Anti TPP Site Blocked by Google & Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_reddit_someone_is_trying_really_hard_to_erase/ Twitter were also blocking it, but they've stopped now. Guess someone from Twitter saw the thread. <comment><AUTHOR> It looks like the site is a false-positive for some automated spam-filter.

Interestingly Twitter were also blocking it but they've fixed that.</comment>


The Mobile Content Mandate - <AUTHOR> http://karenmcgrane.com/2014/01/13/the-mobile-content-mandate/

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't figure out how to link to the transcript, but that is the meaty part of the content.</comment>


The Personal Computer Is Dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39163/?p1=A1

<comment><USER2> Another great article by Jonathan Zittrain. If anyone is interested in delving deeper into the ideas expressed in the article, I higher recommend you check out Zittrain's book, 'The Future of the Internet- and How to Stop It.' Zittrain has put up an annotated html version here:

<http://yupnet.org/zittrain/>

He has also made a pdf of the book available here:

<http://futureoftheinternet.org/download></comment>


California Court Orders Vinod Khosla to Reopen Disputed Beach - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/11/542827955/california-court-orders-venture-capitalist-to-reopen-disputed-beach <comment><USER3> Given all the years and precedent of access (throughout the State of California), I would hope that any stay of the order pending further litigation would be denied.

And that, if he then continues to refuse, he be jailed for contempt of court.

In my own little childhood hometown, I've watched public beach access (to a lake) become more and more locked up behind fees and limited hours of access and upscaling property values and home ownership that wants to keep things quiet and for themselves.

The quiet part, I appreciate. The "keep out" part, not so much.

The childhood memories I have of times spent there, are simply no longer possible. It's all on lockdown. Something lost in that -- something significant, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Zonker Harris Beach Accessway in Malibu is "closed for repairs" again.[1] Closed for over a year now.

[1] [http://beaches.lacounty.gov/zonker-harris-accessway- closed-f...](http://beaches.lacounty.gov/zonker-harris-accessway-closed-for- repair/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just so we don't go over the same thing again, Khosla's unique claim is that the title to the land derives from a land grant from before California was a state, with which he justifies disregarding the CCC.

 _A year after the case was filed, however, a San Mateo County Superior Court judge dealt Friends of Martin's Beach a setback, ruling there was no right of access. He said the property was subject to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, an agreement that ended the Mexican-American War and required the United States to recognize Mexican land grants._

[http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-martins-beach- sn...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-martins-beach- snap-20161026-story.html)

<comment><USER6> What a pathetic creature really

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14984639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14984639)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14984770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14984770)

</comment><comment><USER8> I am surprised more states do not have laws like Hawaii's where you are required to provide beach access. Shame for such a nice beach to go to waste.

<comment><USER9> They do. He ignores and contravenes them.

<comment><USER10> Why isn't he thrown in jail, or why isn't the fence bulldozed down? Where I currently live (a somewhat well-off area), bulldozers (and self-entitled assholes) are a common occurrence.

<comment><USER11> I wonder if the property is on his name, or some shelter company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > One year later, his management companies closed the gate and put up a no- > access sign. A billboard that had advertised beach access was painted over.

What a jerk.

<comment><USER13> Christ, what an asshole!

<comment><USER14> Have you met Vinod? He's..... intense.

<comment><USER15> It sounds like you have a story to tell. Do tell it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Did anyone tried to organize a protest, show up en-masse on 'his' beach etc?

From what I understand, you could use a boat, show up at the beach, party and leave with boat and you are within legal use.

</comment><comment><USER17> So, how do we make sure that he never tries to pull this stunt again? The level of fines the law allows doesn't seem to be doing anything.

<comment><USER18> You could make it more than just a fight over coastal access. You could make it so that he has more at stake than just this case. He publishes a list of companies his firm has a financial interest in: [http://www.khoslaventures.com/portfolio/all- companies](http://www.khoslaventures.com/portfolio/all-companies)

If people truly care about this issue, they can organize public campaigns against those companies as a message to founders to avoid his money or face consequences. He may laugh off fines the court imposes, but this being a stain on his professional reputation would be more damaging.

But it would be hard to pull off. There are some HN favorites in there. How many people here are willing to avoid Stripe or Gitlab over beach access? He's betting that it's not many.

<comment><USER19> That kind of scorched earth tactic is simply inhumane, regardless of the target.

<comment><USER20> How is it inhumane?

<comment><USER19> It's barbaric overkill. It affects other parties far more than the target. It's emblematic of a vicious vindictiveness that is unbecoming of members of a cohesive society. It's simply disgusting to dig into unrelated matters over a relatively petty dispute. It shows no sense of proportionality, charity, or kindness. It is ultimately counterproductive to the creation of the kind of world we all ought to be creating for our mutual benefit.

