Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153419 <comment><USER2> Getting a representative sample in social science is really hard.

"The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That's lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it's well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It's also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both"[0]

How many richer people are spending their days on Mechanical Turk? The authors don't seem to have collected any income, educational or other data that might help us ascertain how representative their sample is. Even when completely random 196 people is a fairly small sample in social science although it's much larger than many psychology studies, which seems to be the background of the authors. Other discussion[1] seems to suggest the people using the service are not very representative of the population at large.

[0][http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of- trumps-...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps- working-class-support/)

[1] [http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are- amaz...](http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-amazon- mechanical-turk-workers/)

<comment><USER3> Not saying you should draw any conclusions from this, but something I noticed:

"Second, research has shown that conservative attitudes are related to relying on intuitive thinking styles [5] while cognitive complexity (i.e., the tendency to construct a variety of perspectives for viewing an issue) is avoided [6,7]"

[5] leads to:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909003596) Authoritarianism and its relationship with intuitive-experiential cognitive style and heuristic processing

So the author conveniently swapped conservative in for authoritarianism.

It's kind of ironic because I can most definitely imagine some of my left- leaning friends using this study as yet more "proof" of their side's righteousness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Keeping aside the clearly political nature of the content, this study itself seems quite poorly designed & amateurish.

A well designed study would mix "bullshit" and "non-bullshit" statements of similar complexity and look at signals on both for comparison. Better still, the "bullshit" statements would be derived from mixing words from the "non- bullshit" statement pool.

<comment><USER5> A much better paper came out last year that used tweets from Deepak Chopra and quotes from a random "new age wisdom" generator.

PDF: [http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf)

And there's some followups...

Dalton 2016 - [http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923ac.pdf](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923ac.pdf)

Reply from Pennycook et al. - [http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923acr.pdf](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923acr.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I had to chuckle at this passage from the first link:

> participants were shown a list of activities (e.g., biking, reading) > directly below the following instructions: "Below is a list of leisure > activities. If you are reading this, please choose the "other" box below and > type in 'I read the instructions'". This attention check proved rather > difficult with 35.4% of the sample failing

The perils of using poorly compensated students for your studies!

<comment><USER7> This issue isn't just with students or compensation. A lot of the quality issues have more to do with serious questions of reading comprehension and the over use of (poorly designed) survey methodologies. It ends up being a lot like the 'democracy' complaints...its not a great method but it is better than all the others for what it does. Not only are 'attention check questions' common, there is some interesting research on their effectiveness.

Eventually, I suspect/hope that NLP and neural networks will enable more authentic data collection across many spectrums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Where do favourable views of Taylor Swift or Ayn Rand sit on this scale? Despite being a bit of a lefty, I can't help but think this article is itself bullshit.

<comment><USER9> There has to be a joke in there somewhere, right? Maybe the article is itself a test!

<comment><USER10> "Are you susceptible to bullshit if it agrees with your priors?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I can tell correctly, these statements were used as examples of bullshit (from [1]):

1\. _Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty._

2\. _Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity._

3\. _Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena._

4\. _The future explains irrational facts._

5\. _Imagination is inside exponential space time events._

6\. _We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself._

7\. _Consciousness consists of frequencies of quantum energy. "Quantum" means an unveiling of the unrestricted._

8\. _Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us._

9\. _We are in the midst of a high frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself._

10\. _Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy._

(I definitely fall prey to 4.)

Some additional commentary (from [2]):

> _Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially > profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together > randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure. The bullshit > statement is not merely non-sense, as would also be true of the following, > which is not bullshit:

> "Unparalleled transforms meaning beauty hidden abstract"._

I wonder what kind of bullshit other political groups (liberals, libertarians, anarchists, ...) fall prey to.

[1] [http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/supp.pdf](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/supp.pdf)

[2] [http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf)

<comment><USER12> These are not all bullshit statements. My summary at bottom.

Here are my ratings where 0 = nonsense, 10 = profound statement.

1\. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.

I rate this an 8/10 and read it as an excerpt from a review of a piece by an abstract painter. It says two things: firstly (though this comes at the end), that in purely aesthetic terms the beauty of the piece is unparalleled. I'd like to see it! But secondly, that the reviewer knows some hidden meaning that transforms this beauty in some way. Presumably I could be told what that hidden meaning is if I read the full review. I definitely want to see the painting! The construction of the sentence is also highly satisfying.

2\. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.

This is an 7/10, but only because it is not such a deep observation. It says something very specific. It says that if you are creative, but only in a subtle way, then if you enjoy good health you are more likely to follow through on your subtle visions. So if you're in a slightly, but not very, creative profession such as technical writer or you are a food scientist for Nabisco, then if you improve your health you are more likely to be in "top form" and have the energy to actually make something you're thinking about a reality. I don't personally agree with this statement, and it does not seem to be very deep. Other things that would top "good health" as a way to impart reality to subtle creativity include: financial independence; a supporting partner; free time; a sponsor; drugs. The sentence is certainly meaningful however.

3\. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.

This is meaningless to me, as "infinite phenomena" is on its face a meaningless descriptor, it just doesn't apply to anything, and even if it did, the idea of quieting them is meaningless, and even if quieting them meant something, wholeness doesn't mean anything to me. 0/10: the same as a markov chain writing.

4\. The future explains irrational facts. 12/10 for profundity and statement.

Luke 8:17: "For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad."

The (Christian) bible says there is NOTHING secret that shall not be made manifest. So anything that is a FACT (actually happened), however irrational- seeming or paradoxical, will be revealed in all its causes. This is a deeply profound statement.

I'd also like to point out that Isaiah 40:4 and Isaiah 40:5 state: "Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the LORD has spoken." says roughly the same thing. But what does the bit about valleys being raised up and mountains made low? It has to be some kind of metaphor, or it's literal but weird, or it's just random nonsense. Our #4 is much, much more profound.

Plus, it's very easy to see how it applies directly to weird actions by someone that can later be revealed not to be weird at all. This can apply to companies, to Tesla, to SpaceX, whatever. It's a deep statement.

5\. Imagination is inside exponential space time events. 0/10\. Markov chain output. "Space time events" simply doesn't refer to anything.

6\. We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself.

This is hard to judge. I will give it 1/10 but want to click through for the context to see what the author might mean by "the nexus" such that it can be something you can align with. On its face it seems kind of ridiculous to align yourself with a nexus. A "self-aware blossoming of being" is, at best, an absolutely ham-fisted way to phrase anything. This is a terrible sentence without some kind of context.

7\. Consciousness consists of frequencies of quantum energy. "Quantum" means an unveiling of the unrestricted.

I can't judge "frequencies of quantum energy" but in the sense that consciousness is a sum of what the atoms in your head are doing, and atoms consist of quantum states, the first part would be 8/10 to me if that were a real phrase. I couldn't see "Consciousness consists of frequencies of quantum energy" appearing in real journal article entitled "Do quantum effects matter in brain neural activity? The possibility of a deterministic emulation of thinking agents." The second sentence is markov chain stuff that is obviously wrong, it's 0/10\. The first half, due to the phrasing, is like 2/10\. Overall it's 3/10 as an average of the profundity of the first sentence if it used a real phrase, deductions for using a fake phrase (frequencies of quantum energy), and a meaningless second sentence.

8\. Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us.

In a context where some author attempted to argue that you should increase your "mindfulness", I can see some author using consciousness instead of mindfulness or presence. As such in an argument that more and more things make sense as you increase your mindfulness, it makes sense to me that such an author would argue that mindfulness, or in their phrasing consciousness, leads to growth in the number of things that are coherent or make sense around us, and lead to growth as a person. Note that this use of "consciousness" is real: "the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings." So I'll give this a 9/10.

9\. We are in the midst of a high frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself.

0/10\. None of the terms have any possible meaning.

10\. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy.

Even if this were a statement about only endorphin production in nature, plants don't experience this. Plants don't have "joy". If it were about animals it might make some kind of sense (though probably still wrong), but as it is this is a nonsense statement that is a 0/10.

\----

        Score:

        8/10
        7/10
        0/10
        12/10
        0/10
        1/10
        3/10
        9/10
        0/10
        0/10

        Average score:
        </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
        4/10

So, I've seen worse.

<comment><USER13> It's funny how you quote the bible as if it had any authority on profundity, given that it is full of equally vacuous bullshit, including the verses you quote.

It seems to me like that demonstrates (a) how real the effect is that this study measured, and (b) what the basic mechanism is that makes it happen: Religious people tend to start with statements that they have decided they want to believe without any actual reason and then they go out and try to find reasons, no matter how metaphorical or analogous these reasons might be, and thus no matter how much these reasons actually logically and empirically support the statement at hand. Scientifically minded people on the other hand tend to reject statements until they have evidence that supports them, so they aren't invested into finding reasons to believe, because they care more about what is actually true.

