Ask HN: On scalability and memory footprint - <AUTHOR>

One of my co-workers is constantly arguing with me that we should not worry about memory footprint. For instance, let Rails use as much memory as it wants, the reasoning being that it would be pointless to try and cut down memory usage since we can just expand to as many slices with as much memory as we need on EC2.<p>Now, is there a significant speed increase in trying to keep memory usage low? What would be the educated answer for this? I could surely try to argue that yes using my programming knowledge and practice only, but I think a truly informed answer would require a deeper understanding of things. <comment><USER2> Yes there is a big advantage to keeping your memory consumption low with ruby apps. Ruby's garbage collector is not the best and has to walk all the objects in the process when it GC's. The more memory your process uses the longer and more often GC will happen. This will degrade performance the more memory you use. In fact I've seen really leaky apps spend _most_ of their wall clock time in the garbage collector.

Sure, throwing more ec2 instances at the problem is one solution, but if you care about your apps performance you will try to optimize for smaller memory footprint.

</comment><comment><USER3> "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." -Donald Knuth

That said, watch your _'n'_ s. If you scale linearly, you can keep throwing servers at the problem. If you end up with some critical piece of your code that's, say, quadratic in run-time or memory consumption, you can't. And when you get there: profile, don't guess. Monte-Carlo code optimization is the beginning of the end for an otherwise clean code-base.

<comment><USER4> Only consider that quote if you've been through all or most of Knuth's TAOCP.

Good design lets your site stay lean and mean.

<comment><USER5> While going through TAOCP is good advice, I think the quote stands on its own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is my experience. I used Rails for one project of mine that requires processing of millions of data rows. Because the Rails ORM create an object for each data row, we end up using a lot of memory. We had to get a 2GB memory server to hold up the project. Even after we avoided the ORM (which removes the pleasure of coding in Rails), the memory usage was still high.

Sure, we could process the data rows outside of Rails in C but because the processing of data rows is an integral part of the project, that would mean coding 80% in C and 20% in rails. Not exactly an enjoyable experience.

So we rewrote it in PHP and avoid objects and use just functions and hashes/arrays. And it worked very well for us. The site render time drops from 0.8s to 0.03s. Memory usage rarely exceeds 100MB.

<comment><USER7> You do know that you can connect to databases and do stuff in Ruby without AR, right?

<comment><USER6> Yes. That's what we did. But the memory usage was still higher than the PHP option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Memory usage" is pretty vague. If you're just talking about writing poor code that naturally requires more memory to store objects and such, it's not a big issue if you can scale linearly. What you really need to watch out for is memory leaking. This can cause processes to slow down dramatically and there's nothing you can do to scale it when that happens; your app server will take requests and probably even have RAM to spare, but the actual processing of the request will take forever and your site will be sloooow. This is especially relevant for long-running processes. I have accidently written memory leaks into programs before that, despite having more than enough RAM to grow, eventually slowed down to an absolute crawl. I'm talking 1 loop per second to begin with and by morning it's doing 1 loop every 4 hours.

Premature optimization? Avoid it. Writing good code? Don't avoid it because bad code is easier and memory is cheap. There are some times when it makes no logical sense to allow something to use tons of memory, despite how much you have available. For instance, if you request the same page from your site over and over again and the memory usage continues to increase, that's probably a bad thing. What is that process storing in local memory and not garbage- collecting after a request? It's HTTP so there should be no persistence at the web framework level (i.e. in Rails). It should manufacture a request, send it, and move on to the next one, shedding all the local variables made in the process. If your memory footprint is increasing while your real load is remaining the same, that's bad. If you're storing the same object in memory in 5 different places, that's bad -- but not that big a deal so long as they're all gone when the request has been served.

(Flamebait P.S. -- save memory, kill Rails.)

</comment><comment><USER9> 1) Build your app how you would normally build it (obviously dont expect to put massive objects into memory for every request — just dont worry about the small things)

2) Go back and refactor the things that really stick out as bulky

3) Deploy

4) Continue your release cycles and refactor stuff as you come across them

.

As the saying goes — hardware is cheap, your time isn't.

<comment><USER10> "As the saying goes — hardware is cheap, your time isn't."

Don' t many small companies find that they have more time than money?

<comment><USER9> I guess, but that "extra hardware" wouldn't be that much. I was talking about like 1 second extra CPU time per 50 page loads or something — I wouldn't worry about that kind of thing, even if I had time to make my code slightly faster, I'm sure I could spend my time better. Maybe I'd refactor it later on when I'm adding extra functionality to that area of code.

I think if your a small company you shouldn't be worrying about small issues like this, even if you have more time than money. It may be making your app more efficient, but your doing it the same way people make apps bulky and never get them out the door! Spend the time on things which truly matter, and fix slightly slower code when its beginning to cause a problem. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're building a fairly standard web app you probably shouldn't be worrying at this stage. Keeping memory usage low does not mean a significant speedup necessarily. It means your memory usage will be low. Sometimes you trade one thing for another depending on what you're doing.

When the app is written, if you run a load test (or you can let your users be your load test, like Twitter), there will be a bottleneck for some n of users. Remove this bottleneck, which could be cpu, database, memory, connections, bandwidth, etc., and there will be a new bottleneck at some > n users. Rinse, lather, repeat.

If you optimize now, you're most certainly optimizing the wrong thing. When I load tested my first production rails app, I found cpu was the first bottleneck I hit, not memory.

</comment><comment><USER11> I run userscripts.org, a rails site which runs on a single serverbeach box.

To keep memory usage low, I find recycling mongrel processes via monit can help a bunch.

Before monit, my mongrels would hit 2GB quickly, after monit with a rule to restart when they hit over 100MB, my memory usage is around 800MB for 15 mongrels. (I'm assuming you are using HAProxy or a similar balancer that can deal with changes of availability).

<http://userscripts.org/articles/2-scaling-a-rails-site>

Another useful tip is make sure your queries aren't doing stupid stuff. A long time ago I had integrated Beast (a rails forum project) into my site. Unfortunately it was loading EVERY topic on the forum index page, which was resulting in slowness as well as large jumps in memory usage. (The culprit was a .last method that caused all the records to load and then grab the last value)

So - I tend to agree with "don't worry" because you can "patch" over memory usage pretty easily.

My site is currently getting 17req/s on a single box - it is never what you think will be the issue that you have to fix.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the thing that making me nervous. When you have got to a point where you need to periodically restart your processes because they somehow uncontrollably start consuming more memory than they should, something must be failing badly. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Your bottleneck in a web app is almost always the database. In some cases, it's not. So, it depends.

If, like furiouslol, you're trying to access a 2-3 million row table and Active Record is topping out at 2GB of RAM and taking close to 1 second on a production machine just to render a page, then yes, you might need to worry about memory usage.

But, if you're prototyping a site, and just getting it off the ground, I would worry about memory usage later.

If you're really freaked out about performance, you can always try PHP or Django. They tend to be a bit more sparing on system resources.

</comment><comment><USER13> Arguing performance and scalability and footprint can be less than fruitful; a distraction.

If you're serious about this, build your test cases, and benchmark.

But before you invest here, ensure you have nothing better to do with your time, and ensure that the probable payback can be justified against the aggregate investment; against the costs of the testing and of the migration. And nothing better to debate, for that matter.</comment>


The Coffee Cannabis Connection - <AUTHOR> http://neurosciencenews.com/coffee-cannabis-system-8649/ <comment><USER2> well, this explains the popularity of the "hippie speedball"!

A coffee and a joint is a wonderful way to while away an afternoon.

<comment><USER3> For me both of those, separately or together, would be a horrible way to ruin an afternoon.

<comment><USER4> >horrible way to ruin an afternoon.

I like reading that as a double negative, and that you're actually saying it's a great way to spend the afternoon.

<comment><USER3> Hm, I did wonder if it would be interpreted that way... but I do mean it would be bad for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting results! I hope they get to spend more time studying the cannabis side, too. Careful coffee/cannabis combos are one of my favorite ways to dig in, hyperfocus, and be productive.

</comment><comment><USER6> Feels good, tastes good, _is_ good. Can't fight with that.</comment>


Startup Offers to Lay Off Entire Staff in Name of Software Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/05/convercent/

<comment><USER2> Ridiculous. People have obligations and bills. Why do people over and over and over again stay in jobs they despise? Golden handcuffs. And it applies to all income levels. Theres guys that stay at their minimum wage gigs for exactly the same reasons.

This would really only work for the most talented engineers confident in their ability to get a new job within a month or two. Plus there is no guarantee that someone will necessarily get an offer they are willing to take, whether it's for the commute, work description, benefits or any other number of reasons.</comment>


100 mpg Prius - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1582/

<comment><USER2> Stop this silliness now. Claiming a "miles per gallon" figure when you get significant amount of your energy from another source is just silly. Its like claiming 100mpg if you start at the top of Pike's Peak.

