vendors for $1 bikes in Seattle. Choose green, yellow or orange. Nearly zero difference. Now they are being abused (hung from poles, dumped in the lake, etc)

What's going to become of these 1000s of bikes toward our long winter, all the casual sunny-day riders are gone.

<comment><USER14> There was an article fairly recently on HN about how bike sharing is failing in San Francisco because it's so hilly. All the bikes would start at the top of hills and end up at the bottom and there was no system in place to relocate them back to the top.

<comment><USER15> Seems like a pricing issue. Tag the stations by elevation and make a price hike for trips that start at a high station and end at a low one, and vice versa. Does SF not have an organization manually rebalancing teh stations? Here in Hamilton you see pickups with trailers full of rental-bikes being redistributed.

<comment><USER16> They could even offer negative pricing for bikes that are out of place.

<comment><USER17> Haul-back bonuses have been used in other domains for decades. Moving vans. Railway cars

<comment><USER18> Airport luggage carts

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Vienna had this problem decades ago when the city donated a lot of gratis bikes without any registration / GPS whatsoever. Just take the bike and leave it anywhere. They replaced the system with a station based one with registration, and a small fee after 1 hour usage. This works well.

<comment><USER20> That's similar to the system here in Helsinki. There are specific stations all over the city where you can collect/drop-off your bike.

You get 30 minutes of free time each time you "checkout" a bike, and are charged extra if you go beyond that.

People do seem to use the system sensibly, taking a bike to go somewhere. Doing their stuff, then taking a second bike home such that the don't keep the same one for >30 minutes to incur the extra (small) charges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Rudeness and inconsiderateness are everywhere, but as anyone who has lived in China for a long period of time can tell you, it is endemic in China. I'm not aware of any place where the problem is generally thought to be as bad.

Why, I don't know. The one-two punches of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution come to mind. As to why China was affected more than other places that suffered similar trauma, maybe it's because China is big enough that it can serve as its own world. Most Chinese people can choose to have no dealings with foreigners if they want, unlike somewhere like, say, Cambodia.

The bikes certainly aren't causing some wave of inconsiderateness. It's just a more visible way for the extreme inconsiderateness of the general mentality in China to be expressed.

<comment><USER22> I think there's a cultural thing going on here - in many places people are paid to sweep the streets so the city doesn't put out public trash cans ... people aren't being 'dirty' here, they just put their trash in different places

(and yes I find it hard to throw stuff on the ground too, I hold on to it in China, I'm socialised that way)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Recently visited china and noticed that the people there behave really filthy. They eat their lunches on the go when walking in the city, and when they are done they just dump the styrofoam containers and leftovers right there in the street. Then city workers collect them in huge stinky mounds waiting to be ferried of somewhere. Apparently city living is such a new concept there that a sence of community hasn't evolved and everybody at least would try to take care of the common spaces.

<comment><USER24> why wouldn't they throw it away if they know someone will clean it in few hours? or you have street sweepers unemployed?

it's same with fast food, only ducks who wanna make fast food workers unemployed take their tray and trash from table in fast food chain knowing there is designated person collecting these trays and cleaning tables

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's worth pointing out that that the Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) has been providing this sort of service for at least a decade (I remember seeing them parked outside of train stations in 2008):

[https://www.callabike-interaktiv.de/de/registrieren](https://www.callabike- interaktiv.de/de/registrieren)

<comment><USER26> There are many such bike sharing services in Germany like LidleBike [0] and NextBike [1]. But, I think it's relatively much more expensive than owning your own bike.

[0] [https://www.lidl-bike.de/de](https://www.lidl-bike.de/de)

[1] [https://www.nextbike.net/en/](https://www.nextbike.net/en/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I found this video by ex-pat YouTuber Serpentza to be quite informative on the issue, and he has been living in China for long enough to have an insider's perspective. Well worth a watch.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdsb2wwn-7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdsb2wwn-7g)

</comment><comment> m-i-l The problem of vandalism might be worse in the UK[0], e.g.

"the scale of vandalism took him [Steve Pyer, Mobike UK's general manager] by surprise. It has been far worse than in any of the Asian countries where Mobike operates 5m bikes"

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manche...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manchesters- bike-share-scheme-isnt-working-because-people-dont-know-how-to-share)

</comment><comment><USER28> melbourne and singapore are also seeing these problems. long story short, there are twats in every country.