That's also why religions consistently fail at discovering true facts about the world (or in other words: why they fail at rejecting bullshit), while science yields all the progress we make in understanding the world (which in particular means rejecting all the bullshit).

<comment><USER12> It's funny how you can say someone "quotes the bible as if it had any authority on profundity" after that person wrote "But what does the bit about valleys being raised up and mountains made low? It has to be some kind of metaphor, or it's literal but weird, _or it 's just random nonsense_."

The study was about bullshit meaning literal, meaningless nonsense statements, like "Imagination is inside exponential space time events." If you can't tell the difference between meaningless statements and ones that are simply wrong you are no better than the editors who accepted this hoax paper: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)

You completely misread my comment.

<comment><USER13> Well, I would say that you didn't make yourself particularly clear, then :-)

Yes, you did list the possibility that that quote might just be random nonsense, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that is what you think is the case. In particular given that you also wrote this:

> The (Christian) bible says there is NOTHING secret that shall not be made > manifest. So anything that is a FACT (actually happened), however > irrational-seeming or paradoxical, will be revealed in all its causes. This > is a deeply profound statement.

I don't see how there is anything profound about this. It's just a baseless assertion, as far as I can tell. So, while it's a step beyond just random gibberish, in that there is some semantic meaning to this, it's still just a deepity ( [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity) ).

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry, I must have let the fact that the document I chose as a basis for comparison (and which I don't believe) influences the lives of 2.2 billion people every day and has for hundreds of years cloud me into thinking that it is more "profound" \- as a basis of comparison - than if a pack of peanuts says "may contain peanuts" on it. /s

In other words I don't think profound statements have to be true, and the article says people were judging profundity, not truth. (although this is irrelevant, I don't think the verses I quoted are true.)

<comment><USER13> > In other words I don't think profound statements have to be true, and the > article says people were judging profundity, not truth. (although this is > irrelevant, I don't think the verses I quoted are true.)

I think you are using an unusual definition of "profound", then?

To quote the relevant definition from the oxford dictionary:

"(Of a person or statement) having or showing great knowledge or insight"

I don't exactly think that would be met by "incorrect knowledge" or "false insight"?

Now, there is a "feeling of profundity", which indeed does not depend on truth, but which can be evoked by, for example, statements that (to a particular person) _seem_ profound, but actually aren't, but also just by certain experiences.

<comment><USER12> >I don't exactly think that would be met by "incorrect knowledge" or "false insight"?

sure it would be met. your usage is obviously not what anybody means by profound. your usage suggests someone can say "I just read a really speculative physics paper which might be really profound, if it's true. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to test it today, so it's impossible to know whether it's profound or not. But it would certainly be interesting if it turned out to be profound!"

Go ahead and find a _single_ person online talking in such terms about whether a journal article in a hard science is profound or not, where if it turns out to be true it's profound but if it turns out to be false it's not profound. Profound is a common word. Find a single person using it in science the way you suggest I use it.

<comment><USER13> Well, I see your point, but I think that's actually more a matter of how exactly you define "truth" and of colloquial use of language.

If a paper has obvious errors in it that make it highly questionable whether any of the results are reliable, then you wouldn't call that profound, would you? I mean, it must be at the very least plausible that it's true after some critical reading. And I'd even go further: For example, a paper can be profound because of a new perspective, even if the specific results are actually wrong. But the reason that it is still considered profound is because the new perspective still "has truth to it", in the sense that it matches reality well enough to be a useful tool for generating future results.

From someone who doesn't have sufficient knowledge to judge the reliability of some result, I would indeed expect them to say something along the lines "this might be profound".

Also, if a paper that at some point is considered profound turns out to be completely untrue and useless, people would probably stop refering to it as profound?

Which is all in contrast to some "feeling of profundity", which really might be a purely emotional matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Participants (N = 196; obtained via Amazon Mechanical Turk)

That's bound to be a representative sample.

<comment><USER15> Why would it not be?

<comment><USER16> It's clearly not a random sample of the population.

<comment><USER15> For most psychological research you don't need a very random sample, nor do you need a very large sample. It's got to do with the fact that our brains largely function the same. Your sample has to be large and random enough to be fairly confident that you didn't accidentally pick a significant amount of people with some sort of mental divergence (i.e. very low IQ, very high IQ, autism, psychopathy, etc..) that could be relevant.

I don't think picking nearly 200 people from Amazon Turk is going to risk that. But perhaps someone should research what kind of people are on Amazon Turk.

Fun exercise, let's modify the conclusion to reflect the specific population bias we think the paper might have:

People working for Amazon Turk are more likely to support conservative ideas when they also are susceptible to bullshit.

What is a much more important question: What is the distribution of conservative/non-conservative supporters in the group, and how significant is the measured correlation?

edit: Just as a disclaimer, I made this comment based on the psych master thesis presentation I've attended of a friend when I was at university where I posed the same question (N was only 16, and only local students were surveyed). He explained to me that for his particular research (pertaining correlation between auditory senses and motor skills) a small group was sufficient because of the fundamental brain structure we (mostly) all share. Whether that holds up for more complex research like this I don't know, I'm not a psych student.

<comment><USER17> The view you're espousing is wrong. When you actually test if what you're calling human universals actually are universal, you generally find they're not:

 _" Broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on narrow samples from Western societies are regularly published in leading journals. This review suggests not only that substantial variability in experimental results emerges across populations in basic domains, but that standard subjects are in fact rather unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, categorization, spatial cognition, memory, moral reasoning and self-concepts. This review (1) indicates caution in addressing questions of human nature based on this thin slice of humanity, and (2) suggests that understanding human psychology will require tapping broader subject pools. We close by proposing ways to address these challenges."_

(The thin slice of humanity referred to above is westernized college students. Perhaps mechanical turkers do not suffer from this bias? seems unlikely though)

[http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscripts/Weird_People_BBS_H...](http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscripts/Weird_People_BBS_Henrichetal.pdf)

also see [http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/psychology...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/psychology- studies-biased-toward-we-10-08-07/) and [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/05/weird_psychology_social_science_researchers_rely_too_much_on_western_college.html) for pop write-ups.

<comment><USER15> Thanks! That's interesting, seems I might have had it wrong. I should've brought that up during my friends master thesis presentation, maybe he wouldn't have got his diploma ;) Are psychology researchers in general aware of this review? Obviously my friends master thesis was just a small inconsequential study, but if the universals that are now commonly used have turned out to not actually be true wouldn't that mean huge swathes of researchers have to retract/redo their research?

<comment><USER18> > but if the universals that are now commonly used have turned out to not > actually be true wouldn't that mean huge swathes of researchers have to > retract/redo their research?

Reproducibility is a major concern. Many experiments are poorly designed.

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716)

So, yes, about 60% of research needs to be redone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "why people who are less educated than me are too stupid to vote for who I tell them too"

<comment><USER8> "I'm a reasonable and intelligent person. I believe x. If you don't believe x, you're either stupid or unreasonable."

<comment><USER20> "Now that I have polarized you into my foil -insert Inigo Montoya quote-"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This needs to be very careful to avoid the mistake of taking "a sentence disagrees with science" as equivalent to "a sentence is pseudo profound bullshit" or you will get results that simply divide people into belief clades some of which are scientific and some of which are not.

An example, if I were to say, "a daily routine of banishing prevents the accumulation of low-level negative entities" that would be starkly in disagreement with science and _a true statement_ in the belief system of western occult magic.

Unless of course you simply wish to detect scientificness versus not, and label the whole of "not" as bullshit.

<comment><USER22> Can you recommend a good daily routine of banishing? My cubicle seems to be accumulating low-level negative entities.

<comment><USER21> The LBRP is reputed to be good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As an outsider, I found the technical term the profession chose (according to the study, I don't know that branch of study myself), to be profoundly distracting. The profession made a really bad choice by choosing to go with it.

It's literally vulgar slang. It's as though a report on being deemed sexual attractiveness called it "fuckability ". The profession should have called it "nonsense" or come up with some other qualifier, not chosen vulgar slang.

<comment><USER23> It's annoyed me periodically as well, in part because it's a bit of a stretch to call it a "technical term" (its precise definition is quite slippery between authors), and in part because to the extent there _is_ well-defined content, it's mostly just PR trying to oversell more narrow results, which would be better called by some more accurate term.

Imo the slang did work okay in its original formulation, where it was mostly just an attention-grabbing headline used by Harry Frankfurt as the title of his book _On Bullshit_. But that's a joke that works okay the first time, and gets old if you keep repeating it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > we want to note that the sample of the present study probably is not > representative of the US as our study is restricted to the specific sample > of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and has a relatively small sample size for > an online survey.