I propose we popularize "kilometers per megajoule", or kpm. A gallon of gas has 130 megajoules, 33% efficient internal combustion engine, so a 60mpg car would be something like 2.5kpm. This will nicely separate separate efficiency of motion from energy source. People should be able to easily reason about a 2.5kpm vehicle with a 20 megajoule plugin chargeable battery. (I think, no one has check these numbers. Notice I had to come back and edit for the engine efficiency once already, so they should be scrutinized.)

The ugly part is how to think about the internal combustion engine. You may have 1300 mega joules in the gas tank, but you will lose 60-70% of those in your engine before they meet the drivetrain. I leave that part as an exercise to the reader.

<comment><USER3> But from an environmental perspective, perhaps people are more concerned about the trade-off between carbon emissions and distance traveled. Efficiency measures would be great way to evaluate drive sources, and would perhaps be very revealing when internal combustion is exposed as being so inefficient.

But perhaps a rating of carbon "moles per kilometer" would be a better indication of environmental impact of any motion source.

It would be interesting to compare even with walking, running, and biking (at different speeds), as you exhale (significantly smaller) amounts of carbon dioxide (and none of the worst carbon offender, CO, thankfully).

Here too, the energy source that you are plugging this module into could greatly vary your MPK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see that it's still more expensive to go green than to bite the gas-price bullet.

Still, 100mpg is a good marketing angle for them.

Let's look at it this way:

Assume average person drives 1000 miles/month

Assume gas costs $4/gallon

Assume Prius gets 100mpg, and other cars get 20mpg

A Prius driver with the conversion kit spends $40/month on gas.

A typical car driver spends $200/month on gas.

A prius driver saves $160 per month for driving the prius.

It will take 5.2 years to re-earn the $10,000 upgrade. This does not include the price for a prius, which I was surprised to find has come down quite a bit. A 2008 prius base model costs $21,100.

<comment><USER5> What if you factor in the cost of carbon?

<comment><USER4> Please explain. Are you referring to the environmental, intangible "cost" of carbon emissions, or maybe the cost of cleaning them from the environment?

What is the cost of carbon?

(To be clear, I was trying to evaluate the 2 cars economically, without the consideration of carbon footprint or other moral duty to the environment to get in the way of the calculations.)

<comment><USER5> I meant the expected cost of carbon once a cap-and-trade system is implemented. All three candidates favor putting such a system in place, so there is something like a 90% chance of getting this legislation enacted sometime within the next 24 months. McCain's bill actually is expected to go up for a vote the week of June 2nd. The calculation should ideally take into account the fact that most people would charge their cars at night when electricity is cheaper and a greater percentage of the mix comes from renewable sources (because of wind power).

<comment><USER4> Ok I get it now.

I actually have no idea what a the cost of such a system will be, because I hadn't heard much about the legislation you mentioned. I assume that once something like that passes, it will help move more people to electric vehicles. Personally, I'm saving for the Tesla Roadster (<http://www.teslamotors.com/>).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Problem is, most people's primary electricity source is coal-burning power plants that do not provide significantly lower carbon emissions (depends on the efficiency of the module, of course). However, more municipalities (like here around seattle) are offering wind-sourced power to homes who "green-up". There is a $12/month additional charge, but it is a great way to reduce overall emissions.

<comment><USER6> That's not a problem at all. If you compare the raw power usage, it's still both cleaner and more efficient to use electricity than gas. Also, gas engines aren't going to get that much cleaner, whereas the energy grid is only going to get cleaner with cleaner coal, nuclear, and renewables.

I wouldn't be surprised if in 15 years from now, if half of all new cars sold use electricity as their primary source. Energy independence should be a goal for every country, but especially for a country like the U.S. that uses so much oil.</comment></comment>


Anyone else notice the Microsoft touchscreen program CNN is using? - <AUTHOR> One of the CNN reporters is working with a large touchscreen display running what strikes me as a really well-designed piece of software.<p>He's been moving seamlessly between states, counties, simulations, counts, past and present results, all with just 1-3 touches. The number of options the software has displayed, all with very intuitive UX, has really impressed me. <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptive_Pixel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptive_Pixel)

[http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/11/04/magic.wall/](http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/11/04/magic.wall/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=KiPMzz_rkIg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=KiPMzz_rkIg)</comment>


How to convert any 3D printer or CNC router into cutting or engraving machine? - <AUTHOR>

Introducing Endurance L-CHEAPO diode laser
Endurance L-CHEAPO is a 445 nanometer diode laser which easily mounts on your 3D printer or CNC mill No additional power supply is necessary, and it will not interfere with normal use of your hardware You can readily switch from laser to print/mill mode, use your existing software (Slic3r, Skeinforge, etc), and with no tools the laser can be removed in about 2 minutes Endurance L-CHEAPO can cut paper and wood up to 3/16ths of an inch, and can engrave most non-metallic materials
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get to work. Video in action available here: http://endurancerobots.com/products/laser-cutters-accessory/video-in-action/ Engraving samples: http://endurancerobots.com/products/laser-cutters-accessory/laser-cutter-accessory-engraving-samples/
Low-cost, High-yield
Laser cutting requires a significant initial investment, but opens up a lot of making possibilities — laser-cut parts are tougher than 3D printer parts. With Endurance L-
CHEAPO, the initial dollar investment goes from thousands to hundreds, and the module requires very little space.
We hope this product will allow high school shop classes, small universities and local hackerspaces to be able to work with a wider variety of materials and techniques
without breaking the bank.
If you are ready here is a quick start link: http://endurancerobots.com/products/laser-cutters-accessory/quick-start/ <comment><USER2> Clicky: [http://endurancerobots.com/products/laser-cutters- accessory/...](http://endurancerobots.com/products/laser-cutters- accessory/video-in-action/)

In the video, it looks like the laser passed trough the target. Is that safe for the building bed? Is that safe for the floor? Is that safe for your foots?

From the other thread:

> _Would you like to write a review about our laser? We can send you one for > test or we can give any answers as you need to write a review._

Is that still available? (Not for me, I don't have the necessary equipment at home or at work.)

<comment><USER3> I run a 40W laser which wouldn't cut through the building bed (although if left running in place would make it quite hot).

<comment><AUTHOR> do you want to try ours?</comment></comment></comment>


Turntable.fm Picks Union Square as Investor Over Kleiner and Accel - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/08/02/turntable-fm-chooses-union-square-ventures-over-kleiner-and-accel/

<comment><USER2> Fred Wilson (from Union Square Ventures) has mentioned them twice in the past few months... I guess they've been talking.

<http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/06/globalization-continued.html>

<http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/06/to-science-and-art.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I like their style, and I would've made the same move. Though I'm speaking on the outside looking in, Union Square seems to be much more connected with the industry and their investments. I think they probably "get it" more than most. Props to Turntable.fm.

</comment><comment><USER4> _But one major question remains. Will Turntable.fm be able to qualify as a non-interactive streaming radio service, afforded DMCA protection by the Copyright Act of 1998? If it does, then all it needs are these relatively inexpensive performance rights. If, on the other hand, Turntable.fm is labeled an interactive streaming service like Spotify, then it would need to go about securing the rights from all the record labels, a much more daunting and expensive task._

How the heck will turntable pull this off? IANAL but they are about as interactive as music services get.

<comment><USER5> It's a subtle challenge. The reason DJs cannot play music alone is that the audience has no choice of the song. So while DJs are clearly interacting/choosing songs, the majority of listeners are passive.

<comment><USER6> I'd love to see a post somewhere that explored some of this stuff, since I don't have a clear understanding of the arguments / precedents for both sides.

<comment><USER7> Terry Hart published a comprehensive exploration of those very issues yesterday, "Is Turntable.fm Legal?":

<http://www.copyhype.com/?p=303>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this story goes to show how much the venture capital business has shifted in the last few years (it sure has changed a lot since I started really caring for it). I guess the best analogy I have to Union Square's ongoing success (and impressive portfolio) is how an indie band pulls a gigantic win and suddenly becomes a key player. These guys have, much due to Wilson's diligence and passion for disrupting ideas, become a force to be reckoned with.

Kudos to them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like a perfect fit, I think Turntable and Fred Wilson are both on the same key about ways in which people share music.

</comment><comment><USER5> Apparently Lady Gaga and Kanye West are now reported to be investors in Turntable as well.

whoa</comment>


Apple's new $5B campus has a 100,000-square-foot gym and no daycare - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/984785/apples-new-5-billion-apple-park-campus-has-a-100000-square-foot-gym-and-no-daycare-aapl/ <comment><USER2> This article is cribbed from [https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new- silicon-valley-...](https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon- valley-campus/) which is currently being discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14349147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14349147).

Submitters: the HN guidelines ask you to submit original sources. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> The guidelines are unclear if the article uses another article as a direct source, but adds additional content. The Quartz article does use Wired as a primary source, but it also adds additional content as the Wired article doesn't mention daycare at all. Additionally, the comments on this post pretty much all talk about daycare as it's in the title and a major talking point of the article, rather than just the building itself.