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-17/obike-responds-to- crit...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-17/obike-responds-to-criticism-of- bike-sharing-scheme/8813574)

[https://vulcanpost.com/608463/bike-sharing- singapore/](https://vulcanpost.com/608463/bike-sharing-singapore/)

<comment><USER29> Yeah, there were a few highly-publicized cases of bike vandalism in Singapore but thankfully it seems to be subsiding. I'm actually seeing a lot more bikes from multiple bike-sharing companies around my neighbourhood these days. It's definitely catching on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The Bay Area already has this, in the form of Google Bikes, which sometimes (often?) find their way off-campus.

I have before come across one outside the entrance to my apartment building (the one I live in, I mean): The bike was standing on the walkway, obstructing it. I found that interesting, because the building has two underground secured area for bikes, and residents can take their bikes through to their apartments.

You may reply "Well, where was the outside bike rack?" And you are right, there is none. But, in response I bring up the Whole Foods not too far away: They have a bike parking area, and the Google bike was parked not there.

Of course, it's possible (likely?) that a Googler hadn't left it there: Someone could've taken it. Either way, I think the point still stands: You have effectively a station-less bike sharing plan, and bikes are ending up outside of where they're supposed to be.

Does Google still do 20% projects? This seems like an interesting thing to study!

</comment><comment><USER31> Aren't all of these bike sharing startups a symptom of a bigger cause?

Afaik there's a huge property bubble in China, particularly in Beijing. A lot of people have become billionaires quickly and they're looking to invest that money into something else. But the bike sharing startups are a bubble within themselves.

I wonder when it's all going to pop.

<comment><USER32> What's unsustainable about cheap bikes?

<comment><USER33> Its not about cheap bikes. The bikes break, are destroyed, left somewhere useless/dangerous, or are stolen/confiscated. The investment money that paid for them was leveraged (an investment/loan). The income from the surplus of nearly free bikes can't pay back the investors and retain their ridership. Meanwhile, people who live near a point of interest have to deal with a massive pile of dumped (possibly broken) bikes in front of where they work/live... and they pay a public price.

<comment><USER34> technically, the newer models get GPS track devices builtin, so the chance of maintenance might be smaller than you thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A universally applicable phenomenon where lack of ownership leads to uncivil behavior got caught in China due to its sheer scale of sharing economy and NYT says "Great material for China bashing. Make sure we get a good title to reflect how bad China is."

<comment><USER36> There are also many users behaving properly. Do you have data showing that property does not yield to as much uncivil behavior? Like, for instance, do car owners behave better than shared bike owner?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The OA links to an article about dockless bike sharing in Manchester UK [1]. Quote from the Manchester article

 _" On launch day, the Chinese designer told me the bikes were basically indestructible and should last four years without maintenance. It took a matter of hours before local scallies worked out how to disable the GPS trackers and smash off the back wheel locks."_

Truly "the street finds its _own_ uses for things". The kids are _hacking_ the bikes for fun and display of prowess which is normal-ish behaviour for adolescents. These objects suddenly arrived in the world, so the local teenagers decided to explore this new and interesting crop.

The OA mentions New York city authorities sending cease and desist letters to a dock-less bike sharing company in the city. I'm hardly surprised, the pavements need active management at the best of times.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manche...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manchesters- bike-share-scheme-isnt-working-because-people-dont-know-how-to-share)

</comment><comment><USER38> Just in case, previous NYT article:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/world/asia/beijing- bike-s...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/world/asia/beijing-bike- sharing.html)

On other news, this summer, August, Mobike started being deployed in Florence and Milan, Italy:

[http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-07/26/content_302...](http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-07/26/content_30250146.htm)

it is too early/too few bikes are in service yet, next test will be London:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/indyventure/mobik...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/indyventure/mobike- china-bike-sharing-scheme-london-launch-boris-bicycles-no-docking-stations- santander-a7868916.html)

but I bet we'll soon see if Europeans will be more polite than the Chinese ...

Manchester, UK, seems like having the same issues:

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manche...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manchesters- bike-share-scheme-isnt-working-because-people-dont-know-how-to-share)

In any case the Chinese problems must be large enough to have the Government intervene:

[https://phys.org/news/2017-08-china-issues-bike-sharing- guid...](https://phys.org/news/2017-08-china-issues-bike-sharing-guidelines- complaints.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> It seems to say more about the mentality of the investing community than anything else. I'd say good ideas are scarce and/or investors aren't really able to identify them, so they wind up doing the same thing everyone else is doing.