I guess one can publish this kind of bullshit in Psychology journals.

There is a crucial difference between experimental economics, and psychology. In economics experiments, participants get paid based on their performance. In this context, that would translate to one's payoff being determined by how well one distinguishes between bullshit and mundane statements.

When people get rewarded the same regardless of their responses, things tend to get dominated by people who are there to do the bare minimum, and get paid.

My gut feeling is that it is far more likely for participants who do not take the survey seriously to report supporting those Republican candidates. After all, participants also live in the same world, and they bring in all sorts of baggage which this study does nothing to control.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is a classic psychology journal ad-hominem:

[https://guscost.com/2016/03/31/the-psychology-journal-ad- hom...](https://guscost.com/2016/03/31/the-psychology-journal-ad-hominem/)

</comment><comment><USER26> "We obtained complete data from 196 US-American individuals who participated in an online study via Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service where researchers can post jobs (such as responding to a questionnaire) which can be completed by users of Amazon Mechanical Turk Only demographic information about sex, age, and in what country participants live was collected"

I imagine the type of people who seek income from Mechanical Turk can skew these results significantly.

</comment><comment><USER27> I haven't read the full article yet but this reminds me of a study last year "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit" which was published in the journal Judgment & Decision Making and was a fun read[1].

I will post the conclusion here which is rather funny:

> Bullshit is a consequential aspect of the human condition. Indeed, with the > rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more > bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before. Profundity ratings for > statements containing a random collection of buzzwords were very strongly > correlated with a selective collection of actual "Tweets" from Deepak > Chopra's "Twitter" feed (r's = .88–89). At the time of this writing, Chopra > has over 2.5 million followers on "Twitter" and has written more than twenty > New York Times bestsellers. Bullshit is not only common; it is popular.3 > Chopra is, of course, just one example among many. Using vagueness or > ambiguity to mask a lack of meaningfulness is surely common in political > rhetoric, marketing, and even academia (Sokal, 2008). Indeed, as intimated > by Frankfurt (2005), bullshitting is something that we likely all engage in > to some degree (p. 1): "One of the most salient features of our culture is > that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes > his share." One benefit of gaining a better understanding of how we reject > other's bullshit is that it may teach us to be more cognizant of our own > bullshit. The construction of a reliable index of bullshit receptivity is an > important first step toward gaining a better understanding of the underlying > cognitive and social mechanisms that determine if and when bullshit is > detected. Our bullshit receptivity scale was associated with a relatively > wide range of important psychological factors. This is a valuable first step > toward gaining a better understanding of the psychology of bullshit.

[1][http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> I can already see how there will be a meaningful and useful debate here. Politically charged articles are always like that.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is funny and all but I fear their accepting articles like this damages the cause for PLoS long term. OA journals already have enough trouble with reputation and prestige, which is the main reason Elsevier et al are still in business, and articles like this (and there are too many examples IMO) don't really help.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder what misperceiving the bullshit that is this study as profound says about someone.

<comment><USER31> That's precisely what makes this article brilliant on multiple levels. I'm a hard core lefty who thinks the Dems are too conservative and I'm laughing with the paper and at myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "It may be that this finding and the present research in general has an impact on some conservatives in that they might evaluate statements more critically. _We invite individuals to start with the present contribution._ "

(emphasis mine)

</comment><comment><USER33> It's not discussed in the paper, but another important point is line between lies and bullshit, and the reality distorting effects of BS:

"For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off. … He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are."

[https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not- liar](https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar)

<comment><USER34> I just commented elsewhere, but the Trump University suits are fraud suits. They're exactly about bullshit _and_ lying.

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

<comment><USER33> Didn't mean to imply that bullshit excludes lying, just that bullshit instead erodes the concept of truth in people's minds. Thankfully there are laws and records that are less easily eroded...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Alternative hypotheses regarding the 'misperceiving [random] statements as profound ' group: maybe the group is: 1) more polite? 2) more efficient? (less time wasted on the task - more money per unit time) 3) more fond of poetry? 4) more religious? I think this last would be an interesting hypothesis to test, but like the authors, I have _NO_ evidence that would support any of these hypotheses. However, unlike the authors, it appears I recognize that there is a lack of evidence :)

</comment><comment><USER36> Funnily, the correlation is higher for Cruz than Trump, also the correlation of mundane statements with profoundness is higher for Clinton (higher than the corr. of BS with Trump)

<comment><USER37> Trump's campaign personality is not exactly a bullshitter, and that seems to be a major component of his appeal. The things he says are often stupid, dangerous or wrong, but they're not bullshit in the sense of the OP's study.

"We should build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" is not bullshit (and therefore it's easy to evaluate how wrong it is). "There needs to be a strong resolve to promote intergovernmental dialogue which can meaningfully improve the lives of millions along the border" would be an example of bullshit about the same topic.

<comment><USER38> Doesn't the latter actually mean something? I agree the structure of the sentence is a bit tortured, but it clearly means that someone should advocate vehemently for the two governments to set up a meeting to discuss how to help out people living on the border.

<comment><USER37> The latter sentence was the first empty thing that came to my mind, so any meaning is accidental. Even though it superficially means something, there's no "who, what, how" in that sentence: who should advocate for the dialogue, what that dialogue should consist of, or how it would help the people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's very bad for PLoS to use these clickbaity titles.

<comment><USER40> What title would you use instead?

<comment><USER39> "Mechanical Turk users who favor conservatives are more receptive to high-BSR statements."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Apparently, in the article's comment section the word "bullshit" triggers a profanity filter.

[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Ad...](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F01a8325f-089b-434b-badd-7d9b99dadfd0)

</comment><comment><USER42> Jason Silva is bullshit.

The League on love [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKGP33tKSk&t=40s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKGP33tKSk&t=40s)

Jason silva on love [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OXfohJQdCA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OXfohJQdCA)

<comment><USER43> My life is slightly worse having watched those videos

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> They don't mention Researcher Allegiance Effect. Therefore I suspect they did nothing about it. Given the nature of the study, I feel comfortable ignoring the results on that alone, without bothering to find specific methodological flaws.

</comment><comment><USER45> I found almost as laughable the statement that Ds were susceptible to mistaking mundane statements as profound.

D: 2+2=4. Wow man! R: 2+2=5. That's what happens when you cut taxes for job creators!

</comment><comment><USER46> The original source for the pseudo-profound bullshit seems to be [http://wisdomofchopra.com/](http://wisdomofchopra.com/)

</comment><comment><USER47> I now know to ignore anything from plos.org, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's also true that oftentimes ideas that are truly profound are instead perceived as bullshit.

<comment><USER49> But it's extremely rare for a presidential candidate to ever make a truly profound statement.

One exception is Mike Gravel's performance art piece [1], and his after-the- fact explanation of it that he gave later [2].

"I figured out that this is a metaphor. That one is focusing on one life. And then you turn around, throw a rock. That creates ripples. And then you go off to your demise. And lo and behold, the drop in the water becomes our logo."

[1] Mike Gravel - Rock: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8)

[2] Mike Gravel Explains The Rock Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_zu3EHJAY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_zu3EHJAY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is a correlation study on Bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is a correlation Bullshit study.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is deep

</comment><comment><USER52> perspective is crucial; this conflict will continue</comment>


Things I have learnt as the software engineering lead of a multinational - <AUTHOR> https://minnenratta.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/things-i-have-learnt-as-the-software-engineering-lead-of-a-multinational/ <comment><USER2> Point 1 resonated with me (and its value outweighs that of the others by an order of magnitude IMO):

> When the plan is foggy, that's the moment to communicate as broadly as > possible. In fact you should not frame it as a plan, you frame it as the > situation and the final state you want to achieve. When you have a detailed > plan, that's when you DON'T need to communicate broadly. So, clearly state > the situation and clearly state the foggy goal to everyone who will listen.

This is a great way to clarify a complex problem, draw out and resolve disagreements in understanding, enlist others' help, and methodically arrive at the optimal solution. It also works well for all kinds of problems, whether they be engineering-related, organizational, or interpersonal.

<comment><USER3> This really is an exceptionally good article, written by a pragmatic and insightful student of working life.

I have often experienced the following but could never have described it as elegantly:

> Incompetence is fiercely gregarious while knowledge is often fractious; the > reason for this is that raw ideas transfer more easily through untrained > minds than refined ideas transfer through trained minds. There's a reason > why large organisations focus so much on simple messages, pity that > difficult problems often have simple solutions that don't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Being overworked is not a good reason to hire. Instead, hire to be ready to > catch opportunities, not to survive the current battles.