<comment><USER2> Yup those are fair points, making this a borderline call. I'm not sure the article adds much of value—it struck me as a slapdash effort to gin up controversy, especially at the end. That's most of what such publications do all day and our job as a community is to filter most of that out. But people can reasonably differ about any particular case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough, although I do respect Quartz enough to not create controversy for the hell of it. I do agree that the last paragraph is a bit much and possibly unnecessary, and maybe only there to make it seem something more than it is, but I think the article overall brings a good question to think about, considering the magnitude of the building Apple made and the attention to detail they brought to the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Article notes it is not commonplace for daycare to be included and flips the Apple HQ launch into a personification of Jobs poor parenting of his daughters. They arent exactly wrong; but this is agenda first journalism 101.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are a lot of places in the valley where it is illegal to build child care facilities, due to environmental hazards. This may not necessarily be an oversight on Apple's part.

<comment><USER5> Overwhelmingly likely to NOT be an oversight. I worked on Apple Park for a year as the IT guy on-site.

I can tell you that every conceivable detail was painstakingly planned. And many inconceivable details, as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Daycare to me seems like an enormous liability, and is also widely available already.

Personally I would prefer a daycare credit each month that I can spend where I please. I think Apple made the right choice.

<comment><USER7> You're right, but gyms are also an enormous liability and widely available.

It's not that either service must be offered by the employer, it's more a rorschach test to see how the company thinks about what services will most enable their workers to be productive. As an employee, I'd certainly take onsite childcare over a gym.

<comment><USER8> Liabilities against adults are treated differently than liabilities against children.

<comment><USER7> In that case, maybe they can only offer 25,000 sq. feet of childcare space for the cost of 100,000 sq. feet of gym. The choice to not offer it all together still feels meaningful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't agree with this article.

Rather than a DayCare facility, just be flexible with your employees when they have to run and pick up a sick child. Let them make up the hours by working at home after the child has been taken care of.

</comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps there's still an opportunity to provide this service - for it presents a really unique business opportunity:

* Apple gets to see how its youngest customers, and future purchasers, interact with their products. How are they actually being used? What are the real frustrations?

* Apple can provide educational services. Music, art, mathematics, engineering - it can go a long way to making these kids life-long learners.

* Bonus points for having a pediatrician on staff. No need to take time off for a sick kid.

* After school care with pickup from local schools would be a huge benefit. Imagine your children being picked up from school and brought to an engaging environment where they can learn and play?

* Ditto for a summer program.

Taking care of daily life issues go a long way to proving peace of mind and allowing one to focus and engage fully while at work. That's why so many companies provide food service, laundry service, workout/health facilities, etc. I'm thinking there's a huge opportunity here.

</comment><comment><USER11> Apple Park partially sits on a superfund site - not the best place to build a daycare.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would certainly appreciate a daycare facility on a campus more than a gym.</comment>


Taco Bell Programming (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20101202135616/http://teddziuba.com/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html <comment><USER2> > The Taco Bell answer? xargs and wget. In the rare case that you saturate the > network connection, add some split and rsync. A "distributed crawler" is > really only like 10 lines of shell script.

As someone who has had to cleanup the messes of people who started with this and built many hundred line dense bash scripts... please do not do this.

> I made most of a SOAP server using static files and Apache's mod_rewrite. I > could have done the whole thing Taco Bell style if I had only manned up and > broken out sed, but I pussied out and wrote some Python.

I feel sad for whoever inherited this person's systems.

"Write code as if whoever inherits it is a psychopath with an axe who knows where you live" is something I heard pretty early on in life and it's been pretty useful.

<comment><USER3> > "built many hundred line dense bash scripts... please do not do this"

Of course. But that's with any language that's many hundred lines of dense code.

His point is if something can be done simply with built-in proven tools, use them until you need something more.

<comment><USER4> No, it's not the same.

Most experienced programmers know a little bash and enough UNIX commands to get by. This is enough to write a script that handles the happy path, but not enough to handle all error conditions correctly. There are all sorts of tricks you need to know that are commonly skipped. (Forgetting to use -print0 for example, and that's an easy one.) The resulting script is probably okay if you run it interactively and check the output but will blow up or silently do the wrong thing for unexpected input in production. To properly review a bash script for errors you need to be an expert.

By contrast, Go programmers with a few months of experience typically know all of Go.

The older tool is not necessarily better if it has lots of obscure sharp edges that most people don't learn.

<comment><USER5> +1 - If you thought "it works on my machine" was bad with binaries, shell scripts are so much worse.

Just like Excel "programs", shell scripts can be easily mined for requirements for a real program though.

<comment><USER6> This is a simple UNIX pipeline, not multi-hundred line spaghetti of korn, c, bash or even zsh shell scripts.

No builtins were used in the example, just core utilities deployed the way they were designed.

Rewriting the wheel is completely bogus, doubly so when you ultimately make calls to those utilities, as is common when 'admins-cum-programmers' start getting their hands dirty with Python.

<comment><USER7> I am generally in favor of the idea of the OP, but the core utilities _do_ differ across environments and this will bite you sooner or later.

I was bit recently by some pretty boring search and replace functionality differing between sed on OSX and on Debian. Like, I would have had to pass a different argument to sed based on the version of sed (So I switched to Perl for the task). But this is certainly an insidious category of bug where you don't discover it until to try to run the script in another environment and then you're potentially stuck debugging the script from the top down.

<comment><USER5> If you need something that is only used once or for a short time, in one place, script away!

I'm actually strongly in favor of scripts; but the web is eating everything. If it has to scale, put it on the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I agree with some comments here that "Fuck you, I had to MAINTAIN your bullshit Taco Bell system", for any project that needs to be run likely no more than once (prototypes, single-run analysis, etc) or is never going to be checked into source control, the power of the shell cannot be underestimated.

I had an intern a couple years ago. Nice guy, but he didn't listen when we said "Keep this simple". We had all the data from an A/B test he ran, and we needed to do the analysis. He broke out MapReduce on EMR and all sorts of other complexity. It was a few MB of data!

After his analysis went pretty poorly, I wrote up a shell script in a few hours (sed, awk, xargs, woo) and got us the data we needed. I'd never ask someone to maintain that madness, but I was able to break it down into simple functions, piped into each other, in a single file.

<comment><USER9> Using MapReduce for a few MB of data? Jeese. That's a whole new can of worms.

I remember being younger, doing things the way I found "interesting" rather than the way I found practical. Eventually for a project or two you end up with basically nothing for all that complexity because you're focusing on the wrong things, and I learned to start putting functionality first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is also on Ted Dziuba's current site, where you don't need to go way back to see it:

[http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell- progra...](http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell- programming.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I found myself nodding along (if not necessarily agreeing 100%) until I got to this:

 _I could have done the whole thing Taco Bell style if I had only manned up and broken out sed, but I pussied out and wrote some Python._

I know this article was written over 5 years ago, but I still feel the need to say: expressions like _manned up_ and _pussied out_ are a huge turn-off for me. Regardless of the ideas surrounding them or the author's programming skills, the author loses a good chunk of credibility in my eyes simply by using them. Sure, it's a stylistic choice, but it's one that I feel is actively harmful to our industry, especially for those who are new to software development or interesting in learning.

So if you're reading this and you're one of those new or interested people: please don't let this turn you off from discovering and learning tools like sed or Python. One is not inferior to the other—they are simply different tools that can be used for a wide range of different things. Don't be afraid of using the "wrong" tool for the job (because even experienced developers do this sometimes), just keep on learning new tools and adding them to your own tool belt. Share your work with others, and then when someone tells you you're using the "wrong" tool, ask them to explain why and to propose alternatives. Lather, rinse, repeat.

<comment><USER12> Is the mindset of "cats are easily scared" considered socially unacceptable and offensive nowadays? Or is the word pusillanimous a derogatory term? I'm extremely confused by your distain of the phrase "pussied out." "Manned up" is understandable, though.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't refer to cats. It's a rude way to refer to women.

<comment><USER13> Do you have a reference on that? I've always interpreted as in 'scaredy cat,' since female genitalia aren't traditionally considered afraid of anything, and cats are.

<comment><USER4> I don't really want to search for a reference, but one other person posted with the same interpretation and this one got upvoted, which suggests at least some other people understood it the same way.

<comment><USER13> I'm not claiming it's the correct interpretation, and honestly my googling is coming up short because of the vast usages of that phrase on urban dictionary, but honest to god I had never heard a misogynistic interpretation of it before this thread. I never use the phrase in real life because it sounds vulgar, but it's surprising.

If my interpretation was correct, I wonder if it's sort of a 'niggardly' situation, where people stop using a word because it sounds similar to something vulgar.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that's why I didn't google it.

