We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6528766848526278657 <comment><USER2> I am both a recruiter and a highly experienced developer and software designer.

I once sent one of the very best programmers I know for a job interview.

I have met a small handful of outstanding programmers in my > 30 years in IT and this guy was in the top five, near the top.

I had personally worked directly with him for 5 years and he was unquestionably one of the most talented programmers there is, and a nice guy, easy to get along with and great to work with. Incredibly productive, and capable of the most incredible feats of software development.

The client interviewed him and said ....... no thanks.

There you go - I have just explained everything you need to know about technical recruiting. Give it some thought - the more you think about it, the more it reveals the deepest truth about YOU and your software hiring processes.

NO-ONE - no-one ever thinks they make the wrong call when they reject a candidate - including you.

If you want to know what happened after that - I called the CEO who I knew quite well and essentially said to him "What the fuck are you doing? I sent you one of the best programmers there is - and I know this from first hand personal experience over five years - and your interviewers rejected him?". They employed him because of that and he became their chief technical architect pretty quickly.

<comment><USER3> I've seen this so many times as well where candidates under sell themselves or key accomplishments never get brought up. Even Elon Musk in the most recent Autonomy day had to say to Karparthy "introduce yourself and don't be bashful." Even then, I've noticed, I've noticed that people don't "hear" things until a second or third conversation. The idea that you can absolutely hear everything a candidate has to say in 60 minutes is just unreasonable. At the same time, I think you did the right thing: you helped your client make a better decision but not letting them rely on a first look exclusively.

<comment><USER2> You assume that the reason the guy did not get the job is that candidate undersold themselves.

It is mostly the responsibility of the technical interviewers to determine if the candidate is suitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Post author here:

My new company helps companies fill contract software positions. We're a lot like a recruiting or staffing agency, but trying to do it in a new, less spammy way. It's been REALLY frustrating working with hiring managers. I used to be one of these frustrating hiring managers so I guess I had it coming.

I had a hiring manager tell me that he can tell in the first 15 min of an interview if someone is a great engineer or not. I remember thinking the same thing. I felt like I had this special intuition that I had developed over the years. That's just total BS. There is NO WAY you can know that and you don't have a "special gift".

I don't have a great solution yet, but for senior engineers I've come to trust previous work experience the candidate has much more than my gut, my culture fit questions and my stupid coding questions. We had a hiring manager that was looking for a strong back end engineer turn down the engineer that built the search backend for yelp because he didn't like his answer to "how would you program the code in an elevator."

So my new company Facet (www.facetdev.com) is basically built around helping senior engineers, with strong experience building products at scale, find contract work.

<comment><USER5> I agree, a 60 minute judgment may just be a random gut feeling, but...

Your new service offers to connect ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-YadaYada with work. It's all pedigree. Pedigree in my face, on page and in the website title tag.

And... I'm none of those.

So... I personally prefer a world in which I have a chance to be misjudged to a world where I have no chance at all. Maybe it's just me though...

I think you got the observation right. The solution, no so much so.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, we're not trying to solve the hiring/interviewing problem yet. We've completely punted on that by only working with people that have a very specific type of experience. We know that leaves out a HUGE number of excellent engineers.

Right now we are focusing on a small niche to try and build a sustainable business. Then we'll have the resources and impact to solve the broader problem.

<comment><USER6> What problem did you attempt to solve? You are essentially offloading the vetting problem to all the companies who's former employees you work with. The only value I can see that you create is in liquidity in the market.

Sure, there's some benefit to solving market inefficiencies and making some money along the way, but don't pretend for a second that this isn't just another recruiting firm using pedigree as a proxy for actual skills.

<comment><USER7> I had written basically this same response fearing I was being overly judgemental before seeing your response but my gut was the same.

The posts read like sales pitches for someone solving a problem of making money for themselves by limiting their portfolio to candidates for whom $company had done the hard work of vetting by having previously hired.

Click-bait is a generous summation, I feel.

<comment><USER4> Some people find our service valuable. There are devs that would prefer to be freelance but don't want to spend the time doing sales to make sure they have consistent work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Obviously interviewing isn't 100% accurate. Almost nothing is. You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company.

But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will _not_ be a success. And that is the purpose of the interview. To filter out the "definitely not"s — the programmers who can't write fizzbuzz. And yes, I have seen plenty of these.

And interview is not the be-all and end-all of recruiting: of course it isn't. But I'm seeing a pendulum swinging a long way in the other direction now, and a lot of people talking as though interviews are worthless. They're really not.

<comment><USER9> And yet the discussions on the candidate post-hiring interviews mostly revolves around whether they confirm to the company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not. The world would be a better place if people started accepting the fact for what it is: There wouldn't be so much despair around the tech interview process if not _everything_ was broken, surely?

Refs:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166501) (On Secretly Terrible Engineers).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541617](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541617) (How Not to Hire a Software Engineer).

<comment><USER10> And yet when a company tries to reduce a candidate to a consistent set of objective criteria as best it can--meaning, the ability to understand programming problems and solve them in a structured interview--people get upset because it doesn't account for the "big picture" of the candidate and unfairly excludes people who'd otherwise be a great fit.

The reality is that any interview procedure is bound to have some false positives and some false negatives, and there will always be people who see themselves as false negatives (correctly and incorrectly) who'll complain loudly about any procedure.

<comment><USER11> If it were only true or false negatives complaining, that would be one thing. But lots of the complaining also comes from true positives. I've gotten every tech job I've interviewed for since college, and have usually been quite successful in the companies I've worked for. I think all of those interviews were evaluating me on the wrong metric. They evaluated something I also happen to be relatively good at - I have a CS background and I'm ok at contrived little programming problems - but I believe the companies just got lucky that I'm actually even better at the kinds of things that are important in my work - problem analysis, solution design, consensus seeking, teamwork, communication, writing, debugging, research, detail orientation, automation, process definition, etc. etc. etc. - none of which has any real overlap with writing little code snippets.

<comment><USER10> All of those things, though, are inherently hard to test in a way that's fair, representative, and not easily cheated. Anyone who had a reproducible, consistent way to evaluate which candidates are good at those things would be able to make a whole lot of money.

<comment><USER11> I don't disagree, but that also doesn't mean coding interviews like we do them now are the best alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I conduct the technical part of interview in my company. There are many candidates which charm our director and HR. They recite the buzzwords flawlessly and their resumes are top notch. When they come to technical part of interview, they charm us as well. Until they start coding. We ask two easy coding tasks (one programming, one data science) and so many candidates have issue with transfering algorithm they conjured on the spot into code; or are unable to solve problem on abstract level (and not hard-code the values for problem given to them). It is not uncommon that we identify sweet talkers which would have negative productivity for the company (meaning we would spend more time/money into fixing their code than they would bring value). I am firm believer that software developers must pass technical part of the interview.

</comment><comment><USER13> Still relevant: [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the biggest issues is the industry as a whole operates on a completely different hubris level. I don't think any of my professional references has ever been contacted with the purposes of gaining significant insight into my prior accomplishments or to get information about what it was like to work with me. Nope, all we need is some fancy data structure and algorithm knowledge and a white board to find that great candidate.

And those that do care about past accomplishments seem to be more interested in public Github repos.

However, it's my guess there's some sort of inflection point because I doubt Pike or van Rossum did any white board problems when they were hired at Google. My guess is their interviews were much closer to the way the rest of the world, the world outside software development, conducts interviews.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's better to let good/great people slip away then to get a bad apple onto the team. Or worse, a mediocre one who never does anything _wrong_ but also isn't contributing positively either.

<comment><USER17> If everyone only wants "great" people, where are the mediocre people supposed to work? Think like this long enough and soon the have-nots are plotting a revolution.

Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to boring coding tasks without complaint. Why do we devalue the grunts? They are the bedrock of every organization.

It's not like Google's Adwords is undergoing a complete code rewrite every quarter. Neither is Microsoft Word. Most code changes are incremental, and people need jobs, so why do we denigrate them so?

Plus A players are only usually A in their requisite subdomain. A crack coder of financial systems is going to struggle mightily when writing a morphological filter or a seam carving algorithm. There's real value to the business when an individual acquires domain knowledge, especially when the domain is not fundamentally exciting (e.g. finance, geology).

<comment><USER18> >Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to boring coding tasks without complaint.

In general, when coding, if you're doing a menial or boring task you're doing something wrong. E.g. I've worked with a ton of mediocre developers who don't automate the menial tasks and end up doing the task manually, sloppily and slowly.

>It's not like Google's Adwords is undergoing a complete code rewrite every quarter. Neither is Microsoft Word. Most code changes are incremental,

Incremental changes are hard. Incremental changes to large and unwieldy systems while leaving them in a maintainable state are very hard (actually, from what I've heard, Google Adwords' code base _is_ a mess).

>Plus A players are only usually A in their requisite subdomain. A crack coder of financial systems is going to struggle mightily when writing a morphological filter or a seam carving algorithm. There's real value to the business when an individual acquires domain knowledge

It's vastly better to have a really good product owner/manager who knows the domain working with a really good coder than a mediocre coder with mediocre domain knowledge.