<comment><USER19> It's clear from downvotes and lack of replies that some parts of this community have a long way to go before deserving the moral high ground the community tries to claim.

There is no justice in mob justice.

<comment><USER21> >There is no justice in mob justice.

you can't have it both ways. The other side refused to accept the form of the justice of the civilized society, ie. the court of law justice. Do you have any other form of justice in mind, other than the two already mentioned - <USER2> court of law and the mob ones? Please do tell if you do.

<comment><USER19> The courts have mechanisms for dealing with land access disputes and uncooperative people, which have not been exhausted. And it's just a beach. While coastal access is an important right, it's not worth throwing away all the other aspects of civilized society to try to make a point.

<comment><USER20> I still don't see how it would be any different than a boycott. If it's big enough to be successful even when the companies he funds are providing value, then that means everyone involved is saying that stopping what he's done is worth enough to give up on the value from those companies. Are people supposed to just lay back and let the wealthy do what they want without a fight anymore? It's not like violence is being advocated, just voting with your dollar

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Without reading the article, I know this is Vinod Khosla. The title should reflect that: put his name there, and save us a click to know who he is.

<comment><USER23> is there a vote2edit feature? /rockthevote

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can see his point of view, though: as a rich man, he _should_ be able to do what he wants, and lay claim to this beautiful stretch of the Pacific Ocean.

<comment><USER24> What if Bill Gates bought the entire coastline? How does that help society?

Society has relatively little to gain from letting the super rich buy up fundamentally scarce bits of land like this. Meanwhile making it public access means way more people can appreciate the beach. Not like this VC is on the beach most of the time anyways.

<comment><USER25> Hmm, not to say I disagree, but let's say hypothetically, instead of providing general public access to the beach, which is obviously a pity, the entire coastline was sold at the appropriate price. The money, in theory, could go into improving local infrastructure, etc, which may lead to an improvement in quality of life for people living in that area. I'm not saying that would happen, just entertaining the possibility that your proposed scenario could be positive.

<comment><USER26> It could, but once sold it might never again be accessible to the public.

I prefer the Scandinavian approach: Non built up land can be freely accessed by anyone regardless of owner in most cases, and the coast is by default protected against people building down to it in Norway at least. Dispensations do get given, but if you block access without applying for planning consent, it _will_ be struck down.

The basis is simple: Restricting access to a scarce resource like the land is equivalent to taking away or liberty. This is a right we've had since time immemorial - in Sweden it's a constitutional right. In Norway it was not codified into law until the 60's as it used to be seen as so self-evident that it wasn't necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why is a beach up for sale if it's not up for private gating?

(Why doesn't California declare its coastline public property that is not-for- sale?)

edit: Just found out the answer. Beaches themselves are never for sale, even though properties right up to the edge of the beach are. Next question: Are all river banks public property too? Can you not build a manufacturing plant at a river bank? What about lakes? Are lakes public property?

<comment><USER28> Many places consider the land below the high-water line of navigable waterways to be public (in midwest US at least). So if you're canoeing down the river and eat lunch on the bank, you're generally not trespassing. Smaller lakes are generally not considered navigable, though I'm not sure how it works for huge lakes like Michigan. I suspect a similar 'high-water' line is relevant.

You'd truly be pretty dense if you wanted to build a permenant structure _below_ the high water mark.

<comment><USER29> This holds true in most of the west as well and provides access for river paddlers/floaters/fishermen.</comment></comment></comment>


Proteins That May Restore Damaged Sound-Detecting Cells in the Ear - <AUTHOR> https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/researchers-find-proteins-that-might-restore-damaged-sound-detecting-cells-in-the-ear <comment><USER2> I'll be interested to see how this pans out. I have significant hearing loss in both ears from infections as a baby, and the doctors always said it was because the hairs in my cochlea are dead. I was denied a few opportunities when I was younger due to my hearing, and I still can't hear most higher frequency sounds (whistles, some cymbals, smoke detectors, fire alarms...etc). It would be nice to be able to hear what everyone else hears and not have to say "what?" so often.

Though, as a bald man, I've learned not to get too hopeful about scientific advancements in regrowing hairs ;)

<comment><USER3> Yours is worse than mine but same root cause and probably exacerbated by power tools and loud music (and loud music at a bar called power tools) later on. There's a huge dip in the middle of my hearing range so I can hear the clink- clink-clink of pint glasses in a pub but people speaking to me over it is a struggle.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, hearing people over background noise is probably the thing that I struggle with the most. It's been a pretty big social hindrance, especially when I was in college. In crowded social areas like bars and restaurants it's very difficult for me to understand what people are saying. As a result, I ended up being the weird guy just sitting there not saying anything all night because I was unable to carry on a conversation. Hearing aids never seemed to help, because they amplified the background noise too.