Like all words its meaning depends on what most people think it means. I'm not all that surprised that you never heard of it. Maybe I just had rude friends when I grew up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another, similar post:

[http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less- egg...](http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/)

The point of both of these posts is more that Unix style tools are extremely powerful and expressive, to the point that writing more involved code for most simple tasks (especially one-off tasks) frequently isn't worth the effort.

Complexity doesn't improve things, especially when it doesn't add value.

</comment><comment><USER15> Related:

       http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/

TLDR: Donald Knuth and Doug McIlroy both wrote a program that would read a textfile, determine the n most frequently used words, and print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies.

Knuth's was 10 pages of (very tightly/well written/literately documented) Pascal.

McIlroy's was tweetable:

       tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' |
       tr A-Z a-z |
       sort |
       uniq -c |
       sort -rn |
       sed ${1}q

Now... a programmer doesn't always have the luxury of working with a full suite of convenient tools well-suited to their problem domain (as UNIX shell tools were in this case), and the merits of Knuth's careful and literate approach can serve well across many domains.

Still, there's something about this I think should strike any developer. It seems we talk about reuse & composability a lot more than we see it done this well, and when it is done this well it's not just elegant but kindof shocking.

(And I bet the astute FP programmers see some familiar lessons at work here...)

</comment><comment><USER16> Sometimes you have to admit that the problem you need to solve is hard. Hard problems usually can't be solved by easy solutions.

Some examples:

> I have far more faith in xargs than I do in Hadoop.

Me too, but those things are very far from comparable. You can only compare xargs to Hadoop only if you have a Hadoop cluster with one node and I'm really not sure why would anybody use Hadoop like that.

> I trust syslog to handle asynchronous message recording far more than I > trust a message queue service.

You mean you trust the protocol that sends messages over UDP and can silently truncate or lose messages?

Standard Unix tools are nice and I always try to use them first, but for some tasks, they are just not the right tools.

<comment><USER17> I think the point is that most problems aren't actually hard enough to need the more complicated tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's like the old programming interview, someone sits down and is asked to write a program that sorts a file containing a list of 100 random numbers.

The programmer enters the UNIX command _sort -n numbers_

</comment><comment><USER19> Off-topic: every Taco Bell restaurant has a server running "Taco Bell Linux" (or did, a few years ago, anyways -- I assume they still do).

<comment><USER20> Off-topic of off-topic: I tried to google it and came up with this instead: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcAgIapM9HM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcAgIapM9HM) and it was just to magnificent not to share

<comment><USER21> Hilarious and strangely addicting! We need to know what is in that Taco Bell Linux flavor.

<comment><USER19> It was OpenSUSE flavored, if memory serves. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was going to write a program to generate static files from our horrible Wordpress site and then I remembered oh yea - wget. I relate to this post in the fact that I'm a system admin that hopes the devs learn some daily tricks, faster word manipulation on a large scale but keep the system calls out of production.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hearing hooves out in the wilderness? Ah, obviously zebras escaped from the zoo. What if all the worlds zebras escaped continuously from all the zoos, better make it scalable. You'll never be able to reimplement so better make it very generic... like a self reproducing herd of artificially intelligent superhuman androids. I've had to maintain systems that should have been implemented with herds of artificially intelligent androids but were not. Most importantly, this is gonna look awesome on my resume.

Or... those hooves could be a couple horses. Use the standard low effort solution of stepping out of their way. Redirect the energy that would have been wasted into something actually useful.

</comment><comment><USER24> If only we could get paid to find solutions, not write lines of code.

I was once asked to create a pie chart of the number of lines of code my team wrote every week. I still haven't figured it out.

<comment><USER25> diff + sloccount?

<comment><USER26> They could figure it out but there's no value so why bother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The Taco Bell answer? xargs and wget. In the rare case that you saturate the > network connection, add some split and rsync.

If you're going to download millions of webpages, you'll instantly saturate your network io. yes you can split and rsync, but you'll lose proper error reporting, and ability to systematically retry, dynamic scaling, machine failure recovery, along many others that a properly designed system would provide you.

It often depends on what you require and expect from your solution.

<comment><USER28> Unless, of course, you read wget documentation and realize most of that stuff is available as flags, you can log errors, you can use GNU parallel and a bunch of other specialized tools.

It still complexity in the end, but you just have to factor it all in - I bet you that 90% of those "big data" problems can fit in a small server's RAM. Most of the time is just people making shit up, so they'll have a job.

<comment><USER27> I've read wget, and I am a cURL contributor as well. I know the capabilities of each very well. But when you have 1M+ urls to download and you care about proper error handling at a large scale, those tools will fall short. Not all errors need to be handled in the same way. Some need retries some don't depending on http response codes for example.

Another problem you'll hit is how to make sure that the machines are saturated. How many jobs should be running at the current time depends on what's being downloaded and how much room you have to run additional downloads.

Again, it all depends on what you need from the system and how much leeway you have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not sure I agree. They may work under good circumstances, but how do you test the error cases? What about when you need to scale beyond a single node or you need an "online mode"?

<comment><USER30> Well, of course, the "online mode" is an `nc -l` at the beginning of the pipeline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Most crawlers of any reasonable size need to use anonymizing proxies, throttling and shuffling of proxy IP addresses. All this starts to get complicated in bash.

</comment><comment><USER25> Taco Bell programs as one liners.

<comment><USER32> Hopefully the 80 character restriction applies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> N.B.: [2010]

</comment><comment><USER33> "Resume ability" is kind of useful when dealing with large data sets though. This kind of scripting often fails in that regard.

<comment><USER34> The tools he mentions support "resume ability".

[https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html#Time_002d...](https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html#Time_002dStamping)

<comment><USER33> Well, yes, for a single download. Not for crawling - a repeated pattern of download, inspect for links, download some more etc.

<comment><USER34> Not sure I understand your point. Wget does recursive crawling, and supports timestamp comparison. Perhaps you are noting that it wouldn't prioritize new pages over changed pages? Or that it doesn't support something like "don't check for changes at all unless the download is more than X days old?".

Generally, yes, there is some point at which wget would fall short of a purpose built tool. I think that point, though, is farther out than you're suggesting.

<comment><USER33> In this very specific example:

It doesn't keep the crawler state (which links have been visited, which links are discovered but not yet visited) persistently.

(You made it this specific by picking this particular example; my more general observation is that this is a common thing in command line/shell script constructs. They remain simple only until you start to care about such things.)

<comment><USER34> >>It doesn't keep the crawler state

It does though. Just not in the way you're expecting.

The timestamp support would keep it from re-downloading anything already downloaded (though it would do an HTTP head for the comparison).

Or, it also has a "no-clobber" feature that would keep it from even trying to download.

Yes, both approaches are more limited than a specific state datastore, but there is state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> shellscript that crawls web? Surely doable but never secure.</comment>


Why Blackberry Will Comeback - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/why-blackberry-will-comeback-2011-10-14

<comment><USER2> >>not to mention the President of the US also uses a Blackberry.

He also smokes[d] cigarettes; not really the kind of person you want to emulate in every way.

Back on topic, I would love to see RIM make a comeback and provide more competition.</comment>


The TikTok War - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/ <comment><USER5> I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked. There's something so refreshingly playful, authentic, and raw about so much Tiktok content compared to Instagram. Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. That was fun for a while but it's just not that interesting after a while. I don't need to see more pretty pictures of women doing yoga. I don't need to see more pretty mountain bikes I can't afford. I don't need to see anymore drone shots of Milford Sound in New Zealand.

Tiktok, on the other hand, is playful, diverse, and interesting (at least my feed is). Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I legitimately laugh my ass off or smile happily at so much of it. Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc. The list goes on. Some of the videos delight me and others inform me.

Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.

<comment><USER6> Something about Tiktok, whether the algorithm or the sheer volume of content, seems to discourage the sort of look-at-me envy-bait narcissistic posturing that is so common on Instagram. To be popular on Tiktok you actually have to _do_ stuff (even it's fairly banal like dancing or telling stories), not just _be_ (or pretend to be) someone.

I found it funny that the author of this post is trying to defend liberal values like the free flow of information on the internet by...making Apple and Google remove Tiktok from people's phones. He's correct that the primary political risk of Tiktok is the recommendation algorithm being manipulated. However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) _all the time_ and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either.

This would have been a good chance to really defend free flow of information on the internet, open and swappable recommendation algorithms, personal data ownership, and so on, but the conclusion is basically "it's bad because a China-affiliated company does it". Generally, everything that Tiktok does that is wrong is also wrong when Facebook does it. The reality is that Tiktok is (for now) a superior product in many ways to anything from American tech companies. Why is this?

<comment><USER7> My naive question is how is Tiktok bad and all other American social media platforms - FB/Insta/Snap good?

<comment><USER8> My theoretical answer would be that we can regulate American companies more effectively and have them be held accountable, like when Zuckerberg had to go before Congress. I doubt you'd be able to get the CEO of a large Chinese company to do that.