<comment><USER17> >In general, when coding, if you're doing a menial or boring task you're doing something wrong. E.g. I've worked with a ton of mediocre developers who don't automate the menial tasks and end up doing the task manually, sloppily and slowly.

That's total BS. Development is full of boring mediocre tasks such as fixing spelling mistakes in UI controls, updating help messages for dialog boxes, or porting the product from one build system to another. In many tasks, there's a huge gap (a chasm sometimes) between manual intervention and complete automation. I've lost count of the number of times a clever programmer has tried to automate the process and completely mucked things up, forcing me to go in and fix things manually.

>Incremental changes are hard. Incremental changes to large and unwieldy systems while leaving them in a maintainable state are very hard (actually, from what I've heard, Google Adwords' code base is a mess).

That's exactly where a great product manager can mentor a mediocre developer in making a sensible change. It's a great learning opportunity that we're depriving people of because software founders want to retain all the revenue for themselves.

>It's vastly better to have a really good product owner/manager who knows the domain working with a really good coder than a mediocre coder with mediocre domain knowledge.

Of course. It's also vastly better that to be born rich so one doesn't have to work at all. Ideally, all developers in the market would be great developers. But they're not. So I ask again, what are the mediocre developers supposed to do?

<comment><USER18> >That's total BS. Development is full of boring mediocre tasks such as fixing spelling mistakes in UI controls, updating help messages for dialog boxes

I would say this counts for much less than 1% of what I have to do. A lot of this stuff is in files which I can give product owner control over, too.

>or porting the product from one build system to another.

And this isn't boring. Build systems are tricky and filled with pitfalls. The worst thing you can say about build systems is that it's not a prestigious task.

>I've lost count of the number of times a clever programmer has tried to automate the process and completely mucked things up, forcing me to go in and fix things manually.

Yeah, and fixing things manually in that case _is_ boring. As I put it above "if you're doing a menial or boring task you're doing something wrong" and you precisely described "something wrong".

>That's exactly where a great product manager can mentor a mediocre developer in making a sensible change.

Product managers are not the right people to teach this kind of thing.

>Of course. It's also vastly better that to be born rich so one doesn't have to work at all.

Unlike being born rich, which is out of your control, you are able to exercise some degree of control over whom you work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate noted for his work in judgment and decision making, stated in an interview earlier this year that interviews are terrible at choosing the best candidates. Unfortunately, he didn't articulate alternatives.

<comment><USER20> The alternative is certainly the big problem.

The other big problem is not even giving an interview to a great candidate based on things like a resume and possible a cover letter.

<comment><USER21> I feel like this is the much more complicated and secretly much worse problem, not just for businesses, but for society as a whole.

We lean on heuristics like pedigree, both corporate, which is reflexive on having already past a hiring filter before, and academic, which is ludicrously expensive, both in time and money, is itself largely reflexive on having been born into high socioeconomic status, and seems to have dubious value outside of providing an easily digestible signal to get past these filters constructed in the labor market.

Maybe if we could design a better interview system and more accurate and precise cheap signals for who to throw into that (expensive to scale) pipeline, we could save young people from having to start their lives 4 years later and behind the starting line, reaping the productivity gains of the labor market gaining those extra 4 years and a wider pool of talent, while also creating more socioeconomic mobility spread more widely across society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe making the 'extended interview' process more formal would be a good thing.

Formally have an internal 'contract' worker process where anyone they might want can be hired in to a trial pool, and projects can bring in the trial worker for small things quickly (maybe writing unit tests, or a fresh set of eyes, etc).

Every month review performance, make a decision to offer job as X, keep on for another month, or let go.

As a different part of this, alternating weekends might also be a more focused part of this, let someone that ALREADY has a job have a similar trial process on just some weekends, maybe with a more remote-work focus.

<comment><USER23> Why in the world would anyone be interested in doing this? Companies are competing for talent, not the other way around.

<comment><USER24> Because there are people out there looking for work. It's not trivial for all programmers to find a job. I am in particular really awful at the entire applying and interviewing process (except funny little algorithms problems, I can kill those). It's a stressful, amorphous blob of everything I hate.

What the parent of your comment describes sounds a lot like a specific kind of contract-to-hire, which if it's done well can be really effective. I get to show off that I can actually develop software well, a company gets to judge me on more than just an hour (or maybe a day) of questioning.

Unfortunately it can be pretty exploitative if done wrong. It's easy for it to become an unending period of low-paid work where you're just hoping that one day it'll turn into a real job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's more accurate to say that the current format of asking algorithm questions is not the best way to judge programmers ability. All it tests is how much has the programmer memorized for the interview and not really how he codes in the real world.

But i dont see this changing as most interviewers have been through the system and are likely average programmers themselves.

</comment><comment><USER26> I am approaching 1.5 decades as an employed software engineer. Interviewing culture seems to change a little over the years, but usually in other wacky directions that leave me feeling entirely disengaged from the industry. I also very much love my vocation, though it alone is not enough to keep me enduring through the insanity of technical interviews , "cultural fit" assessments, and the violence of linear reductionism.

Articles and discussion threads like this are pretty much the only reason Im willing to interview at all (and thus remain in the industry). So thanks for sharing, Im glad to know other people are aware of how bonkers this is.

The long version takes years of explaining.

The short version is: I am highly allergic to cognitive dissonance.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm interested in where the break-even point is. With some interview processes now stretching over 15-20 hours or even more, it seems at some point the process is not helping make a better decision and just demanding extra resources from both the hiring company and the interviewees.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is why onsite rounds last 4-7 hours instead, while speaking to 5-10 engineers.

</comment><comment><USER29> The underlying assumption is that Daniel would have been a great fit. Can this be assumed? Even as a good engineer, his claim to fame is founding the Prime Air team. Would there have been a "What started as an idea over coffee with Gur..." moment at Netflix? Would he have just become a random developer instead? Worth nothing that Daniel actually went from Microsoft to Amazon after not being hired at Netflix, so perhaps he would have similarly churned at Netflix.

This really isn't your typical "but whiteboard interviews suck!" situation. (not to say that they don't ....)

</comment><comment><USER30> I feel that the best we can do is "does this person look good on reference and/or paper? Then if so, in the phone screen and then interview: is there any reason to believe the stuff on paper might not be true?" (that latter happens a surprising amount).

Also: "is this person a jerk?" though you have to account for the awkward things someone might accidentally say when they feel they're in a high- pressure situation.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's interesting that some people find that many so-called "programmers" cannot write FizzBuzz (see links in post, apart from a fun FizzBuzz version in Python):

FizzBuzz in Python with nested conditional expressions and a generator expression:

[https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/12/fizzbuzz-in-python- with-...](https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/12/fizzbuzz-in-python-with- nested.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> Sometimes I think we would be better off hiring people on the spot at random.

In France we have a legal maximal 4 months trial period for employees so... This gives enough time I think.

[https://www.service- public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1643](https://www.service- public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1643)

<comment><USER23> In the United States we basically only have trial employees. There's nothing at all like French job protections.

<comment><USER32> Really? Is that in all states? So hiring someone should be at least as easy no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It really depends. When you are hiring senior programmers, don't set the bar very high, then you can filter out majority of bad applications in a 60mins interview. For both hard skills and soft skills.

Then you need to spend more time for the remaining ones to find the right people.

</comment><comment><USER34> What's interesting is that most thoughtful people in the industry agree that our conventions around interviewing make for an almost hilariously arbitrary hiring process, but very few large software orgs have actually changed the way they hire.

</comment><comment><USER35> Portfolio, portfolio, portfolio.

I could talk to someone for hours and still misjudge whether I would enjoy coding on the same project with them.

Show me reams of code that they wrote, and I will know immediately.

It's too bad that usually isn't possible.

</comment><comment><USER36> We can't. But we also can't interview people for weeks. So we do one hour and we go with our gut feeling. It's a terrible way to hire, possibly the worst, except for all the other ones.

</comment><comment><USER37> No worries. There's always that probationary period in which either party can recognise it's not a match and either do something about it, or just give it up. How long will it take you to decide? A week? Two weeks? A month?

<comment><USER38> It's not a "no worries" situation if you just left one job for another only to find out the culture isn't a good fit.

<comment><USER39> Particularly if you relocated.

<comment><USER40> Had that happen to a co-worker once. He moved (on his own dime) from Chicago down to Dallas, then got let go just three months later. He wasn't even bad, he just wasn't performing at the level I guess they wanted him to. I never imagined back when I was in school that programming, of all professions, would be as cut-throat as it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Of course we can. Its just that we can't do it right.

</comment><comment><USER42> You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. Can someone program? 60 minutes is way more than enough. How great of a programmer are they? You're going to need more than 60 minutes, unless already had a chance to look at their prior code base.

What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? how do they handle stress? how's their communication and attitude? do they write great documentation? do they test their code? are they a great team player? how creative are they?

Due to time constraint of an interview, someone might be more sloppy than usual. Their might be the interview stress which is different from regular work stress, interview stress can impact their communication, etc. But if we focus plainly on technical skills, you can flush that out in 60 minutes.