I disagree - if you have overworked people, that is usually a red flag that you need more personnel and planning failed. It doesn't necessarily mean you should be hiring right at the moment, but it is a significant alarm bell that you should seriously consider starting to hire or you're going to chase away engineers.

<comment><USER5> >> Being overworked is not a good reason to hire. Instead, hire to be ready to catch opportunities, not to survive the current battles.

> I disagree - if you have overworked people, that is usually a red flag.

Overworked people is a red flag indeed, but it is usually a symptom of a deeper problem that is unlikely to be solved with more hires. I think the author hits the nail on the head here -- first and foremost hire for future opportunities.

<comment><USER6> > Overworked people is a red flag indeed, but it is usually a symptom of a > deeper problem that is unlikely to be solved with more hires.

Not necessarily. Accepting a new project or extra responsibilities in exchange for a generous sum may increase your company's workload unexpectedly, which leads to overworked people while the company struggles with the hiring process. Another example is losing a team member right before crunch time.

<comment><USER5> Sure, there are exceptions. For example, I do not see a team flying out for a 2 60+ hour week test campaign as a red flag as long as the participation is mostly voluntary and the team gets an ample opportunity to detox after the fact.

The exceptions, for me, have three key properties: (1) they are temporary, (2) overworked people know that it is temporary and have a clear (maybe not 100% realistic) date for return to normalcy and (3) this state of affairs is seen by most of the team as acceptable at the moment: not pleasant, but bearable and probably least bad of all options.

If (1) and (2) hold, (3) is usually easy to achieve with sweeteners: $x bonus, T extra vacation, etc. But break either of the three and you have a clear red flag. Just my 2c.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article is too abstract for me. I don't have enough leadership experience to relate to what is being said. I'd be grateful if someone could rewrite this article with some concrete examples. I am sure there are many others in the same boat as I am. They will find this useful too.

<comment><USER8> Getting lots of people together to work on a large problem is an engineering problem in itself. It has its own language and constructs. Doing it wrong means millions or billions are wasted, and enterprises lose ground on the world stage.

Some of these ideals don't translate well to smaller scale. A 5 person team doesn't have to work out much except the work. How do you get 1000 people to agree on a plan, an IDE, a language, and to row in the same direction? Not magic. Study and practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a bit confused by the authors use of the words entropy and entropic, starting specifically with this point:

> _Don't let entropy get at your daily routine. Avoid entropy-driven work_

In a physical sense, my understanding of entropy is that it's a degenerative phenomenon, a lowest common denominator - it doesn't create anything. This point means avoiding distracting or sporadic work, which is a test of discipline. But the rest of this point and others further down using words like 'entropy-driven' work are meaningless.

I'm sure there's a good point to be made here about valuable work in large corporations, but the (over)use of the word entropy has lost me.

<comment><USER10> Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system, so my interpretation here was that you shouldn't take on work that was generated by organizational disorder. An example I have in mind is when someone on the product side asks for a new feature that you know wouldn't take much time at all. Even though you could knock it out quickly, the correct action is to have them go through proper feature request channels.

<comment><USER11> Your example is right on the money. I used to be consumed by organizational disorder, and even worse, wasn't aware that it was happening. Agile is no magic solution but it can be a vehicle to creating organizational order if you need it, especially if it's a hot buzz word in your company.

<comment><USER12> Scrum, if you do it right, is precisely the solution. Scrum specifically rejects the idea of "just doing something on the side".

Unfortunately, most organizations believe in cults and magic, and believe (and act) that Scrum is a cargo cult where you say the magic words and hold the magic rituals and get the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "When the plan is foggy, that's the moment to communicate as broadly as possible."

Here's a good rule of thumb: Ask them to explain what has to be done, and then count the number of times they say "it should be pretty straightforward".

Consider those multipliers of complexity.

<comment><USER14> I apply a similar algorithm, except I use the word "just" as variable. As in "we could just stick this in a DB", or "isn't it just about adding a checkbox to the page?"

<comment><USER15> Using Just and extremely easy should be where you make a milestone for each statement(s) after that .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _There are some very rare cases where delivery date is more important than what you are delivering, but modern management seems to delight in generalizing this unusual occurrence to every situation. People do get promoted for having been able to deliver completely broken, useless and damaging solutions on time. If that's the measure of project success you can expect dates to rule (even when they continuously slide). After all, if you are not a trained surgeon, and the only thing you are told is that a given surgery should last no more than X hours, guess what will be the one criterium for all your actions during the operation._

I love that metaphor.

<comment><USER17> Yeah but not all things are like surgery. Often, « A good violent attack now is better than a perfect one next week » (George S. Patton)

<comment><USER18> That doesn't apply to software development unless you're a startup with limited funding and no positive cash flow. In the vast majority of cases, the software is already released and making money. Whether you finish the next release in 1 month or 2 is of no practical importance, except that it makes the manager look good. He can report a larger profit margin because the cost that went into that release is roughly half if it was released in 1 month rather than 2.

And therein lies the conflict that this post doesn't really address or resolve: there's rarely a discernible difference in revenue between a high quality release and a buggy, low quality release, but the profit margin of the former can be (and often is) much lower. A great real world example of this is PUBG.

<comment><USER19> Since you picked a gaming example, I would like to present the idea that in gaming the opposite is true.

If you have a live game that you intend to last a long time, it's extremely important to establish a reliable release cadence that the players can depend on.

Our company first released our game in 2012. After release we didn't know how important this is. We just kinda made updates and released them when we finished them.

The player numbers never went above what we had at release. For a few years our numbers were pretty flat. We would have up releases and down releases but we never broke our initial numbers.

Then we changed to a cycle of having a release every 3 months.

This was a massive improvement. Most players won't keep playing your game continuously forever, but if they always know that there will be a thing to come back for, and when that will be, they will stop playing before they are burned out with a plan to come back.

Suddenly our numbers grew with every release. Each 3 month cycle saw a large percentage increase over the previous one.

After a few years of that our game is massively larger than it was at release, and it's still growing with each subsequent release.

I'm not saying that it's okay to release a buggy game, you have to scope each release so that you can do it on time without being too buggy. What I am saying is that the release schedule is actually really really important.

<comment><USER20> For context to other readers, Negitivefrags is talking about Path of Exile[0] and seems to be downplaying the success GGG has achieved in the last few years. The regular release of compelling content has driven PoE into a great position as the market leader for ARPGs.

One thing they didn't mention is that the regular release cycle lets you mess up and recover. For example, the Essence league(a 3 month batch of content) was underwhelming for most players. However, the Breach league following that regrew any goodwill that might've been lost.

[0] [https://pathofexile.com](https://pathofexile.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _> If you feel like you don't know what you are doing it's probably because you don't know what you are doing and that's bad._

I think this one depends on one's personality. I know people who have been relatively successful in their role for years who still regularly express impostor syndrome.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Incompetence is fiercely gregarious while knowledge is often fractious; the > reason for this is that raw ideas transfer more easily through untrained > minds than refined ideas transfer through trained minds.

This resonated with me and definitely gave me food for thought. Raw ideas with uninformed opinions can easily percolate throughout organizations and even across the industry. Feels like something we as a society need to more actively guard against.

<comment><USER23> I think this explains a great deal and was a concept I had been mulling over myself recently: basically there's an asymmetry in clueffulness that works to propagate cap around much more widely than you'd expect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> OT, but: funny, I felt the name was familiar, and turns out I commented on a post on this blog 12 years ago[0]. A reading lost due to the death of google reader, I presume.

[0] How time flies! [https://minnenratta.wordpress.com/2005/12/23/le- proporzioni-...](https://minnenratta.wordpress.com/2005/12/23/le-proporzioni- del-mondo/)

</comment><comment><USER25> > Teams don't self-organize unless you organize them to do so.

...or, teams self-organize _unless_ you have organized them not to, in which case, if you want them to self-organize, you have to hire an Agile coach and start putting up posters telling people what it means to be "self directed" and fire everyone who is insufficiently short-term in their thinking.

/s

</comment><comment><USER26> Nitpicking.

> 20\. The Sith are right, rage propels. But the Jedi are right, you must not > let it control yourself. What nobody tells you is that the rage game is > intrinsically tiring and rage will take control as soon as you get too > tired, so stop well before.

37\. Don't assume everyone reading your article gets the Star Wars reference.

<comment><USER27> Speaking as someone that has never seen Star Wars, I still get his point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> _Teams don't self-organize unless you organize them to do so._

Interesting. I wish there was a bit more detail on _how_ you organize them to do so...

<comment><USER29> Seating arrangements. Be it putting people who work well together in adjacent offices, or on adjacent tables.

Giving people freedom and allowance for failure, not having a strict "I am the boss" micromanaging hierarchy on the team.