In reality we don't regulate them nearly as much as we can, so the end result is that FB and Tiktok both invade your privacy.

<comment><USER9> As a non-American looking on, it seems to me like the US government has failed spectacularly at any kind of regulation, and to the contrary is often actively trying to undermine privacy laws. Zuckerberg in front of congress achieved exactly zero, except provide footage for loads of memes of Zuckerberg as a lizard.

I prefer the idea of a US based social media company to a Chinese one. But only slightly. I would much rather the company be based somewhere with genuine intent to create consumer safety and privacy focused laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This tiktok "war" is, ultimately, changing the way people politicians think about media tech.

With Twitter or Facebook, it's a lot easier to dismiss the magnitude of their influence. After all, they're not in business to influence politics. They just want to make tech & sell ads and make money. They don't care what becomes news, who wins elections etc. Benign commercial interests, that's all

With tiktok and the chinese government's explicit approach of combining public & commercial interest... That argument falls apart. That and the fact that it is a foreign entity potentially affecting american politics.

Ultimately, the argument will swing back to FB & such... hopefully.

<comment><USER11> > After all, they're not in business to influence politics.

Dude, I personally know people who work in Facebook's own lobbying department. I would be very surprised if Twitter didn't have the same thing.

<comment><USER12> There's a difference between Facebook lobbying and Facebook using its products to disseminate propaganda.

<comment><USER13> Yeah right, Cambridge Analytica wasn't a thing...

<comment><USER12> That's considered a scandal, and was on behalf of political groups, not the government itself.

<comment><USER13> You say political groups when there's only democrats/republicans dicothomy on the US.

Republican interests channelled through russian oligarch friends made TRUMP possible.

Let's see what happens on the coming elections...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recently deleted TikTok from my phone. I didn't have it for too long, and until the recent press I had no idea it was a Chinese app. Honestly, I understand companies will mine my data, but I have an issue with those companies being forced to submit my data to the Chinese government on a whim. And it was really all the same thing. People doing the same skits or dances. Most of which were just chicks doing it in bikinis to get more views and likes.

<comment><USER15> Are you actually concerned that the Chinese government might get access to your data or is it a matter of principle? What do you think they want to do with it? If they really wanted it could they not acquire it by other means? I ask as I'm genuinely curious. I'm considering install it on my phone to try it out and see how it compares to youtube. I'm not dissatisfied with my youtube feed. Just curious as to how much better TikTok would be based on the descriptions on the article and on this thread.

<comment><USER16> > Are you actually concerned that the Chinese government might get access to > your data or is it a matter of principle?

Both.

> What do you think they want to do with it?

Absolutely no idea. Much like I had no idea what Facebook was doing, or planned to do, with my data back in the 00s. I think we've been down this road enough in the modern era to be distrustful of any entity, especially a government, especially my own government, and especially the Chinese government.

> If they really wanted it could they not acquire it by other means?

If they really wanted to target me as an individual, I am sure they could dig up $THINGS. That doesn't mean I want to do their job for them.

Your line of questioning here, as I've read it, boils down to: "What are you afraid of if you have nothing to hide?"

<comment><USER17> Possibly, but it could be just be pragmatic - if I lived in the PRC, I would be very, very nervous about sharing some kind of unfiltered feed of my data with state entities. Living outside of the PRC, it's harder to imagine what kind of practical use they'd put that same data to - though that might get more exciting if I traveled to China at some point in the future...

<comment><USER16> Maybe you're right, but I don't think so. For me, personally, it is kind of personal...

I have visited China multiple times. My wife is Chinese-American. My children are half-Chinese and will, hopefully, be fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese (MIL is Vietnam-born Chinese and a Vietnam War refugee), and English. A lot of our extended family still lives in China, in Hong Kong and the mainland (and even Taiwan). I am critical of China, online and off, and I have been for many, many years.

This isn't even that new to us, specifically. We decided in 2014 that we were not willing to go into the mainland anymore. Most of my wifes paternal family left Hong Kong after the hand-off in 1997 -- the writing was on the wall for anyone willing to pay attention. Given everything that has happened in Hong Kong in the last year or so, I don't think we'll ever visit family there again, either.

More on topic, though... It's bad enough that I have this nagging feeling in the back of my head about what sorts of bullshit the NSA, etc..., (and how they probably share this data freely, if asked, with the FVEY, allied intelligence agencies, etc...) are getting up to with my data, but I've learned how to deal with that without experiencing too much of a chilling effect. I don't have the mental capacity to fight this on yet another front, especially when my own understanding of Chinese state politics is so inadequate. Thankfully, I can easily opt out by simply not installing and/or using TikTok, or any of the other Chinese state-sponsored spyware, on any of our devices.

> Living outside of the PRC, it's harder to imagine what kind of practical use > they'd put that same data to

Their reach doesn't end at their borders. The same can be said of every modern government / state on the planet today.

If you want a specific example, the Blitzchung controversy is worth understanding. [0] There's a list of censorship-related issues on Wikipedia, too. [1]

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

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_censorship_of_Chinese...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_censorship_of_Chinese_issues)

<comment><USER17> Oh yes, I don't think that sounds overly paranoid to me under those circumstances at all. I am sure I am on some lists here in the US for having taken both Mandarin and Arabic as an undergrad (I could only be more evil if I'd added Russian).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's a lot of false equivalence in these comments along with a focus on the app itself.

My worry is about CCP influence and their ability to both spread misinformation and at the same time suppress stories the party doesn't like.

Easy current examples are the democracy protests in Hong Kong, and the sterilization going on in the Uyghur camps in China.

On Twitter you can talk about both things, on TikTok they will be shut down by the CCP and it's set up in such a way that users wouldn't even notice.

On Twitter you can also be critical of the USG.

That's the risk to me, that the CCP turns down the knobs on speech they dislike and the public is too focused on dance videos to notice.

It's an even greater risk to people like Joshua Wong, not only would his speech be suppressed on TikTok, but the company would also hand over whatever personal or location data they had on him to the government itself. ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Wong](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Wong))

The CCP should not be stewards of the services we use.

<comment><USER19> Twitter the company shouldn't be a steward of the Twitter the tool, too - <USER2> you agree with that ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I absolutely love using TikTok, but would give it up in a heartbeat for a Western replacement.

It has absolutely brought more positivity into my life. I am specifically feeding the algorithm with this intent and I get what I asked for. It is a psychological tool.

<comment><USER21> > give it up in a heartbeat for a Western replacement.

It's important to recognized that it's not a coincidence that TikTok exists and is run by a Chinese company.

In the West that replacement would have been immediately purchased by FB or Twitter and then summarily destroyed. This is literally what happened to the closest Western equivalent: Vine.

The Chinese government has many faults, but unlike the US government, the Chinese government still enforces the idea that Chinese companies should operate in the interest of the nation.

Facebook did try to buy Musical.ly, the company that became TikTok, and would have likely destroyed it just like Twitter did Vine.

If the US government was remotely functional it would put a little effort into challenging the ability of near monopolies to simply destroy any competitor through acquisition. I agree that it's not ideal that the Chinese government is tightly connected with TikTok/ByteDance, but the reason there is no Western TikTok is because our governments (particularly the US) are so deeply aligned with the interests of larger corporations that a viable competitor to these cannot exist.

<comment><USER22> Why assume FB would kill an acquisition? They didn't kill WA, IG or Beluga. They made them into massive billion+ DAU services.

<comment><USER23> It may be harder to monetize short video content than short text or longer videos (maybe that drives YouTube revenue nudges for longer content?).

But people like short videos, so there's a tension there. If you're in ads, maybe just buy a few short video companies, get their patents to sue their competitors, and shut them down, so no one gets access to the thing that they like but is less lucrative for you.

But maybe you're right and they would have followed an IG model just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is TikTok allowed to gain market share in Western countries? China banned Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc. while Chinese companies such as Baidu, Sina Weibo, WeChat were able to capture the entire Chinese market share.

It seems that companies not adhering to censorship cannot expand into China, however, Chinese companies adhering to censorship (e.g. TikTok) are able to expand into Western countries. Isn't this anti-competitive?

<comment><USER25> Good question. If you want to get into the Chinese market, you must comply with its laws and not get in the way of angering the CCP. China is one of Apple's largest markets due to its access to over 1B+ people and it now has its hands tied and anything the CCP wants removed, Apple will do it. [0][1][2]

Like you just said, TikTok already compiles with this security law and censors/bans whatever the CCP requests. By moving outside of China it can either lose access to the Chinese market and get banned by China or still comply with its laws and get banned by the US.

The thing is, TikTok has offices out side of China due to the Musical.ly acquisition (Located in the US) so can still operate there whilst Bytedance being headquartered in Beijing.

A takedown request can be made to the App Store owner. Apple and Google.

