Mt. Gox – Business Plan 2014-2017 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/209535200/Business-Plan-MtGox-2014-2017 <comment><USER2> >Strengths

>Technical expertise of Mark Karpeles, CEO of Mtgox, as a leader in network security, systems development, and cryptocurrency.

Clearly.

>Mark is a young technopreneur with more than 15 years experience ins oftware development, network administration and entrepreneurship. Mark is well-versed in multiple programming languages, has a strong background in network security, and is well-known in the tech community.

That last part is certainly true now.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a fantasy. Mark is quite likely going to jail for a very long time, along with at least some of his fellow staff members. At market value they are something like $400 million in debt.

This ridiculous idea that the world can't live without Mt. Gox, which has been clearly communicated in both this document and the previously leaked crisis memo, shows signs of serious narcissism in whomever is behind them. Whatever PR/political damage their crisis has inflicted upon Bitcoin has already been done and could not be reversed even if they were saved. These executives should spend more time trying to find non-extradition countries that will take them and less time living in fantasy land.

<comment><USER4> You can't go to jail for losing $400 million, you can go to jail for stealing it. You are implying that he has committed a some real crime beyond incompetence?

<comment><USER5> losing the money was not the crime, trying to cover it up and engage in dubious practices like using customer fiat funds to shore up your company, buy btc (on gox at $150) to sell on other exchanges (bitstamp at $500) is likely to be the root of their legal woes not that they wer ehacked and lost 750k coins.

Their cover up is what will bring legal repercussions.

<comment><USER6> I have no idea how accurate this is, but Mark seemed to believe they were "operating within the law":

 _" Karpeles replied that the matter is "confidential," adding that the company had discussed its business model with Japanese authorities "to ensure that we are operating within the law here.""_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks like they won't die without a fight. I don't think they're coming back from this one though. Unless they repay everyone and have a good explanation as to what the past week is all about I'm pretty sure Mt.Gox has ruined it's image ( if it had one haha..).

<comment><USER8> It's looking like the document was meant to sucker in new investment so they could continue to hide their insolvency and keep the ponzi scheme going.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Gems:

> 2.6 Key to Success

> Security: MtGox has a solid IT infrastructure, protected from DDOS attacks > and hackers by a number of security providers and we continue to develop > several customized security features for customers in order to protect their > account.

> Speed: MtGox runs an highly efficient trading engine that will compete > enormously against the capabilities of our competitors. We will also develop > more efficient fund transfer infrastructures to ensure that customers can > send or receive money to/from their MtGox accounts within 3 business days.

<comment><USER10> This is about the only thing that comes to mind when I read things written by Mt Gox about their software, and IT:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1umbFOLztAw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1umbFOLztAw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Someone needs to run them through the difference between Weaknesses and Threats. They've got plenty of threats even if they make it through this and ignoring them in the SWOT is laughable.

</comment><comment><USER12> How many employees did Mt. Gox have? This seems pretty polished for a company that I thought had ~10 employees.

<comment><USER13> >This seems pretty polished

Hmmmm, it looks like a standard MS Word template, nothing especially polished, nothing anyone with a proficiency in Word could not knock out.

<comment><USER14> This business plan looks more like a college kid in an ill-fitting suit and badly tied tie going for their first job interviews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "We are use the Yayoi Kaikei accounting system."

Outside of that hilarity, this thing seriously is either fake or a scary indictment of the lack of acumen and precision demanded by an organization of this type.

How often does a grunting, surly herd of "male 20-40 year olds, with a deep distrust for established financial systems", organize on your tiny Japanese farm and crap gold nuggets towards each other?

Bitcoin, the Napster of cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER15> I'll contend that Mt.Gox::Bitcoin as Napster::MP3.

MP3 was "good enough" to revolutionize the way we buy and pirate music. Napster was enabled by MP3 tech, but flamed out spectacularly.

MP3 survived though, and now more music is sold online than in record stores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Who on earth would be foolish enough to ever give those involved another dollar/transaction?

They are going to try to use this to peddle security devices? Seriously?

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh, God, an Arm and Hammer cat litter flash ad popped up while I was scrolling through this site, playing sound automatically.

And I see no way to silence it or close it.

<comment><USER18> Try not to use God in vain when you're on a public forum. It's just a daft popup mate.

<comment><USER19> If you tried to cope with everyone's varying view of blasphemy on a public forum, there isn't much you could say.

Also, you can only really take a gods name in vain if you happen to believe in that god, otherwise it is merely a culturally acquired exclamation. If I say "By Zeus, that bathwater is hot.", I am not being blasphemous unless I believe that Zeus exists.

<comment><USER18> It's not about blasphemy. It's about referring to the source of the universe (belief respective) over a popup, just a bit daft is all, mate.

<comment><USER19> _" It's not about blasphemy."_

 _" Try not to use God in vain when you're on a public forum."_

I seem to remember there is something in one of those books about bearing false witness.

<comment><USER18> Ahahaha. That's all I have to say, because your point is so pedantic and wrong, that your aspergers might have infected your whole frontal cortex.

<comment><USER19> Look, I'd had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was, 'That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Farewell, Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange. With your passing, the Bitcoin world has lost its greatest and most hilarious punching bag.

<comment><USER21> At the very least, maybe this overly clever joke of showing off that you know the original name of the service will finally die with it.

<comment><USER22> The best part about that joke is there is no remotely convincing evidence that the site ever actually was a playing card exchange.

<comment><USER23> Assuming a (presumably incomplete) scraping by archive.org is "convincing evidence", it was originally an exchange for _virtual_ trading cards.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20070525044536/http://mtgox.com/...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070525044536/http://mtgox.com/gwt/mtgox.php)

<comment><USER24> Of course they were virtual cards, that's what a "Magic: The Gathering Online" Exchange would be.

(But actually MTGO has it's own de-facto virtual currency - tix - which are regularly traded for cards through the MTGO interface.

<comment><USER25> > Of course they were virtual cards, that's what a "Magic: The Gathering > Online" Exchange would be.

I think the confusion is that some people parse it incorrectly as "Magic: The Gathering" \+ "Online Exchange" rather than as "Magic: The Gathering Online" \+ "Exchange", so think that it was (planned to be) an exchange for _physical_ rather than _virtual_ cards.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google's Nexus 9 is made by HTC and coming very soon - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/22/6819129/google-nexus-9-is-made-by-htc-and-coming-very-soon

<comment><USER2> I wonder for how long will Google be able to keep its version scheme for the Nexus program. I guess Nexus 6 and 8/9 will be the end of the road.</comment>


The financial cost of not knowing things - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@andyferris/the-uncertainty-tax-the-financial-cost-of-not-knowing-things-2de05a5d21f6 <comment><USER2> Just to be a pedant the FDA doesn't consider the value of a drug to society, just if it is safe and effective. It is up to the pharmaceutical company to decide if it is worth developing and selling a new drug.

One thing the FDA doesn't consider that I think they should is the cost of not approving a drug. Safety and effectiveness is not black and white when faced with uncertainly.

<comment><AUTHOR> A agree, that's totally true. That "exercise" was just my thought experiment about what might be for "the greater good" (whatever that might mean, precisely).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > However, the perverse situation that can (and does!) occur is when people > _don't know what they don't know_. In being naive, in not doing the above > analysis, in making a quick decision, and in choosing to "use your gut" and > make a decision, you limit your options. You loose the opportunity to > address weaknesses in your knowledge.

As an interesting aside: "Not knowing what you don't know" is known as second order ignorance or the Dunning-Kruger affect [1]. The "orders of ignorance" beyond this one stage are quite interesting when analysing how we learn. Andy Hunt describes this in great detail in "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning".

I have always suspected it's possible to reduce your propensity for 2nd order ignorance through more varied learning. For financial decision making I can imagine this as a key meta skill where you must identify unknowns quickly and accurately and be able to intuit their potential impact... as each decision can appear to have very little in common to previously encountered ones such that knowledge accumulation alone does not result in significant accumulation of skill.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

<comment><USER4> That's not what the actual Dunning-Kruger effect is. See [https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the- dunning-...](https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning- kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/) for an explanation of why this is wrong and what Dunning and Kruger actually found.

<comment><USER3> I understand the difference, but I should have framed it better: it is not 2nd order ignorance itself, but it is one expression of it in the extreme.

I suppose the point is that we all have 2nd order ignorance (just pick a context until you find it), but we act inappropriately upon it to varying degrees depending on... what might as well be called wisdom i suppose, you could call it the anti-dunning-kruger effect I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why I think colleges should pay people who work in industries to give students the scoop on things regularly. Unless you have close family that works in a business, there's so much you don't know when you're in college or just graduated about the careers you want to join.

