Handful of "highly toxic" Wikipedia editors cause 9% of abuse - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/one-third-of-personal-attacks-on-wikipedia-come-from-active-editors/ <comment><USER3> This report reminds me of some of Jeffrey Lin (Riot Lyte)'s work on League of Legends. He found that 1% of players are toxic, frequently acting badly. But that only accounts for 5% of toxic behavior; 77% of bad behavior comes from people who are just having a bad day. That echoes this report's finding that 34 Wikipedia folks are responsible for 9% of abuse.

A related finding is Riot found that toxicity in LoL was contagious; people who played with an abusive player were more likely to be abusive in their next game. The Wikipedia phenomenon of abuse pile-ons seems similar.

Some links for Lin's work: [http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game- company-tame-tox...](http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-company-tame- toxic-behaviour-1.19647?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYQ0AVVBGU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbYQ0AVVBGU)

<comment><USER4> One of the interesting things about high functioning forums (like this one) is that there's a group of people who have as part of their job function the ability to enforce civility and reduce abuse. Like any community, HN also has "power users", in WP they're the run of the mill editors, but the difference is that here dang or somebody will show up to calm down incivility and point to the guidelines. In WP those people either don't exist or they're absent in providing that function.

I contribute here, I don't to WP and this kind of active community hygiene is exactly the reason why.

<comment><USER5> It has a lot to do with the community governance structure.

Wikipedia is something akin to a democracy. Every editor has the potential to become an Administrator or a Bureaucrat. This means that a lot of editors engage in metrics-gaming behavior and become involved in the Wikipedia community, which by its very nature means weighing on on various controversies, like whether or not to delete an article. There's nominally a focus on creating a consensus, but in practice, the opinion of the Right People wins the day. There's a process for everything, and everyone has a refuge in some guideline or another which leads to lots of rules-lawyering. It's difficult to get rid of problematic people who are good at rules- lawyering and garnering support.

On HN, dang and sctb are kings. If you cause problems, you are warned. If you continue to cause problems, you are banned. There are no higher appeals. Your interpretation of the guidelines is irrelevant; that of dang and sctb is irrefragable.

I think it is possible to construct well-run, friendly 'democratic'-type communities on the Internet, but very difficult. In practice, it's always seemed to me that dictatorial moderation creates the best communities - <USER2> course, there are communities with bad administrators, but they generally die out. I've seen some really excellent forums where moderators ban posters simply for not having sufficiently high-quality content, and the result was amazing.

Granted, for any reasonably active community, it means that someone is going to spend a _lot_ of time doing the moderating. I think HN strikes a good balance with allowing users to downvote and flag, even though I feel that most people generally downvote for reasons I disagree with (disagreement.)

One other key factor I've found in community civility actually seems a little strange at first. In my experience, it is very important for no communication backchannels to exist - for example, no IRC channels. Those effectively breed the creation of cabals and all sorts of strategic interventions in discussions, or in the case of Wikipedia, talk pages and votes. That's been a major problem on Wikipedia. It is _nominally_ community-run, but "community" really refers to the insiders who frequent the right IRC channels and are friends with the right people - connections you have no way of seeing simply by looking at Wikipedia talk pages. On top of that, people who are friends with the right people outside of Wikipedia always, simply by human nature, get much more leeway when engaging in abusive behavior than do people who aren't.

<comment><USER6> The much bigger difference is that Wikipedia conversations/disputes are long- running and relate to the state of permanent artifacts.

The technology of Hacker News makes it literally impossible to carry on a long-running conversation or collaborate on serious permanent artifacts. There's no point in going back to last week's discussion and vandalizing it with troll comments, because nobody is ever going to read it. There's no need to invent complicated rules for productive collaboration, because there's no work to collaborate on in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From my brief experience with (English and Korean) Wikipedia editing many years ago, the problem was not "toxic" editors but more with entrenched ones. They never resorted to personal attacks, but instead used their vast knowledge of WP:this and WP:that to provoke other people until either they left or get banned.

E.g., for a long time, the article title in the Korean wikipedia for Japanese Empire was 대일본제국, literally, Great Empire of Japan. Well, this being Korean wikipedia, you could see how some people took offense at it. The sensible thing would be just to drop the "Great" part: everybody knows which Empire we're talking about, nobody thinks the Empire was particularly Great anyway, and then we could move on to actually talking about the article's content.

But no, some editors would object, because we have to use Official Names(TM) for everything. (For some reason, nobody bothered to change Bangkok's name to the official "Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathaniburirom Udomratchaniwetmahasathan Amonphimanawatansathit Sakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit", but if anybody did that I'm sure it would be quickly reverted, citing WP:(You can't make an edit just to prove a point) or something like that.) To this day, I suspect some editors' criterion for "Official Names" and other similar policy was maximal likelihood for alienating potential contributors. Classic power game move.

<comment><USER8> Changing titles to avoid offending people is exactly the wrong thing to do.

<comment><USER9> But changing the current title "Coeliac disease" to celiac disease in Wikipedia might reduce confusion, and since celiac death rates are quite high if undiagnosed, over millions of users, save some lives.

(Against this, search engines are now very good at matching synonyms.)

I know, you didn't like the hint of political correctness in the particular Korean example. That's a judgement call, I might agree with you in general, but with such an emotional topic (comfort women, atrocities, etc) I wouldn't resent the change.

<comment><USER8> It's not called Celiac disease, it's called Coeliac disease. And 'Celiac disease' redirects to 'Coeliac disease'.

<comment><USER10> Therein lies a difference: "it's called" vs "it's proper name".

For a point of comparison, we can look at Google Trends to determine relative popularity. This would give us an idea as to what "it's called".

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0h1pq,coeliac...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0h1pq,coeliac%20disease)

"Celiac disease" is consistently between 15 and 20 times more popular than "coeliac disease".

Also, the Wikipedia article opens with "Coeliac disease, also spelled celiac disease,…"

Given the widespread use of "celiac", not only among the public, but also in the literature, one might reasonably argue at this point that "celiac" is the proper name.

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

<comment><USER8> >"Celiac disease" is consistently between 15 and 20 times more popular than "coeliac disease".

Because Americans don't know how to spell. The fact is that it's called 'Coeliac disease' by sane people and 'Celiac disease' by non-medical Americans. Medical Americans know how it's actually spelt, as do all non- Americans.

<comment><USER10> _Because Americans don 't know how to spell. The fact is that it's called 'Coeliac disease' by sane people and 'Celiac disease' by non-medical Americans. Medical Americans know how it's actually spelt, as do all non- Americans_

Attacks like this are unwarranted.

Reviewing the references for the coeliac disease article shows plenty of "Medical Americans" and international papers referring to "celiac disease".

\- "Celiac Disease" [https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive- disea...](https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive- diseases/celiac-disease)

\- "Subclinical celiac disease and gluten sensitivity" [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4017418/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4017418/)

\- Tonutti E, Bizzaro N (2014). "Diagnosis and classification of celiac disease and gluten sensitivity". Autoimmun Rev (Review)

\- Ciccocioppo R, Kruzliak P, Cangemi GC, Pohanka M, Betti E, Lauret E, Rodrigo L (Oct 22, 2015). "The Spectrum of Differences between Childhood and Adulthood Celiac Disease". Nutrients (Review).

That's four from the first six references.

Of the first 25 references for the Wikipedia article, 13 spell it "celiac", 8 spell it "coeliac", 1 spells it "cœliac", and 3 don't mention the disease specifically. To my eye (granted, quickly scanned), they all look like solid references, mostly journal articles. To me, especially given the dipthong œ used in one case, this looks like a clear case of a word that has legitimate spelling variants, just as you used "spelt", where others would spell it "spelled".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not terribly surprising. But looks like the system manages to handle them pretty well - the paper shows that the probability of getting blocked is up to ~80% after 5 personal attacks.

I've never worried too much about that kind of incivility or 'abuse' \- I've always been far more worried about the 'abuse' which takes the form of deleting contributions, which, because it can be justified and rules-lawyered and is not as clearcut as 'you suck', the system does not handle well and culturally encourages.

</comment><comment><USER12> An impressive amount of information on Wikipedia is just outright wrong, misleading, clearly biased, or astroturfed. At the rate in which I encounter inaccurate data on Wikipedia that I can identify, it makes me suspicious of nearly everything on the site. It's an interesting experiment to allow the masses to create and edit their own facts and it can provide a broad (albeit often inaccurate) overview of some topics, but it's hardly a substitution for a legitimate source let alone encyclopedia.