[0] [https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/04/new-york-times-apps- removed-i...](https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/04/new-york-times-apps-removed-in- china/)

[1] [https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/21/skype-china-app- store/](https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/21/skype-china-app-store/)

[2] [https://9to5mac.com/2019/10/10/protest- app/](https://9to5mac.com/2019/10/10/protest-app/)

<comment><USER26> TikTok is banned in China.

The company has an isolated version called Douyin that is only available in China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As an European I am happy that someone is finally breaking the American monopoly on social media.

It just feels wrong only being surveilled by the NSA.

<comment><USER28> Install yandex tiktok and facebook and you have the holy trinity ;)

<comment><USER29> Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania ;)

(by the end of the year Airstrip One will have always been part of Oceania)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting that only India's decision to ban TikTok made that possible in the US. Shows how polarized the US is. If one side suggested banning TikTok, the other side would immidiately defend it, but India banning it can bring it into the conversation in a way that doesn't force everyone to adopt a view on it reflexively.

</comment><comment><USER31> I guess the sentiment that TikTok should be sold is gaining ground. It's pretty clear from a regulatory perspective that Facebook won't be allowed to buy it and probably Google neither.

The app also seems to be kind of a wonky fit to Amazons, Microsofts or Apples portfolio (although Amazon does own twitch, so who knows).

I can't make a solid argument for it, but I wouldn't rule out either Netflix or Disney making a bid for TikTok. Both companies are great with video, and I think the current CEO of TikTok is the former COO of Disney. IDK.

<comment><USER9> If it does get sold, hopefully it's not to an US company. The web is already far too dominated by US socal media companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Tiktok's parent company, bytedance is incorporated in Cayman islands. It has a Chinese subsidiary operating Douyin in China , and a US subsidiary operating Tiktok in the US. The Chinese national intelligence law is applied to the Chinese subsidiary but not the parent because the parent is not incorporated in China. Hence the US subsidiary is not subjected to Chinese law. If Chinese government demands US data and Bytedance's Chinese subsidiary refuses, the government can shut down the Chinese subsidiary, but the Cayman island parent will still operate. Hence Chinese government has no power over the US subsidiary. Author says that Chinese values and American values are absolutely opposing and because of that Tiktok's algorithms and product design could undermine American values either consciously or unconsciously. Right now Bytedance's US subsidiary is managed by Americans, hires US based engineers, and the content moderation team is staffed with Americans. The goal should be that Tiktok and Douyin will be separate, design, operated and moderated separately. This could be strengthened by having American management at Bytedance parent, and have Bytedance go public and have American board directors. I hope that whatever international fears about Tiktok, the regulatory body/government should make list of rules for Tiktok. Tiktok should be given a chance to defend its positions, and ability to comply with the rules. We should not just straight out ban tiktok, like "bam, after today, its removed from app stores everywhere". that is not in the spirit of rule of law.

<comment><USER33> "If Chinese government demands US data and Bytedance's Chinese subsidiary refuses, the government can shut down the Chinese subsidiary, but the Cayman island parent will still operate. Hence Chinese government has no power over the US subsidiary."

The issue is the Chinese government can compel it's citizens to do whatever they want. Having non-Chinese in the management of Bytedance could help but I can't imagine they could have a truly independent board if Bytedance is majority owned by Chinese citizens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> As the instagram teenagers that made it popular are now 22 - 25, it's their turn to see a new generation overtake what is cool. Don't worry you guys will see them in 10 years sad-facing when BlopChop is popular with the now 5 year olds...

</comment><comment><USER35> It's interesting that we are beginning to realize the paradoxical nature of "free speech". It's unfortunate that _free speech cannibalizes itself_. Since there are other powers with significant influence who can enforce their speech protectionism, it necessitates a response of the same kind, or risks collapsing free speech entirely in favor of an opponent. It's a power struggle, plain and simple.

</comment><comment><USER36> i personally enjoy seeing young teenagers recording dancing videos on the beach while prior to tiktok they used to just seat down, heads down on their phone, absent, non-existent.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Yeah, you can make fun of them but they are actually doing something now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > I can't emphasize this point enough: one of the gravest errors made by far > too many people in the U.S. is taking an exceptionally self-centered view of > U.S.-China relations, where everything is about what the U.S. says and does, > while China is treated like an NPC. Indeed, it is quite insulting to China, > a great nation with a history far longer than that of the United States.

Culturally, China has a very long history. Governmentally, which is what's being talked about here because we're discussing trade, they're less than a century old. We should expect the ruling government of China to behave as they have in the past, not as previous governments have.

</comment><comment><USER38> An under-appreciated aspect of this "war" is how bad US companies have been at building ML-first products. ByteDance in particular is just fantastic at it - their products feels designed with the algorithm in mind, as if everyone involved in the development has some understanding of machine learning. This exposes some weaknesses with existing social media platforms that were built before the deep learning boom, as he says in the article. It is probably worthwhile for American innovators to think about what otherwise-impenetrable areas this could expose.

</comment><comment><USER39> > What is increasingly clear, though, is that China's insistence that the West > ignore the country's "internal affairs" is a sentiment that is not > reciprocated; the list of Western companies bullied by China for Western > content is long and growing, the country is flooding Twitter and Facebook > with coronavirus propaganda, and is leveraging WeChat to spread > misinformation and to surveil the Chinese diaspora.

None of those are "internal affairs" to any Western country. Those are international companies that have an interest in not pissing off their cash cow. If they poured money into the Cascadia independence movement then that would America and Canada's internal affairs. But the only party doing that is the State Department and NED.

There's a lot of inaccuracies in this article. He seems to think knowledge in tech translates to knowledge in other things. Pity.

</comment><comment><USER40> The scale of information available to an app is potentially huge.

Thus they're automatically involved in some sort of information warfare.

I guess there's two options, either by default the the ecosystem doesn't allow for them to have that information ... or they're in play for these types of things.

I don't think there's any other options...

</comment><comment><USER41> > the service censored #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd

I feel like this claim isn't well substantiated. TikTok claims it was a bug where 2 billion+ views were shown as 0 views. That specific number - the limit on a 32 bit signed integer, makes me think that it was a bug.

</comment><comment><USER42> \--yawn--

Another dude advocating for the suppression of a foreign government. Been there, done that, seen it all, happened before, will happen again.

To think that a little app that promotes a bunch of videos of kids acting silly, is a national security threat, is ridiculous.

All you need for counter-evidence, is to look at Twitter, Facebook, and all the American news media sites and outlets. They routinely and actively brainwash the population, with the same repeated bombardment of information, even though they claim to be independent reporting agencies.

In fact, all the American news agencies, are increasing the aggressiveness of the rhetoric, and appear to be drumming up the mood for war against China.

You, as Americans, should be very disturbed by this. Because, if the United States engages into a war with China, then it is you, and your children, that will face the brunt of the violence of war. The American elites, and their children, will be safely kept away from any of that violence; and they will be benefiting financially from it all, while you and your children die in the Pacific Ocean.

If you want to ban TikTok, then just ban them. Just say, that you don't want any Chinese media presence on American airwaves. Simple as that. Begin your own censoring of the internet.

Don't bother with making some far-fetched reasoning that some fictitious enemy is out to get you. This is, in fact, what scares Americans the most - <USER3> creation of some fictitious bogeyman.

</comment><comment><USER43> Maybe a correction: The article mentions that Amazon asked its employees to delete the app. But Amazon later retracted that decision.

<comment><USER44> this is already mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I wonder how true Thompson's assertion about a war of ideology between China and western values is.

Are there any examples of TikTok influencing thinking in a pro-Chinese way via algorithm tuning or direct curation?

</comment><comment><USER46> I am just going to repeat the best link here:

[https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology- in](https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in)

Wow.

</comment><comment><USER47> Relevant to the topic of political propaganda and in particular conspiracy theories, the leftist blogger Digby wrote a good post [1] critical of TikTok even though she was sympathetic to the punking of the Trump rally in Tulsa. In particular, she cites reporting from the Daily Beast that Pizzagate conspiracy theories are circulating widely on the platform. I'm not endorsing this reporting as fact, but do think it is good food for thought. In any case, the platform seems to be very poorly optimized for critical thinking, which is fine for "laughter and dancing" but less fine in other domains.

[1]: [https://digbysblog.net/2020/06/tiktok-isnt-the-answer- folks/](https://digbysblog.net/2020/06/tiktok-isnt-the-answer-folks/)

</comment><comment><USER48> It is hardly just Tiktok policing content with an agenda. Twitter, Youtube, Reddit are particularly bad if you are conservative or have gender critical ideas.

Reddit recently banned a ton of subreddits that are simply critical of the idea that men can _literally_ become women (they say it's to stop hate, but they leave up violent porn subs and other subs that hate women). Even subreddits like PCOS - a very serious condition that only females have - <USER4> into trouble because they aren't inclusive enough with their language. Someone got suspended on twitter for saying only females get cervical cancer (this is apparently hate speech), Meghan Murphy got banned from Twitter for using the pronoun 'he' about Yaniv about a profile of his when he was presenting as a man. People get their videos taken down on youtube for "misgendering" people, or demonetized for not having the correct opinion.