<comment><USER6> Isn't that exactly the point of internships?

<comment><USER7> Internships seem to be structured as yet another hoop to jump through on the path to a career, and by that time it's already expected of you to know what you want to do.

<comment><USER8> Actually - as it is often used - internship is only a way to pay less for the same (or sometimes more) not-fully-qualified job.

Internship (what was once called apprenticeship) made (and makes) a lot of sense where the employer supplies knowledge (arts and crafts being a typical example), nowadays to actually be considered for an internship you need to have a full, recognized cycle of uni-level study (which is the thing that _in theory_ should have already provided you with all the knowledge - bar the experience - needed for your profession).

One thing is having a (lower paid but with "full dignity") entry-level job, and another is having "stages", "internships" and similar, where very often the young people is not actually taught anything and are just a replacement for generic secretarial or similar activities.

<comment><USER9> > Actually - as it is often used - internship is only a way to pay less for > the same (or sometimes more) not-fully-qualified job.

are you speaking from experience here? i have had several internships, and at each one they let me fix a couple trivial bugs in production before giving me a toy project they have no intention of actually using. my peers have had very similar experiences. i would actually have loved to be given a full engineer's assignment.

<comment><USER8> >are you speaking from experience here?

No, not really personal experience, due to age I am way past any internship or apprenticeship possible offer, but I have (much younger than me) cousins and sons of friends that went into the stuff (a couple still are).

Also, you are speaking about a very definite field (I presume software engineer or similar), while I was more broadly speaking, an internship at - say - a legal firm or - still say - an accounting firm or other "generic" office, where internships usually (not always) revolve around data entering, making photocopies and similar.

<comment><USER9> ah, i assumed we were talking about SWE type internships. i could certainly see interns doing entry-level work in other fields.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey Andy — love this. But really you are developing a framework for figuring out how much time to invest in research.

A couple of questions — which was prompted by your blog

What situations is there no value in research ? Corrollary — are there ways you can systemically reduce your risk by increasing your gut feel for probabilities without reesearch ? Final one — you make the great point on unknown unknowns — apart from systemically working through all possible states and thinking through various envrionmental changes — are there any systemic approaches to reducing this risk. In working with startups — I would summarise an alternative approach that covers all 3 by the following pieces of accepted wisdom from startups.

Launch early — to validate in the market with real people Talk to customers to build an empathy or gut feel for relative priorities of stuff — and what really matters I think these two principles go some way to solving the problems you are highlighting through a different approach.

I'm sharing — as I'm sure you have considered this appraoch — and have a reason for discarding it.

I wrote a bit about it here [https://medium.com/@nilanp/building-conviction- the-art-of-pr...](https://medium.com/@nilanp/building-conviction-the-art-of- product-management-c65d481d653c)

N

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Nilan - thanks for your words. It's true, that as someone who is ultimately employed as a researcher in some role, I do wonder (a) when research is valuable and (b) whether the people controlling the decisions of when/how much research to undertake can justify this decision quantitatively. (But rather than think of "research" I'd prefer to back that out into a more fundamental concepts like "information".)

I think your question 1 is partially answered by the inequality — it provides a upper bound for how much utility you could gain from the research. More practically, perhaps a decision maker could use gut feeling to break it down into quartiles — outcomes which are worst case (0th quartile), below average (1st quartile), average (2nd quartile), above average (3rd quartile) and best case (4th quartile). If the estimated cost of research is much less than ROI(3rd quartile) minus ROI(1st quartile), then the research seems worthwhile even for "typical" outcomes. If the estimated cost of research is greater than ROI(4th quartile) minus ROI(0th quartile) then the research is obviously not worthwhile (that's the inequality).

I think your questions 2 and 3 are the questions I would also like to see answers to :) I think that given decision makers come from a variety of (often non-mathematical) backgrounds, tools should be simple and easy to use/remember, which is why I'm focusing on using things like "worst case scenario" and "above average scenario" and so on. That way we get to combine quantitative analysis and gut feeling to get good outcomes from typical decision makers.

And yes — I completely agree that the agile "release often, get feedback early" and the startup "move fast and break things" philosophies are designed for revealing information quickly so that you can make good decisions as early as possible (thus also maximizing the utility of that information). As a general work pattern, I put this under a kind-of "don't be stupid" mentality — even if this maybe wasn't obvious 25 years ago. I think the topic of the article is to be able to address specific, large decisions (like exercise 2).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1\. You should be able to sell the camera for about $1500 if you don't like it, therefore the cost of the wrong decision is about $500, or $100 in expectation. Spend no more than 4 hours.

2\. Regardless of the answer, worst case you'd be spending $250k this year to make 500k over the next few years, which is a terrific return on capital. Buy it, information is useless here.

3\. Studies showing 95% confidence are wrong more than 50% of the time. The answer is let private companies decide if they think the odds are good enough to conduct expensive trials.

4\. The current ROI for pharma companies is below cost of capital and will be negative in 2 years. It's not a great business anymore. [https://endpts.com/pharmas-broken-business-model-an- industry...](https://endpts.com/pharmas-broken-business-model-an-industry-on- the-brink-of-terminal-decline/)

I'm not sure if these are the answers the author is expecting, but they seem to be the correct ones to me.

Edit: also, the cost of a drug is mostly development. Production is dirt cheap once it's been developed. The model here of a cheaper drug is just wrong. They might be cheaper, which would force A's cost down, etc, but has nothing to do with cost of production.

<comment><USER12> >Buy it, information is useless here.

Information isn't useless in this example. For some unexplained reason you have already obtained information for no cost which doesn't make any sense.

The real scenario is: cost overrun by $250k to $1 million over x months, profit increase between $50k to $100k per year. How much are you willing to spend to obtain 100% certainty?

<comment><USER11> Well then you need to estimate the distribution of those results. If it's uniform between those numbers then it's an expected loss, and whether it's worth spending a significant amount of money on information depends on whether the company can afford it. If, say, the value of information was 200k in expectation, that doesn't imply that the company should spend anywhere near that amount on information, because they should be somewhat risk averse if they can't spread the risk over many such decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought this was rather obvious. Businesses is all about risk. Every step in business is a balance of risk vs potential reward.

That is why we pay so much for insurance. That is why we pay so much for hedging. That's why we do risk assesments and keep risk registers. All the machine-learning age adds is the potential for better identifying opportunities and the potential for measuring past performance more accurately, in order that we may extrapolate better. It isn't going to answer the big question that CEOs are paid for, and that is "how much risk an I willing to take, what potential reward would I need too make that worthwhile"

</comment><comment><USER14> Look no further than Bitcoin. Without knowing a combination of cyber security, computer science, economics, law, and incentive modelling Bitcoin could have been the thing that cost you tens of thousands of dollars or could have made you hundreds of thousands or millions.

It's so obvious that information and understanding is directly tied to wealth. The growing gini coefficient within developed countries as partially attributable to the information super highway that's enabling the intelligent to hyper charge their mental models of the world with a just in time information delivery system to boot.

The whole system is speeding up for the top 5%. Focussing on the _cost_ shrouds the true takeaway. The money is all on the growth side and the intellectually impoverished are getting left behind.

<comment><USER15> Bitcoin is dumb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > 1\. Both models I'm interested in cost $2000. I'm worried that there's a 20% > chance I'll end up with a camera that I never use because I don't like it, > and therefore have a $2000 device which is essentially useless to me. I > value my spare time at roughly $25/hour. On financial reasons alone, how > much time could I reasonably spend on doing research?

> ~16 hours. Because 20% × $2000 / ($25/hour).

I'm not sure if I have understood, I think in this example, the expected loss here is, 0 x 80% + -2000 * 20% = -400, thus the answer, is my understanding correct?

<comment><USER17> He's not being clear about what he's talking about and mish-mashing stuff from Bayesian decision theory ([https://www.reddit.com/r/DecisionTheory/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DecisionTheory/)). The calculation he seems to be trying to do there is 'Expected Value of Perfect Information' (EVPI): the value of omniscience. Which is an upper bound, not an exact amount. He also is unclear about the choice being involved (is he choosing between buying a camera and not buying a camera, or buying camera A versus buying camera B? If camera A fails, why expect camera B to succeed? Couldn't they both fail?)