Nonetheless, I know plenty of people who take it as legitimate and cite it as if it's an authority.

<comment><USER13> Curious, what areas do you find are usually flat out wrong?

The math sections seem to be pretty good. A friend found a flaw in a crypto algorithm though.

<comment><USER14> Really? I find many math topics to be covered extremely poorly, and presume a lot of prior knowledge without linking to that knowledge.

Plenty of philosophy articles are also very poor. For example the page on Deconstruction, though its better than it was ~4 years ago.

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

<comment><USER15> >Really? I find many math topics to be covered extremely poorly, and presume a lot of prior knowledge without linking to that knowledge.

At what level, an ELI5 level or the level of people who are actually going to look that stuff up?

<comment><USER16> I think all articles should be at formers level since people with a deeper knowledge will be using sites, books, etc where that deeper knowledge is assumed. If they aren't already they can get started by reading reading the sources in the article

<comment><USER15> It is an encyclopedia, not a collection of tutorials. That seems more appropriate for something like wikibooks. Otherwise, every single article would be in inordinately long with a lot of redundancy. I like it better in which pre-requisites are often linked to other pages, so you can brush up on the pre-req's if you don't understand them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I suspect the sentence "A handful of 'highly toxic' <members> cause <overly large> amounts of abuse." is true for all groups.

<comment><USER18> Well, of course, because the terms 'handful,' and 'overly large' are undefined. In the article's case, it refers to 1% causing 9%. Disproportionate, but far from a majority.

Contrast with threads about the '80/20' rule. In those, people start saying something not much different, like:

> I suspect the sentence "80% of <effects> come from 20% of <causes>," is true > for all groups.

We'll always have a distribution of a range of behaviours, and we'll always have cognitive bias; these in combination will lead to any number of reasonable 'x of y' rules about populations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Almost immediately, they found that they could debunk the time-worn idea that anonymity leads to abuse. Although anonymous comments are "six times more likely to be an attack,"

Hmm, that actually DOES seem to support the idea the anonymity fosters abuse...

<comment><USER20> I think the net of it is: anonymity encourages some people to be abusive, but enough people are abusive under their real names that you can't say anonymity is the primary factor behind abuse.

Whether curbing anonymity is a necessary component of fighting abuse and/or worth it becomes a further question.

<comment><USER21> It may in fact be self-selecting.

Out of the total corpus of people, there are some who would be abusive if anonymous, however they have enough 'social awareness' to not behave that way when real names are used.

However, there are another subset of this group who lacks the social awareness to curb their abusive behavior even though they are using their real names.

By enforcing a "no anonymity" policy, you filter out the first group effectively but wind up increasing the percentage make-up that the second group has in the overall community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I expend a lot of effort to avoid Wikipedia as a bona dude source of truth, and man is it difficult. The desire for a single easy-to-access repository of knowledge is incredibly strong, but over the years, I've been stung repeatedly by this particular one.

As it turns out, the "Neutral Point of View" rule that Wikipedians so proudly tout is quite strongly biased toward a specific world-view: that of the so- called "progressive" mindset.

It doesn't matter how much value a system of ideals has; if it transforms a purportedly neutral source of information into a dogmatic one, then the source loses all credibility and usefulness.

This seems to be happening on Wikipedia at an alarming rate, which is a real bummer. It's not as ridiculous and blatant as (e.g.) Conservapedia, but... well, frankly, that makes it all the more concerning. Zealotry is way harder to call out when it's cloaked, as Wikipedia tends increasingly to be, in the sly guise of unassailable moral high ground.

<comment><USER23> Former WP editor, left because I was tired of abuse after the Esperanza project disbanded.

There is always the distinct possibility that progressivism is part of the correct way to interpret the universe. It seems to pop up in many places.

Consider Pirsig's argument: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only 'runs up,' converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high- energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep 'running up' faster and faster. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It's a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can't turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun's heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That's a scientific fact. The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the sun's energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something else. What is it?"

<comment><USER24> That quote is wrong in so many ways - the man clearly didn't understand thermodynamics. Life doesn't reduce universal entropy, and inorganic compounds will spontaneously form more more energetic and complex compounds given a little input energy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Depressingly, the study also found that very few personal attacks are moderated. Only 17.9% of personal attacks lead to a warning or ban." I'm not sure, but it seems like 17.9% is probably close to the right rate for moderation, not "depressing" or "abysmal". Especially if there are calm comments from experienced users disapproving of the abusive behavior in many of the other cases.

<comment><USER26> I find it encouraging we have some AI to throw at this. I've hypothesized for a while that people make blaming statements using biased arguments because it is cheap, effective, and presents the gain of an upper hand without too much risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is very interesting! So if anonymitiy isn't correlated with abuse, then what is? I believe the answer is community standing. Anonymous and low-ranking users know they will suffer the consequences for foul language therefore they moderate themselves. Users with thousands of edits to their name, knows they will get away with it.

About ten years ago when I edited Wikipedia, there was one particularily nasty user who accused everyone who didn't agree with exactly everything he wrote. I belive this person was mentally ill, but he spent a lot of time on Wikipedia and wrote a lot of content.

Several people brought complaints about him and his toxic behaviour, but he always had the backing of Jimmy Wales (the leader of the project), who would make excuses for him. If the community intervened against this person by for example temporarily banning him, Wales would intervene and undo the ban.

So this person kept being nasty because there were no repercussion. Eventually I believe he got tired of the Wikipedia project and left on his own violiton.

</comment><comment><USER28> Abuse and harassment on Wikipedia does not belong to a handful of editors, it's endemic, because the only way to succeed on Wikipedia _is to be an asshole_. But it's important to note that bad behaviour on Wikipedia is a symptom of poor software design. The software that Wikipedia is built encourages conflict, and uses hundreds of rules combined with poorly-trained admins to try to patch things up. The boundaries between conflict and abuse are wide, arbitrarily defined, and patrolled by people who have neither training, nor consistency. A better designed system would install systems to minimize conflict, and would give clearer rules and standards to it's moderators.

</comment><comment><USER29> So - how do you rate partisan editors in geopolitical conflicts? The Irish Troubles, Russian Federation and especially Israel-Palestine come to mind. Especially the Israeli side was very successful in casting a very favourable light on its position, and it took great effort to rein them in a little. Would the pro-Israel faction be called abusive under the present metrics?

<comment><USER30> This became really obvious to me in June 2014. For whatever reason I became really interested in ISIS taking over northern Iraq and spent ~10 hours / day editing pages (to the detriment of my PhD).

There were so many sides, a lot of fake news (before that was a thing), and abusive editors. After getting multiple 24-hour bans I realized I was also becoming an abusive editor for reverting edits that seemed "obviously wrong" within seconds. It's pretty easy to emotionally pick a side. Luckily I deleted my account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why do threads like these talking about a specific aspect of something always devolve into hatejerks about the subject? I've noticed the same thing on threads about Apple as well. It's talking specifically about personal attacks yet people are somehow relating that to the reliability of the site. It's not wrong to criticize Wikipedia, but then you should focus on the topic of the toxic atmosphere instead like how that might compromise neutrality by keeping out editors who are more conflict-averse. (or actually back up how you think the site is unreliable, considering a study in _Nature_ found Wikipedia to be just as reliable as _Brittanica_ )

<comment><USER32> People can't fix the reliability of the site because of the fucking arseholes on WP that make personal attacks.

Your comments ("Have you tried to correct these errors?") are answered by the submitted article. People don't try to fix errors because of the toxic culture at WP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ah..Wikipedia. Nice to know my HN Username is relevant for this thread.

Jokes aside, Wikipedia has a ton of flaws and the abuse is definitely one of them regardless of what percentage of people do it, but there are just no other realistic substitutes that are actually large enough to matter. The largest and most respectable competitors are Everipedia (only one that doesn't reuse mediawiki software), RationalWiki, InfoGalactic, and some other rolled mediawiki crap. And none of those alternatives are even Alexa top 1,000 let alone Alexa top 100 traffic.

<comment><USER34> Online encyclopedias suffer from the network effect like everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> One has to wonder about the logic of unemployed lute players (people like most armchair anchor "journalists" without a shred of topical understanding) given power to referee edits on highly-scientic topics or judging vital concepts/details "irrelevant" because they don't understand historical context or subject matter.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is an example of what Jo Freeman famously called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness": [http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

</comment><comment><USER37> Somewhat tangential, for those who think Wikipedia's ideologically-driven revert wars are anything new, a 19th century instance I ran across some months back involving Chamber's Encyclopaedia:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chambers_encyclopaedia_editorial_statement/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Good article, but I wish she'd reached out to Wikipedia or the community of editors to solicit some answer on what they intend to do about it. Once one is aware of such an issue, failure to wield the banhammer is treated as an implicit endorsement.