American companies are absolutely policing content to their own political agenda.

<comment><USER49> Reddit banned a bunch of hate subreddits. Full stop. I don't care what you think about trans men and women but this is not a case of people being overly sensitive. "Gender Critical" is the spiritual equivalent of "Race Realists" and their subreddits were nothing other than a safe space for them to express their overt hate. This was not a place "simply" for people with an opinion.

You don't understand hate speech. Misgendering a trans person isn't hate unless you do it with the intent to hurt them. Saying that only women get cervical cancer or that that shit that JK spouts about menstruation is literally no issue except for the fact that it's said to purposely be mean and exclusive.

Like FFS, I'm glad we're finally at the point where this bullshit "I'm speaking in coded language and therefore technically not being a hateful pos despite everyone and especially my followers know exactly what I mean" is being called out for what it is an not tolerated anymore.

<comment><USER50> For what it's worth, I came across Gender Critical a couple of months back, as a confused neutral trying to understand what everybody was talking about. My impression was of a community uniting around a common anger at new trans- rights encroaching on hard-fought womens' rights. I didn't see much hate, and indeed many posters took pains to call out their support for trans-rights _in principle_. I think the anger was real though, and maybe was mistaken for hate by whoever decided to ban them.

<comment><USER49> Yep, that's pretty much what their community says on the tin. If that was what they actually were in practice I don't think it would have even been an issue. Sure, the trans community would have probably still disliked them, but like it's not like trans people are some big cultural powerhouse. There have been old-school well-respected academics that held similar opinions since the dawn of second-wave feminism. And don't get me wrong, there has always been plenty of infighting among feminists along this line -- many impassioned conferences, books, articles written about it. And it's from these people that GC takes their heritage and has used it for years to "legitimize" their hate. It's what allowed them to survive online as long as they did because they knew how to fly just under the radar.

Then, like a lot of subreddits, GC got bigger and the new influx of people weren't uhh... so subtle and more and more of the content became insulting, shaming, and "cringe" directed at specific trans people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> actually not just tiktok, others like wechat, taobao, all the eCommerce, messengers, USA is behind China by a few years these days.

in the early days they cloned and studied, now they actually took over and Facebook etc barely can even catch up

</comment><comment><USER52> There seems to be a concerted effort from both China and the US to create sides. It feels like a new Cold War is looming.

Stratechery is playing on one side. The reality is that US companies are quite willing to censor and manipulate information as well.

Facebook and YouTube censored coronavirus information for the US government. Facebook is fine with right wing manipulation. These propaganda efforts by US companies affect people from other countries.

Both sides are just trying to amass and maintain power. The CCP needs to control information to maintain power. The US is a consortium of entities amassing money and power and likewise tries to destroy institutions preventing that. I bet if you look inside the CCP, you would likewise see multiple groups vying for power.

If you follow Stratechery's logic, then non US countries should likewise ban Facebook and YouTube.

The more ethical solution would be worldwide standards on censorship.

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't see the problem.

TikTok will be banned. SV will do a US based replacement. All will be good.

</comment><comment><USER54> Tik Tok success as a technology is well argued by the author. That should be copied and cloned and compete as MANY not as one.

That is this onesness that I try to argue. This is this oneness that get China and the strategy missing this part of China the problem.

Obviously I would be baised in the sense that the author just gave up my whole place and my 2m+ liberty loving followers. U people, HK people, TW people ... is just part of China, we can just dump them (or you can just dump us) because we belong to a "ONE". The whole idea of human rights are about individual not about the rights of nation over you or us in Hong Kong. If you let the oneness grow and ignore that one is evil, you die with us because the evil will expand. HK is the front of the ideological fight. Not sure why the author not noted that the play against HK is a play against the promise and contract by the less powerful China to the future. Read Deng speech in UN, you can see there is a promising China. But look at today you know nothing in the one is preventing it. The West look otherwise by letting China grow so powerful it is near a stat that cannot fail. The west has to feed the hand that is going to kill them. Just cut the tie is not enough. A more aggressive way of engaging is needed. Otherwise the world is just another South China Seas.

China has been asserted itself in Internet (speech by Xin please read), UN, WTO, WHO, ... etc. They have number on their side in the past. Now they have money, they have the language (so many good English speakers in the elite and their children), ... There could be millions inside the west and trillion in the bank. It is like Soviet Union evolve and attack USA soil from underneath.

But the analysis is so well that seems ok? That we have to deal with China as one. It is partially yes and partially No. The key problem is what we call one-ness of Chinese thinking. You using that you lost already. What America is great and Europe in a sense has built-in immunity is that there are individual (or even the extreme right has the club concept). You do not analysis a world as a world. A world is nothing but its individual and its links among individual. Now the problem when you think the whole China is a whole you have to fight against then you got yourselves a long term problem.

I said long term is from time to time China would group itself together into one big nasty empire. The best is when it is weak (like in Sung Dynasty) when the culture of unity does not break human backs. But once they are big and as oneness is built into the pyshce they just go ahead to transform all barbarians and uncivilised into one of them. There is no stop. Nothing internal to the Chinese philosophy has many in mind. Everyone has to be saved is what they think, and it is what ultimately you got.

What you need to do is to ensure the individual spirit and liberty mind to survive inside. So the original promise that a great China contribute as part of many, not force its way as one into the world. Just cut into two would not help. HK, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the whole Asian countries are those many.

Not one less! Not just one!

:-) ok back to my debugging of the solitaire of C. gdb tracing of pointer structure is hard, isn't it. From 6502 (by guessing), 370 (XA to ESA extension and control block) to now; still you always deal with dump. Sigh. Back to my cave even though the world is collapsing, that you can hack as an individual and do what you enjoy is more important. And that is why this all about. We should have more or one TikTok.

</comment><comment><USER55> Nitpick, but this man doesn't really seem to understand what "Marxism" means.

</comment><comment><USER56> "the Chinese Communist Party very much believes that Marxism is the means by which that must be accomplished"

This is BS, the economic system in China is in no way Marxist, nor is it going in that direction. It's worse, lol. This sounds like someone is simply rehashing propaganda he heard somewhere that was intended to either smear Marx or China or both.

<comment><USER57> It's unfortunate that you were downvoted for this; you're absolutely correct. No one in China gives a fuck about Marxism, and the CCP certainly isn't trying to wage some ideological war to establish some sort of Marxist utopia. To think so is to completely misunderstand the CCP's motivation, which is a dangerous thing when the tensions are escalating and war could be the result.

<comment><USER58> This link was included in the article: [https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of- the-soul-ideology-in](https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology- in)

While China has certainly strayed pretty far from its state-controlled economy in recent years, it also seems pretty clear that Xi is more ideologically "hardcore" than his predecessors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Tiktok is changing the mindset of our generation

<comment><USER60> Current young person here (entering college this fall). I can't think of a single way it's changed "the mindset of our generation", and it seems it's used very heavily by a specific type of person but not by others (as opposed to other social media which is more widely used). How is it changing anything?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Ben is absolutely right and something needs to be done to fight for the values of liberalism, democracy etc we hold dear but I don't see how this will happen. The world seems more divided than ever. Just 2-3 countries unilaterally acting on these issues isn't going to make a difference, how I wish there were strong leaders in some of the nations who knew how to work well for those ideals in the long term together with others.

Also, this is not just about Tiktok as Ben mentioned. When American corporations like NBA start censoring things on their own soil, it is beyond reprehensible.

<comment><USER62> Everyone forgets that Tiktok bought Musical.ly which was an American product to get the market traction they have. The issue that seems more real than political speech is that US social media / internet companies are denied access to the Chinese market while we allow Chinese owned companies complete access to the US market. Seems like that is unjust.

<comment><USER63> Musical.ly is not an American product. Just because it was incorporated in US does not mean the team and co-founders are from US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> In the last century the prevailing line the U.S. was that the U.S. would change China through economic engagement, I think what is really going to happen is China is going to change the U.S.

Mainly in the sense that in order to adapt to the competitive threat from China the U.S. has to become more state capitalism and industrial policy guided.

Using strong government to guide industrial policy, fend off or cripple foreign competitors, enact infrastructure. These are the standard tools in China.

As for China, I wonder in the long term if this is not pioneering a completely new mode of the human species. What is the logical end of total surveillance and censorship? Eventually unifying every person into the mind of the state until individualism dissolves and we are all subsumed into a common entity.

Maybe I am speculating too far but if you could have everyone carry an implant from birth wired to a single network then you could achieve the common science fiction trope of an unified collective conscious. Maybe even the leading Party theoreticians haven't even sought about it this far yet.

</comment><comment><USER65> Good article, but I do feel disagree strongly with this statement:

"while I mourn the end of a free and vibrant Hong Kong that I have had the pleasure of visiting on multiple occasions, I am unmoved by complaints about China's promised adherence to the Basic Law; that was an agreement imposed on China by a colonial power, and Hong Kong is unquestionably a Chinese city, ultimately subject to Chinese law."