Reward people for taking initiative. Find work that people want to do, and give them time to do it on their own but only if they self organize all of it, this builds necessary skills.

Taking someone who looks like they may have leadership potential aside and asking them to take on a small feature.

Combine all these together and you'll come in one day and find your team in a huddle tackling tasks together.

Requirements: Not being an insecure manager. Knowing that your value to the team and org is not in telling people what to do, but rather in helping them do what needs to be done. Sometimes this means communicating directives from on high, other times it means getting the team the resources that they've determined they need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Most people are commenting on what bullet points they agreed or disagreed most with. I am sure, however, that there are other software engineering leads on HN --- what other lessons have you learned, and/or what were the best resources to learn them (if not just experience).

</comment><comment><USER17> I have to disagree slightly on the paragraph about dates (#32). Engineers leaders cannot dismiss dates as one of the metric of their performances. The metric is not the goal nor the means in itself, though. In my view, entropic organization and management make this mistake constantly of confusing the metric with the job, like driving a car looking at the speed meter and not at the road (sounds absurd, I know, but is really what happens).

<comment><USER31> For a competent team, arbitrary dates, generally leaving not enough time, only serve to limit scope. A competent team will produce as fast as is possible, given a specified scope.

<comment><USER32> Right. I wish more managers/coaches/masters understood this.

Features are done when they're done (for a given definition of "done"). Once we're satisfied with what we have, we release it. Otherwise we keep working, or we scope down.

Strict deadlines are seemingly based on financial period expectations, rather than on what actually produces better software, and thus, ironically, more revenue for the same stockholders who were demanding a date. It seems more of a short-term strategy than long-term.

Anyway, that's my pessimistic, armchair interpretation of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Favorite quote:

> Delivery dates have often irrelevant but very simple to understand impacts. > Good and bad solutions have dramatic but very difficult to understand > impacts.

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice list, although I was horrified by one (sorry to need to pick on the one thing that was bad):

>Being overworked is not a good reason to hire. Instead, hire to be ready to catch opportunities, not to survive the current battles.

That's why we as programmers should say no to overwork, because only then will they see the need to hire. I only do overwork when some unexpected disaster happens, or when there is a sudden huge opportunity. In the other cases, they should plan better or hire more people, simple as that.

<comment><USER11> > 24\. Don't let entropy get at your daily routine. Avoid entropy-driven work.

Your anecdote is rule 24 in practice. Good job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Being overworked is not a good reason to hire."

Because the world certainly needs more sociopathic management advice.

<comment><USER36> Rereading the advice, I think he means hire before you get to overworked. I agree it's phrased poorly.

<comment><USER37> I agree with his advice and not yours. Good candidates are a good reason to hire. Overworked is a good reason to reexamine priorities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> All of the comments about entropic organizations ring true and hit close to home. Way too close to home.

<comment><USER39> The idea that entropy works on the direction of "hard work -> easy work", instead of "complex work -> simple work" or even "more work -> less work" is a great insight.

<comment><USER40> Could you please elaborate on this?

<comment><USER39> The articles has some examples on the difficult -> easy propagation. Like discovering what a company does well and creating a vision that uses it is difficult; joining all current projects and creating a slogan that fits them all to use as a vision is easy. Measuring impact is difficult; setting and measuring deadlines is easy.

There is more there. I leads to an "I know it when I see it" understanding. If I tried to compress it into a definition I would certainly miss lots of relevant details, at least without refining it for some time, so I won't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Thing one: use "learnt" instead of "learned" to sound multinational. ;)

<comment><USER7> So it is true Americans don't use past participles?

<comment><USER41> At least in this case yes. For us the past participle would simply be "learned"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> >Mass emails and top-down communication are not taboo: just because most such communications are irrelevant it doesn't mean yours will be perceived as such.

Mine are always perceived as such :-(

<comment><USER43> Have you considered studying how you communicate? There was something on HN recently titled How to write emails like a CEO (or similar).

I studied my old CEO's communication style, holding it up against how many of my peers communicated. I noticed that he got right to the point, expecting other people to assume he considered multiple ancillary points. My (lower status) peers' emails would meander, and read like they wanted to show their superiors how good/smart they were at their job, and that they thought of every last thing.

The high status person didn't feel the need to pre-emptively brain dump.

My larger point is if your emails are perceived in such a way, it's worth improving.

<comment><USER30> Along similar lines: I often write an e-mail with all of the information I want to include, and read it over and edit it several times to cut down on things that aren't necessary. The unnecessary things can be as simple as an awkward prepositional phrase, but often they are a technicality that is hogging too much space in the e-mail.

I personally think this really improves my communication. In a workplace where people are expected to read through dozens of emails each day, it makes a difference in the information that's finally conveyed to my colleagues, which is often what matters the most to me.

<comment><USER43> Great point. I wonder how often people shoot emails out without serious editing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> >>Construction work is not a good metaphor for software/product development. Factory work neither.

I like this, really fed up with everyone comparing software development with construction work and/or building a house. Don't compare those, apples to oranges. Sure, borrow the best, most appropriate things, techniques, methodologies, approaches and not just from construction. Just don't compare.

<comment><USER11> Avoid metaphors in general. In my experience, metaphors lead to discussion about the correctness of the metaphor instead of the subject the metaphor was referring to. This is a waste of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Interestingly he (she?) seems confused and rage driven (!) over entropic organisations - i think the main issue with entropic organisations is simply size - there is no organisational approach that can ever make hundreds of thousands of people co-ordinate in a positive manner.

we don't lack the technology, just that there is no good strategy at that level.

</comment><comment><USER46> _Fire people whenever you can. There's often someone to fire, but not many opportunities to do so. When you are given a lot of opportunities to fire people_

I like this. Put another way "we are a team not a family."

[https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664](https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664)

<comment><USER47> Companies like Netflix have the cachet and can retain people despite an anti- worker culture. It's also a self selecting group of over-achievers who may like the environment.

I'd argue most above average but not stellar workers would not put up with Netflix's implicit demands.

<comment><USER46> I would gladly work for a place like Netflix for a year or two, bust my butt, put it on my resume and move on. My market value would make it well worth it.

<comment><USER48> Having worked at a "name" company is not the big boost to your value lots of people think it is. That's a lie that those big companies use to get people to accept bad working conditions.

<comment><USER46> You can't just "work" at the company, you have to produce.

There was an anecdote about Netflix about how a group of engineers who were top performers were let go after they did their part in transistioning Netflix's data center to AWS.

So should we feel bad for the people that got laid off? They will be some of the most sought after people in the industry.

<comment><USER48> That's exactly it. And the thing is no matter where you worked, if you did great things and have great skills, you're going to get opportunities and recognition. If you don't have the skills and don't do the work, it doesn't matter where you filled a seat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This list made me realize I have only ever seen Entropic Organizations. Is there even any other kind?

</comment><comment><USER50> A great article mostly nailing problem descriptions. This is usually represented too briefly. I believe "The Entropic Organization" (Teo) would be a highly cited book, cited by all kinds of management books emphasizing the solutions. Please, write TEO.

</comment><comment><USER51> Looking at things related to Entropy I can can clearly see the company I'm working for(which is sad).Considering that I'm not at leadership position, my next action is to quit and find a better one.

<comment><USER52> It really resonates with me and a job I used to have too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm not sure if this is brilliant advice or really bad advice.

</comment><comment><USER54> > People appreciate when you fire the right people, so don't worry about > morale.

When you select for sociopaths, you get sociopaths.

</comment><comment><USER55> Title whinge: a multinational what?

(That's not intended as a pedant's review of the article, just a note on the title presented on HN, which was praised in a recent thread for making even small changes to improve the grammar and quality of the site.)

<comment><USER56> "Multinational" is in regular use (reflected in most current dictionaries) as a standalone noun with an equivalent meaning to the noun phrase "multinational corporation".</comment></comment>


iOS 11.0.1 availble - <AUTHOR> https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201222 <comment><USER2> I hope they'll bring some fix for battery drain as soon as possible.

<comment><USER3> i was hoping a restore would mitigate this... but nope

so far on 11.0.1 all morning(and after charging up during and after the update, and doing a fresh restore of 11.0 just last night) it doesn't seem any better at all. This is on a 6S+ that has something like 90% capacity left on the battery

<comment><USER4> Restored as new and not from backup?</comment></comment></comment>


Why Apple's Artificial Intelligence Acquisition Is Much Bigger Than Siri - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/10/03/why-apples-artificial-intelligence-acquisition-is-much-bigger-than-siri/ <comment><USER2> I don't care as long as the AI is pink!</comment>


Zoom introduces all-in-one home communications appliance for $599 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/15/zoom-introduces-all-in-one-home-communications-appliance-for-599/ <comment><USER2> Given their security SNAFUs I'm surprised anyone would want their tech in their home for free let alone 600 bucks

<comment><USER3> regular users dont care about security issues

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish more companies experimented with in-home appliances, particularly for cases where it means being able to drop a dependency on cloud infrastructure. The only company that seems to have made inroads is Amazon with Alexa, but like the Zoom appliance here, it encourages cloud dependence rather than relieve it.