If you interpret it as buying a camera or not buying a camera, a 20% risk of the camera being useless, then the EVPI is 20% * $2000 = $200: you would be willing to pay up to $200 for certainty about whether the camera would be good or not. The EVPI serves as an upper bound on more realistic Value of Information quantities like Expected Value of Sample Information (EVSI; the value from a reduction of posterior uncertainty by a sample of data eg a small survey). If, for example, there were some piece of information you could buy for <$100 which reduced the risk to 10%, you would want to buy it; if you could do that by doing research for <4 hours and you value your time at $25, then it would be profitable to do that research. Similarly, if you could somehow reach certainty, you would need to do so at under 16 hours (not exactly 16 hours!)

#2 is also wrong because it ignores discounting/opportunity cost (imagine the integration cost could be $499,999 instead). #3 can't be answered because it omits the side-effects and magnitude of the gain, which affect both the net benefit and EVSI (smaller differences are less profitable and harder to detect) and 95% 'confidence' does not mean 95% probability the drug is better, which is the fallacy of inverting the p-value. (For a good paper on how you'd actually do drug approval in an decision-theoretic way, see [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2641547](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2641547) ) Not to mention again discounting, and elasticity of demand to boot.

<comment><USER16> So you think it's just some half-cooked Bayesian? Perhaps I should put "systematically indoctrinate myself with the LessWrong methodology" to my agenda, seriously.

<comment><USER17> I think it definitely is and he's either explaining it poorly or reinventing the wheel. Try applying any of his explanations to something more complicated than binary data with perfect information, such as a normal distribution with small sample _n_, it falls apart immediately - you need the full Bayesian perspective in order to work with the posterior and apply a loss function sensibly.

(I wouldn't call it 'LessWrong methodology', though. LWers pretty much never do a formal true subjective Bayesian decision analysis, and to the extent they do, you should be calling it LessWrong indoctrinating itself into the 'Raiffa- Schlaifer-Savage methodology', as they preceded us by ~60 years.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting. I'd be curious to know if the author has read "The Influential Mind" by Tali Sharot. Long to short, humans are wired to be anything but rational and purely logical (even when necessary).

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/books/review/the- influ...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/books/review/the-influential- mind-tali-sharot-decision-making.html)

The book was on FT's short list for best of 2017.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but seems like an interesting read. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > I think the take-home statement here is that it pays (literally) to know > what you don't know.

So true.</comment>


The careful process behind Fyne's simplicity - <AUTHOR> https://changelog.com/posts/the-careful-process-behind-fynes-simplicity <comment><USER2> I guess there is no support for printing.

print site:fyne.io

1 result

viewer for Gerber RS274X files (for PCBs)</comment>


Ask YC: What is/are the best book(s) you have read on nutrition? - <AUTHOR>

It has been 3 months since I started dieting, and exercising on a regular basis as a plan to become a more healthy person. I have lost 20 pounds by now, and have gained some insight about how nutrition works by reading the hackers diet and articles over the Internet, however, I dont seem to get the full picture about how the whole process works, and would love to hear recommendations about some books that would help me understand about how metabolism, fats, carbohydrates, and everything else that is involved in nutrition operates. <comment><USER2> Don't worry, no one gets the full picture about how the whole process works. Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (2007) summarizes some open questions from a hundred years of nutrition research.

</comment><comment><USER3> I liked "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever" by Ray Kurzweil. Arthur De Vany's evolutionary fitness essay is also very good: www.arthurdevany.com/webstuff/RevisedEssay.pdf

</comment><comment><USER4> Go to www.t-nation.com and read all their diet and nutrition articles. Chris Shugart et al write from personal experience, and they've got the results to prove their ideas work.

</comment><comment><USER5> For sports nutrition, Nancy Clark's books are the best.

</comment><comment><USER6> "The China Study" made a really good impression on me.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price</comment>


Bigger Settlement Said to Be Reached in Silicon Valley Antitrust Case - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/technology/silicon-valley-antitrust-case-settlement-poaching-engineers.html?ref=business&_r=0 <comment><USER2> For people saying the settlement isn't enough. That's probably true, but it's not a bad settlement as class actions go. Class action litigation has a number of problems, partly because plaintiffs' attorneys working pure contingency have little incentive to see claims all the way through, and partly because judges and juries are skeptical of claims against large, respected companies.

In this case, there were a number of challenges. The first of which was that the DOJ settled with a slap on the wrist.[1] That's a very strong signal to both the court and jurors that the claims aren't a slam-dunk. Second, remember that in a civil case you don't just have to prove that the defendant did something wrong. You have to prove every element of the often multi-facted claim. Finally, there's a lot of back-and-forth with experts. Defendants can afford to hire the world's leading economists to say that the damages were less than claimed. Plaintiffs will have experts, but they're unlikely to be able to front the money for them to do as thorough a job.

$412 million would be over 10% the plaintiffs' experts estimated damages of $3 billion. That's not an atypical recovery in a class action settlement.

[1] Contrast this to the LCD price fixing cases, where the DOJ's levying $500+ million in fines resulted in big civil settlements.

</comment><comment><USER3> They suppressed the entire market. They should pay tens of billions to the workers in the affected market. The individuals responsible should at the very least be fired!

<comment><USER4> But it was a windfall to every company not in the no-poach cartel, and made more talent available to startups and small companies.

And then, the economic benefits of talent-outside-the-giants flowed (via early-employee equity) to many of the same people who "lost out" on big- company salary-bidding wars.

The effects of such collusion on "the entire market" are thus pretty murky. If you've worked with any ex-Apple, ex-Google, etc people – you may already have been a net-beneficiary!

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, more Apple and Google folks may have left and founded their own companies if their salaries had been higher.

<comment><USER6> Then, please give me 30% of your salary right now. Within 1-2 years, you'll start a great company and you will thank me for this.

<comment><USER7> I think you've misread the parent comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a fine that might catch their attention: All companies involved should receive no new H1Bs for a duration equal to the time they had this illegal arrangement.

<comment><USER9> They would just hire sub-contractors who could provide them with h1bers but I like the cut of your jib.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The $100 checks are kind of insulting IMO. I'd rather see criminal sanctions or at least fines against the individuals responsible. Any fines would make more sense as going into a training program to expand the labor pool.

<comment><USER11> I agree. Fines are B.S. We need scalps. Sending boldface names to jail will certainly cause future potential bad actors to think twice before transgressing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seriously surprising to hear that money-conscious lawyers might agree to such a piddly amount ($415M) from 4 companies whose collective market cap is over 1 trillion dollars. This is palatable only if it comes with significant sanctions and admission of wrongdoing, which of course, is highly doubtful.

<comment><USER13> You have to look at it from the lawyers perspective. 30% or whatever their cut is of $415 Million is a huge pay day for them. Why go through the time and hassle of seeing the case through when you can have a huge payday now with no more work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really hope Apple/Google will do admission of wrongdoing with an apology letter, as I suggested before.

</comment><comment><USER15> Offering to pay $415M, up from original offer of $324M which a judge rejected.

</comment><comment><USER16> Since I'm not an insider, I won't argue the merits and difficulties of extracting a settlement in a situation such as this. But if I were a shareholder looking at this not-very-surprising and easy-to-stomach number, I would simply see this as having been an acceptable cost of doing business.

</comment><comment><USER17> I got a check from this (I was in the 'Google' class) so I wonder if they will update that, or if by cashing it I released my claim. Interesting.

<comment><USER18> Still waiting for my check. Wondering if I didn't miss the window for that.</comment></comment>


The Necessity of Musical Hallucinations (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-necessity-of-musical-hallucinations <comment><USER2> I constantly hear music in my head. It's exactly like a song being 'stuck' in your head.

I wonder if I have some sort of illness or is it just a result of being a musician for 20 years

I also have perfect pitch, which apparently may have more to do with genetics than training and experience

</comment><comment><USER3> I often have musical hallucinations before falling asleep. It is not uncommon for me to hear music that suddenly stops. This usually happens when my mind is not busy thinking of anything else. Does anyone else experience this?

<comment><USER4> Be careful who you tell this to. Or be prepared to vehemently defend yourself from charges of incompetence at the next important political decision you face.

Propaganda based on the intellect can and does happen more routinely than is healthy in any society.

Sorry if this is a downer. I have your best interests in mind.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the laugh! I appreciate your concern for my future political decisions.