I'm a hiring manager, and I have never failed in hiring someone who didn't have the required tech skills. Technical ability I can always hit spot on, the tough one is determination and soft skills. Some of the folks I took chance on, who displayed terrible soft skills during interview turned out to be champs, communicate great, work hard, etc. A few that were very eloquent during interviews were a disappointment, sloppy in development, poor communication in practice, etc.

People also grow, so someone that was a bad fit/interview for you, could in a few years grow and become great. Potential is also difficult to spot.

<comment><USER43> > You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. [...] What's difficult to > judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? [...] do they write > great documentation? do they test their code? [...]

You answer in the affirmative, but then go on to clarify that you're excluding 95% of the job. I would simplify this to say "no, you can't".

<comment><USER44> > Can this person code at all? How well?

He's trying to draw the distinction between these two questions.

<comment><USER45> The distinction is meaningless. No company wants someone who can merely code (as determined by their ability to solve fizzbuzz-type stuff). They want someone who can code well.

<comment><USER46> I think you're missing the point.

The purpose is to Filter out people who can't code at all.

If you've ever hired developers you know how many people show up to interviews and genuinely cannot program to save their life.

<comment><USER45> >>The purpose is to Filter out people who can't code at all.

You shouldn't need a 60-minute in-person interview to figure out that they can't code.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to prevent sexual assault (no chilli powder required) (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/21/how-to-prevent-sexual-assault <comment></comment>


Show HN: Mitty – All in One Travel App - <AUTHOR> https://getmitty.com/?ref=hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, We have built Mitty, All in one Travel App. You can access all essential travel services instantly in one app without the need to research and download additional apps. When you travel from one city another, service provider changes to the best local service depending on the location.

</comment><comment><USER2> this is really cool....just went to Iceland and was looking for something that solves what you're talking about

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback! What is the next city you are travelling to? We will add it to the app by that time ;)</comment></comment>


How much would I have to pay you for a day of teaching kids how to program? - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking about launching a business around this idea, so I wanted to get some good opinions.
Here's mine: I'm a senior-level Rails/JS dev, and I'm not really into the whole "do good things for free" thing. I think for 8 hours on a Saturday I would do it for $200, or $25 an hour.
Let me know your honest opinion. I would appreciate it a lot, for real for real. <comment><USER2> 50% of the registration fee for teaching kids how to program games course run during school holidays

</comment><comment><USER3> Teach me programming and I'll teach you music.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pay me some money and I'll waste time helping you by answering your question.</comment>


The Royal Society's report on open science - <AUTHOR> http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/science-public-enterprise/report/ <comment><USER2> Anyone in the bay area interested in building better tools for researchers? I did materials research at Stanford and was stunned by how tech-backward most sectors of academic research can be.

</comment><comment> excuse-me Once again they manage to get it completely and entirely wrong

>Scientists need to be more open among themselves and with the public and media

At least in the physical sciences we couldn't be more open. We even have to schmooze 'contacts' in the press to get our results mentioned. We are total publicity whores.

>Greater recognition needs to be given to the value of data gathering, analysis and communication

By whom? I think most experimental scientists are pretty convinced of the value of gathering data!

>Common standards for sharing information are required to make it widely usable

Oh dear, I see another huge government plan for another over complex family of data formats. HDF meets the semantic web. With lots of competing Eu, NATO, International committees all meeting in nice places for years withotu producing anything that is usable

>Publishing data in a reusable form to support findings must be mandatory

Fine but probably pointless. The raw data is available, it's the data processing that is the argument.

>More experts in managing and supporting the use of digital data are required

Cut researchers, hire more "digital media interface facilitators"!

>New software tools need to be developed to analyse the growing amount of data being gathered

We do - we spend most of our time writing < bleep >ing software. The average experimental physicist writes more lines of < bleep >ing code than the average programmer. And thanks to the unique way in which UK academia is funded we did it all with open source software. If we had had decent funding in the 90s we might have used IDL, mathematica, Matlab and tied everything up in proprietry formats - but we didn't so we didn't

NEWS guys - the problem isn't the data - it's the papers. If I want the next job I need publications. they have to be in proper journals to count. The journals not only charge money, they screw us over - you want to buy the Astrophysical Journal at a cost of approx 1 staff member/year? Then you also have to subscribe to the Ecuadorian journal of fish spotting. Want online access, fine, but you still have to pay page charges to publish in it and still pay extra for color 'pages'

If the Royal Society had any purpose - beyond big lunches - it would be to do what it originally did 400 years ago. It should run it's own reputable FREE online journal with proper referees, a citations score where I could publish results and get a job. Without having to do all the staged press releases, minimal publishable unit, getting a story on the news, interesting Discovery channel - and all the other chicanery I had to do!

<comment><USER3> I don't think they have it wrong... they're merely spinning it in such a way to keep publishers in the picture. I think a lot of what they're saying is valid though.

In the biological sciences, there is a huge need for more openness. The stakes are just too high for many researchers to share data that hasn't yet been published, and the vast majority of researchers are still deathly afraid of being scooped.

I think there needs to be a better way to write and publish articles in the first place... some way to make it easy to embed different data types (videos, 3d models, 3d graphs, large datasets, code) into papers. Making a replacement for Word (maybe an online, collaborative editor integrated with Mendeley?) would probably be a good step in this direction.

<comment><USER4> I keep hearing about how much fear is involved in pre-publication sharing ... I'd love a giant list of those individuals who have _ACTUALLY_ experienced this and the context in which it happened.

Clearly this is an area which could be capitalized on... and as we're talking about truly novel information the value is almost guaranteed.

<comment><USER5> I think every scientific lab has a story of someone in the group being scooped for whatever reason. From my experience it's most often from presenting unpublished work at a conference or presenting data where next logical step for publication is obvious.

In my own experience, from conferences and word-of-mouth, I know the X other labs in the world that are doing the same project as me. If I was involved in pre-publication sharing and one of these X individuals published first, my years of work would no longer be accepted in a top journal and my publication record would suffer.

My dream would be to have a prestigious journal that publishes the reproduction of an entire experiments rather than only novel discoveries. All labs already do this, reproduce published results, but it is rarely published.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Transfer Pact Between U.S. And Europe Is Ruled Invalid - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/technology/european-union-us-data-collection.html <comment><AUTHOR> The "Safe Harbor" rule had been in place since 2000 and is now essentially invalid. So each country in the EU will have to rule whether they authorise the data to be transferred back to the US.

The problem it seems to cause is for companies who have European employees on payroll, and do not have a European entity. Also, small(er) businesses (who can't afford data-centres unlike Amazon or Facebook) may be losing a competitive advantage in Europe.</comment>


Web scale: Facebook's architecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-is-Facebooks-architecture Can someone at Facebook verify whether this answer is accurate/mostly accurate? <comment><USER2> I like the anon comment that they should not re-invent the wheel so much. That gave me a chuckle, I'll just use my off the shelf distributed web app deployment software that runs on thousands of machines ... oh snap!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Can someone at Facebook verify if the answer on Quora is accurate/mostly accurate?

<comment><USER3> It's basically accurate. Also, there are upvotes from notable employees at Facebook like Andrew Bosworth

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the comments at Quora, this presentation is great (and dated this month):

[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Infrastructure-at- Faceboo...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Infrastructure-at-Facebook)

</comment><comment><USER5> What's facebook take on memcached? Are they happy with it?

<comment><USER3> It worked well in the past. They made significant improvements to it.

However, it's not as well-suited for multi-datacenter usage. For example, they needed another replication layer. I think they're working on a current system that will replace memcached, and it seems to be causing some consistency problems...

<comment><USER6> Do you have any additional details about this possible memcached replacement?

<comment><USER3> I do, but I'm not sure if I should say anything about it. Sorry. It's not open-sourced (yet), like everything else is.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Search Is Still King But Ignored - <AUTHOR> http://cemagnifique.com/2011/04/12/why-search-is-still-king/ Why are there hardly any search startups funded, while the search industry is one of the most profitable industries? <comment><USER2> Actually a pretty good question. Search is highly profitable (although you might need scale for that to be true), and clearly not yet "solved". And Google seems distracted.

I hope it will be someone else than Bing to take advantage of that.</comment>


Anti-Uber gang grows: China's Didi in $100m funding for Brazilian startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/didi-brazil-99-funding <comment><USER2> "Anti-uber gang"? How does the article not mention that Uber owns shares of Didi as a result of the truce in 2016? And that their CEOs are on each other's board.</comment>


Did Facebook panic? - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/09/did-facebook-panic

<comment><USER2> how is yet another photo sharing thing worth $1B. I am in the wrong business.</comment>


Opinion: StubHub's Urgent Peril and the Industry Response - <AUTHOR> https://www.ticketnews.com/2020/04/opinion-stubhubs-urgent-peril-and-the-industry-response/ <comment><USER2> Fascinating information on how the money works in concerts. Didn't know that the primary ticket seller keeps the funds until after the event takes place.