</comment><comment><USER39> If you want to see for yourself the seedy underbelly of Wikipedia, check out [http://wikipediocracy.com/](http://wikipediocracy.com/)

<comment><USER28> Wikipediocracy is so over. All the cool kids have already moved on to [http://wikipediasucks.boards.net/](http://wikipediasucks.boards.net/)

<comment><USER32> Was that link dead when you posted it?

<comment><USER40> At a guess: certain people behind Wikipediocracy apparently really like to use legal threats to try and shut up people who disagree with them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What makes Hacker News so special? - <AUTHOR> I'm wondering what makes Hacker News so special? Simple UI? Karma? Traffic? <comment><USER2> I think it's a careful combination of things:

1) Simple UI and only one "channel". This forces all the users to take part in all the submissions resulting in a diverse set of comments and expertise on any given submission plus many eyes on fact checking.

2) As a result, the high volume of views on each submission, and the simple karma and voting system, quickly highlights the most enlightening comments and directs the conversation.

3) Votes are democratic across all users, this makes the results of voting less "tribal" and more appealing to the entire audience.

4) Branding. HN has the branding as a place for intelligent discussion with high expectations for professional quality responses and specific links to sources, and a minimum of commentary that doesn't move the conversation forward. The community holds these values very dear and they seem to me at least to be maintained pretty well.

In closing though, I think it's the branding and ethos part that really does it. Nothing about the sites simple design _forces_ this ethos I think. And as soon as people stop enforcing the ethos, or in the other extreme, become complete d __* 's in doing so, nothing about the technical design of the site will keep it here.

follow-up: When I bookmark anything that I find on HN, I don't ever just bookmark the link itself, I'll bookmark the HN page with all the comments as they are an incredible resource of context and introduction to the topic at hand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know how karma and voting system work? I mean algorithms?

<comment><USER2> Other then what is described on the FAQ[1], I don't know specifics, no.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Traffic: relatively low, and still specialized around a few industries, meaning not only is there a small number of people, but they're more mature than a random sampling of internet users.

Culture: There's a "this is not reddit. do not make your one line pun here" attitude that is massively healthy. Prevents attention seekers from clamoring over each other for points at the expense of discussion.

Feature inequality: downvoting, etc are restricted to significantly more senior users. (this is related to low traffic and terse culture - which make it hard to game your way to becoming an influential user)

Good moderation: It's stiff, relative to other communities, but fair and based on easily cited guidelines. This is made possible by low traffic. ?id=dang couldn't pop into every reddit thread, but it seems to be possible here.

</comment><comment><USER4> * Moderation is unusually good: [http://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator-problem-how-...](http://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator-problem-how-reddit-and-related-news-sites-decline/). In addition, and as noted there, the economic incentive attached to keeping HN smart helps a lot; sites like Reddit don't have that incentive for moderators.

* Attention to culture is unusually good, and so is feedback: [http://jakeseliger.com/2012/01/15/commenting-community-deter...](http://jakeseliger.com/2012/01/15/commenting-community-deterioration-and-hacker-news/) . I actually got a real response for this.

* UI that encourages more serious / intellectual people. This is a signaling / filtering issue, but it works. When I've brought this up before I've read cries about elitism, but, again, the UI thing _works_.

* Meta posts like this one are rare.

<comment><USER5> >UI that encourages more serious / intellectual people. This is a signaling / filtering issue, but it works.

Is there actual evidence to support this, because I suspect it's confirmation bias more than anything. I can see how certain behaviors are limited, for instance by not being able to post images, memes aren't really going to become a thing, but I don't see a lot in the UI that could encourage or discourage serious behavior. Evidence to the contrary abounds in the comments throughout the site (even some of my own, if I have to be honest.)

<comment><USER6> _by not being able to post images, memes aren 't really going to become a thing_

Slashdot would beg to differ... :)

<comment><USER5> fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I personally don't find Hacker News particularly special. A lot of the conversations on HN are the same one we would have had on Slashdot in the early 2000s, with largely the same audience.

<comment><USER8> That same audience is now 15 years older and more experienced.

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea. That will be an interesting study many decades from now when we have entire lives of Internet usage to study. I wonder if web site populations, particularly the ones around news/commentary forums such as HN, slashdot, reddit, etc., as a whole migrate from one site to the next as a collective or stay married to single sites. I'm curious if it's the same for social media sites too? My prediction is that the sites will stick around, but different age groups and populations will adopt different sites in somewhat unexpected ways in the same way that fashion or music fads reemerge with populations without warning; that people choose their site/community based on their friends, social allegiances and/or aspirations rather then the "tech" of the site.

<comment><USER9> I also think its fascinating to think about where the source of "news" or some type of idea, picks up critical mass to become viral. Are they concentrated to tiers of sites for example?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me, it's the quality of the submissions and comments (which are often better than the articles themselves).

<comment><USER11> _For me, it 's the quality of the submissions and comments (which are often better than the articles themselves)._

Funny, I remember reading this sentiment exactly in a Slashdot comment, circa 2003.

HN is great because the site (for whatever reason) has been picked up as the place to go for intelligent and knowledgeable individuals to discuss the latest news in tech with each other.

It's also much better than /., though, since HN isn't just about filling in the gaps left by mainstream tech reporting, but also about sharing cool software and ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As cheesy as it sounds... I think its simply the people that hang out here. (Of course the software helps maintain the culture too im sure)

<comment><USER13> Not cheesy at all. HN, Reddit, Digg, Slashdot are all powered by its users. Unfortunately, management needs to "add value for shareholders" and users left\are leaving for greener pastures. Lets see how long HN can hold out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Overall, HN is quite good. However, there is a considerable amount of groupthink here, an avoidance of many legitimate sources of information. Kind of like Gollum covering his ears and saying "I'm not listening".

For example, submissions from many sites are silently banned. E.g. not long ago I tried to submit something from breitbart.com, but that's impossible to do. It just gets quietly blackholed.

Still, it's not like there's a shortage of stories (or comments) on HN. So, "it's all good".

</comment><comment><USER15> Amongst other reasons, you only see someone's karma if you go specifically looking for it, and the old-style average score per post has been withdrawn anyway, so there's no way of knowing if someone's really good, or just hangs around all day every day saying things.

So unless it happens to be a commenter a reader has seen before and recalls the quality of their comments, a reader has no groupthink preconception about how valuable this line of text is. I suspect this significantly improves the odds of evaluating it on its own merits.

I'd like to see karma vanish entirely from everyone's view and be only a hellbanning/moderation assistant, but to be honest most of the benefit came with removing the average post score.

</comment><comment><USER16> It is part of the business model for YC, so for both the company running it and some portion of the members participating, there are potentially millions of dollars at stake. Thus, like at your job, this is not a great place to casually be a butt for giggles. It cuts down on the trolling.

Edit: Of course, it is more complicated than that. But I think that is the heart of the matter and often overlooked by members analyzing the dynamics here.

<comment><USER8> Do people really take it that seriously? It's not like you can exchange karma points for VC investment...

IMHO, anyone who takes HN like that is bound to be disappointed. What rises to the top is pretty much a crapshoot.

A few weeks back I made a small side project that got to #1 on the HN frontpage:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10117297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10117297)

Thing is, I had posted the same site as a "Show HN" the previous week, and that time it didn't get a single upvote! It's just a matter of luck. (The moderators will even sometimes send you an email asking for a repost if they think your submission should have got more attention.)

Also worth mentioning is that the only reason I was inspired to make the WordSafety site was a discussion on HN (it's mentioned in the comments on the post I linked above). That to me is the real value of Hacker News: finding the motivation to do something. Showing off the finished product feels kind of secondary even.

<comment><USER16> _Do people really take it that seriously? It 's not like you can exchange karma points for VC investment..._

HN is the funnel for YC. You cannot (or could not -- perhaps they have changed it, I have not looked at their application recently) apply to YC without having an HN handle. The last time I looked, every member of your team needed an HN handle to apply, even if they created it solely to apply and never posted anything.

Paul Graham has commented in the past about the fact that he read HN enough that he sometimes recognized the handles and already had an opinion about the applicants based on their handle before they applied.