<comment><USER5> Called hypnagogic auditory hallucinations - these are common period (Feynmann discusses how to acquire them in his autobiography) but especially common if you have temporal lobe epilepsy. Note that most cases of epilepsy are never diagnosed because most seizures are nocturnal, and focal, not necessarily the tonic/clonic seizures movies have made us familiar with.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gender Bias in Hiring: Interviewing as a Trans Woman in Tech - <AUTHOR> https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/gender-bias-in-hiring-interviewing-as-a-trans-woman-in-tech <comment><USER2> Very good article. Our humble startup is not hiring anyone right now but we'd certainly welcome you aboard. Great software is built by a great team, not by genders. Keep strong.</comment>


Tablets Suck - Why You Might Want To Avoid Buying A Tablet - <AUTHOR> http://enterprisefeatures.com/2011/08/why-you-might-want-to-avoid-buying-a-tablet/

<comment><USER2> A great deal of these points are things that my parents, who love (and stole my) iPad really don't care about. All they want to do is watch videos, read emails, news, and play games without having to type, click, get spammed, catch viruses, and a bunch of other things that we're used to but is horrible user experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, but I suspect that your parents do not watch multi-hour movies holding the tablet in their hands. You can do that with notebook or even hybrid notebook/tablet as the device screen stands up vertically by itself, so you do not have to hold it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has LinkedIn Apply and 3rd party websites overcome applying over email? - <AUTHOR> I have been using linkedIn for some months now and have also found my current job through it. Still I noticed that when applying you most of the time get redirected to 3rd party websites or use linkedIn EasyApply.
I dislike this because I need to share sensitive information, keep track of accounts, get spammed by notifications and be one of hundred applicants in an UI.
What happened to conventional email apply? Would you use a tool that utilizes job search from linkedIn but gives you the ability to apply over email? Does something like that already exist? <comment><USER2> > What happened to conventional email apply?

Most of the time these jobs are posted on a lot of platforms, including the companys own website and not just on Linkedin.

I never had a problem finding an email address of a position by just looking at the website. If you apply somewhere looking at the website should be part of your application process anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I never had a problem finding an email address of a position by just looking > at the website.

This is true, there is no problem finding an email address in general. I am just wondering why it is not the default way, on LinkedIn at least. Why does the apply button redirect me to a 3rd party site rather than providing me an email address?

> If you apply somewhere looking at the website should be part of your > application process anyway.

I agree though for me that kind of research takes place after getting a first reply. Researching every companies website manually on the first, cold, outreach does not seem worth it.

So what I had in mind is a tool that scrapes contact info from company websites and does the first outreach. Utilizing templates for position name, company name and likewise, keeping track of applications. Get the benefits of mentioned 3rd party sites, but removing the man in the middle part of it.

<comment><USER2> > This is true, there is no problem finding an email address in general. I am > just wondering why it is not the default way, on LinkedIn at least. Why does > the apply button redirect me to a 3rd party site rather than providing me an > email address?

Because that's the URL the company decided to put there as it most likely is connected to their ATS where they can easily track applications and make sure everyone gets their response, gets screened by the appropriate person. They could just put an email address there if they want to. It's not really a Linkedin problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Because that's the URL the company decided to put there as it most likely is > connected to their ATS where they can easily track applications and make > sure everyone gets their response, gets screened by the appropriate person.

This makes sense, thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SF Housing by Health and IBM Watson - <AUTHOR> http://hedge.mybluemix.net/

<comment><USER2> I'm just getting a whitepage with "SF Life" title, fwiw, which is triggering a massive irony reaction. ;)

"Why don't people scale a little before posting a Show HN", I always wonder...

<comment><USER3> +1, It's understandable when websites aren't perfect across browsers, but when they don't work at all it just seems lazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> why is it limited for selecting three features?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Watson API limits feature * dataPoint < 2000

<comment><USER4> The limit is only when you use the query param generate_visualization=true (which is the default :)), since you dont show the visualization, e.g. you dont use our Tradeoff Analytics client side code, you should go with generate_visualization=false. If you do choose to use the visualization, please note that the the actual limit is feature* "top data points" < 2000\. Your data points size might be 5000 and still our analytics will find that the optimal data points are just 100...

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great to know! I'll share this info with the team. Opens up the API a lot more :).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Roy Wildstein - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html

<comment><USER2> More people seem to care about one sentence in the article than the rest of it.

In fact, many people are missing this sentence:

"I don't know if there's any solution to this. I certainly don't advocate not hiring people Roy's age -- I'm now older than he was then."

...and thus taking the following sentence out of context:

"But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you."

Edit: that said, the author really needs to rephrase his words or he is going to piss more people off.

<comment><USER3> I've also noticed that a lot of people complain when the statement immediately following "I'm not racist but..." is given more emphasis than the preceding disclaimer. /s

<comment><USER4> Part of the reason for this is that when people hear the word "but" they mentally remove all the words in the sentence preceding it. One way to get around this is by replacing "but" with "and." That's my opinion, but I'm not an expert.

<comment><USER5> The real problem here is that legal protections for certain classes by themselves create a disincentive for hiring those people. Discrimination/racism protections especially suffer from this.

I've had some experience with this as well. In Europe (Brussels) it's plain to see that most companies don't hire certain "bad" minorities, then fix their legally mandated "racism stats" (ie. a quota) by demanding the cleaning company provide them with contractor cleaners of the correct ethnicity.

Why ? Because if they sue, the damage is 24x their monthly pay, which is next to nothing.

This is a horribly bad factor for people like Jewish programmers, black sysadmins, and the like. They're doubly fucked : there's a very good legal reason for companies not to hire them, and they have a good legal incentive to be incompetent assholes, so they get fired and get legal damages from their legal anti-discrimination rights. In addition, the government's education incentives cause and strengthen the racist prejudices. Black sysadmins/programmers are worse than white sysadmins ... well of course ! If the law mandates a passing grade for black sysadmins in university is 40% where whites have to score 60%, this would be exactly the expected result wouldn't it ?

In the end there is no substitute to waiting for immigrants to naturally work their way up the food chain like has mostly happened in America. Problem is simple : this takes multiple generations.

This is one of the many reasons it's really bad to protect certain classes of people, doubly so when we're talking ethnicities or religious groups (as opposed to say, stem graduates, legal professionals, ...). Plus it generally seems to me to fly in the face of the idea of non-discrimination. You cannot achieve a colorblind society with racist law, in fact you're achieving the opposite.

Of course the problem is that discrimination laws are not trying to achieve a colorblind society. Rather they're trying to throw a religious/ethnic group a bone to prevent them from rioting, and making their situation worse in the process.

Let's face it, in Western Europe if you're muslim/jewish/black/... (and not self-employed) you want to be an incompetent asshole, because that's what the law rewards. You can effectively get 2 or 3 wages paid out if you do that. Nothing to do with ethnicity or religion, has a LOT to do with people attempting to take shortcuts in fixing observed injustices.

There are some that are creating their own companies and avoiding the problem this way. But this is much, much harder than making it as an employee. I have a lot of respect for the few that do this, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This isn't much different from someone getting mugged by someone from a different class or race and then concluding that "those people" can't be trusted. Sad.

<comment><USER7> Actually, it is different. The "normal" mugger gets caught and goes to jail, this one has a loophole that allows hum to walk off with your wallet without being arrested.

It's a basic scam created by a law. You see it with some injury cases[1] and many of the lawyers suing businesses based on the ADA. The law is meant to protect people from an injustice done, but can be used in the opposite manner.

Chilling affects like these are often mitigated by documentation by HR. Specifically, performance reviews and performance improvement plans. He was not equipped to provide the documentation.

This is just a reality and cold logic. You can say he is "Sad", but he is expressing the "stick hand in fire" learning of the situation. The sadness should be expressed to the folks who fit into the spirit of the law that has been abused.

1) often with headlines "X who collects disability enters a triathlon" or similar sensationalist stuff.

<comment><USER6> There's plenty of ways for people to take advantage of their employers and the law does effectively nothing for the aggrieved.

One case I directly encountered was a young, white male who was responsible for procurement for a small company I was working for. It turned out he was ordering all kinds of stuff for himself (the one thing I remember is he bought a game console with it). He was fired and the police were called. Their response was basically, since he had permission to order stuff, they weren't going to pursue it.

The law failed here, too! But let me tell you what didn't happen: nobody decided to use that as a reason to not hire young, white males. What did happen, correctly, was some additional controls were put in to prevent abuse.

<comment><USER7> You react to what your burned with. Most places put in the control measures I mentioned. Some go the way of the poster particularly if they cannot afford an HR solution. The stats on disabled employment since the passage of the ADA are problematic.

Who did the company next hire for procurement?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The particular sentence that most people are reacting to is this:

"But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you." [http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html#aIDKIT](http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html#aIDKIT)

<comment><USER9> And those reactions... I don't even see anyone telling him he's not correct, just that it will/could/should be used against him legally.