Sure looks like Stubhub as a middle man is in big trouble.</comment>


The Truth About The Early Days of Digg - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/early-days-of-digg-kevin-rose

<comment><USER2> This is just blog spam.</comment>


Ask HN: Hiring Ethics of a Fringe Tech Stack? - <AUTHOR> The small startup where I now lead engineering is planning more engineering hiring, as well as picking stack for some major new development.  And our stack might be a key factor in being able to hire high-powered people -- despite not having FAANG money and prestige, and despite no unicorn strategy lottery ticket.
One of our stack options, to be nimble, and to be very attractive to hiring candidates, is to use one of those tools that's not popular, yet is beloved disproportionately by engineering-as-a-passion developers.  I'm thinking, in languages for example, things like CL, Scheme, Haskell, OCaml, Smalltalk, Erlang (though that's more popular), etc.
The biggest question on my mind at the moment is -- given the current industry emphasis on always keeping the latest most popular stack buzzwords on one's resume -- the ethics of hiring people to put a few years of a fringe stack on their resume.  Would it be doing the hires a disservice, in a way that recent grad developers might not realize?
In addition the fact that they probably won't be able to get a job with that stack if they move, there also seems to be a lot of sterotyping and stigmatizing in hiring interviews right now.  Like one article of clothing in an otherwise fashionable wardrobe, at a mean-kids school, is, "like, so 2019, loser."
Though I think an aspiration to provide potentially lifetime great working situation and career opportunity to everyone is a helpful guide, we shouldn't plan that we'll be able to do that forever, for everyone.  And the norm is for developers to move every couple/few years, so we should also be guided by that reality, and how we can be good for people's careers if they do move in a few/several years.
Summary: Can we attract some of the best developers using the fringe tools they really want to use, without doing them a disservice?  I hope the answer is yes, and want to pick HN's brains on this. <comment><USER2> Are people really stigmatizing certain stacks in interviews (especially modern stacks)? I can see some skepticism over a candidate who only has experience writing BASIC and is trying to join a front end team. But I've never seen anyone care about the languages you know as long as they think you can pick up a new one easily.

I've only worked at and applied to 500+ person companies, so I am curious if that is different at smaller companies, or if I've just been lucky.

<comment><USER3> > But I've never seen anyone care about the languages you know as long as they > think you can pick up a new one easily.

Is that true for the beginning of the hiring pipeline? While my experience is limited to healthcare developer recruitment in the UK the recruiters and agencies seem very focussed on keywords - and without passing that barrier you aren't even getting an interview with software professionals.</comment></comment>


sexwi.se launched - <AUTHOR> http://sexwi.se Hacked together a little side-project over the holidays around the social relationship/dating/friendship advice theme. Wasn't too sure about the name at first.. but what the heck.. sounds sticky .. ahem.. catchy ;)
Oh and it ain't p0rn or anything like it.. just plain ask & community-driven answers.
What do you think? <comment><AUTHOR> Hacked together a little side-project over the holidays around the social relationship/dating/friendship advice theme. Wasn't too sure about the name at first.. but what the heck.. sounds sticky .. ahem.. catchy ;) Oh and it ain't p0rn or anything like it.. just plain ask & community-driven answers. What do you think?</comment>


A Million Pageviews, Thousands of Dollars Poorer, and Still Countlessly Richer - <AUTHOR> http://danwin.com/2012/01/a-million-pageviews-thousands-of-dollars-poorer-and-still-countlessly-richer/

<comment><USER2> _"I made a $1,000 (mostly to cover expenses) to shoot a friend's wedding... but weddings are so much work that I've decided to avoid shooting them if I can help it."_

OK, I admit that I don't know the business, but isn't the "so much work" part of wedding photography kind of the bread-and-butter for a lot of photographers? I'm guessing that the market rate for that wedding would have been closer to $3,000, which after a day or two of ground work and a couple of days of editing, really isn't to be sniffed at. Am I missing something? I'm not being snarky, I'm just wondering why photographers would pass up what seems to be relatively easy money.

<comment><USER3> I would say that there are 2 kinds of "work" involved in wedding photography:

1\. The physical stuff like scouting out the locations way before the day of the actual wedding, attending wedding rehearsals to understand how the actual ceremony would go like on the day itself, the actual shooting for the wedding ceremony as well as the reception, and the days after spent sorting through the shots and editing them. This is definitely a lot more physically taxing compared what a recreational photographer (which I'm assuming the author is) is normally used to. I still remember how my legs just gave up after I came home from spending the whole day running around trying to get all the shots while lugging around a couple of kgs of gears.

2\. The mental stuff like how stressful it is to know that you only have one chance to get things right on your client's special day, and if let's say you screw up the bride-walking-down-the-aisle shot, you can't just get the couple to rewind the whole ceremony just so you can get the shot right. On top of that, sometimes if you're unlucky enough you may even face lawsuits from dissatisfied couple asking for a refund AND for you to compensate for their wedding costs and pay for a new ceremony so that they can have those "memories" be immortalised in photos. Don't forget that like in all creative professions, you have to deal with clients who insist that you charge too much cause their 16 year old nephew with a DSLR can do the job for free.

So yeah, wedding photography may be for some people but personally I wouldn't want to make a living out of it, probably because I don't think it suits my more laid back personality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr - hobbyist spends $50 on a flickr pro account, makes $100, and has spent $8000 on camera gear. He's had a great time.

The camera gear is a sunk cost - he's not buying it to make money. He's buying it because he loves taking photos, and wants good gear.

He's a good photographer. But photographers don't make money, unless they are being paid to be there (i.e. for a wedding, or by a news outlet). OK, you can try to sell photos after you took them, but the world is saturated in good photographs.

To make money, you need to create value then find a way to extract some of it. Or you need to con someone. There's few ways for a photographer to make money _after_ creating the value, because there's likely to be so many alternatives to their photo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the adroit summary...Since I've only done photography in the digital age, the idea that a photo alone is worth something seems strange to me. However, a photo produced during an assignment in which a photographer has to schlep a half-day to get is most definitely worth hundreds or thousands.

Someone who cares about preserving the memory of their wedding will recognize the value of paying someone $3,000-$10,000 to capture it, over some uncle who just bought a massive DSLR system to toy with. Same with publications and important news events. In the latter case, the problem is that there are just far fewer wealthy publications that still exist.

<comment><USER4> adroit - I like it. I usually get told "terse".

Also, I should have told people that they really should click on the link, and scroll down to the sample pictures - they really are good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Creative Commons Non-commercial license (but I've let anyone who asks use them for free)"

This is his primary fault. If he gives his photos away for free to anyone that asks, it's hard to listen to his argument that he can't make any money from his photos. He can - but he chooses not to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, and I didn't really argue otherwise.

However, the dilemma facing photogs who _do_ want to make a living is that to "be with it" is to be on some kind of service that allows for easy sharing of their work. But this sometimes (which, in most photogs' eyes, is too often) leads to photos being reused without proper payment.

And then you get into the discussion of, "Well they wouldn't have paid any money for your photo even if you did have it under lock-and-key"

In other words, even if I didn't have CC on my photos, I would still make a negligible amount of money. They aren't good/specific-to-a-buyer's-needs to make money in their digital existence. I could conceivably make money by selling prints and really marketing myself, but I foresee that ultimately making me less money than if I spent that time focused on my actual job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I struggle to find what the post was trying to say.

I've 10 million pageviews for my photos, averaging 430 pageviews per photo.

I derived a lot of revenue from the photos. Not from selling but from using photos to drive traffic to my blog where people will buy stuff.

Mine is more of product photography, targeted at people looking to see how a product looks.

There are may ways to make money off photos. E.g. Some are

1\. By selling the photos. 2\. By selling your service as a photographer 3\. By affiliate marketing - driving traffic

</comment><comment><USER7> I read this and wondered "how significant is a million pageviews on Flickr"?

I've got 637k pageviews (<http://flickr.com/photos/ckindel/stats>).

Does anyone know if there is a way to list Flickr users by the # of pageviews?

<comment><USER8> Now I'm also curious. At first I thought 1,000,000 is a huge number of views, but at 3,100 photos that's just 322/photo. I can't access Flickr from work but I think I have about 45 photos and 18,500 views, averaging 411/photo, and that's just from a couple of up votes on reddit/itookapicture (seldom more than 5-10). Obviously the actual distribution of views will vary quite a bit, but it's a useful starting point.

That being said, this guy seems to have quite an ability to take interesting photos of ordinary situations whereas I tend to save the camera for special moments so I doubt I'll ever hit 3,100 photos. Unfortunately it looks like the Flickr Stats API is per-user, and private, with no global statistics available (nor in a Flickr blog post), so we can't know what's "normal" and what's not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why doesn't Flickr have a revenue model similar to YouTube based on views to share with users? Or even let you overlay links to other sites (advertising) on your photo?

<comment><USER2> A photograph doesn't grab 3 minutes of attention like a video. Or, more specifically, you can't ask someone to watch a 15 second ad just to see a picture.