The price point here reminds me of the Helm email appliance, though, in that they're both too expensive to realistically make a dent in changing mainstream habits.

<comment><USER3> > I wish more companies experimented with in-home appliances

have to disagree. I want the least amount of corporations in my home as possible

<comment><USER4> ... so don't buy the appliances.

Based on the two comments you left here, it seems as if your main motivation is to be glib and contrarian. It's almost like _yes-and_ ing, except doing the opposite and just for the sake of it.

<comment><USER3> I don't plan on buying them :)

<comment><USER4> > glib</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best technology for an open sourced voting platform? - <AUTHOR>

Trying to build an open sourced voting platform (found here: https://github.com/acmeyer9/us-election-voting-platform) and wanted to know what technologies would be best. <comment><USER2> When you say technologies, what do you mean?</comment>


How a bullet turns into a beep (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070104-12/?p=28513 <comment><USER2> I'm confused. The article seems to suggest that it's unintended behaviour, but it's not being reported as a bug, instead it seems to be a curiosity. Is this how Microsoft tends to handle these things?

<comment><USER3> For the command prompt specifically, I believe Microsoft's policy basically boils down to "the correct behavior is whatever it's doing now." It's provided primarily for backwards compatibility, and someone somewhere is relying on every single 'bug' in it, so any fixes they try to make will inevitably break some twenty-year-old process or another.

[The above information is being vaguely recalled from something on Raymond's blog, but if someone has an actual reference it would be greatly appreciated.]

<comment><USER4> The right fix would be to remove your dependency on the OEM code page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Should be labeled (2007)

<comment><USER6> Thanks; added.</comment></comment>


Apple Card bills can't be paid online if you lose your iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-card-bill-cant-pay-online-if-you-lose-iphone-2019-8 <comment><USER2> Also there is no way to export your transaction data (even to CSV)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you suggest I do? - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=gmiM79Jn

<comment><USER2> Have you tried taking some time off and just traveling and trying new things? You have quite a bit saved up and you could probably take a leave of absence or something.

Maybe get a difference perspective. I think there are a ton of emerging markets that you could do well in, but obviously better if you can find something new that you can be passionate about.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's been in the front of my mind. I think 1-3 months completely disconnected could do some good. I always fear though that either nothing will come out of it and/or my current gig won't be waiting for me.

I do make a point to travel as much as I can each year; I usually visit at least one new US city, and at least one foreign country. It's something I'm incredibly passionate about. But it's more for a typical vacation rather than a personal improvement trip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a contractor, can you cut back your hours, to split it between the "bill paying" work and the "soul-feeding" work you want to do? Have you looked at other means of happiness; like volunteering, teaching kids to code, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't asked but I don't think that would be possible. It would probably depend on the project I'm currently on. There's times I'm working solo on something and can easily afford to not be around for some time. But most of the time, I'm working with a team both on our end and the client end, we have daily calls and collaboration, strict deadlines, and every so often I'm the one leading things.

If I were to say I'd only be around 20 hours, my guess is they would find someone else to take my place.

That's a good thing you brought up - looking at other things that could bring some alternate forms of happiness. The answer is no. I'm so fixated on fixing/changing my situation that I haven't thought of anything outside of that -- except when the weekend rolls around where I try to leave everything at the desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It's hard to explain to people the job I have, how easy it is, how I work > from home, answer to no one, make about 120K/year, and I'm miserable about > it. How do you explain that?

I'm not sure you realize how lucky you've been until now. There are people out there who would _kill_ for 120K/year and people who will never have that much savings _after a lifetime_ of work. Never forget your blessings!

<comment><AUTHOR> I know - I don't argue what you said at all. I know it sounds horrible when I put it that way. Maybe I was a little too blunt. I obviously appreciate it and know I've been very lucky and fortunate. It's a shame that I write off what most would consider a winning lottery ticket.

But in the end, I really hate doing it and waking up every morning to. I feel like I'm just wasting every single day that passes. And the money isn't making it any better. Maybe it's because I've never struggled for money so I don't appreciate it as much.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's also what you said that prevents me from just walking away from it. I feel like you'd have to be insane to..

<comment><USER4> Forgive me, I wrote that last night. I realize now my post does sound very preachy and I should not guilt trip you into keeping your job! I showed you sympathy instead of empathy. So here's an actual advice:

take 1 year off with your girlfriend to travel around the world and brainstorm business ideas. [http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/how-to-travel-around-the-world- fo...](http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/how-to-travel-around-the-world-for-a-year/) Alex Maccaw spent $22.000 (you'll spend at worst +-$44K with your girlfriend) and most of that money went into the flight tickets he bought at [http://www.oneworld.com/](http://www.oneworld.com/) (check it out, you can design your own journey around the world). There are many ways to make it even cheaper.

If you want to gain some kind of following or traction, you could have a blog where you describe your adventures and realizations about business, life, everything.

I'm telling you because this is one of my dreams as well. I highly recommend you to read the whole article... you may even find out that you like the idea of _programming on the road_.

If you're interested in other nomadic-related articles, check out: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8971345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8971345)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TechCrunch releases new site design - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com

<comment><USER2> As I scroll down I see the same articles repeat over and over</comment>


Ask HN: How do you ask other seniors questions and not get shit on long-term? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed that when I ask other seniors questions I don't know the answers of, or that I even know the answers of but just want to make sure(the case most of the time),
they immediately start thinking they're better than me, they start questioning any technical decision I make in a humiliating way,
How can I talk with other seniors without them feeling superior over the long-run? <comment><USER2> Maybe find a better place to work? I was at Microsoft for for years and asked dumb questions of some of the smartest people in the world. They never, ever made me feel bad about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> > They never, ever made me feel bad about it.

I think this is what real seniors are about, they avoid making others feel inferior.

> Maybe find a better place to work?

I want to, but the other senior was a friend of mine that I don't want to lose.

Do you know how I can fix things and regain my respect?

<comment><USER3> > they start questioning any technical decision I make in a humiliating way,

You regain respect by getting clarity on what they meant when they said the humiliating thing. "When we were X, you said Y. By that, did you mean to imply Z?"

They'll either clarify that they didn't mean Z or they will double down and explicitly ridicule you.

In the first case, problem solved. Maybe you talk about why his words would make a reasonable person feel ridiculed, maybe you don't. Either way, you've eliminated the possibility of misinterpretation, which always exists when humans communicate.

In the second case, you need to actually confront him about that if you want to gain respect. Look him in the eye and say something like, "Okay look dude, we're here to help each other learn and solve problems. If you're going to ridicule someone for asking a clearly-framed question, you're not doing a good job at that. That's a serious problem. How can I help you practice that?"

Is this confrontational and therefore uncomfortable? Absolutely. Does it require enduring an uneasy feeling in your bowels as you stand up straight and maintain eye contact? yep. But being willing to deal with uncomfortable situations, keep calm, and drive problem-solving-focused confrontation is necessary for the sort of leadership that earns the respect you are looking for.

<comment><USER4> > "Okay look dude, we're here to help each other learn and solve problems. If > you're going to ridicule someone for asking a clearly-framed question, > you're not doing a good job at that. That's a serious problem. How can I > help you practice that?"

It might be just me, but this comes across as condescending or patronising. I'd be inclined to be more straight forward and just say something like "I was asking <your question> to <valid reason a senior would ask said question>. I don't appreciate you ridiculing me for what should be a perfectly normal thing to ask, so please don't do that again."

Obviously don't go that route if they aren't owning the ridicule. If they try to weasel out of it or be passive aggressive then sometimes you just have to pin people to their implications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a (somewhat) senior, I think its very hard to distance yourself from the core belief age == knows more. Its not just mansplaining (although I am sure I do this, hateful though it is) -It's like the human DNA is baked in to assume something which palpably isn't true, and frankly has never _been_ true.

The humiliating behaviour part is simply unacceptable. You might need to talk to HR and ask them to remind senior staffers not to do this, and that annual review process includes feedback on this kind of thing. The problem there being if you can be identified by context, you get all the negativity which goes with that kind of thing.

They sound like asshats, frankly. Is it possible they just need to be told to can the ass-hattery?

Bullies sometimes can't be stopped. They have to be avoided. The problem is that senior bullies are glued in place.