 _the best part about this article is how it will be used against him in court_ [http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html](http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html)

[https://twitter.com/codeslinger/status/445665523632984064](https://twitter.com/codeslinger/status/445665523632984064)

 _And if anyone needed any evidence to back up a discrimination lawsuit against @davewiner, they certainly have it now._ [http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html](http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html)

[https://twitter.com/Mickipedia/status/445665545514668032](https://twitter.com/Mickipedia/status/445665545514668032)

 _No, don't worry everything is fine with startup culture_ [http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html](http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html) _(side note, pretty sure roy might want to sue over this too)_

[https://twitter.com/whatidoissecret/status/44566292849965056...](https://twitter.com/whatidoissecret/status/445662928499650560)

<comment><USER10> > _" I don't even see anyone telling him he's not correct..."_

If you've only got 140 characters, do you really need to spend any saying that he's wrong, because I certainly don't need that spelled out for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd just like to point out the last time Dave Winer weighed in on a similar topic: [http://scripting.com/2013/08/19/whyArentThereMoreWomenProgra...](http://scripting.com/2013/08/19/whyArentThereMoreWomenProgrammers)

> Programming is a very modal activity. To be any good at it you have to > focus. And be very patient. I imagine it's a lot like sitting in a blind > waiting for a rabbit to show up so you can grab it and bring it home for > dinner.

> There is specialization in our species. It seems pretty clear that > programming as it exists today is a mostly male thing. Which also raises the > obvious question that perhaps we can make it so that it can better-use the > abilities of the other half of our species?

<comment><USER2> This is probably pretty easy to label as sexism - not to jump to the author's defense again (I don't know him at all). I wouldn't say women can't program (they can, obviously) or do anything else males can, but there is definitely a different set of interests between males and females (generally speaking). I don't think its because of market manipulation or brainwashing, I just think the two sexes are wired differently (psychologically and physically). So, I don't know if his point is valid, but I do know that males and females have different traits (we don't need to be equal to be treated as equals, I guess).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _" But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run > the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam > you."_

Old white male, having accrued all the benefits of the privilege of his position, proceeds to use his power to make sure that only People Like Him can continue to succeed.

Rather than fix problems, he'd rather tell you all that Everything is OK, being Agist and Sexist isn't _our_ problem, it's _their_ problem.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, the day you have a dollar is the day someone shows up with their hand out. From what I've seen of the legal system it is just a proxy for brute force, the only thing it really accomplishes is to keep everyone from killing each other, beyond that it is pretty much the law of the jungle.

I think software development actually has an easier time than most professions to weed out freeloaders. You can make someone program right in the interview. Programming ability is an extremely perishable skill.

EDIT: also, obviously, REAL reference checking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Setting aside the larger issues I find it's curious that Dave doesn't even take a moment to consider that perhaps "Roy" just didn't like working in the style that Dave demanded. Some people do need to think a lot before pooping out the golden gem or perhaps just need some reflection before they can move on. Some people are hard to collaborate with, maybe Dave was, for Roy?

Dave's position seems to have been "there's one way to work, you can't do it with me on these big things so let's try the same method on these smaller things. Oh that doesn't work either, let's try the same method with a different person."

Never any critique of the methods used by the authority structures.

I reckon this does, in fact, have great bearing on the larger issue.

<comment><USER11> Not liking the working style, or being unproductive because of it, isn't a reason to sue on being let go.

Not saying we're hearing the whole story and this "Roy" guy is totally wrong... it could easily be that Dave WAS discriminating against "Roy" because of his age. Or the firing was done in such a way that it seemed that way to "Roy".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why can't I have 3 flag buttons? Even if they all registered the same single flag signal, it would be gratifying to be able to mash them all in this case. This is less a blog post than an elaborate, carefully timed troll.

<comment><USER15> Do you believe the facts claimed are incorrect? Or that the analysis of the incentives is flawed? What's your specific objection?

I'd normally ignore comments like this. But coming from you I feel like there might be some substance to the criticism that I simply don't recognize. Can you explain?

<comment><USER14> Happily, this story appears to have been buried shortly after I wrote that comment, sparing us both any incentive to hash out the merits of Winer's post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ignoring the ageism here, can we discuss why this would not be an open-closed case and cost thousands of dollars just to lose?

<comment><USER17> That had me puzzled too. If the CEO would have documented every interaction with the employee in writing (e.g., "on 3/17/85 I gave him job #1, explained what I wanted done, and he failed to do this, and said..."), he would have had a pretty solid case for having fired him for incompetence. It's what any competent HR person or employment lawyer would have advised him to do, especially since the employee was a member of a protected class.

What really surprised me is that the same guy could have later been hired at Apple.

This whole story is a bit scary, since I'm over 40 (the age at which U.S. age discrimination laws kick in) and I wouldn't want bad experiences like this to deter an employer from hiring me.

<comment><USER18> It was too much work to write all that stuff up.

But Dave could have just given him severance instead. "Here's a week's pay, go away." It seemed that Roy was there for several weeks, so one more week to make Roy go away forever is money well spent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I would rewrite this blog post and use "Roy's" real name...he deserves to be shamed.

Edit: I don't mind the downvotes, but as usual I appreciate any reasoning behind them...I don't think what I said was irrelevant? This guy is apparently dangerous and his real name should be exposed.

<comment><USER19> >he deserves to be shamed.

You heard one side of a story about a contentious situation between two people and you want to publicly shame someone based on this? What if the older guy has a completely different story that explains why he had trouble working there? Just don't dox people -- and if you really think it's necessary to try to publicly shame someone make sure you have truly irrefutable evidence to back you up.

<comment><USER2> Also a good point - thanks I did not really think of that -- just a gut reaction to lawsuits. That said, if this guy really did what he did, I hope that real justice eventually prevails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People that are looking to scam you are a class by themselves, and they can belong to any other class.

<comment><USER11> Honestly, this! I feel like almost every person in the world, white males included, could come up with a reason for a bogus wrongful dismissal suit if they so desired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you make it harder and more costly (on average) to fire people, companies will be more reluctant to hire.

This goes for employees in general, and subgroups ("protected classes") that public policy may be trying to help.

Housing anti-discrimination law can backfire in a similar way.

<comment><USER22> Not really. Companies need to hire to make money, and that's a hell of a good motivator to hire anyway.

<comment><USER21> More precisely, they want to make profits.

Increasing the cost of new employees – compared to, say, overtime, outsourcing, automation, or other kinds of employees – decreases the hiring of the more-costly employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I haven't actually done this, not to this extent. Still, I absolutely see myself morphing more in Roy's general direction as I get older. I see it a little like extracting karma from the world on my own terms. That is, in my youth, some companies got a slice of my brilliance at a deep discount, because of my young age. Now, having lost much of the naivety of youth, _particularly_ with regard to what companies and executives want to tell me the "deal" is, I take advantage any way I can, at every turn.

It goes without saying that you shouldn't hire me, but you won't know any better.

<comment><USER24> It's too bad companies and employees don't have loyalty to each other anymore. You could have been respected for having paid your dues.

<comment><USER23> I agree it's too bad. I also think the problem is many orders of magnitude larger than I am. That is, the ol' "being the change I want to see in the world" will most likely end with me getting shafted.

Until the day pigs fly, and managers and executives stop lying, milking plausible deniability for all it's worth, wasting everyone's time with re-orgs and resets, surprise-laying people off two days after telling them they're doing great, generally playing shady politics, etc, etc...</comment></comment></comment>


Sailing Stones - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones

<comment><USER2> This is a fantastic phenomenon.

Also, that black & white panorama picture [1] with the Milky Way is just gorgeous, and big enough for multi-screen wallpaper as well.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deathvalleysky_nps_big.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER3> "I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles."

</comment><comment><USER4> maybe the desert in aggregate is a boltzmann brain.

 _This leads to the Boltzmann brain concept: If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which is only just able to create a single self-aware entity. For every universe with the level of organization we see, there should be an enormous number of lone Boltzmann brains floating around in unorganized environments. This refutes the observer argument above: the organization I see is vastly more than what is required to explain my consciousness, and therefore it is highly unlikely that I am the result of a stochastic fluctuation.