<comment><USER9> What? Ok, I take back the "like YouTube." How about like Google search? Users don't spend 3 mins on google results page. Also, a text ad can be targeted to whatever tags the pic has (ie: New York hotels).

<comment><USER2> Users click on ads in Google search because they're looking for answers. For one in every couple of thousand search results, a Google ad will provide the answer that someone is looking for. They'll click it. Revenue is generated.

Over at YouTube, users are willing to sit through 15 seconds of pre-roll ads so they can watch 3 minutes of whatever. Revenue is generated.

If a user arrives at Flickr, they've probably already found what they're looking for. Someone searching who arrives at a Flickr page of dolphins will see pictures of dolphins and have succeeded in their task. There's not much chance they'll notice any ads Flickr shows and click because they want NFL tickets.

<comment><USER10> Ignoring comparisons with YouTube or Google, the fact of the matter is that content sites can indeed make money from advertisements.

I'm not saying Flickr _should_ go down this road, but you're wrong in suggesting that sites can't make money from adverts unless they are pre-rolls or on search engines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> and I'm assuming $0 for the adobe photoshop version he pirated or didn't bother including in his calculations.

<comment><USER12> He didn't mention the costs of his computer either, so he must've stolen that too?

But srsly, I think we can be sure that he has a legal copy of Photoshop. From the bio on his employer's website [1]:

 _"Dan Nguyen is a news application developer at ProPublica. [...] Previously, Dan worked as a reporter, Web developer and multimedia producer for the Sacramento Bee and sacbee.com. His work on multimedia projects won awards from Editor and Publisher and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency."_

[1] <http://www.propublica.org/site/author/dan_nguyen>

<comment><USER11> I know I'm getting downvoted for making a "douchebaggy" statement but not including the cost of a general purpose computer and not including the cost for a professional photo editing tool is something totally different.

I was just kind of upset about reading the "cost" of his photography experiment/hobby and not even thinking about including the cost of the photo editing software. Especially when it comes to photoshop which is probably one of the most pirated pieces of software due to its price.

I unfortunately know too many hobby photographers who would not even think of paying for this essential tool they probably have been using for many years.

<comment><AUTHOR> No you're right, as is the previous commenter who speculated that I have a copy from work (no one considered GIMP? :) )...funny enough, I noticed someone in one of the discussion threads about the "This photograph is not free" who was in agreeance with the author but also seemed to imply that it's OK for non-rich photogs to pirate Photoshop.

The two things are apples-to-apples in that people who copy photos or Photoshop w/o permission justify it in that the original work is still available for the owner to sell/use. But it's funny how it's hard to see that perspective unless you are actually in the aggrieved group (i.e. photographers and software developers)

<comment><USER12> _"you're right, as is the previous commenter who speculated that I have a copy from work (no one considered GIMP? :) )"_

I did consider it, but I saw screenshots of the Photoshop toolbox in one of the chapters of your publication _The Bastards Book of Ruby_ [1].

I could never get used to the GIMP, though. I've worked with Photoshop since 1993, I'm stuck in my ways. I have often wished for a leaner program that would let me do simple tasks that I usually do in PS – GraphicConverter satisfied some of those needs for years. Then, Pixelmator 2 [2] came out, and nowdays I find myself using it about as often as Photoshop. It's lean, has a gorgeous UI, and it works almost the same as Photoshop. For web graphics, it has all I need. For print, I still (have to) use PS.

[1] <http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/chapters/image-manipulation/>

[2] <http://www.pixelmator.com/></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Silicon Valley's Quest to Live Forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/silicon-valleys-quest-to-live-forever <comment><USER2> I think that on this subject, I am most at odds with my Silicon Valley friends. Most people I talk to seem to want to live forever if possible.

I think this would be a disaster. We would create a race of ultra wealthy Methuselahs who dominate the world and prevent the very "creative distruction" that Valley types claim to worship.

Talking about this subject is very like talking about vegetarianism. Many people would admit the basic premises under the practice, yet find some reason to ignore those premises and just keep doing what they're doing.

Are we doomed to destroy the world in our selfishness? Or is there a hidden upside to everyone (or worse, a select few) living forever on a finite planet?

<comment><USER3> I agree there are significant political problems associated even with life extension, let alone immortality. I suppose a charitable view might be that either or both might drive us to colonize our moon, Mars, etc. But what doesn't seem to get much attention are the psychological problems of living hundreds of years (or a more extreme 'upload' of your mind). My instinct is that there a whole host of psychological disorders waiting in the wings for people who manage to live much longer than humans have lived before. Not that there couldn't be treatment for those as well, but physical health is only part of the picture.

<comment><USER2> This brings up another subject where I find myself at odds with my hacker brethren. Look, I'm a huge fan of science fiction myself, but the idea that we are ever going to solve any of our problems by colonizing Mars is just that -- fiction.

Sure, I agree with Elon Musk that a disaster recovery plan for humanity seems like a sensible idea. Also, technology developed for space has applications down here in the gravity well we call home.

But we're never going to have a large-scale migration off-planet, or any sizable off-planet populations. A Mars colony even on the order of your average Antarctic research facility sounds incredibly difficult to accomplish. We are having trouble figuring out how to keep Earth -- the planet we literally evolved to live on -- habitable for ourselves. Why should we be able to transform a barren, icy, radioactive, razor-sharp-dust-covered, dead rock into a suitable place for us to live?

I feel like my thinking on this subject paralleled the work of Kim Stanley Robinson. The Mars trilogy was very popular in Silicon Valley (and, relevant to the original topic, that series introduced immortality as a plot device to maintain the same set of characters across (even wildly accelerated) geologic timespans). But then KMS went and wrote Aurora, which paints quite a different picture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The ultimate ponzi-scheme.. the young born after us, shall inherit the slavery for not having grabbed early in history.</comment>


hledger – plain text accounting - <AUTHOR> http://hledger.org/ <comment><USER2> Enormous discussion of "plain text accounting" was here just a day (or so) ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12119050](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12119050)

322 points, 235 comments.

Long discussion.

That submission was of an article about plain text accounting, in which the author describes using hledger, which is what this submission links to, so that article is particularly relevant, but not a duplicate.</comment>


Should I join a startup or a FAANG company? - <AUTHOR> https://my.causal.app/models/952 <comment><USER2> It reaaaally depends on the market. Joining a startup in the last 5-ish years was mostly pointless and you would have made much more at FAANG (and given the pandemic prolly would have had much more job security).

I personally feel that the age of GOOG-FB style IPOs is over, and joining a 10+ person startup for monetary gain is probably not a good idea.

That being said, there are other good reasons for joining a startup and they have been discussed on HN multiple times.

</comment><comment> dan-robertson The chat doesn't include the (likely) Chance that the startup is not sold/ipo'd it that it is sold but not for enough for employee equity to be worth anything. There needs to be a thick orange band that goes in a flat line (where the options remain being worth their expected value, 0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Startup! FAANG is designed to feed you well and pay you well and keep you well occupied until you have too many encumberments to create your own, potentially competitive, startup!</comment>


Ocean's Oxygen Starts Running Low (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ocean-s-oxygen-starts-running-low/ <comment><USER2> I hate this feeling of hopelessness regarding global warming. It feels like even if you were a billionaire/massive corp, at some point you would say "wow we should stop, or else there won't even be a world to spend this money in".

<comment><USER3> I think it's partially related to something akin to the prisoner's dilemma: it's a world-wide problem, and "we" might not want to take the financial hit for being the first in leading the cause.

I spent quite some time in South-East Asia the past few years, and when you see the sheer amount of boats that just dump all their trash in the ocean, and the sheer lack of awareness of the issue, it makes you hopeless. I come home, diligently recycling my trash, and I can't help but wonder whether this is all just a show, and not addressing any of the core issues that are needed to fix this.

<comment><USER4> I share your feeling, but I also note this contradiction:

> I spent quite some time in South-East Asia

> I come home, diligently recycling my trash

Not saying you shouldn't recycle your trash, but your flights are much more impactful for the environment than your trash.

<comment><USER5> Is flying really that bad compared to ocean pollution? I feel like flying is overall a pretty efficient means of transport, everything is geared towards efficiency.

Plastic in the oceans, now that's a mess.

<comment><USER6> Consider a world where every human traveled by plane like you do and where also every human used recycling as you do. Would you prefer living in that world?

<comment><USER7> [http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2014/07/dri...](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2014/07/driving_vs_flying_which_is_more_harmful_to_the_environment.html)

<comment><USER8> > Consider a world where every human traveled by plane like you do and where > also every human used recycling as you do. Would you prefer living in that > world?

According to the above article, one would prefer that.

> The trend has continued so that in 2010, flying burned just 2,691 BTU per > passenger mile—an improvement of 74 percent since 1970. That was 43 percent > better than driving the average car, which gets about 21.5 miles per gallon > (4,218 BTU per passenger mile)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nobody mentioned reducing pollution and greenhouse emission is the best way to help the situation so I will -- non-polluting alternatives to flying, eating meat, heating and cooling (I'm surprised how many people heat their homes in the winter so they can walk around in shorts), packaged food. Having fewer children.