Not everyone on HN is here to apply to YC. But some are. Successful YC companies can go on to be worth millions. YC itself is currently worth billions as I understand it. They have a paid moderator. This is, in fact, part of their business model.

I don't really understand why you would question my assertion given the market value of some of the YC alumni, who are, as I understand it, the only companies allowed to advertise jobs here and get to use HN in other ways to develop and promote their business. Granted, there are a great many more participants that will never apply to YC than there are YC alumni. But, yes, for some people, HN is a first step towards becoming very wealthy.

That doesn't mean every last person here feels a need to be on their best behavior. But group culture does not require every last member here to view it as a possible path to millionaire status for that expectation to influence the culture as a whole. The ones who relate to it that way are some of the most influential people here.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you know that they have a paid moderator???

<comment><USER17> [https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over- hac...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news)

"Finally, I'm delighted to announce that Daniel Gackle (pronounced Gackley), who has already been doing most of the moderation for the last 18 months, is going to join YC full-time to be in charge of the HN community."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the inability to post images is a filter on users, to a large degree. One-liner jokes aren't tolerated here, by and large. You can't vote for a very long time. HN is not for drive-by consumers.

A few things like that and you are selecting for people who enjoy, and probably produce, good discussion and informative, factual comments.

</comment><comment><USER19> Latest trends, experienced people, successful actors, ambitious wannabes, $$$ flavour, general respect of the rules aka good moderation. That said, the flow is a bit fast and futile threads sometimes get too much attention imho.

</comment><comment><USER20> They've built a community that is intolerant of abuse and trolling (partly due to the people they initially attracted, partly due to moderation). That dramatically improves the signal/noise ratio.

</comment><comment><USER21> Probably the lack of "mainstream" popularity. Once a site gets big enough it goes to shit.

I remember once upon a time both reddit and dig had smaller, higher quality tech oriented communities.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's the community, and the moderation that keeps the community from getting worse.

</comment><comment><USER23> Constructive participation by really fucking smart people™.</comment>


An Ode to Privacy Normalcy - <AUTHOR> https://themargins.substack.com/p/an-ode-to-privacy-normalcy <comment><USER2> I'm going to have to agree with the author here. Defining what is "normal" or acceptable levels of privacy or tracking has become one of several battlefields in the world of privacy.

An orthogonal but related idea that is often floated is that many web sites _need_ tracking and targeted ads to survive and that they cannot exist without the [increased?] revenue they provide. Personally I think we'd all be better off with fewer web sites that were higher quality and if cutting off some revenue starved some of the weaker click-bait publishers out of business and funneled that revenue at about zero-marginal cost to other higher quality outlets that would actually be a _very good_ thing.</comment>


Ask HN: What software do you use to generate PDFs? - <AUTHOR> I need to automatically generate invoices and similar documents as PDFs for clients. Currently I am using headless Chromium + print to pdf calling the front end.
I thought Latex to be too heavyweight for my use case, but I am not completely happy with the styling of my current setup.
Are there good alternatives to generate PDFs server-side? <comment><USER2> For my invoices I use a LaTeX template, filled via a Perl program that reads a custom invoice format.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Are there good alternatives to generate PDFs server-side?

pandoc is suitable for this.

</comment><comment><USER4> LaTeX, org-mode and pandoc.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the most useless HN thread you have saved? - <AUTHOR> A few must have in their armory the sickest moment of HN <comment><USER2> Actually from 3 days ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776408). It's about paying employees with crypto currency.

The one with the most controversy was "I freed an innocent man from prison. Hacker News failed him." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958567) Basically the poster previously asked the community to review legal papers ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10323025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10323025)) which would've required hours to get into that topic (life of that person). It had a good ending ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760)). But the thread in 11958567 was him complaining HN didn't do anything.

Stupid submission, especially ASK HN, get flagged fast. I remember a couple "what should I do this weekend?", "where can I buy a car", "what server should I get?" (without providing any other information) and similar question which are so open ended that the first question has to be to ask for more information.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423)

</comment><comment><USER4> This would definitely be a contender.</comment>


Show HN: Balto, an API to Send iMessages - <AUTHOR> https://balto.withterra.com/ <comment><USER2> Great work here. Are you using the legacy AppleScript interface [0] provided to Messages? I built an iMessage bot a long time ago that would respond automatically to messages you sent it and save notes for me using that and found it to be pretty reliable and easy to script but with a number of quirks and gotchas. I even bridged it out to Python to make it easier to work with.

The only limitation of course was that a Mac had to be always on, logged into the relevant account, connected to the internet, and running AppleScript to run it so there was no dream to scale it reliably/economically (as you are) much less even use it privately since the Mac was also a primary laptop. How are you getting past one device, one account scalability problem? Mac in cloud on the roadmap?

How do you consider you will scale this and at what cost? Have you checked into Apple's viewpoint and policies on this given they offer a business API [1] for a similar solution?

[0] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11812184/how-to-send- an-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11812184/how-to-send-an-imessage- text-with-applescript-only-in-provided-service)

[1] [https://www.apple.com/ios/business- chat/](https://www.apple.com/ios/business-chat/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, proud to share balto, an API to send iMessages from a new phone number. I originally built this out to take advantage of the iMessage features (specifically read receipts and videos) after sadly learning that these features are severely limited when using Twilio or other SMS providers.

From there I went down a crazy rabbit hole, talking to apple support, shopping on eBay for an old iPhone, digging through poorly documented JXA (javascript to control your mac), and eventually landing on a MVP which today supports sending new iMessages from a custom phone number and looking at read receipts (if the other party has them turned on); with many more features on the way (think full videos, audio recording, tapbacks, group chats, etc.)

Love this community and the valuable feedback y'all provide!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is super cool! There's definitely an advantage to being a native iMessage vs just sending out texts.

Also if I'm understanding correctly, I can also use the API to understand if a message was read or not?

</comment><comment><USER4> That's pretty neat. So you are controlling imessage software on a physical device? You haven't had control synchronization problems or stability issues?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. There's a mac mini running which directly interfaces with the Messages app and underlying data storage. There's been a few synchronization problems, but for the most part the Messages platform is fairly robust. Unfortunately, there's a couple sleep statements that I had to write in for the short term, but there's a path to removing them in the long term.</comment></comment>


Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jobs-and-the-yoke-of-managerial-feudalism <comment><USER2> One of my most favorite essays on the subject: [0]

In February 1968 New York City sanitation workers went on strike. After just six days a state of emergency was declared, and after nine days the city had to give up and give the strikers their way.

In May 1970 Ireland's bank employees decided to go on strike.

At the outset, pundits predicted that life in Ireland would come to a standstill.

> Heading into the summer of 1970, Ireland braced itself for the worst.

> And then something odd happened. Or more accurately, nothing much happened > at all.

> In July, the The Times of England reported that the "figures and trends > which are available indicate that the dispute has not had an adverse effect > on the economy so far." A few months later, the Central Bank of Ireland drew > up the final balance. "The Irish economy continued to function for a > reasonably long period of time with its main clearing banks closed for > business," it concluded. Not only that, the economy had continued to grow.

In the end, the strike would last ... a whole six months!

[0] [http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more- than-b...](http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than- bankers/)

<comment><USER3> One big difference is these cases I suspect is the power of unions and regulations. If some enterprising people in New York had tried to set up their own ad hoc sanitation service where they'd drive around a neighborhood in a van and for a dollar a bag they'd drive your trash to the dump they'd be stomped down on by unions and regulations in a flash. If a hypothetical Irish banking union had sent thugs each pub acting as an ad hoc clearing house or convinced the brewers union to not deliver beer to 'strike breaking' pubs the the situation probably would have played out very differently.

Basically the real conclusion should be that strikes only work if there is also some additional force preventing outside people from filling the void left by the striking workers.

<comment><USER4> If the situation is shit are you so sure that someone would come in to fill in the void? Your scenario relies on the fact that people, in desperate need, were willing to pay more which is exactly what those on strike revendicated.

<comment><USER5> If the alternatives are doing a nasty job or not having any money, there are plenty of people who will do the job.

In the case of the union, their wages were probably artificially high due to the government keeping out competition.

> someone would come in to fill in the void

If a good or services is demanded by the consumer, then someone will find a way to satisfy that demand, barring market interference by the state (for legal business - you get black markets otherwise).