Would love to hear examples of recent investments in Chinese startups that have businesses based on something truly novel.

<comment><USER40> "Liulishuo raises approximately $100M in Series C funding to extend its lead in building smart AI English teachers"

[http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/liulishuo-raises- app...](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/liulishuo-raises- approximately-100m-in-series-c-funding-to-extend-its-lead-in-building-smart- ai-english-teachers-300494378.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> How about docked bike sharing? Barcelona has been having one for some time, it doesn't have many of the problems here, even though our suzhi is not very high. It does have the problem that you have to start and finish in a dock, but that seems minor.

<comment><USER42> The investment required is huge. On top of the costs for the bikes ($80 each) there's another $1000+ to install the docks. Not to mention the huge Chinese bureaucracy to navigate if you wanted to install docks in public spaces.

[https://www.itdp.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/07/ITDP_Bike_Sh...](https://www.itdp.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/07/ITDP_Bike_Share_Planning_Guide.pdf) (page 109)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Here in Shenzhen where it is stinking hot _all_ the damn time (we don't get freezing, snowy/sleeted, dust storms or 'normal') and windy/wet _some_ of the time, there's government e-bike stations all about my area. Unfortunately I can't use them because they don't take foreign passport numbers. Otherwise, I would.

<comment><USER44> I live in Shenzhen and I use Mobike all the time. The biggest obstacle was getting a bank account to pay with. The identity verification process was to take a picture of your passport and a picture of you holding your passport, and then it took half a day for Mobike to verify the information.

<comment><USER43> Mobike != government system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> If there is money tied to rider's mannerism, I would be confident to predict that almost all the observed issues will be resolved.

<comment><USER46> I think they have the capacity to do this (o-bikes in Melbourne have similar issues), but haven't enabled it yet while trying to build up a customer base; additionally there is nothing to stop dickheads kicking over parked bikes for no particular reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The introduction of similar oBikes in Amsterdam and Rotterdam prompted comments from my friends seeing similar bad behaviour. Meanwhile I live in Montreal, where with the Bixi bikes you need to return them to a station (spread throughout the city) and there's no problem.

</comment><comment><USER48> I just hope we don't sling shot back to individualistic ownership driven economy (as opposed to sharing economy). Sincerely hoping that after the dust settles there is a tiny bit of forward progress.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is a concept that you learn in an intro to economics class in college. People will abuse a free, limited resource. A sharing-based economy doesn't work.

<comment><USER50> It's not an economic issue, it's a human nature. Just most of the people lack morals, no matter what country. Sad, but true.

<comment><USER51> What's easier to change? An business model or human nature? Clever people already know not to fight human nature and build their business models around it.

<comment><USER50> I'm not saying we should change human nature, it's impossible at the one human life scale. Just correcting this is not exactly an economics. But yes, of course business model should just keep this in mind. Even sharing economy can adapt to this requirement and still be profitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Let's see what will happen outside China. Then compare them with data :P

</comment><comment><USER53> "China has been pushing for years to develop technology products that catch fire overseas."

I almost pissed myself laughing at this line.

<comment><USER54> Shucks. Samsung beat them to it...

<comment><USER24> wasn't the battery supplier from China?</comment></comment></comment>


Release Candidate Ubuntu 9.04 Available For Download - <AUTHOR> http://www.honeytechblog.com/release-candidate-ubuntu-904-available-for-download/

<comment><USER2> I assume people are voting up the headline, not the article, since that must be the most incomprehensible piece of text I've read in quite a while.

How about a link to the proper source? <http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/904overview>

</comment><comment><USER3> Ubuntu is reaching a real maturity with this release. The interface is solid. The components are stable, full-featured, and best of all _consistent_. Oh, and shiny :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Umm... Who writes this?

" _The upcoming version Ubuntu Linux distribution which is due out on April 33rd. You shouldn't wait to get the latest version, maybe your friends waiting. Why don't you download the released candidate of Ubuntu 9.04 for your operating system. On that version, their is no major bugs found and even no changes will be made within a week and few days are left. You can install that operating system by showing your OS to your friends._ "

Perhaps just liking to the Ubuntu site would make more sense, as stated by wvl.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apology for the typo. I thinks the its corrected now. @wvl Please check the post again for the proper source info Thanks for your suggestions @PieSquared That post was written by my co-author and apology for any inconvenience you faced. @windsurfer Yeah,i used the "ubuntu studio" and pretty much satisfied with it.I'm upgrading it for few bugs in network driver binaries.