As a community, HN seems to think nuclear energy is easy while carpooling or flying less are misguided wastes of effort.

<comment><USER10> > _As a community, HN seems to think nuclear energy is easy while carpooling > or flying less are misguided wastes of effort._

Yes, because it's the truth. Knowing that reflects understanding.

It's _orders of magnitude_ easier to design[0] a nuclear reactor than it is to get a meaningful number of people to voluntarily refrain from flying, or even driving cars. Getting lots of people to agree on something, especially when they have strong short-term incentives for not following through on that agreement, is a near-impossible thing.

Pretty much the only way to tackle coordination problems (without going full- authoritarian, one dictator to rule the world) is to develop technologies and strategies that reduce the "activation energy" required for people to coordinate on an issue.

We won't get ourselves out of this mess by appeals to our shared human heritage, because responsibility for the planet always takes a backseat when one's tired and has to choose between 20 minutes in a car or 1 hour in a bus to pick up their daughter from school.

\--

[0] - and build it; but notice where pretty much all the problems with building a nuclear plant are - getting the local population to agree to it.

<comment><USER11> That's an interesting perspective, and one I hadn't considered before. I have to admit that it only fuels my fatalism. If people can't be convinced not to (e.g.) throw their trash out the window, then I can't help but despair.

<comment><USER10> I wish I could tell you otherwise; I sometimes try to believe it, but then I go outside to intermingle with the general population, and all of this is plainly visible.

Sometimes I wonder, who are those people who don't give a damn and just dump garbage wherever they please. I personally don't know any of them (or at least I don't know I know). But then I realize that current population levels mean we all live in our own filter bubbles. I did a back-of-the-napkin math recently and realized that personally, I've meaningfully interacted with at most 0.1% of people in the city I live in. In other words, I don't know a first thing about 99.9% of people I live next to. This probably explains why everyone seems so surprised come election days, or when they start discussing anything on a mainstream Internet portal.

All of this suggests civilization is a fragile thing, and the only structure and semblance of stability it has is thanks to systemic incentives (I wonder how our streets would look like if you couldn't be fined for littering). There's too many of us, we don't know one another, and we can't agree on shit, unless indirectly compelled by self-interest. I think the only way to achieve some large-scale coordination is to work on the incentives and the environment in which they apply, but that itself is a hard thing - especially that for any change you'd like to make, there will be those who profit off status quo and want to oppose you.

Really, designing a new nuclear reactor is trivial in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The oceans are by far the most important eco system on the planet, they have tremendous capacity for healing and regeneration but once that gets pushed too far there may be no way back. And without the oceans alive the world will be hungry.

There are many bad things the Trump administration might be remembered for domestically but internationally the most visible decision was the withdrawal from the climate change accords and it may eventually make the USA a pariah state no matter what military might they have.

<comment><USER13> Posting from a throwaway because politics.

Wouldn't there also be more different fish now especially in places that used to be covered by ice? Sure, some species might die off but you might get more new species as well. Some new fish perhaps that is good at living in lower oxygen concentration. Also, the fish that lived in the tropics can move to subtropics and so on.

I see it as more of a change that's not really bad or good. As Joe Carlin once said, the Earth will be fine.

Here is the clip: [https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4](https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4)

<comment><USER12> It's George Carlin, not joe, and he was a commedian - a good one - not a scientist, and his point, in case you missed it was that humans won't necessarily be around for the earth healing part II.

Earth will be fine, but we, you, me all the other humans, need earth to be healthy so that we can continue to exist, as apex predators we are extremely dependent on the lower branches of the foodchain working properly and all our hydroponics tech won't save us if we don't have oxygen in the air to live off.

Keep in mind that the atmospheric oxygen is there to a very large extent because the oceans act as the planet's lungs.

Lower oxygen in the oceans means less life in the oceans and ultimately less oxygen in the atmosphere, which affects all life on earth, including us. So unless you feel a planet with mostly just plant and insect life is 'fine' you probably need to review that piece a couple of times to get the real impact of it, in which Carlin's prediction is that we won't make it.

<comment><USER14> > as apex predators we are extremely dependent on the lower branches of the > foodchain working properly

Would you mind elaborating on this? It's not clear to me how we would be less dependent on lower branches of the food chain if we weren't apex predators.

<comment><USER12> The key is extremely. As an example, DDT sprayed to get rid of certain insects killed off a large number of birds at the top of the food chain, such trouble tends to concentrate. So poison the lower levels and the intermediate levels might survive but the apex species will suffer the most.

<comment><USER14> Oh, if you're referring to biological magnification then yes, but that's not the problem we're talking about, right? We're talking about global warming, which leads to species dying off (due to habitat loss, etc.) rather than staying alive but accumulating toxins... that's where I don't get how things would be any different if we were lower in the food chain?

<comment><USER15> We have many more points of dependency. So a malfunction in the machinery of life is more likely to be disastrous the further up the pyramid one lives. At the apex of the pyramid, we are dependent on the entire pyramid being structurally sound. And consider: we are already in the midst of the worst die-off of species since the dinosaurs. So the pyramid is already crumbling.

<comment><USER14> > We have many more points of dependency. So a malfunction in the machinery of > life is more likely to be disastrous the further up the pyramid one lives.

You're just repeating the claim, and again, I do not follow the logic. Again, my question is: why would it be less disastrous if we were lower in the food chain? It would help to give an example of a species at a lower position in our food web and explain why, if we took its position, we'd be better off.

<comment><USER15> I'm not "just repeating the claim". If you're at the bottom of the pyramid, you only need sunlight and water. If half the animals die off, you're fine. The higher up you are, the more species below on which you are dependent. You're only dependent on what's below, not what's above. With us at the top, a 50% die-off would be catastrophic.

<comment><USER14> In that case I believe you're saying something else, not answering the question I had asked. The sentence I replied to was this:

> as apex predators we are extremely dependent on the lower branches of the > foodchain working properly

Again, I repeat my question: if we were lower in the food web, wouldn't we _still_ depend on branches of the food web lower than you? That seems to be true regardless of where you are on the food web. In fact, wouldn't we be _more_ susceptible to harm if we had fewer possible sources of food? One would expect that the fewer alternatives we have, the worse off we would be, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How many nuclear powered vessels would it take to generate and pump in sufficient oxygen?

<comment><USER17> Well, considering most of the atmospheric oxygen is produced by phytoplankton in the ocean that's a receipt for suffocation.

<comment><USER12> In a nutshell it is a very nice illustration of how easy misguided attempts to repair things can be worse than the original problem.

<comment><USER16> Actually, it's a very nice illustration of creative problem solving.

Your totally unnecessary commentary added nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> An important topic, but can we at least have some mention of what we can do to improve oxygen levels in the oceans (aside from reducing the level of pollution, which is the obvious but slowest to implement solution). Surely there's something that could be done to tackle this in a more immediate manner? Are there plants within the ocean ecosystem that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen?

<comment><USER19> >It is estimated that between 50% and 85% of the world's oxygen is produced via phytoplankton photosynthesis.

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

<comment><USER18> Thank you, that was the information I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This could very well be humanity's Great Filter.</comment>


Is Nathan Myhrvold/Intellectual Ventures a patent Troll? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/12/intellectual-ventures-sues-nine-tech.html

<comment><USER2> Yes.</comment>


John Gilmore: History of Cygnus's Growth - <AUTHOR> https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2020-May/021225.html <comment><USER2> > It wasn't just a compiler, it was a whole ecosystem that had to be built or > improved. About half of our employees were software engineers, so by the > time our revenues grew from <$1M/year to $25M a year, we were spending about > $12M every year improving the free software ecosystem. And because we > avoided venture capital for six years, and shared the stock ownership widely > among the employees, when we got lucky after 10 years and were acquired by > the second free software company to go public (the first was VA Linux, the > second Red Hat), all those hackers became millionaires. A case of doing well > by doing good.

Indeed. The sheer amount of economic impact GCC has had - it has to be enormous. Back in the day for example we were able to ship our s/w on Solaris SPARC and bunch of other platforms (HPPA/AIX(Forgot what arch) without licensing any compilers because GCC 2.95 existed! (As I recall compiler licenses were sold separately from the OS and weren't cheap especially for a non-US company.)

<comment><USER3> And all the vendor compilers had their own different bugs and such while GCC was GCC.

<comment><USER4> And that's if a proprietary compiler was actually available on the system. I worked for a widespread computational project that really needed GNU Fortran as eventually a reliable basis for people to use that was generally available.

On the other hand, some bugs were common. There was at least one that originated in the original Unix f77 (which became f2c) that turned up in the Sun(?) compiler some time after it had been fixed in g77.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >And because we didn't control the master source code for gcc, one of our senior compiler hackers, Jim Wilson, spent a huge fraction of his time merging our changes upstream into FSF GCC, and merging their changes downstream into our product, keeping the ecosystem in sync. We handled that overhead for significant other tools by taking up the whole work of maintenance and release engineering -- for example, I became FSF's maintainer for gdb. I would make an FSF GDB release two weeks before Cygnus would make its own integrated toolchain releases. If bug reports didn't start streaming in within days from the free software community, we knew we had made a solid release; and we had time to patch anything that turned up, before our customers got it from us on cartridge tapes.