A cheats way out would be this:

actors: Ron, Frank (seniors) and Debby (junior, or disrespected less-senior)

Debby: hey, Ron, I think I heard frank say <theory of debby>

Ron: oh yea, thats true and cool

Debby: hey, Frank, I think I heard ron say <theory of debby>

Frank: oh, Ron, he's a complete twonk. Thats rubbish this is why...

Another cheats way out might be "..I read in Knuth that ..." or "Van Jacobsen said to me that ..." which puts the words into somebody else's mouth.

I read that to overcome the same structural behaviours in the Astrophysics community, some senior astronomers took to asking questions for PhDs because they weren't getting traction, and I have also read that Nils Bohr and others used to commit deliberate solecisms in workshops, to remind people anyone can make mistakes and encourage junior staff to speak out and correct them. Which is kind-of sad, manipulative, but what it says is "this is a problem of some long time.. " oh wait.. sorry.. sorry.. I'm doing it again...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughtful reply

> A cheats way

I see your cheats way is to put words into somebody else's mouth,

which should work in an environment where there are more than 2 senior devs, but we are only 2 seniors, so the "I read in Knuth that" method should work.

How can I get my respect back and not cheat around the issue? should I dive into more advanced topics and show it in my work?

<comment><USER5> Maybe, find a mentor outside this relationship and without breaching your NDA and company obligations explore your ideas, and competencies and gain back some sense of self-respect because somebody you trust shows you it again?

Professional development, in field can help. I have a colleague who does FP, but can't find enough tasks at work to use Haskell on, and he does a monthly functional-coders meetup and gets a huge amount out of it.

I found asking other people if they'd hire me gave me a lot of confidence around how I felt in role. I didn't waste their time actively seeking jobs, but exploring what you are worth outside your current role can be validating. It pays to have options.

My cheats way is really not ok btw. You can't sustain denying your own ideas. But, once you can get over the sense its a game they're playing and the actual ideas have merit, its somewhere to move from. You maybe get an ah-HAH moment from it but I suspect that doesn't play well

(37 years in, I'm only too well aware of hearing my own ideas played back at me. It used to infuriate me but now, I take it some kind of compliment they finally soaked in, if other people take ownership of them)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let go of your ego - what's wrong with somebody knowing something more than you? Aren't there topics you are an expert on? How do you handle it when someone asks you a question? If there is a marked difference between how you respond and they respond - maybe they are just a jerk or have bad social skills, that's not your problem. If you respond in a similar way when asked questions then it's just your ego having a hard time when the situation is reversed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ego can definitely be a problem here, I hope its not ego that caused this (and I don't think it is)

> If you respond in a similar way when asked questions then it's just your ego > having a hard time when the situation is reversed.

I 100% don't respond in any similar way.</comment></comment>


Can We Kill This Myth That The Internet Is A Wild West That Needs To Be Tamed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110527/13281714462/can-we-kill-off-this-myth-that-internet-is-wild-west-that-needs-to-be-tamed.shtml

<comment><USER2> The actual Wild West was many things. There were certainly outlaws, but most people were there to farm or mine or provide goods and services to farmers and miners. Those businesses needed clear laws about who owned a piece of land, so a complete set of laws evolved.

The best way to make laws is to watch what people decide amongst themselves in reasonable debates, then write down the rules. There are important questions still open. Can online crooks steal my accounts if they guess my password? Can some slimeball send me ten thousand emails about v1agra? Can adults have sexual conversations with minors online? Can email services read my mail, figure out my situation and show me relevant commercial solicitations?

Anyway, if someone would put together a template of proposed internet laws as a wiki I'd write some entries. I think they'd be fairer and clearer than laws written by companies, promoted by lobbyists, and voted on by politicians. They have done poorly in the past. The laws about tobacco, food and drugs, to name some glaring examples, are not well aligned with the public interest. So let's have an open public process for writing down some rules to live online by.

<comment><USER3> >There were certainly outlaws, but most people were there to farm or mine or provide goods and services to farmers and miners. Those businesses needed clear laws about who owned a piece of land, so a complete set of laws evolved.

Exactly. It's not just businesses, but it's also everyday people who aren't HN readers who want the Internet to work in a stable and predictable fashion. They didn't grow up developing services at the edges of the network; they are the people who use email and play Farmville and are just fine with that. They want their GMail to work without spam, they want viruses to stop, and they don't want to be spied on. These are not unreasonable demands. It's just that they happen to clash with the people who read HN and want the network to be free to grow around the edges rather than from the center.

The book Wild West 2.0 (<http://wildwest2.com>) talks a lot about this evolution. When we wrote it, we didn't realize that we were going to make the idea of naming worse -- we just thought it was a useful metaphor for the self- reliance and self-defense angles of the Internet. [Full disclosure, I am a co- author]

Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" (<http://futureoftheinternet.org/>) is also a great resource for this culture clash between open and closed frontier models of the Internet and how reasonable demands ("stop spam") lead to solutions that clash with the HN view of the Internet.

<comment> loup-vaillant You're not really thinking there actually is a clash between those reasonable demands and the desire for an free internet, right?

Because the best solutions happen to be implementable at the edge of the network: don't want viruses? Use GNU/Linux (-> needs an idiot-friendly distribution, or education), or use a good firewall (I bet a FreedomBox could fill this role) Don't want spying? Host your e-mail (-> needs a usable FreedomBox). Don't want spam? Use a spam filter on your FreedomBox (will probably be there by default).

Yeah, the FreedomBox is a damn fine hammer.

Now, if people are all lazy and just want their privacy, security, and tranquillity to be spoon-fed without them having to think about it, then the internet is doomed. But some of us aren't, so I have hope.

<comment><USER4> BTW I upvoted you to make your karma 1337 :-)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet>

<comment><USER4> I thought the HN crowd would have an appreciation for the number 1337.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I may be pointing out the obvious here, but a man from a newspaper hates the internet. The internet is killing newspapers. This probably isn't a coincidence. I am especially convinced of this because of the irrational arguments presented, as the argument correctly pointed out, the comment from The Guardian was hardly sensible. A dying industry clutching out to kill its replacement.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but I do disagree with this. Maybe 3-5 years ago I would agree, but for the most part the curmudgeons have left or been forced to leave the news business. That isn't to say that Luddites no longer exist in the media world, but the view that the Internet is the enemy has largely died out.

<comment><USER7> I don't work on fleet street, but I find this assertion hard to believe.

Firstly, the Internet most certainly is the enemy of the printed publication. In the sense that printed publications are dying because of the Internet. I'm not sure if the printed newspaper or magazine will exist at all 50 years from now, but if they do it's somewhat reasonable to assume they'll be a tiny fraction of the industry they are today.

Note I said _printed_.

Will journalism survive? Yes, there probably is a place for journalists, even on the Internet. However with the barrier to entry being near zero, and getting lower all the time the role of a traditional journalist will need to change substantially. There's a place for pay walls, and that will help existing news organizations survive, but their audience will be tiny compared to what say a popular blogger might get.

The value of a many-to-many communication system is that it allows people to communicate their opinion with zero barrier to entry. No degree. No fact checking. No paycheck. (Indeed much like this comment itself.)

50 years ago an article in the newspaper might generate some letters-to-the- editor, a select few of which might be published. Today literally everyone can comment and all replies are published, and indeed a conversation on the article ensues - whole sites (like hacker news) exist to promote that conversation.

This freedom of expression is dangerous to those who used to control public expression. Namely old-style "news" organizations and government. The one calls on the other to create more legislation.

The Internet is not the enemy of the printed news, because that war has alredy been lost. The Internet is the enemy of the professional journalist though who now has to compete with everyone to be heard. There are lots of good journalists who have successfully made the transition, but many will find it hard to compete out here in the colonies.

The internet isn't the wild west. It's the new world.

<comment><USER6> I don't see printed media dying any time soon. Television never killed radio; radio just changed tactics. Every time a new medium came out, it meant the end of the others and it never really happened.

That said, what I'm saying is essentially what you're saying. Many in the news business (which should really be called the advertising business) see their futures online and are transitioning their core business to it.

It's not like they can, or should, do it overnight, though. There's still a lot of money to be made on the sun-setting industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I actually end up use the above description, "Internet as Wild West" quite a bit when trying to explain the internet to computer-illiterate people, because for some reason their skepticism filter fades away and they become all-too- trusting when the medium is something they are unfamiliar with. They seem to think that if someone was able to get something posted on the internet, well that person must certainly be a smart being in a position of goodwill.

Sure the internet functions as an information superhighway. It also functions as a den of thieves and swindlers, and people who elevate scams and pseudoscience to the look and feel of accurate information through mere the power of website presentation.