<comment><USER4> I agree that someone will come in and fill the job, but it will cost more to swap your entire staff, why not front the salary your employees asked for in the first place. Turnover costs a fortune.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lots of stuff just plain wrong, e.g.:

> If you can't afford to send your kid to a top college and then support them > for 2-3 years doing unpaid internships in some place like New York or San > Francisco, forget it, you're locked out

<s>Unpaid internships aren't a thing in the US, they are not even legal</s>Looks like they are a thing...maybe just outside of tech. Or:

> Something like 37-40% of workers according to surveys say their jobs make no > difference.

The whole idea of bullshit jobs is based on people's own assessment of their work? You should really ask the people paying their salary whether the job is useful or not since they are the ones paying for it.

Labor productivity is constantly increasing, if you measure it in a systematic, rather than anecdotal way. Here is an article about some trends in US labor productivity, notice that even though growth has slowed it is still steadily increasing: [https://www.brookings.edu/research/understanding-us- producti...](https://www.brookings.edu/research/understanding-us-productivity- trends-from-the-bottom-up/)

<comment><USER7> Yeah.

Graeber's theory of what jobs are BS doesn't really work. For instance, say a surgeon decides 'hey, y'know people are going to die anyway, my work is useless' then according to Graeber's definition their work is BS while most people would say it is useful work.

But one that says that anything people pay for does't really work either. Say I'm rich and pay you $100K a year to go somewhere and do nothing. Surely that is useless.

However, no doubt there really are quite a lot of jobs out there that don't need to be done. I've certainly had pretty pointless jobs. 37% of people say their job is pretty much useless which is remarkable.

Graeber's book is worth a read, my review is here for anyone interested ( [https://reviewsien.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/bullshit- jobs-a-...](https://reviewsien.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/bullshit-jobs-a- theory/) )

<comment><USER8> Sometimes I do wonder though, even "good" jobs (for some definition of "good"). For example, I can work on some tech, say mp5 (made that up), knowing full well it will be replaced in 5-10yrs by mp6. Now I get maybe the person/team who invented mp5 are bringing the world forward. But as some programmer on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Safari, Chrome, or Firefox adding mp5 support to those OSes there's a part of me that knows my work is temporary and it bugs me for some reason.

And that's not even at the point of BS for most people saying their job is BS.

another random thought is when you know you're being asked to do something in an inefficient way. The job might not be useless but your time is being wasted and it feels awful.

<comment><USER9> It's not really temporary in that example, though, if mp5 existed for some period of time there will always be mp5 files that some people will want to play and adding support ensures those files are never lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll leave this here:

"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

\- R. Buckminster Fuller

<comment><USER11> I don't necessarily disagree. But how do all these non-workers afford a new iPhone X and a Netflix subscription and apartment? I have no idea but it is a non trivial thing to solve.

<comment><USER12> Bucky was suggesting that it's no longer inherently necessary for everyone to have a "job" as we see it. You're pointing out that our society demands it. These views are definitely not in disagreement. In the kind of post-scarcity society Mr. Fuller was talking about, having a place to live and the other essentials of life would not be contingent on earning one's keep; if it were, people wouldn't be free to go back to school and think about the things they want to think about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> EZ-E A lot of full time bullshit jobs become this way because of the full-time 9-to-6 requirement. These jobs usually don't justify a full time position by themselves so it leads to people making up work and responsabilities to justify the job's existence. ie : a designer without assignment pushing an unneeded graphical revamp to avoid being laid off, a manager pushing new features which has almost no use to seem busy etc

<comment><USER13> I cannot imagine having a full time design job if you are not at a design agency... what would you even be doing 80% of the time?!

<comment><USER14> Well, why do you think we have so many re-designs (and re-structuring, and re- packaging, and re-writing, and so on)? To keep people busy and believing that they matter.

You don't need to imagine, it is right here, everywhere around, in programming, in tech and in almost all other trades.

<comment><USER10> Bingo. Software engineers, raise your hand if you've ever worked for company where your project had to undergo a full UI/UX overhaul with every major release. This is why. These designers have a portfolio to build up, and your software is their perpetually blank canvas!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a UX UI designer my profession is total bullshit. It would be meaningful if I were helping design educational apps for kids or information hubs to enrich the world around me but the bulk of my work consists of helping companies sell more shit to people who don't actually need it. SaaS, ecommerce, web, most of mobile apps - all bullshit toxic parasitic garbage that does not need to exist and yet I help drive that industry. My life has had no professional purpose to this point and if I dropped dead today the world would be non the wiser. To make up for all the bullshit I produce, I try to work as little as possible to spend as much time as possible with my family. I've got it down to 5 working hours a week so far and we are getting by fine. If I can get it down to 1 hour a week I will feel more satisfied.

<comment><USER15> I'm very sympathetic. The project that I'm on is building software for a company that I detest.

> 5 working hours a week

Nice that you're able to live out your priorities! Is this contract work? That would be quite remarkable if you were a (nominally, apparently) full-time employee somewhere. Does your family have another person with income?

<comment><USER13> Design and business consulting. I am not cheap but returns are worth it. Family has additional real estate income but we are not dependent on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >One thing it shows is that the whole "lean and mean" ideal is applied much more to productive workers than to office cubicles. It's not at all uncommon for the same executives who pride themselves on downsizing and speed-ups on the shop floor, or in delivery and so forth, to use the money saved at least in part to fill their offices with feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies.

This part resonated with me, having seen it first hand throughout my career. Some of the most productive people remained under constant threat of being downsized lest they increase their output even further in some way, disproportionately compared to those in other positions.

<comment><USER17> I don't think you mean "lest" here -- they didn't threaten them to prevent them from increasing their output, they threatened them "unless" they increased their output.

<comment><USER16> Yep, I caught that a while after posting and kicked myself for it but failed to edit it as I got distracted. Thanks nonetheless. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think it would be useful to divide that between jobs that are 'zero-sum', jobs that are useless for the people who do it because they don't understand what they are doing and jobs that are really just accidents. The root cause of the increase of all these is the complexity of our lives: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17263041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17263041)

Some more on the 'zero-sum jobs' (a metaphor) - jobs that are useful to the direct employer but are useless to the bigger organism. This can happen on many levels: a manager employing someone just to have bigger department (manager is the employer the biggger organism is the company), army (the employer is the particular state the bigger organism is the whole civilization). There are also cases where something is useless only partially - like advertising which does a useful job of informing customers, but that job is kind of the least important for it. There are also cases where there is like a pair of jobs to it: like police and thieves.

<comment><USER19> I do not believe our lives and systems are significantly more complex than than of our great-grandparents. Instead I believe we are under an illusion.

The world has always been a complex place, but we manage that by many layers of abstraction, mostly innate but also by social organization.

The failures of social organization and complex coordination are genuine, but they're not occurring because our world is much more complex. I have a speculation on the cause which can be convincingly demonstrated but it's the species of topic where HN is liable to change the colour of your text in its lalalalalalala-itsnothappening-mode.

Under most lights our world is more simple than it used to be. You didn't have to fetch a pail of water from the well this morning. Your clothes: washed, possibly dried by machines in a process that used to take a day out of every week. Your food... you see the picture. Getting blitzed by streams of information on the internet isn't the same thing as the world becoming more complex, that's partly a choice and something people used to do with a library card - besides most of the web is not especially information dense and that's another illusion. When we do a lot of the human version of context switching it doesn't take much to overwhelm our sense of proportion.

<comment><USER20> It's certainly not just the Internet that has gotten more complex.

Grocery stores have gone from an average of 9,000 products for sale in 1975 to over 55,000 today. Similar expansions of products exist in communication, finance, automotive, fashion, appliances...

There were approximately 2,000 federal crimes in 1900. Today there are nearly 5,000.

People with college degrees skyrocketed from about 10% in 1970 to well over 25% today. Stanfofd conferred degrees in 22 majors in 1968; they offer over 120 today.

And to take a small but real example for me, when I went to consider a preschool for my 4 year old, I received more literature on curriculum, activities, nutritional programs, Harvard studies, diversity initiatives, and instructor CVs ... Than I did when I chose my university back in 1998.

Or take my job as a Microsoft platform analytics professional. When I started out it was just SQL Server and its 5-10 components. Now someone coming into the same level is expected to have understanding of machine learning and AI, Big Data, chatbots, log analytics and other streaming/event sourcing capabilities, cloud architecture ..oh yeah and SQL Server and its 10-15 components ...

I can cite examples in medicine, finance, communications, linguistics (6 million words in Urban Dictionary, most of which aren't in the OED), pop culture ...