"Human Knowledge Belongs To This World" (we should better link to proper sources. :P) I'll wait for your suggestions.</comment>


Google Pagespeed Test Fails Itself on Mobile - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.google.com%2Fspeed%2Fpagespeed <comment><USER2> This doesn't surprise me. The PageSpeed Insights site has a very atypical use case.

Anyway, the PSI 'score' is only a rough guide to help point you to problems. It can be kind of useful, in that if you get something like 97-100 then you can be pretty sure it's a very fast page... but it's also probably a page that doesn't do much beyond displaying something. With a more serious web app that does more interesting things, the score becomes a less useful indicator – it's often possible to make code changes that improve perceived performance but actually reduce the PSI score.

For example, it's impossible for PSI to really know if inlining a script is going to generally improve or worsen performance, because it doesn't know your site's usage patterns, or which parts of your UI need to render first for a user to feel that the your UI 'is fast', whatever that means. UI performance is a subtler art than, say, algorithmic performance, and much less quantifiable. That's why many people prefer webpagetest.org, which comes with much smarter tools to record and analyse _how_ the page loads, so you can actually improve UI performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> It does poorly when empty, but Google Pagespeed on Google Pagespeed does well on Google Pagespeed.

[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.google.com%2Fspeed%2Fpagespeed%2Finsights%2F%3Furl%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fdevelopers.google.com%252Fspeed%252Fpagespeed)

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazes me how much weighting people sometimes put in these type of tools, and start panicking because they enter a website they work on and it comes back with some red text.

Have had jobs where random marketing colleagues email the developers along the lines of "Why do we only score 7/10 in this test, 45.5% in this test, and 2 critical issues were found in this test?"

Don't get me wrong, they are useful, but people act the same way they would if their virus scanner found their computer was completely comprised. Unless the tools have a major tangible impact in something that affects the business, ie. SEO, I tend to ignore them unless they are a simple fix.

<comment><USER5> Your comment brings back memories of previous clients I worked with, who phoned me in a panic after running an HTML validator that turned up mutliple _warnings_. Not even errors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also fails google.com on mobile. [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) however is a 99/100.

<comment><USER7> [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmotherfuckingwebsite.com%2F)

<comment><USER8> Apparently motherfuckingwebsite would score 100 if they took out the google analytics tracker.

<comment><USER9> The suggestion says to cache the js file for the analytics tracker, not to remove it.

<comment><USER10> It's hosted by Google, so they control the cache time.

<comment><USER11> You actually can host the Google Analytics JS file locally, though I'm not sure it's an officially supported configuration.

<comment><USER12> Do you have any resources on doing this?

<comment><USER13> it's definitely not a supported config: [https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032389?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032389?hl=en)

But you can download it, and host it locally. Just update it periodically. As you can see from the changelog, it only changes every few months: [https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/changelog?csw=1)

Google actually takes a few days to deploy updates to all of their servers. So a daily script to update it on your server would be fine.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The PageSpeed Insights tool gives itself [1] a high score [2]; what this link is showing is that it's giving its documentation pages [3] a low score. Not that that's much better.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

[2] [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.google.com%2Fspeed%2Fpagespeed%2Finsights%2F)

[3] [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, the mobile version fails badly (62/100). The desktop one doesn't fair that well either though (77/100).

</comment><comment><USER16> Hilarious that this was just posted as I had to answer to it yesterday. Are we working together?

Here's an email I ended up sending yesterday in reply to a Google Page Speed Test report:

> We can address most of these issues with some further optimizations.

> One thing that will always appear in the Google Page Speed Test reports is > the "Should Fix" issue with "Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in > above-the-fold content". This is a much discussed flag that Google returns > that would really only work with non-modern websites, and a test that Google > itself can't pass: > [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=www.google.com).

</comment><comment><USER17> 'Fails' is a bit harsh. Since when was it decreed that Google should make all of their web pages blazingly fast on mobile? Al Gore didn't pass any laws on that.