They get it.

Man. I've seen first hand how unsustainable it actually is to adopt a "private fork" (in spirit because of course anyone can GPL request your source) business model. Your stuff stagnates and falls behind upstream because your business is elsewhere. You didn't have the discipline or acumen or backbone to work with upstream from the get go so the effort required come time to update everything is utterly massive and can easily amount to decades of engineering time. It's possible the leadership never really understood how software works and was convinced it would be a risk to contribute back upstream, but it's no excuse if you ask me. It's your responsibility as an engineer to help them understand.

I wish more business and lawyer and founder types understood software licensing and how to make money in the software ecosystem beyond pure cloud SASS.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Cygnus: We make free software affordable."

(That countered the anti-slogans: "Free software: more expensive than money" and "Linux is only free if your time is worthless".)

I once asked Gumby if he and John Gilmore and Michael Tiemann named their company "Cygnus" as the result of typing "grep gnu /usr/dict/words". Without missing a beat, he replied that if they'd thought of doing that, they would have named the company "Wingnut".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingnut_%28politics%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingnut_%28politics%29)

Wingnut (politics): According to Merriam-Webster, it is "a mentally deranged person" or "one who advocates extreme measures or changes: radical."

<comment><USER7> Jim Wilson named his machine wingnut for that reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It'd be nice to see more success stories like these in the free software community :(

<comment><USER9> Red Hat's engineering is surprisingly similar in spirit to what is described in the post, considering that it's several orders of magnitude larger and making money in a completely different way (selling support and certifications rather than contracting development work).

<comment><USER7> That was how Cygnus made most of up its money, not the contracting. In fact when we merged with red hat both organizations were about 200 people, but we had over 160 developers and they had about 20-30. The development group you mention is the descendant of cygnus'</comment></comment></comment>


VueJS Front End Developer: Remote Friendly in EU - Cycloid-Sophie https://www.cycloid.io/join-us <comment> Cycloid-Sophie send us what shows you best at email@example.com or directly on the website.

We are a friendly scaling start up of 30 highly passionate and dedicated people. We value kind people who care and who are willing to participate to a nice adventure (in remote YAY!).</comment>


Questions you can't ask - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelalanmiller.com/?p=386 <comment><USER2> There should be a word for the phenomenon whereby people try to make things sound more interesting than they really are by pretending they're disallowed, banned or censored. The phenomenon is common enough and annoying enough that it'd be great to say "Oh, that's just [insert new word here]".

In this case, these questions aren't really "questions you can't ask". It's true that people are a little over-touchy on a few of them, but most of them are just fairly dull questions which are rarely asked because either:

(a) They're dumb suggestions (active population control, abolishing corporations)

(b) They're based on false assumptions (e.g. people are "anti-sex", whatever that means), or

(c) We're sick of the question already

A couple of the others (rights of AI, why people make decisions subconciously and then make rationalizations) are questions which get asked all the time.

<comment><USER3> I have never heard anyone ask about AI rights or free will/rationalizations to a politician.

What makes you think they get asked all the time?

<comment><USER4> It's because neither one is an ISSUE for a politician. What laws could POSSIBLY require thought as to either one?

AI rights? Yeah, save my Roomba.

Free will/rationalizations? Let's just assume that nobody has a choice in anything. Where's that lead us then? Nihilism? Dude, how exhausting would THAT be?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1\. No. First, because we don't know how genetics really works. Second, because it violates an individual's freedom.

2\. Genetic and social aren't separate things, but parts of an evolutionary continuum. Google the Baldwin Effect. Yes, there are many theories. Read any book about evolutionary psychology.

3\. No.

4\. Citation, please.

5\. No.

6\. Yes, but not what you're thinking. No.

7\. Stupid question.

8\. Yes. None.

9\. Nothing.

10\. Nothing, none.

11\. No. Market economics.

12\. Evolution. That they aren't what they at first seem.

What a load of crap.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. A cursory examination of EP would answer a lot of these questions, and most of the rest are just kinda dumb. For instance, does anyone think IQ does not exist? IQ is just a test score. That's like saying 1600 doesn't exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Touchy topics, to be sure. I think they all can and should be asked. Whether each is really worth of much debate is a different question.

Most are worth debating, some aren't: depending on your audience. I think most people think these are things you "can't ask" because many folks lack an intelligent, informed opinion on the topic, and therefore resort to emotional closed-minded positions that result in little exchange of ideas.

So, intelligent people think: "Maybe I can't ask that question."

</comment><comment><USER8> _8\. If AI can be created, should it be? What rights would it have?_

What's wrong with this one? Maybe I live in my own mind, but this question seems to be asked a lot in my group of people.

<comment><USER9> That one struck me as well. I don't know anyone who considers that "off- limits."

The eugenics and race ones are the touchiest in my experience.

<comment><USER10> I don't see why eugenics should be a touchy issue. It's no different than any other argument between science and religion. The idea that the human race can be improved through eugenics is a purely religious belief, and I see no reason why any rational person would support it.

<comment><USER11> _The idea that the human race can be improved through eugenics is a purely religious belief, and I see no reason why any rational person would support it._

The idea that unlike all species, humans cannot be selectively bred for various traits, is a purely religious belief, and I see no reason why any rational person would support _it_.

<comment><USER10> In almost every case, animals bred for specific traits end up with severe physical, mental, and emotional problems. The idea that humans are the one species that won't encounter these problems is a purely religious belief.

<comment><USER2> OK, everybody: stop calling views you disagree with "a purely religious belief". None of the ideas mentioned above is a "purely religious belief", even though several of them are half-wrong and the others are half-right.

Animals bred for specific traits don't almost-always wind up with severe problems, unless said breeding is done over-zealously (trying to do too much in too few generations) or deliberately for traits which aren't necessarily beneficial to the animal. All modern-day farm animals are the product of a lot of selective breeding over the past few thousand years, and they don't have "severe" problems.

<comment><USER10> "OK, everybody: stop calling views you disagree with 'a purely religious belief'."

If you take the position that the human race can be improved through eugenics and call it a scientific belief then the burden is on you to produce the science. I'm not taking the position that eugenics absolutely can't work, rather I'm taking the position that the science to support eugenics just isn't there so people who do support it support it on other grounds. If you can produce some books or journal articles making the case that eliminating intra- species biodiversity can make that species as a whole more resilient then I'd gladly recant.

<comment><USER11> I would argue that eugenics is a valid belief so long as there is at least one trait that 1) is desirable, or correlated with something desirable (e.g. resistance to a disease, stronger work ethic, lower criminality, resistance to sunburns) and 2) is heritable.

So I think I've got one! Skin color: people with darker skin are less likely to get sunburns, and darker skin appears to be heritable. So a smart eugenicist who believes that resistance to sunlight is an important trait would encourage darker-skinned people to breed more, at the expense of those of us with lighter hues.

I'm sure there are other examples. But given that humans are an evolved species, all I'm saying is that we might be able to outguess chance and know which traits could be useful down the road. In a country with a solid welfare system, the ability to delay gratification is a bad one for your future genes -- if you're busy going to school instead of having unprotected sex, you'll have fewer kids (and they'll have fewer kids, later in life, too). So maybe a eugenic policy would be to subsidize people who have kids above the replacement level after getting their degrees, or who get sterilized if they have a kid when neither parent is employed.

<comment><USER10> "So a smart eugenicist who believes that resistance to sunlight is an important trait would encourage darker-skinned people to breed more, at the expense of those of us with lighter hues."

You can't just select for one trait and leave everything else untouched. DNA doesn't work that way. Pick up a copy of Animals In Translation the next time you're in the bookstore and skim the chapter on single trait selection, I think it's ch. 4.

<comment><USER11> Of course you can't select for one trait and expect everything else to stay constant. But you can expect that if the trait is significantly positive, and you screen for recessive disorders, selecting for it can be net beneficial.

<comment><USER10> I think there are a few basic issues here:

1) Selecting for any single trait, even without recessive disorders, is going to select for other traits as well. For example, selecting for IQ might make individuals more prone to heart disease. Humans are pattern matching machines, and most of the things we consider to be human traits aren't controlled by a simple genetic switch that can be flipped on or off. Even selecting for something as simple as skin color can cause all sorts of problems. For example, most black people are lactose intolerant. Even if it isn't melanin that causes this, selecting for this one trait is going to bring with it all the other traits of the population.

2) Even if there are some traits you can select for without damaging the individual, that doesn't mean society as a whole will be better off. Societies are an emergent phenomenon and you it's impossible to predict what a society will be like based on it's component parts.

3) Who gets to decide what's good and what's bad for an individual? Who gets to decide what's good and bad for a society? What if something good for a society is bad for the individual, or vice versa?