The Boltzmann brain paradox is that it is more likely that a brain randomly forms out of the chaos with false memories of its life than that the universe around us would have billions of self-aware brains._

<comment><USER5> Far, far more likely that you are. And I'm guessing a very baked Boltzmann brain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love this planet.</comment>


A Mathematician's Secret: We're Not All Geniuses - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-07/a-mathematician-s-secret-we-re-not-all-geniuses <comment><USER2> This sounds ridiculous. In the writer's own words, "As a mathematician who studied at Berkeley, Harvard and Princeton, I've known geniuses". Maybe that's what she means by "geniuses", but usually the word tends to mean "who studied at Berkeley, Harvard and Princeton".

In terms of IQ, I think mathematicians are averaging something like +2 SD (>= 130). They are certainly "geniuses" (or "gifted"). But they themselves don't think they are geniuses, because by that word they mean +4 SD (>= 160) people.

<comment><USER3> Genius has nothing to do with IQ. Genius is a level of creative thought that appears magically simple once you behold it, but yet was beyond people up to that point. The things that IQ tests for are almost orthogonal to this. Sure, there are probably geniuses with high IQs, but I'd be very surprised if high IQ has any predictive ability to detect genius.

<comment><USER2> > I'd be very surprised if high IQ has any predictive ability to detect > genius.

This is the most ridiculous thing I have read for a while.

<comment><USER4> Why? High IQ means you are very good at solving the IQ test problems, not that you are intelligent or genius. I don't think these problems represent anything else, or if there are examples of high IQ people that made actual, genius contribution to humanity. Do you?

<comment><USER2> Are you familiar with modern intelligence research? IQ test is reliable (get the same score when you test multiple times) and valid (correlate with things we actually care about, not just being good at solving IQ test problems).

Intelligence: All That Matters by Stuart Ritchie is a good summary of modern intelligence research. [https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters- Stuart-Ritc...](https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart- Ritchie/dp/1444791877) To quote:

"The scientific evidence is clear: IQ tests are extraordinarily useful. IQ scores are related to a huge variety of important life outcomes like educational success, income, and even life expectancy, and biological studies have shown they are genetically influenced and linked to measures of the brain. Studies of intelligence and IQ are regularly published in the world's top scientific journals."

<comment><USER5> My mum, after getting her PhD (and having taught herself through A-levels because her Yorkshire school stopped at O-levels, and got into Oxford) decided to take her first-ever IQ test. She rated mentally subnormal.

Astonished, she thought about what it was trying to test and took another test: now genius.

None of us think that either was right...

<comment><USER6> Up until I was eight they thought I might be deficient. So they poked and prodded and eventually some people came to school and took me to the library and gave me an IQ test. Then they came back and gave me another one. And I believe another one after that, by which point I was a little disgruntled. Didn't I already take one of these? Did you lose my answers?

Turns out that the test can be tuned to a range. If you take the wrong one it loses some accuracy at the low and high end of the range, so they had to retest me. They had assumed I might be dim and gave me the wrong one. The real problem was that I was so insufferably bored all the time that I wouldn't engage. But I liked puzzles and the test had a bunch I'd never seen before, so by the last one I was taking it in the spirit it was given.

My guess is in two parts. Either your mother took the wrong one(s), or took a bogus one, or you're thinking of elements of a successful adult that the test can't measure, like common sense and social graces.

In any group of peers at that level there are bound to be people who can certainly do the work, possibly better than you, but who are painfully, even cringingly, bad at certain other life skills. It gets a little uncomfortable to acknowledge these people as geniuses. And there are people who seem not to be all that, but on occasion surprise the hell out of you by coming through in a clutch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _I'm not saying we shouldn 't have high hopes and standards for our children. But by focusing our attention on the kids who get the top SAT scores, we reinforce the fixation on genius to the detriment of everyone else_

No amount of idealism will change the fact that mathematicians , with virtual certainty, tend to score very high on such tests. To find the next generation of mathematician, look to kids who are getting ceiling scores on the math part of the SAT at the age of 13. Sometimes 'late boomers' exist, but still they exhibit preciosity at youth and then later decide to turn to mathematics and learn the material very quickly due to having a high iq. If genius is defined by having a high IQ (which according to the Stanford Binet Intelligence scale it is) and standardized test scores, virtually all mathematicians are geniuses, regardless of how much recognition they later get in their careers.

<comment><USER8> What research are you referring to?

<comment><USER9> He didn't mention any research. Lets not start the 'prove that there is such a thing as smart people' debate again.

<comment><USER8> I meant: "Mathematicians, with virtual certainty, tend to score very high on such tests".

This seems easily tested or refuted, and I'd be surprised if nobody has done it. However, I haven't figured out a good search query yet.

<comment><USER9> [https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Wai2009SpatialA...](https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Wai2009SpatialAbility.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Colin Percival wrote one of my favorite response to a question about mathematicians here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228233)

      You have to be smart to do make a significant contribution to
      mathematics, and I don't believe that people can "become
      smart" past a very early age. However, it's possible for
      someone to be smart despite not having been recognized as
      such, depending on which fields his intellect is applied
      against. Finally, it's definitely possible for someone who is
      smart but has never done well in mathematics to make a
      contribution to mathematics -- if he can develop the interest
      which is necessary for him to apply his intellect
      appropriately.

<comment><USER11> Colin's response nails it on the head (but also, some of the people Cathy is talking about are really, really scary smart).

For what it's worth, around 15 years ago, I personally had a "traumatic" and relevant experience involving the author (Cathy O'Neil) of the article we're discussing here, which I've never told anybody about. We are both number theorists, with a similar educational track (Berkeley, Harvard, etc., at similar times). She and I were hanging out in a pub in Cambridge, MA, and I was showing her a list of research projects I was very excited about and working on.

First, some background about me. In grad school at Berkeley, I had changed from worrying about "being a genius", to just being completely obsessed with doing mathematics research all the time, and actively simply not thinking about myself or social things. I had many clear experiences when working on research problems in which if I thought at all about myself and whether or not I was "smart" (or anything social), my progress would completely _stop_ ; however, if I could clear my mind of such worries -- about myself or others, then I could prove theorems and do good mathematics. So at the time I really embraced mathematics research itself over social concerns.

Anyway, Cathy and I were in a bar, and I was showing her (on my laptop), my list of projects. I really hoped she would find some of them interesting, and we might coauthor a paper together, since her thesis research was closely related to mine, but approached things from a completely different (more geometric) direction, which I personally found extremely difficult (at least, I didn't have the "interest" to master that approach, in the sense of Colin's comment). Well this is not at all what happened! Instead, of getting excited by any of the projects I proposed, Cathy got really, really angry at me for (I guess) intimidating her (?). I was never sure. I genuinely meant no harm.

For me personally at least, somehow worrying about the social aspects of research mathematics too much would make it impossible for me to actually _do_ mathematics. I wonder if some of the other people Cathy alludes to in the article are similar, and if this has consequences. Anyway, it was a lesson to me at the time of the extent to which having a sense of "being in the zone" and not thinking about oneself (or social and emotional issues at all), can simultaneously be very conducive to research mathematics and also really piss off certain people.

I make no claims to be a genius or "emotionally mature" at the time, and I'm a different person today than I was then. However, there is (at least for me) a real psychological conflict between the social aspects of thinking about research and actually doing research; it is a very difficult challenge to balance the two.

<comment><USER12> Oh wow. I've had this exact thing happen a few times. I'm way in the zone, making thrilling progress on something and perceiving my own state of mind as rather egoless. I see that if I could collaborate with certain people, the result would be incredible. But instead of catching my excitement they get angry, tell me my work is garbage, and say don't speak to them again. It seems obvious that it must be an ego thing, because if the problem was simply that my work was bad, they could tell me nicely. Such people seem very territorial. It doesn't always happen this way. I've also approached people and had them respond enthusiastically. But when you're in that state of pure excitement about the objective, it doesn't occur to you that a colleague could feel threatened, and it can be quite crushing to get slapped back into that social plane.

<comment><USER13> I've published in mathematical/statistical areas as well as applied ones, and my sense is that interpersonal difficulties are more acute, but also more transparent, in math and statistics, for lack of a better way of putting it. My sense is that people tend to hold views more absolutely, because they see their positions as more logic-based, and so have a more difficult time recognizing unrealistic assumptions they're making, or outright errors in their derivations or thinking. An applied researcher can shrug and dismiss something as sampling error, or ambiguity in a study design, but in math, it's harder to invoke such excuses or pressure relief valves. A threat, of whatever real or misperceived magnitude, seems to take on greater significance in math and statistics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "In short, we over-reward those at the top and dismiss the rest. It's an unhelpful and unnecessary bias that facilitates hero worship, undermines the goal of nurturing creativity and discourages valuable contributions to communities, worthy causes and scientific projects"

I don't think "the rest" are in any way "dismissed", but certainly it's much more interesting to read about a Feynman, Saussure or Pascal, than the more mediocre people around them. Reading about a hard working and helpful but relatively average group of helpers seems profoundly boring, and our attention is quite limited, so naturally all coverage focuses on the more interesting luminairies at the apex.