If Google make a developer oriented tool then it is no surprise that it works brilliantly on the desktop and slightly sub-optimally on the mobile phone. I am quite useless at web design yet I can game Pagespeed to get 95% or higher in the score. Of course the javascript will be mashed into some black hole that can't be un-minified and the way things load will not be well suited for the visitor seeing more than one page (using cached things). I can't believe someone at Google could not have done what I do to 'game' Pagespeed. The fact that they haven't is good, you should never let scores from things like Pagespeed or YSlow determine how a web page is delivered, it is like using a 'defeat device'.

I do wish they would do something to Pagespeed as they have changed what it does over the years and the latest iteration didn't excite me, I preferred the previous one, in part because you could run it against 'localhost'.

</comment><comment><USER18> The Pagespeed Insights API is pretty easy to use, if anyone is interested in Pagespeed Insights as a service.

I built an Android app for it as sort of a proof-of-concept back when Holo was a thing, and it was very straight forward. I'm actually kind of surprised that Google didn't build one themselves.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sometimes the dog food on the other side of the fence does taste better.

</comment><comment><USER20> I heard it's closed already last year?

<comment><USER21> You may be thinking of PageSpeed Service[0], which was a proxy service of Google's. PageSpeed Service was shut down[3] in May of 2015. PageSpeed Insights[1] is a service of theirs that checks pages for usability and performance and is still active. There is also a PageSpeed Insights SDK[2] available, so you could self-host if they decide to stop offering the service.

[0] [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service)

[1] [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

[2] [https://code.google.com/p/page-speed/](https://code.google.com/p/page- speed/)

[3] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06/google-shuts-down- pagespeed...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06/google-shuts-down-pagespeed- service-for-accelerating-websites/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> cnn.com gets 95/100 on mobile user experience which must be a joke of some kind. My own page (the development version) gets a similar score in spite of loading much must faster. reddit.com also almost fails the desktop test.

This is a nice tool to give you suggestions about things you might want to change but it's hard to use it as a predictor of page quality.

<comment><USER23> cnn.com gets 95/100 because it's just an HTTP redirect to www.cnn.com, which gets 59/100 on desktop and 48 on mobile:

[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com)

[https://redbot.org/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcnn.com](https://redbot.org/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcnn.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anomaly of recursion?</comment>


How to prevent "random" bad moments influence productivity? - <AUTHOR> Something happens and triggers a bad emotional state. It affects productivity, drive and basically a lot of if not everything that could have been easily achieved in the upcoming time period is now a struggle or just left undone.
It happens to me and everyone I know, to some extent. I'm in the low-tolerance part of the spectrum so I have to ask:
How do you handle moments when something bad happens that then affects everything that was coming?
Let's say you have an argument with your spouse or someone calls you and gives you some bad news.
Besides working on understanding and really engaging in properly managing emotional intelligence, do you have any tips and tricks that work for you? Such as counting backwards from 5 and the bad news is gone? :D
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Look at general measures to improve mental health and stress tolerance.

Soldiers in combat try to fit 1 to 2 hours of cardio into their busy days. Weight training is more important for general health, but intense exercise is the best medicine for stress tolerance.

If that sounds impossible, then start with some realistic like 1/2 hour, walking, biking to work, moving boxes, and work up from there.

Overreaction to small upsets is a symptom of depression and it is one that SNRI or SSRI drugs such as Vanlafaxine and Sertraline are effective for. Generics are very cheap even if you don't have health insurance, and your primary care practitioner is trained to prescribe them.

The above measures are intended to build up your base so you will be resilient without trying. Spare time activities in the areas of pets (e.s.p. raising chickens), religion, volunteer activity are also helpful.

I was a long time practitioner of

[https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Higher-Consciousness-Ken- Key...](https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Higher-Consciousness-Ken- Keyes/dp/0960068880)

a self-help approach aimed at training the mind while in action. Today I think that repeating mantras and phrases fills up my mind with more junk and makes managing harder. If I repeat a mantra I won't repeat it quickly but will try to repeat it at the moment a distraction comes in.

</comment><comment><USER3> What helps me, is to talk it over with myself. So if something bad happens, I take a moment to calm down, feel whatever needs to be felt, and talk it through.

Between genitals-in-a-vice and world peace, where is the event on the scale? Will it matter in a week? A month? Should I do something about it, or may it solve itself? That kind of stuff.

If it's bad enough, I know for a fact that it'll influence the coming period, and that must be accepted. I'll take an extra day off, or work less hard, go to bed early, or do whatever to regain mental strength.

I just looked it up by the way, and there's quite a bit of documentation on it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience)</comment>