I have to tell my mother that just because something is on the internet doesn't mean it is _important_ or _true_ , and it certainly doesn't mean that the author necessarily has good intentions. I _want_ her to consider it a Wild West.

The article accuses the narrative of sticking because it is "compelling" in the fanciful way, but I think the counter-argument here is the same problem. In many ways the internet _is_ a Wild West. I think the argument is much more nuanced than saying it's not. I think the harder argument needs to be made with the wild west aspect as a given, but that an authoritarian clamp would make it a worse-off place.

<comment><USER9> I've learned web development over the past year. I can throw together a reasonable looking site, sell a reasonable product and obtain the most highly sensitive information from my customers in the process: their email and a password to my site, which, for probably about 50% of the population, is the same password for their email account and most other sites they visit.

And I have no training in database security.

Yeee haaaaw!

<comment><USER10> One would hope you're storing the passwords as salted hashes (preferably bcrypt) so that passwords won't get leaked no matter how bad you are at database security.

<comment><USER2> One would hope so. But many websites that keep personal data aren't very secure. Personal information is stolen online pretty often, and it often seems in hindsight that their information security was embarrassingly slack.

If you're a heavy internet user, your information is almost certainly stored in a database sitting on a machine running Windows XP. There can be several security patches in a month, and sys admins can be slow to install them. Are you OK with that?

<comment><USER11> I would change your "many" to "almost all". Very few websites, even sites that really should know much better (like Newegg or Gawker, both catering to technical audiences), actually implement things in a known safe manner. Many just do plaintext (like Newegg) and many an archaic and/or useless obfuscation mechanism (like Gawker's use of DES).

You should always act defensively when relying on any third-party. Very few are trustworthy. Use a reliable password management system for your passwords (like KeePass or mailing GPG-crypted passwords to yourself) and generate a unique pass for each site. Use a unique mail if you can. If you're storing any data on there, make sure it is encrypted and triple encrypted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems that politicians all over the world are starting to really press this issue, and even get the press to promote these ideas for them. I don't think they realize what they are about to start here. I think they underestimate how much people want the Internet to remain free, and how many want it to remain free. I feel the next few years will be very interesting.

The TechDirt post was referring to this article:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/26/internet...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/26/internet- controls-cameron-sarkozy)

<comment><USER13> I think you give people too much credit. People don't see the Internet as the new printing press. They see it as an improved entertainment device.

<comment><USER14> Ask your local small business owner how much they appreciate being able to have their own website. Previously their options for letting people know about their business were newspaper advertising, yellow pages or TV.

<comment><USER13> Oh, don't worry, your website license will be part of a business registration package.

Most people consider such things a minor inconvenience.

<comment><AUTHOR> In China you already have to apply for a website license (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license>). And most people do not care about it very much. I once made a site with a friend from China, and he applied for the ICP license, even though the server was in the US and there was not a single word in Chinese on the site. In my friend's opinion it was a natural thing to do for a law abiding citizen.

<comment><USER13> China is a North American politician's wet dream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the Internet will end up regulated. The question is, what kind of regulation? Want net neutrality? That's regulation. Guarantee of privacy of your search engine history? Regulation. Freedom from email snooping without a court order? Regulation. Taxation of purchases? Recourse from anonymous online harassment and libel? Child protection from pedophiles and child pornography? Terrorists?

At a gross level, Democrats/liberals want to regulate corporate interaction with the Internet and Republicans/conservatives want to regulate personal interaction. In this respect the Internet is no different than other sectors.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why should the Internet not reflect the values of society, as reflected in existing regulations on cars, media, etc.? If people want the Internet to remain free they should work to change the template: free up control over other aspects of our civilization a If that fails, then society doesn't really value what you value.

<comment><USER16> You are a much less cynical person than myself if you think that society is a reflection of its members' values. There is a mismatch between what people say/think that they value, and what people actually value. It takes only sidelong glance at the current political climate in the US to see myriad examples of people voting against their own best interests.

By and large, people expect the status quo, and as it has been, so shall it be. Had the internet been born in some corporate boardroom - restricted, tiered, filtered - people would expect nothing more.

I suspect we only a few rebrands from control be wrested away - look at Verizon/Google's net neutrality bill making a distinction between wired and wireless internet access. Certainly a reasonable person might agree that wired vs wireless internet access are conceivably "different" - and if the average person can be convinced that there is a difference, they will accept the terms of this difference as it is given to them.

I think that like most things in life, the internet will be controlled by a few people with a desire to shape it. The question is whether or not the people who value freedom, take a vested interest as well.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The 'net looks like the wild west because most are ignorant that it is really a bunch of city-states like Greece. Each ISP/Host/Site has its own rules. Some are allied, some aren't. Governments are the overall nation.

This simplification should good enough to explain to most people.

</comment><comment><USER18> This myth is needed by the MPAA and the RIAA, so you should expect it to continue.

</comment><comment><USER19> The internet is a very real disruptive force to many entrenched power structures. I personally think that's a good thing because I value individual liberty. However, many entrenched power structures think otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER20> No we can't. Not so long as the Mainstream Media is powerful and afraid of the internet. They are very good at spreading myths, and very motivated in this case.

</comment><comment><USER21> And who will regulate the internet inside internet? Internet^3? Internet^4? Seems governmental efforts are doomed.

</comment><comment><USER22> Replace "tamed" with "controlled". There are vultures everywhere circling the internet, pondering how to establish ownership of it (or some portion of it) how to shape it, throttle it, condition it, modify it, how its very existence can be turned into an asset that can produce dividends, most importantly, how to get others to pay you money to maintain a connection to it.

The internet doesn't need fixing, what it needs is protection from men who want to put a big fence around it and charge you money so you can get some.

<comment><USER23> _The internet doesn't need fixing, what it needs is protection from men who want to put a big fence around it and charge you money so you can get some._

Ars Technica had this feature article that I thought was very insightful. [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/how-the- robb...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/how-the-robber- barons-hijacked-the-victorian-internet.ars)

<comment><USER13> Which part did you find insightful?

<comment><USER24> If you have a problem with the article why not just articulate it.

<comment><USER13> Because I'm curious to what he found insightful.

<comment><USER23> The article talks about how Western Union telegraph was taken over by essentially one person, which in turn thoroughly destroyed the credibility and trust in the system. I can imagine something similar happening to the internet, and some people are already wary of this (that is why we have so many projects along the lines of Tor/Freenet).

There's also a troubling story of how freedom of press was stifled despite the technology. Doesn't this sound familiar in context of Youtube videos of demonstrators being taken down, recently, in England?

And finally, as mentioned in the article, this is a concrete instance where freedom _was not_ essentially a zero-sum game, which meant, regulation by the government was not necessarily a bad thing. This squarely addresses some arguments made _today_ about Net Neutrality among other things by people who favor a more laissez-faire approach.

<comment><USER13> I don't think that people are distrusting the Internet because of a rogue company taking it over. They are distrusting it because of the government taking it over. Tor and Freenet are to prevent eavesdropping from governments.

What I would like to see happen is absolutely no subsidized infrastructure. Once you subsidize, you have a responsibility to make sure the taxpayers get their money's worth (theoretically). If you ignore this responsibility, as government often does, you get the situation in the article.

One person lives a lot shorter life than a government. For example, Standard Oil was a monopoly and yet, even they were naturally losing their grip as time went on. I don't think you should be worried about a single person taking over. Sure it may mess things up for a few years, but so what? Better that than forever, by law. At least in my opinion. Competitors will pop up and the old guard will become old.

I'm not saying I favour net neutrality or not. Just that if the government could just resist getting involved in every single thing, they will find economical solutions.

Today's problem is that many governments subsidized the creation of the infrastructure and then handed over the keys to the private companies. Sounds familiar? I don't get how anyone can look at the past 200 years in North America and still make that decision.

So based on that history, regulation is necessary to make sure that citizens get their money's worth.

But goddamnit, what's wrong with these people?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If only it was a myth.

</comment><comment><USER26> 4chan is the wild west.</comment>


Show HN: Carrot – Lightweight Dividend Tracking App - <AUTHOR> http://www.thecarrot.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Y'all, my name's Ricardo and I spent the past couple of months building The Carrot App. Like many others I started off with a spreadsheet for tracking dividend income, but soon found it too cumbersome to keep up with. I looked around and found tons of tools for tracking dividends, but most required higher barriers to entry (brokerage account, min net worth) or were free solutions missing some of the key features I needed. I built this primarily to be a middle of the road tool for the average, self-managed investor to look at and project their dividend income. Currently it's a one-man crew behind the dev, marketing, and customer support but I've thoroughly enjoyed working these multiple roles. Let me know what you think!</comment>