Taken together you would easily see that all the "convenience" and "simplicity" you're touting is completely offset by the amount of cognitive processing we have to do to navigate our modern world. We have all been forced to carve out mental fiefdoms - filter bubbles - just to cope. And that's led to the break down in coordination you cite - there is less empathy because I simply can't connect with the many someones out there with a vastly different set of life choices than me, at least not collectively.

To celebrate diversity is to acknowledge and embrace that we can come together on anything at all given the vast gulfs between most of us.

<comment><USER19> This may be a semantic argument. I probably mean 'complex' as in useful production by being more sophisticated and you probably mean 'complex' as in there is more of it in a variety of ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the article makes some really good points about the bullsh*t jobs and their effect, but I ponder the final two paragraphs in which this is said:

"Just think what kind of culture, music, science, ideas might result if all those people were liberated to do things they actually thought were important."

Would this really be true? I've heard that an artist needs something to struggle against, something to constrain the medium they're working in, to inspire the creation. Just having it be wide open is not optimal.

I think it's much the same for any field. You have to be challenged to have your spirit moved to take action. You have to have a focus for your intent.

Just having copious amounts of free time might not be the cornucopia of wonderful ideas and creations proposed in the article.

<comment><USER22> I used to think it was true, but with the rise of YouTube/SoundCloud/DeviantArt the internet I no longer think it's true. Most people really don't have that much interesting to say. From a social perspective I don't think we are missing out on great art. People would be happier though.

<comment><USER23> No? But all those sites are filled with great art of various sorts. The combination of easy publishing and relatively easy lives has created the sort of "millions of people being creative and doing art" that utopians always imagined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Many times when we believe a job is bullshit we are falling victim to the paradox of the library.

Go to your favorite library. Take one book and destroy it. Is it still a library? Yes, of course. Destroy three more ... still a library. But what if you keep going? Clearly one book is not a library. So ... where is the crossing point?

The same is true of many jobs. Yes if I was vaporized tomorrow my team would still function pretty fine. But that doesn't mean my job is bullshit. It means that we're overstaffed for the average demand. It probably also means that 9-5 is a bit silly. But if you got rid of all of us you'd have a problem, and the company can afford a bit of slack capacity.

<comment><USER25> For a medium sized business you're probably right, but for a huge C-Corp? What possible project is Bank of America going to undertake that will actually, to borrow a metaphor from cars, redline their staff? Where everyone is coming in and working nonstop from open to close to get something done?

<comment><USER26> Is BofA going to redline all of their staff? No. But absorbing a spike at a single department or branch is another story, and it wouldn't surprise me if having excess capacity already on hand is more efficient overall than trying to reassign individual workers on demand.

Besides, actually working on a team that's redlined is _exhausting_ , and doing it for more than a few weeks is a recipe for burnout. There's real business value in high employee morale and a low turnover rate, and having some amount of built in slack at normal operating capacity seems like a relatively cheap and reliable mechanism to safeguard that value long term.

<comment><USER25> Except the article is saying that employee morale in these places is in the toilet, so apparently it's not all that effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Just think what kind of culture, music, science, ideas might result if all > those people were liberated to do things they actually thought were > important.

Is there really any reason to believe that this would amount to anything? Sure, there might be some people out there who would do useful or important work. But isn't there also the possibility that the majority of people would just feed their pleasure side all day long? Without any constraints, maybe we would just consume, have fun and go to the beach all day long?

Maybe a rather unintended purpose of some of these bullshit jobs is to put a strain on the endless desires some of us might have.

<comment><USER28> > _But isn 't there also the possibility that the majority of people would > just feed their pleasure side all day long? Without any constraints, maybe > we would just consume, have fun and go to the beach all day long?_

And why not? Is there some ethical imperative that says you should not "have fun and go to the beach all day long", if you have what you need to go by?

I'd extend Pascal's praise of idleness: ""All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room." \-- to including "go to the beach" and such along with sitting still in a room.

The point (and I think Pascal's point) is not doing nothing, but in being able to be content without having to create schemes and busywork when there's no need for any, but instead find satisfaction to being itself.

<comment><USER29> Pascal is talking about an inherent need in humans to be busy. I do not see how denying such a need would be very effective at increasing satisfaction. Ignoring human nature just seems idealistic to me, like ignoring the target architecture of the software you're trying to hyper-optimize.

<comment><USER28> > _Ignoring human nature just seems idealistic to me_

Well, evolutionary humans started as animals not much different in behavior and inherent needs than gorillas. All civilization has been made by "ignoring human nature" in its original form and thus transforming it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Reading about the choice between reasonable pay and rewarding work, I was reminded of this Dilbert cartoon. As usual, Scott Adams got there first.

[http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02](http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02)

</comment><comment><USER31> Honestly, if it wasnt for health insurance benefits that comes with full time jobs. I would gladly work as a freelancer and build software that actually has a real world impact.

<comment><USER32> Hasn't Obamacare addressed that? Or are you worried that the exchanges may go away?

<comment><USER33> Speaking from experience, premiums go up every year, coverage decreases/copayments increase, and plans often get discontinued. I've had to switch to a different plan three times now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Something like 37-40% of workers according to surveys say their jobs make no > difference.

I'm simply not convinced that if a worker believes that his job makes no difference it really is so.

Most people I ran into don't really understand importance of such things as safety, maintenance, record-keeping and other things that don't give instant gratification. Taxi drivers are constantly surprised that I buckle up in the rear seat (while they don't buckle up themselves in the drivers') and tell me that I shouldn't worry about the police - without giving any thought to actual security. Junior developers that I mentor always have to be reminded about good practices and not cutting corners - and I am certain that they're much brighter than average developer out there.

It's very easy to imagine how such people would see their jobs as meaningless while they're actually performing a neccessary, although not often needed, function.

<comment><USER2> In my anecdotal experience it's actually the highly educated people, very well aware of what they do, who often find their jobs meaningless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd love to see a study of whether so called "bullshit jobs" rise in percentage to real jobs at a business when the number of employees goes up.

Ie: 100 employees = 10% bs 1000 employees = 25% bs

I've deal with whole groups at people at certain organisations that I simply used to call: "corporate politicians". They don't produce anything, they get information from A, manipulate it to make them look good, then broadcast it or send it straight to B. A good way to test for one is to tell them at an appropriate time that "it's not what you know, it's who you know".

If you get smiles and nods and winks, you're dealing with one. I guess they never stop to consider that if everyone thought like that, no one would know anything.

</comment><comment><USER36> There's a difference between the position itself being useless and someone being underutilized. Businesses often staff up to be able to react quickly if needs change, although most of the time some staff might be given just busywork, leading to the impression that they have a bullshit job.

</comment><comment><USER37> Not sure I buy in to the whole thesis here, but I really like the term "managerial feudalism" \- Great little soundbite.

</comment><comment><USER38> I found this aside really interesting, it helped me understand other perspectives:

"Everyone hates the political class who they see (in my opinion, quite rightly) as basically a bunch of crooks. But all the other resentments make it very difficult for anyone to get together to do anything about it. To a large extent, our societies have come to be held together by envy and resentment: not envy of the rich, but in many cases, envy of those who are seen as in some ways morally superior, or resentment of those who claim moral superiority but who are seen as hypocritical. "

</comment><comment><USER39> David Graeber doesn't even acknowledge that most bullshit jobs are in governments. The man is really an intellectual: he lacks common sense. Also, when Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant confronted him with other pitfalls in his reasoning, he walked out of the room twice.

[https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een- ongeloof...](https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een- ongelooflijke-hoeveelheid-dode-tijd-bijgekomen-~bcc09392/)

</comment><comment><USER40> >"People want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that makes some kind a positive difference."

This sounds like people are just rediscovering alienation[1] again.

1.: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation)

</comment><comment><USER41> somehow this reminds me of the telephone sanitizers of Golgafrincham

</comment><comment><USER42> Link to the original Essay:

 _On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant by David Graeber_

[https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Has anyone read his book?

<comment><USER44> He explored in detail his theory of five different kinds of bullshit jobs and supplied some very memorable anecdotes. He had some analysis of economic trends coinciding. For example, 40% of the workforce in the 1940s was in farming, now it is 1%. Automation happened and his theory is that instead of massive unemployment, our system basically created this bullshit jobs level. It is kind of a feudal capitalist version of a guaranteed job benefit.

I found it quite enjoyable and particularly the explanation and relation to feudal ideas. Why are productive workers being squeezed out while the managerial class is expanding? Shouldn't the opposite actually happen (fewer workers with better automated oversight controls should need less managers, not more).