4) Eliminating massive amounts of biodiversity within the species makes humans more vulnerable to extinction. Furthermore, evolution happens in S-curves. By selecting the "best" individuals you are almost certainly eliminating whatever mutation would start the next S-curve. Look at peacocks for example. Each female peacock wanted to mate with the male with the biggest tail. So male peacocks evolved to all have really big tails. That's why today the only place you ever see peacocks is in the zoo. This is just a case of premature optimization; in this case they've basically optimized themselves out of existence.

If our technology today isn't even sufficiently advanced to make a college admissions test that predicts academic performance, how are we supposed to tackle infinitely more complicated issues like the above?

<comment><USER11> 1) is simply silly, since it applies to any decision. Maybe getting a job instead of smoking weed and playing video games all day is too stressful, and maybe it will deprive you of a career as a video-gaming champ. But probably not. Maybe selecting for IQ will increase heart disease -- but a high-IQ population is more likely to deal with heart disease effectively, anyway.

2) Actually, people who model societies based on IQ (by, for example, taking a large sample of people and then randomly removing samples until the average IQ moves up or down a bit) have found that high IQ clearly makes things a lot better -- income is up, unemployment down, crime way down, etc. But this is complaint #1 again: "Why improve things without knowing all the side effects?" Because it's worth the risk, and progress is impossible if you don't.

3) The only serious example I've proposed is a private charity. I don't think there should be a philosophical objection to the government using eugenic policies to counter the dysgenic effects of welfare and tax systems. If you know that welfare makes irresponsible people breed, the only way to maintain equilibrium is to give them a reason not to.

4) There are plenty of extinct species that are pretty humanoid, but with smaller cranial capacities. often, it looks like the bigger-brained proto- humans just killed them off. In general, this optimization has worked out as a random mutation. And intelligence, unlike a peacock's tail, is about adaptability within an environment, not sexual selection within a group at the expense of the same. In fact, when you look at fertility rates compared to education (the best proxy I have, sadly -- but education correlates very well with IQ) you find that the educated ones reproduce _less_ because they spend their time accomplishing other stuff.

 _If our technology today isn't even sufficiently advanced to make a college admissions test that predicts academic performance_

You're referring to the low correlation between SATs and college performance, right? And you're ignoring that schools select people on multiple criteria, including SATs, such that everyone is at about the same level academically. So Smith's SATs show he's great at math, but a mediocre writer. And Jones' SATs show he's not too bright, but his admissions essay is jaw-dropping. Smith double-majors in math and CS; Jones majors in philosophy. They can get the same GPA even though they have different SATs, because the SAT is one of several criteria on which they're selected. The other obvious example is a student with high SATs and a poor GPA (smart, but no work ethic) versus the opposite; they could perform at about the same level, in the same school, but only because the high-SAT, low-GPA student is at the bottom of his SAT cohort, and the other student is at the top of his.

Also, it was nice of you to just focus on college performance. As far as I know, IQ test results predict income, fertility, crime and civic participation better than any other variable measurable from childhood. Could be environmental, of course, but most of the tweaks for raising IQ seem to be temporary -- the only known ways to raise IQ into adulthood seem to be having smarter parents and getting proper nutrition.

Of course, I don't think we should breed as a policy. It's enough to admit that such a policy is possible, probably beneficial, but perhaps not worth the total costs. I'm glad you're able to consider it rationally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Assuming for a minute that this is a person who honestly feels these questions are off-limits (as opposed to just trying to crank up the old hit machine) I think the questions say more about the questioner than the questions themselves.

In certain circles all of these questions are on the table -- including a lot more obnoxious questions than he thought about. In certain circles a lot more questions are off limits (I'm thinking of the former dean of Harvard and his simple suggestion that "Do the sexes learn differently?" would be a provocative question. Poor schmuck)

I liked #1 the best, about evolving the human genome. The reason why is that it seems so logical at the surface -- if people can be "bred" like cats and dogs, why not breed them for qualities we all hold dear?

The coolest part of that question is that we immediately hit Godwin's law and end up where all internet discussions lead -- Nazis. And for good reason! They had the same ideas. (I won't go into trashing the entire notion. Too easy to do. I would add that most attacks on it are a lot more emotional than rational though)

</comment><comment><USER13> all of these focus on what the government "should" do. The government is broken. good luck getting it to do anything.

<comment><USER2> The government is like wikipedia. Some people focus on all the things it gets wrong, but personally I'm amazed that it works at all.

It makes glaring errors from time to time, and plenty of things it does non- optimally, but the fact is that almost every day I get up and find that the garbage gets collected, the streets get swept, the electricity is coming through the wires, the police aren't demanding bribes, foreign countries aren't invading, mobs aren't rampaging, and the little pieces of paper in my wallet can still be reliably exchanged for physical goods. How awesome is that?

I believe in small government, and I don't think the government _should_ do many things, but you can't say that the government is incapable of doing anything.

<comment><USER14> i agree, as many problems as it may have today, one only has to look at some 3rd world countries to see how radically good governance can change things and how important it is. i'm not saying that just because we have it better than somwhere in africa or the middle east, we shouldn't complain or try to improve, but government, especially at the local levels, does a decent job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just a bunch of nutcase, leading questions.

"If IQ doesn't matter or doesn't exist, then why is it the single largest statistical predictor of life trajectory?" Who says it's the largest predictor? Who says IQ does not exist or does not matter?

All of these "questions" were made to fit this guy's pre-conceived answers and arguments. And why can't you ask these questions in "modern political debate and polite society"?

Then you see the guy's blog subtitle: "Driving my truck through the flaws in capitalism" and you realize you've wasted your time reading gibberish from a guy people usually describe as "nutcase."

Creating questions to fit your pre-conceived answers is a cheap mental trick, nothing even close to the Jedi mind trick :-). I figure since nobody was asking him, he chose to ask himself the questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> What does my blog subtitle, which I merely found amusing, have to do with the content of my musings and/or ideas?

You're right, some of the questions are leading -- though I really doubt you can predict my views from them, even though I am sure you think that you can. And, yep, it's my blog and that's the way it goes. However, they are questions that people shy away from, even though they matter.

But, if you require peer-reviewed evidence that IQ is a pretty good predictor of life trajectory, there's plenty of that for the IQ question you cited:

[http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intellig...](http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/1198gottfred.html)

<http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/322/7290/819>

<http://ijo.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/45/5/574>

And then, anecdotally, there's people like Feynman who didn't have a particularly large IQ who still excelled. Make of that what you will.

I asked the questions not to satisfy my notions of their answers, but to get them out there. If the evidence is against me, then so be it. When the evidence changes, I change my mind. What do you do?

And, you're the first to call me a nutcase. Congrats! From you, it's a badge of honor.

<comment><USER16> I think the issue is not whether IQ is a good predictor of success, within the system of it's application (for example the military screening new employees). The issue is whether this equates intelligence.

Rephrased: there would probably be less of an issue if it IQ was really "SP" (Success Predictor), not "Intelligence Quotient".

It might seem like the same, but I don't think it is: throw a Harvard graduate into the middle of the jungle, and he might fare rather badly. On the other hand, throw a perfectly successful jungle inhabitant into the middle of Harvard and he might also fare rather badly.

<comment><USER17> _On the other hand, throw a perfectly successful jungle inhabitant into the middle of Harvard and he might also fare rather badly._

To the contrary, I think the denizens of Harvard might fare badly, not the perfectly successful jungle inhabitant. Professors got nothing on panthers.

<comment><USER16> That's what I said: the professor will get eaten in the jungle, the junge inhabitant will get run over by a car in the city.

Obviously IQ tests measure something: at the very least, they measure performance on IQ tests. The controversy starts when people claim to measure "intelligence".

Might be fun to design a "jungle IQ test".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Why is there a deep-seated, cross-cultural tendency to be de facto anti-sex, > even among the "liberal" left? What is the genetic or social basis of this > tendency?

Who is anti-sex? I don't know any people who are against sex. Does this question mean something else? Or is this US specific?

<comment><USER19> Being opposed to sex is common on the American left. If you want names, Hillary and Joe Lieberman are two prominent ones.

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

<comment><USER2> I don't know of anyone who's actually opposed to sex. Plenty of people are opposed to sex at certain places and times, between certain pairs or groups of people, or in certain styles or orifices, or as part of a commercial transaction, or in front of other people, but I'm pretty sure that being opposed to sex in general is a fairly rare position.

(Insert your own "fairly rare position" joke here.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 1\. No. You try to breed for egg laying chickens and you end up with super aggressive chickens. You select for Malaria resistance you end up with rickets. Life is not something you can linearly improve on and there is no goal to reach for.

2\. Uh, what?

3\. No. George Bush is a socialist.

4\. Are you sure it is, what if your dad is Prescott Bush? I'd think who your parents are is an even better predictor then IQ.

5\. No. But you sure should stop government subsidies.

6\. All of humanity is more similar then just one tribe of chips. We are all descendant of a handful of people (5 women) who lived ~ 80000 years ago.

7\. Maybe they have kids?

8\. Yes. None.

9\. Nothing.

10\. Difference between individuals are HUGE, difference between large groups tiny.

11\. China.

12\. Nothing. Most people are simply more emotional then us rational geeks.</comment>