Besides, it's not even true that all these people were heavily dependent on big teams of helpers, especially not before the mid last century or so.

Did Leibniz get much help? Did Newton rely on dozens of graduate students? Did Dostoyevskiy have a team of writers? Hardly. The geniuses of old worked pretty much alone.

But coming back to the main point, isn't it precisely this "hero worship" that makes the teams work so hard for these geniuses? And why would this focus necessarily discourage any creativity? I don't see why it would. It's not like people, when they inevitably discover that they are not Einstein, give up science completely. The situation is the same in sports, most people are not going to set any records, but they don't stop training, despite the total focus on a few individual top level athletes.

If the author feels that things should be different, why not try writing a book about these teams, and see if people are actually interested in hearing about them.

<comment><USER15> The issue is the expectations this builds.

If the only mathematicians you hear about are apparently the smartest fucking people ever, you might think math isn't for you even though you enjoy it. The message needs to get out that you don't need to be that exceptional to do math. Mostly, its about being interested.

Note that I don't mean interested in the results of math. You need to find the intricacies of a proof interesting (at least some of the time).

<comment><USER14> Now do you also think that the average kid starting out in basketball will be put off by, rather than inspired by, the likes of Michael Jordan?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > In short, we over-reward those at the top and dismiss the rest. It's an > unhelpful and unnecessary bias that facilitates hero worship, undermines the > goal of nurturing creativity and discourages valuable contributions to > communities, worthy causes and scientific projects.

This happens in every research community. The hero worship also tends to over- fund certain areas because of how the agenda is effectively set by a few researchers.

One way that may help fix this is if there's a way to generate a crowd-sourced network of links whose purpose is to plot as a graph the current gaps and challenges of the field. It's perhaps easier in fields with clear subject boundaries like physics.

We could then observe how individual knowledge contributions have helped (are helping) progress the growing knowledge "surface." Young researchers could also observe areas of neglect and attack those instead of going where everyone else is. Reward people who grow the knowledge surface, irrespective of their background.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wish companies also realized this. We need to recognize and reward effective groups, not super good individuals. It doesn't matter how brilliant an individual is if they aren't in a group that will leverage that genius. Whatever, still somewhat mysterious, factors make that group work overall are the things the company needs to not trample on.

<comment><USER18> Amen to that friend. Many have observed this before, but culture trumps everything. Teams that establish viable cultures become engines of value, the mechanisms of corporate life seem to me to be especially designed to prevent that from happening and to dismantle it arbitrarily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you want to _do_ math and can and do, then fine. Else, still fine. There's no sense in inserting _genius_ into the situation.

Bluntly, there's only one way to know if someone can do math: They want to and try. If their efforts result in some math, then necessarily they can do math. That's really the only way to know.

</comment><comment><USER20> The press likes to reinforce this "one hero who did it all my himself" myth. They are big part of the problem.

<comment><USER21> It's not really the press that does this, it is the human psyche. It is why we have celebrities, in any field. Humans love to idolize others, for various reasons that have been deliberated upon for centuries by those in philosophy and psychology.

<comment><USER22> There is nothing fundamental about this. It stems from a lack of understanding, not human nature.

The concept of a single genius coming up with everything exist mostly to people who don't know any better, not to people who actually have extensive study of the field.

<comment><USER21> Well there are a lot of musings in the field of psychology about why society creates celebrities from a fundamental need to have living idols.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I see a lot of comments stating that mathematicians have high IQ and high test scores. Is there any data to confirm that or is everyone just speculating?

<comment><USER16> [https://www.quora.com/What-college-majors-have-on-average- st...](https://www.quora.com/What-college-majors-have-on-average-students- with-the-highest-IQ)

You could use GRE test scores to compare across subject majors. There may be saturation at the top where further differentiation between majors could be possible if the exam material were sufficiently more difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For the perspective of someone to whom the label "genius" hsa often been applied: [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one- have-t...](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a- genius-to-do-maths/)

<comment><USER25> Terry Tao is genius, so what does he know :)

His brother, Nigel Tao, who is not quite as genius as him and works in Google has IQ of 180.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Elitism is a form of social stupidity but egalitarianism is socially dangerous when it comes to STEM-based endeavours.

<comment><USER27> Agreed, unlike other administration-heavy fields such as academics and government, STEM really can't sustain a net-negative contributing subset who are a natural baggage of egalitarianism. Considering the dangers in fields such as engineering and medicine and the many important systems that software fuels there are serious consequences when competency filters are devalued in the name of some idealized form of equality or other social hierarchies or attempting to fulfill some artificial processes in the name of risk aversion.

But in a more practical sense life is too short to be a smart person without having a bit of elitism. Which is both a result of optimization and a bit of cynicism.

You can indeed be a mathematician without being a genius. In the sense you can understand the field and convince enough people of your value to keep you employed.

Every field has tons of busy work and not particularly challenging jobs but jobs that none-the-less need to be done and are ultimately an important piece of the puzzle. So it's true that any field, even STEM, shouldn't be hostile to the 9-to-5ers and the 'middling' bunch, merely because they aren't genius.

That said - if you're going to push those fields forward and make real progress like these two:

> Andrew Wiles, who is credited with solving Fermat's Last Theorem, and I met > Grigori Perelman, who solved the Poincare Conjecture

you have to be top tier. Or close enough to it to feed off the top tier. These are typically the people pushing industries forward which generate work for the middling level tiers who weren't child prodigies. In math meaning the people to work out the details of proofs and finding real world applications.

Talent shortages are usually the result of the work of this tier. So it will always be a symbiotic relationship between the genius/elite and average person. The problem largely then isn't so much the elitism, or the fact their is an elite, but merely that the field was given a false image as being limited to only those types of people. Rather than one that needs (and welcomes) the average-person as much as any other field.

More of a marketing problem than a systemic one.

The people doing middling busy-work aren't going to fill pages of Bloomberg or fill the pages of books like 'Men of Mathematics'. But regardless the fact is there are a small subset at the top are doing pioneering work and that is what makes them interesting. Why else would New Yorker write an extend profile on Grigori Perelman and Shing-Tung Yau? They are interesting because they a small group at the top. If there were a bunch of them then Grigori wouldn't have a million dollar prize for his work nor would layman be praising them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I thought "genius", properly defined, was an ability to perceive things before the general public can. They discover not only what we know is difficult, but completely change how we think about that aspect of the world. Intelligence is important, but only one part of that quality, and does not have to necessarily be among the highest, as traditionally measured. As Nietzsche is often quoted, it lies on a line very close to madness.

<comment><USER29> Something I skimmed in a random book recently is that "genius" and "genie" have the same root and origin.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_(mythology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_\(mythology\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I regret not getting more into Math in college; only got as far as Linear Algebra even though I was pretty good at it, even relative to people in the class. For some reason, I did believe you had to be really exceptional to major in Math. I think it was, in part, because there were a couple really talented kids in high school and everyone including the teachers put them on a huge pedestal. I never felt like I measured up, and if you were smart but not the type to dominate math league, something like Chemistry or Biology were more suitable. Having since met many math majors and even phds, I know know my assumption was kind of false. I look at those talented kids; they're doing advanced degrees or research at top tier universities, and I realize that wasn't the route you had to be on. Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER31> I like the idea of genius as derived from genus, and meaning something like a particular kind of excellence, an exemplar of its kind, something's characteristic disposition. One can think of there being not one class of geniuses, but think of it as excellence of a particular kind, in a particular activity, that is related to the intrinsic and highly developed talents or disposition of the genius. So, Rafael Nadal is a clay court genius, because he is a great tennis player, and in addition he puts maximum effort into the kind of tennis that requires it, and his physical, top-spin heavy tennis is ideally suited to the surface.

</comment><comment><USER32> My first week of grad school at Harvard, Ted Slaman was freaking out a bit, wondering whether he (or any of us) was good enough to succeed at math. I replied (more or less in these words):

"Look. You're brilliant. I'm brilliant. We're all brilliant, or we wouldn't be here. We may not be brilliant ENOUGH to make it, but we have nothing to feel inadequate about."

He calmed down, and eventually went on to have what may have been the best math career of any of us (at least judging by the stature of the department where he wound up tenured).