His final chapter leads to a proposal about UBI as a way of walking out of this trap.

He explores the explosion of administration in universities. Basically, lots of money flowing in and it has to go somewhere. So it goes to a level that can be easily cut (administrators) instead, of say, paying adjuncts more which is not easy to walk back from.

It is a fast read and has some interesting ideas in it. It is not a definitive scholarly piece of work, but it provides a starting point for understanding how bs jobs arise when there is plenty of excess going on (lots of profits => bs jobs )

Some related readings: "Debt, A 5,000 Year History" and "The View from Flyover Country"

<comment><USER45> How well does he characterize what those bullshit jobs are? Which industries are they in? What are their titles, what are they doing on a daily basis?

Most of his examples in interviews sound like office workers, but what percentage of office workers would have to be working bullshit jobs for his 37-40% numbers to be realistic? I have a hard time squaring his claim with what I know about the jobs people do: See, for instance, a breakdown by industry: [https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major- industry-...](https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry- sector.htm), or by occupation: [https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupational- projections-and-...](https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupational-projections- and-characteristics.htm)

<comment><USER44> I take his piece to largely be about self-identified bullshit jobs. While many of the jobs he describes, such as transcribing boxes on a form into a system that is never consulted by anyone or hiring someone to guard an entirely empty room, are clearly useless to society, he also describes jobs that have some benefit to someone, but the one performing them feels wasted. While many jobs have various stresses, both mental and physical, he wanted to explore the particular stress of not having much, if anything, to do as well as the stress of doing stuff that is pointless or harmful.

He does categorize the types of bs jobs into several categories:

1\. Flunkies. They are largely around to make others feel more important by having others around. Often busy little tasks that don't seem to have much to do with a job description or being useful. Sometimes they sit somewhere just as a warm body. 2\. Goons. Largely those without social value. An example might be someone who edits advertisements to make women look unrealistically thin in a way that makes real women feel bad about themselves. These are non- good PR types, corporate lawyers, telemarketers... 3\. Duct Tapers. These are people doing something that only exists because the problem is not fixed, for some reason. Example is of a form submission setup that must be routed to a person because they decided to change the format but did not change a program. Or being a "proofreader" of someone whose reports are beyond awful. 4\. Box Tickers. They serve to simply ensure that some rule is being observed. Example: someone filling out a preference form that someone has to put in somewhere but the results are never consulted. Others might be highlighting pointless forms, helping people jump through government hoops, asking for funds, or be bureaucrats almost anywhere. 5\. Taskmasters. People who assign tasks to others even though those others could easily figure out what they need to do (Type 1) or people who create and oversee bullshit jobs (Type 2): "strategic" and other buzzwordy bullshit.

In addition to those, there are useful jobs that only exist to support useless jobs, such as those cleaning offices of those are useless.

I am not sure where he puts the following, but he had two stories of people where they were essentially hanging out just for an emergency to happen: an engineer managing a rapid response team that never, ever got called to do anything and a caretaker for an elderly woman who was largely fine, but could not be left alone. He writes how they at first tried to find something to do with themselves in a productive fashion, but then simply couldn't take it anymore and quit.

I think he wanted to explore what are the implications of jobs where the one doing it feels useless, whether they were actually useless or not.

The 30-40% of jobs figure comes from both limited surveys where people rate their jobs as well as looking at some statistical growth of jobs. As automation took away a lot of physically productive jobs in the past 70 years, jobs in the information/management/financial sectors grew to fill in that gap, which is roughly 30-40% from the graphs he provided. In his mind, particularly as he is an anarchist, such jobs are majority useless and/or harmful.

For me, I'm simply interested in the idea of finding ways to help people find engaging work because I think society benefits from that the most. I also found it interesting that the ones who had the hardest time being in a useless job are from the working class. While uselessness and boredom is soul crushing for everyone, there are systems of raising that it more palatable.

I would also say that this is largely a starting point for many further explorations of these ideas. This is a narrative of exploration, not a fully flushed out scientific theory. It was definitely written with a popular audience in mind in order to, hopefully, stimulate more analysis rather than a report on findings.

<comment><USER45> Thanks. I ask because while feeling like your job is useless is sad, the really provocative claim is that most people are sitting around doing nothing of value to anyone.

And having read your description of the useless jobs, I'll reiterate that while I'd entertain the idea that 40% of people think their jobs are bullshit, I don't think those 5 categories possibly contain 40% of workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The General Intellect Unit podcast also discusses Graeber's work [1]. They call themselves 'Cybernetic Marxists' so don't expect this to be neutral. :P

[1]: [http://generalintellectunit.net/e/013-alternatives/](http://generalintellectunit.net/e/013-alternatives/)

</comment><comment><USER47> vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas

</comment><comment><USER48> "People want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that makes some kind a positive difference." - That's the bullshit. I just want to make positive difference in my wallet. And then I can think about the rest of the world.

<comment><USER49> Yes, the wallet is usually the first priority. However, I believe that doing work that has a deeper meaning is more satisfying. I've observed that it is for example very demotivating for employees if their work gets dismissed (i.e. when they worked hard on a project for months and then the project gets cancelled).

<comment><USER48> Of course - if two jobs give similar income, you look at other factors. But if you can earn 10x more than now but in bullshit work (playing all day computer games etc. - as described in article) which job would you choose?</comment></comment></comment>


Colleges Think Women Having Sex Is Dangerous. Laura Kipnis Says They're Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/reasontv/2017/05/09/laura-kipnis-unwanted-advances-title-ix <comment><USER2> Shortly after I graduated, I was taking a couple of CS courses at a local college that was affiliated with one of the mainstream Protestant churches. I discovered that 1) There was a $50 fine for walking on the grass and 2) If two people were caught having sex on campus, it was an automatic expulsion, even if the two people were married. (I didn't discover this by getting fined or kicked out.)

A few years later, at a southern state university, I had the experience of having my driver's license taken by the RA before I could visit with a friend in her women-only dorm room. It was like the rest of the world was a man library, and my card was being filed away like a book in a 1980's library.

<comment><USER3> Speaking of the 1980s: in the mid 1980s I had a girlfriend at Wellesley. Someone pulled the fire alarm in her dorm in the middle of one night, and among the evacuated crowd was a significant number of men wrapped in towels or womens' bathrobes.

Sounds like that theoretically would not happen today -- but I have a hard time believing that's the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What this whole thing about consent issues tells me is that the promise of the sexual revolution and free no consequence sex is bullocks.

Is it sexual harassment when someone gets someone to have sex with them by taking advantage of another's vulnerable state, or giving false promises, or has un-consented anal or other sex acts when only vaginal sex is consented to. How clear does a woman have to express lack of consent when in the heat of the moment?

These are not questions with easy answers and their inherent vagueness encourages jilted women to make these claims, horny men to act in ways that encourage these claims, and leaves administrators and officials straining to effectively and fairly evaluate these claims.

The way Western culture and Western sexuality and the expectations surrounding it are set up is pretty much geared for these sorts of sexual harassment cases to come up.

<comment><USER5> _Is it sexual harassment when someone gets someone to have sex with them by taking advantage of another 's vulnerable state, or giving false promises, or has un-consented anal or other sex acts when only vaginal sex is consented to._

The unconsented acts would not be harassment, they would be assault.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not a perspective you hear a lot in the mainstream, either from the right or left. It's refreshing.

</comment><comment><USER7> "feminist paternalism" is a good description.

<comment><USER8> Maternalism even.

Funny how paternalist is pejorative, when mothers can be just as controlling, especially about sex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how much VC money you could raise for a block chain based consent app. Basically, it allows two or people to agree on consent for specific acts then at the end of the encounter everybody can verify nothing nonconsensual occurred. If anybody disagrees, it automatically calls the police so everything can get sorted out while evidence and memories are fresh. Everything is saved to the block chain so it cannot be modified.

<comment><USER10> Yes, because everybody would love to have a decentralized, public ledger for sexual activities. /s

I can't imagine what hard forking or a 51% attack would do to the "community."