Hong Kong is a unique place, with a unique history, unique government, and more. Yes a Chinese imperial government leased land to British under duress. That imperial government no longer exists, period. The British gave it to a different government under clear terms that were violated. So where does that put Hong Kong? I think you can argue a bunch of different positions, but not that it is unquestionably under authoritarian Chinese communist rule.

This is disregarding the liberal traditional opinion in the West (and Locke, etc ) that people have universal rights period, and that governments that violate those rights are not valid governments.

I think there are stronger philosophical positions to take, including that Hong Kong should be Independent by right, and that China violated it's agreements with the citizens of Hong Kong.

<comment><USER66> Hey, I see you've struck a nerve with some people - even talking about the idea of an independent Hong Kong will send your comment to the absolute bottom.

Have my upvote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> This piece is ridiculous. Mainly:

> _What matters more in an ideological war, though, is influence, and that is > why I do believe that ByteDance's continued ownership of TikTok is > unacceptable._

What's implied but unsaid here is that somehow the CCP is going to fill TikTok with political propaganda that... a bunch of teens are going to somehow become influenced by? Sorry, but that's just completely far-fetched. _Facebook_ is something to be concerned about, with people sharing political stories, memes, etc. But _TikTok_? A bunch of funny videos? There's nothing that could be further from ideology.

> _Perhaps the most powerful argument against taking any sort of action is > that we aren't China, and isn't blocking TikTok something that China would > do?_

Yes, this is precisely why we _don 't_ need to do this. We're better than China. Things like freedom of speech, democracy, and the free market set a moral example to the world. Once we start censoring things, we lose that moral leadership. (And sure you can argue all you want about our declining moral leadership and the state of our democracy, but let's not make it _even worse_ , shall we?)

> _If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only within its borders > but within ours, it is in liberalism's interest to cut off a vector that has > taken root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans > exactly what they want._

Isn't _every_ product trying to be brilliantly engineered to give customers exactly what they want? All this boils down to is, it's a good app, so let's kill it. Again, totally opposite the American values of competition, the free market, and consumers.

Sorry, but there is absolutely zero logic in this analysis.

<comment><USER68> TikTok users flooded the Trump rally with fake ticket requests.

[https://nypost.com/2020/06/21/tiktok-campaigns-ensure- hundre...](https://nypost.com/2020/06/21/tiktok-campaigns-ensure-hundreds-of- unused-seats-at-trump-tulsa-rally/)

The plausible deniability is easy. No one will ever find out if it was specially promoted. They could just throw up their hands and say that it all happened all by itself. The algorithm is a mystery and a trade secret!

U.S Teens are making "I Love China" videos on TikTok.

[https://www.recruitmentnewsuk.co.uk/2020/05/28/why-us- teens-...](https://www.recruitmentnewsuk.co.uk/2020/05/28/why-us-teens-on- tiktok-are-making-i-love-china-videos/)

The algorithm could interfere to remove any pro-Trump or anti-China TikToks and noone would be the wiser. There is zero transparency.

The Chinese government can lend these institutions billions forever and undercut rivals and overpay programmers if it buys them political influence.

Speaking of a free market in ideas. 90% of the U.S media is owned by 5 companies. I think a good idea would be to reverse the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which allowed for massive TV and Radio consolidation. Local radio was actually good in the late 80s and early 90s and new music styles were discovered and promoted by disk jockeys on local stations. After 96, the conglomerates bought up all the radio stations and IMHO, popular music more or less froze in place with just the names of the bands rotating.

<comment><USER67> And all sorts of nonsense happens on Facebook. But TikTok is almost infinitely _less_ political than Facebook.

The Trump rally thing was a prank that was widely publicized on the internet. And the "I love China" videos seem to be a joke too.

You're going to find a little bit of everything on every platform. The idea that TikTok is somehow pushing Chinese ideology remains completely unfounded and baseless. It's pure imagination and conjecture.

If it ever _does_ , it will be obvious and action can be taken then. But until it does, banning something like TikTok is simply blatantly anticompetitive and stooping to China's types of censorship. Again, _we 're better than that_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Tiktok could offer to pay your mortgage im still confused and disgusted people use it

</comment><comment><USER54> Save yourselves, please!

       A message from Hong Kong.</comment>


How Dumb is Daniel Dennett? - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dennettdumb <comment><USER2> This would be just as informative if someone else wrote a blog post called "How dumb do you have to be to say 'How dumb is Daniel Dennett?'" and then quoted Aaron's in full. No new information, no arguments. I know from other posts that Aaron is a fan of John Searle (whose "Chinese room" argument disproves a Turing Test for artificial intelligence by disproving any kind of intelligence). So to me, this post reads like a reminder that Aaron is on a particular side of a particular squabble.

<comment><USER3> If Dennett's argument (in the ordered list in that post) is stated accurately, it _is_ obviously wrong. Having not read _Freedom Evolves_, I can't say whether this is an accurate summary, but it's clear that "to avoid the actions you'll deterministically take" and "to avoid objects" are not using "avoid" in the same sense.

<comment><USER2> Sure. I get the feeling I'm not hearing an accurate summary -- like when Naomi Klein turns something like "the pursuit of rational self-interest maximizes collective gain" into "They're trying to convince people that by doing good you do bad, and that by being bad -- by pursuing your most selfish desires -- you do good." (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2kTy7glZ9s>).

I've read some Dennett, and I've never found anything amenable to the paraphrase AS quoted. I'm sure if you wanted to, you could find people who tell you how ridiculous Dennett was by quoting him that way, just as people have had a great time finding out what Milton Friedman said by way of Klein's parody. I suspect that AS just hasn't bothered to consider the possibility that he and his idol are wrong.

<comment><USER4> Later on q reaffirms aaron's argument (@ 2008-01-19T10:55:30), seemingly based on q's own read of DD's work. So, at least two seemingly smart people come to the same conclusion independently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Who is q?

<comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_>

But I don't recall seeing Dennett in any episodes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How did this completely unimportant blog post make it to the top page on hacker news?

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems to me that the entire study of philosophy is comprised of arguments based on linguistic puns; how else to express our thoughts? As long as we are limited by language, any existing language, we are constrained by its syntax and semantics. This is analogous to the study of physics with math; we often need to invent new math to model physical phenomenon. Likewise, until we invent a suitable new philosophy language to model the world, we're just going to spin our wheels.

<comment><USER8> somebody's been reading wittgenstein

<comment><USER7> I haven't ever actually, but I may have to start now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How dumb is Daniel Dennett? Umm, not very. From what I've read of his work he seems to be pretty smart, which is why I suspect that this Aaron guy is misunderstanding his argument. I note that his summary is in fact a summary of somebody else's summary.

I haven't read Freedom Evolves, but my guess is that Dennett was actually making an argument that it's possible to simulate, in a deterministic universe, entities which have "free will", or at least which believe they do. I doubt he really makes an argument based on confusing two different meanings of the word "unavoidable".

Though I'm happy to be proven wrong if anyone can post some actual quotes from the book.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why is this useful or interesting to hackers?

Seems like Aaron doesn't like Daniel. Also seems like it belongs in a soap opera and not on ycnews.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it here not for Aaron, but for Dennet. I thought that the argument posted by Aaron (and attributed to Dennet) was silly, and if that argument was truely Dennet's, then maybe he was right at some level. That was it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I haven't read Freedom Evolves, but I intend to. Judging by the list of points that Aaron provides and Dennett's other books, I bet Dennett's actual point was to say: 'Look, this is _plausible_ , and you can't dismiss it out of hand. Yes, obviously the data still needs to come in to determine whether this is the _actual_ truth, but you shouldn't consider it a foregone conclusion that this isn't a valid option.'

Here's some "primary source" Dennett material in contrast to Aaron's angry "tertiary source" rant: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101017> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101024> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101023> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66917>

</comment><comment><USER12> Hark! Philosophy doesn't have the same standards of argument as 20th century mathematics! Sound the alarm!

</comment><comment><USER13> I like Dennett a lot precisely because he's badly behaved and disrespectful of other philosophers.

Free Will is a completely meaningless concept. I don't know what it means in the real world, or how I could test for it, or what would be different if it did or didn't exist, and neither does anyone else. I don't know why people spend so much energy squabbling about it.

At least consciousness (which Dennett might but in the same category... something that affects _precisely_ nothing) is something I can experience.

</comment><comment><USER14> He quotes a person whose like or dislike of Dennet is _not based on how good Dennet's ideas are_ and instead are based on personal character:

"I used to be a rabid Dennettite [until] I started reading more widely in the subject, and found that Dennett had been pretty (no, make that very) badly behaved [...] And that's when the hate developed."

Aaron goes on to call Dennet "stupid" but fails to actually seriously discuss any on-topic ideas.</comment>