</comment><comment><USER33> > In short, we over-reward those at the top and dismiss the rest.

This is standard tournament theory: big rewards at the top to provide a strong incentives for excellence. Look at the prize structure in sporting events and at the three-medal rewards at the Olympics. Paradoxically the decline in quantity and quality typically seen after tenure suggests that it works in academic circles: post-docs and assistant professors are doing outstanding work because that's what it takes to "win".

<comment><USER18> Or is it that faculty are diverted into keeping the roof on the lab that the post docs and assistant professors work in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> TLDR: "I'm special too, give me more credit for whatever I'm doing."

Egregious logical errors throughout. Would not recommend others read this article.

</comment><comment><USER35> Maybe one or two of you living are geniuses. At least I can think of two in my lay-man's opinion.

</comment><comment><USER21> Everyone is always calling me a genius, but I've learned that they apply the term too loosely, and thus I support much of this article's points. For example, when socializing with my colleagues a couple weeks ago, a very pretty girl asked me at the bar if I wanted a drink. I already had one in my hand, so I told her, "I already have one in my hand." My colleagues, as they often do, said to me after she walked away, "Good to point that out, genius." I will admit that it is very hard to be a genius, and I empathize with others in my same position.

<comment><USER36> That sounds more like they're making fun of you or mocking you for being an idiot and not realizing that a very pretty girl was interested in you. I will say I've a noticed a lot of book-smart people can be total idiots in social situations.

<comment><USER37> @hellofunk is clearly having a deadpan laugh. @winter_blue either missed this or is a next level genius of the deadpan his/herself!

<comment><USER38> I'd like to believe in the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author is referring to genius without defining it.

You might say that being 1/1,000,000 in intelligence qualifies as a genius. However, that would still leave around 8000 people smarter in the world. This author seems to limit the word 'genius' to the people that those 8000 people look up to.

When this author talks about genius, she means a genius among geniuses. The population she's calling not-geniuses are in the top 1/10th to 1/100th of 1%.

<comment><USER39> Genius itself is a slippery social construct, defined by social position rather than any actual objective ranking.

(Also, the author's a she, genius.)

<comment><USER40> Are height and eye color also social constructs?

<comment><USER41> Height and eye color are measurable and meaningful. Intelligence is neither.

<comment><USER9> Intelligence is measurable and meaningful.

It astonishes me that people can claim with a straight face that it is not. I suspect it is sour grapes or something?

If intelligence isn't measurable, then you would agree that the average frog cannot be reliably distinguished from the average human in terms of intelligence?

Ok, so lets move on from that, and don't give me some painful story about how there are different kinds of intelligence and frogs are 'smarter about eating bugs' or something, please?

Maybe with the benefit of the doubt, you are trying to say that human's are genetically not very diverse, and so you can't find significant differences in intelligence. To that I would say you are certainly not claiming this in good faith, and you have some quasi-political reason to deny something that is obviously true to anyone who has interacted with more than 3 people. (and we can skip the lecture along the lines of 'you can't trust what is obvious and have to pretend that all your beliefs are properly cited or they are invalid')

<comment><USER42> So you really think intelligence can be accurately measured using a single number?

Do you not agree that different people have different talents? Some are good at constructing clever arguments, some can compose beautiful music, and some can solve partial differential equations in their heads.

<comment><USER43> thats just being butthurt because we chose to call it intelligence, and somehow not being classically intelligent is understood as a personal insult.

the IQ simply doesnt measure creative genius. if it was called "the test that measures how good a persons brain is at pattern recogniton", you wouldnt care. you'd simply state that you're not particularly interested in logical reasoning.

intelligence, in terms of IQ, is a more or less well defined metric. in popular language, its conflated with "not being a mouthbreather". thats why people get pissy when they dont score above average on an iq test. its kinda pointless, really. people only care about iq tests because of the name.

<comment><USER42> It's possible to be a very able, erudite person and not do well on an IQ test. Conversely, it's possible to score highly and be incompetent.

Intelligence is an ill-defined, nebulous quantity. IQ is a precisely defined quantity. Since intelligence is hard to measure and IQ is easy to measure, it's tempting to use one as a proxy for the other. But I, and the other posters above me, just don't find that very convincing.

<comment><USER43> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFgXF0a_Yw4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFgXF0a_Yw4)

<comment><USER42> Not even a little. But you won't get much respect on HN with that attitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> A genius is somebody shizophrenic enough to make connections where others are incapable off doing so, while still remaining sane enough to filter the results and only ocassionally walk the street naked at night, to escape the satellites tracking him/her with bugs embedded into buttons (lets call it sabatical).

To be this mad is nothing worthy to strive for. It comes with real cons.

Con A: Your family has usual several shizos who are "over the edge", meaning people who are in need of constant care.

Con B: If you get the necessary education to contribute more then spynovellas and abstract art in this unstable family environment, which may include initially getting pushed into engineering/the sciences against your will - boy/girl are you lucky.

Con C: No drugs, no long partying, no chem-triggering yourself of any kind (no, coffee - what a world!)

Con D: Selfisolation tendencies- as perceiving other people as hostile, overinterpreting constantly on theire intent is very tiresome- thus, you end up self isolating to not feel the sting of beeing constant wrong (aka Mad) all along on your spouse.

Con E: Good Connections can also be had by normal people now, if they would go for that. There are several systems to make them and find exotic and interesting solutions. The real problem starts with normal people fighting against new ideas because they pose a risk to there career, there company, the process and there concept of self-worth.

Con F: You are not systematic, meaning for example, to set up a coherent list will be impossible.

Con 8: Martyrers of any kind, in religion become sort of very attractive- or was it the other way around, that martyrer religion produce more durable creative bonkers people? The irony is that israel, america and irans cultural looks very much alike to a bonkers inventor.

Con G: The real trouble starts, when the normal people run out of ressources, and start to vote the "geniuses" as war-chieftains to power, usually after a prolonged episode of "pulling up more Cash obsticles to actual archivers". If you are constantly in danger of beeing the guy/girl who the mob will turn to when they need a witch-streetlight, its a good quality to turn on the needle and point on any group guilty of beeing not part of the mob enough. Thus artists and geniuses- the worst group to look for integrity the day the madmen gets voted to power.

Con H: Sometimes people crash, like computers, and spend the rest of there days iterrating over a "topic" or "obsession" totally not worth it.

Con I: CEOs and Decisionsmakers constantly crowding in on "working" geniuses, trying to deduce the "process". Its laughable- but there is no process. There is no method to learn, there is nothing you can take home from that art- gallery-meetup. The process consist of a mind constantly recombining stuff that is not supossed to be recombined, throwing away metric tons of wrong stuff subconciously and sometimes putting out ideas, with a tacked on invented backstory how they came to be. Thats it. And as you are going to sit on those patents and stuff anyway, and live in constant fear, that all those incremental investments blow up, why fly towards the fire, little moth?

Pro A: Wir sind die Quelle, ihr seid die Senke.

</comment><comment><USER45> The definition of a genius is someone with an IQ >= 140. Sorry, that word is taken. Embiggen your vocabulary and apply your definition to a more cromulent term.

<comment><USER46> Would you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? At some point Cunningham's Law blends into trollery.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14532068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14532068) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER45> > Would you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN?

I take issue with this. How is the content unsubstantive? It wasn't untrue or misleading, it is just what the Stanford Binet IQ test classifies as genius. so that it being one becomes a matter of fact, not of opinion.

> At some point Cunningham's Law blends into trollery.

Now that I reread my comment, I see how it can be misconstrued as snarky. That was not at all the intention. It was meant to be self-deprecating and lighthearted, as I was using made-up words while criticize someone for not using made-up words. I thought about adding a smiley face so as to make my intentions clearer, but emoticons aren't really used on HN.

I'm about as anti-troll as you can get as I believe them to be parasites of the internet and a brief look at my comment history would elucidate than I am always if not I'm not earnest, helpful, or passionate in discussion, I am positive in tone.

Look at the amount of discussion it generated before being pruned and the varying opinions on what constitutes "genius". It's not that big a deal, but this is the first time I can ever recall having a comment moderated in my nearly 25 year history of using the internet. I see how it can be interpreted as snark, but when moderating, perhaps take the user's history into account.

For my part, I will make my intentions more obvious so that they will not be interpreted as negative or as an attack.</comment></comment></comment>


Andy Hunt - How Good a Job Can You Do? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.toolshed.com/2003/07/how_good_a_job_.html

<comment><USER2> a weak article, where the weakness centers around the definition of "good", which is different in different cases.</comment>