<comment><USER2> _Yes, because everybody would love to have a decentralized, public ledger for sexual activities. /s_

Diaspora?</comment></comment></comment>


Personal data of all 6.5M Israeli voters exposed by security flaw in app - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/11/tech/israel-voters-data-exposed-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22286925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22286925)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22299901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22299901)</comment>


NASA Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/02/28/nasa-says-earth-is-greener-today-than-20-years-ago-thanks-to-china-india/#58849f8d6e13 <comment><USER2> The Nasa abstract link is: [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity- in-china-an...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-and- india-dominates-the-greening-of-earth-nasa-study-shows)

[http://sites.bu.edu/cliveg/files/2019/02/Chen- NSUST-2019.pdf](http://sites.bu.edu/cliveg/files/2019/02/Chen-NSUST-2019.pdf)

And the original paper is here (unfortunately behind a paywall): [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0220-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0220-7)

It would be great to see the breakdown by country and by category of forestation and planting of crops.</comment>


Work on using AI to brain activity into speech - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/artificial-intelligence-turns-brain-activity-speech <comment><USER2> After working on the same task ~3 years back I will say: Be skeptical about results. Neural activity shifts over the course of days, and experiments without long term recordings will produce results which look a _lot_ better than what can be obtained in realistic scenarios. As the article also mentions, there is a sizable question about the differences in signals when vocalization is not possible. I've seen some of that data, and in my opinion we're still a good whiles away from being able to use that data in any practical sense.

<comment><USER3> Iam very interested in brain computer interfaces. It would be great if you can share any of your work here..

<comment><USER2> Poster from extracting speech articulation events using local field potentials (electrodes inserted into brain matter) [http://fundamental- code.com/tmp/2015-neurosig.pdf](http://fundamental- code.com/tmp/2015-neurosig.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does it compare with what [https://www.ctrl-labs.com/](https://www.ctrl- labs.com/) are doing? It seems that they get the intent just from having a device attached to the arm, so is it really necessary to attach the electrodes to the brain? Because if the person is reading silently you can still get the signal going from the brain to the muscles in the throat/mouth, can it be just attached to the neck?

<comment><USER2> Typically the end target for applications like this are for patients who have some impairment which prevents normal vocalization which would mean that the EMG around the throat/mouth would not be reliably available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> With these kinds of MMIs, I often wonder if it wouldn't be better to train the mind to the machine instead of the other way around. What I mean is, have the machine convert certain brain activity into phonemes or some other primitive and allow the human mind to do what it is already pretty good at: learn to use a tool.

Since I'm not an expert in this domain, I assume there are reasons this isn't how it is done. Is anyone aware of what they are?

<comment><USER2> To a degree there is some learning on both sides. I don't know if I've seen it mentioned in detail in papers that I've read, but it was a general tone at a few confs when dealing with coarse motor functionality.

As per why the same approach is not well suited for speech, one (of many) components is the data bandwidth you need for speech to happen at a reasonable rate. For many applications the ML involved in the brain computer interface is only able to extract a few bits per second. It works for applications where the output is coarse (e.g. up/down/left/right) or where large delays are acceptable, but it's not the best fit for speech.

<comment><USER6> > extract a few bits per second

That's surprising. I thought it would be a lot higher than 3.3 bits for 10 fingers (probably not worth considering in this context).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The eeriness of the second audio clip reminds me of the first recorded voice by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Gi6j4w3DY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Gi6j4w3DY)

</comment><comment><USER8> Stephen hawking: AAAAHHHH you got be kidding me

<comment><USER9> This had me legitimately laughing out loud. Thank you ^_^</comment></comment>


CodeCombat's live coding level editor - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codecombat.com/post/64394275470/new-feature-onslaught

<comment><USER2> That level editor is awesome(and the 2.5D physics must have been painful to program.) When the source is released, I can't wait to see what people do with it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Me neither! It should be possible to build hugely different levels with it, kind of like the StarCraft II map editor (which lets you build first-person shooters, underground, or like 2D sidescroller arcade games.)

I really want to get it so that people can create campaigns for younger students, or for advanced developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Played through the first levels and I really like the idea. I've been thinking about how I could get my kids started and this seems like a great way.

I also see possiblities for some really cool stuff for more experienced coders, especially in multiplayer.

Mentioned earlier: make it completely playable through keyboard. When I got the first alert that I had to use "enter" to continue I was thinking how great it was it was just keyboard and then it started mixing up.

I understand the server being hammered so errors pop up that shouldn't be there. But if I didn't have the knowledge level I have (simply being sure that the error was wrong and the code was right I might have bailed out in the first couple of lessons by not being sure what to do. So I think you should also put some thought in helping people new to coding navigate the errors also when they are not due to server error.

I will play it through as I'm curious how you'll make it more difficult, or better put, make it so that the player needs to program more instead of just putting the right commands in the right order. I can see it getting out of hand rather quickly on the development side :) But things like different classes that you can execute based on stuff happening on the screen would be great.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Great Job!!! I am working on an after-school programming club for my son's elementary school. Scratch is currently the main focus of the curriculum, but I could see this being a very enjoyable way to introduce text-based programming without resorting to HelloWorld-style tutorials. What is the best way to provide feedback?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sending us emails through the contact form on our site (or just to email@example.com) is a great way to get the discussion going. Eager to talk about how we can make this awesome for your son and his friends!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm often asked for recommendations on how to learn to program and this will probably be perfect for nerdier types (but looks like it assumes zero initial knowledge, which is awesome). What other things do folks recommend? Coursera? Code School? Khan Academy?

<comment><USER6> Hi Dreeves, here's a partial list of the projects we've seen:

ONLINE VIDEO LECTURES

Let's Code Test Driven JavaScript: [http://www.letscodejavascript.com/](http://www.letscodejavascript.com/)

One Month Rails: [https://onemonthrails.com/](https://onemonthrails.com/)

Learnable: [https://learnable.com/](https://learnable.com/)

Code School: [http://www.codeschool.com/](http://www.codeschool.com/)

Treehouse: [http://teamtreehouse.com/](http://teamtreehouse.com/)

CodeHS: [http://codehs.com/](http://codehs.com/) \- "Computer science class in a box" for k-12 schools

Learn Street: [http://www.learnstreet.com/](http://www.learnstreet.com/)

CODE CHALLENGES

Top Coders: [http://www.topcoder.com/](http://www.topcoder.com/)

Hacker Rank: [https://www.hackerrank.com/](https://www.hackerrank.com/)

Interview Street: [https://www.interviewstreet.com/](https://www.interviewstreet.com/)

OTHER

CodeCombat: [http://codecombat.com](http://codecombat.com) \- online game that teaches Javascript

Codecademy: [http://codecademy.com/](http://codecademy.com/)

CodeAvengers: [http://www.codeavengers.com/](http://www.codeavengers.com/) \- Pay-per-module coding game

Hakitzu: [http://www.kuatostudios.com/games/hakitzu/](http://www.kuatostudios.com/games/hakitzu/) \- Paid iPad game that teaches coding

Kodable: [http://www.surfscore.com/](http://www.surfscore.com/) \- iPad game that teaches coding

Full disclosure, I run CodeCombat.

There are dozens upon dozens of other not-for-profits and pre-monetization projects out there, but this list covers most of the major players.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am teaching a class for 4th graders to learn to code. We will definitely be trying out CodeCombat!

<comment><USER6> Glad to hear it tarr11, if you guys find anything that's busted or could be improved, please let us know, we're always looking for ways to improve!

<comment><USER8> I thought the "taste my longsword" snippet on the second level a little risque for my own kids. That said, maybe it was meant completely innocently and my minds in the gutter.

I love the fact that you can continue past certain things by pressing enter. It'd be REALLY nice if you could do most things from the keyboard (pause/resume time, cast the spell, etc)...having to grab the mouse is disruptive when you're trying out code.

Good work all around though. Very fun game and I look forward to its future!

<comment><USER6> Huh, we hadn't thought of that, but it's almost incidental to the plot, we could change that dialogue no problem.

I agree about the keyboard/mouse confusion. I find myself switching far too often. We need to figure something out that works better.

Thanks for the kind words, we'll definitely be working to continue improving the game!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SkyNet now officially online - sync your watches - December 12, 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2011_cr/cyberwar.html On December 12, 2011 congress has authorized offensive military action in Cyberspace -
CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 1540, NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2012 -
SEC. 954. MILITARY ACTIVITIES IN CYBERSPACE. <comment><AUTHOR> On December 12, 2011 congress has authorized offensive military action in Cyberspace -

CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 1540, NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2012 -

(see some comments at [http://www.activistpost.com/2011/12/congress- authorizes-offe...](http://www.activistpost.com/2011/12/congress-authorizes- offensive-military.html) ) SEC. 954. MILITARY ACTIVITIES IN CYBERSPACE.</comment>