<comment><USER4> I am going to venture and say this is not related to the ear apparatus, but in perception processing. I believe this type of deficit has been associated with ADHD, and other neurodevelopmental disorders/variations.

<comment><USER5> As someone with attention issues, I've wondered if this contributes to my issues in loud environments. I feel like it's a blend of "your brain is being overwhelmed" and "this place actually sucks for everyone".

<comment><USER6> AFAIK I don't have any hearing loss. I wouldn't say that I have attention issues but I can't stand distracting environments - I enjoy loud music if it's a concert and that's what I'm there for, but otherwise I can't stand it.

I agree with your assessment. I pretty much don't go to bars because of the suckiness. You can't have a worthwhile conversation, so it's just constant drinking in an oppressive environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was hoping to read that it might also help people like myself who suffer from tinnitus. Sadly, no.

Still, if it can restore hearing to the deaf, this is a good thing.

<comment><USER8> YMMV (from Reddit thread):

\---

Strong temporary relief from tinnitus:

Place the palms of your hands over your ears with fingers resting gently on the back of your head. Your middle fingers should point toward one another just above the base of your skull. Place your index fingers on top of you middle fingers and snap them (the index fingers) onto the skull making a loud, drumming noise. Repeat 40-50 times. Some people experience immediate relief with this method. Repeat several times a day for as long as necessary to reduce tinnitus.

~ Dr. Jan Strydom, of A2Z of Health, Beauty and Fitness.org.

<comment><USER9> Have tried this a couple of times with zero relief unfortunately. I have conductive hearing loss due to otosclerosis (plaque buildup on stapes) so that might be why it doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER10> I'm fairly certain this is a case-by-case kind of "remedy". A friend of mine had terrible tinnitus and this did not help him at all. I wonder if this has something to do with bone structure or, perhaps, depends on the severity of the condition. Still, it's solid advice that should be spread wide in case it helps some people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have early hearing loss. If you haven't checked out hearing aids in the last few years, they've improved significantly, although they remain appallingly expensive.

Wired wrote up a short piece about my hearing aids at the bottom of [https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-love-tech-better- humans/](https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-love-tech-better-humans/)

Of course, some drops to regain perfect hearing would be far better.

</comment><comment><USER12> My wife has premature hearing loss of an unknown cause. Doctor kind of shrugged when asked what could be done about it. This was some 15 years ago. I'll push her to make an appointment with a doc again to see if something new has been discovered.

<comment><USER13> My dad has severe hearing loss (hearing aids, etc.) but we made an interesting discovery: bone-conduction headphones bypass the portion of his ear that's damaged. When he first put them on he literally said: "That's better than I've heard anything sound in a decade".

YMMV but it might be something useful to try with your wife.

<comment><USER14> For what it's worth, this only works if the source of hearing loss is conductive (e.g. eardrum or the ossicles). If your cochlea or any sub-element (e.g. inner hair cells) are damaged, bone conduction will be _no_ different. In fact, the comparison between acoustic and bone-conduction hearing tests is a key element of audiological testing.

<comment><USER15> True. The classic tuning fork test: hit the fork, hold it up in front of your ear. Can you hear it? Then gently press the end of the (still vibrating) fork against your skull. Can you hear it now? If no/yes, the loss is conductive. If no/no, it's sensorineural.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Slightly off topic but (nearly) two years ago my father had a bad stoke. They keep him in a drug-induced coma for a week. Prior to the stroke his hearing was pretty bad. Loud TV, etc.

In any case, after the stroke I swear his hearing wasn't as bad. I didn't have to talk as loud. He would hear more of what was said even when it wasn't directed at him. I have no idea if his hearing is better but all the signs that said it was bad don't say that as much as often.

<comment><USER17> There are some conditions, like cranial nerve VII (facial nerve) palsy, where hyperacousis is a symptom. You have a couple muscles in your ear that attenuate sound, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that something happened to your father and his hearing improved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would love the opposite... some kind of medical treatment to make my ears less sensitive to sound. I feel constantly bombarded by noise to a point where now I got this dorky little thing on my keychain with ear plugs in it for loud places.

Curious if anyone here has experience w/ this and any advice.

<comment><USER19> I can't hear all that great, but I am also very annoyed by noises.

I think earplugs are the best solution. I keep a box of earplugs where I am likely to get annoyed, office, bedroom, but I also keep a box in the car so I am likely to have them close at hand (say I go on vacation and the hotel has rowdy neighbors). I also keep a pair in my backpack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have read other studies by Dr. Angelika Doetzlhofer, and she is brilliant. I am heavily involved with disability law, and have had two very close associates who have received treatment aimed at inner-ear hair stimulation for balance issues. The study of molecular impediments to mammalian hair cell regeneration could not only change lives for those who have hearing loss, but also for those who suffer from balance issues. Thank you for the share!

</comment><comment><USER21> Hell yeah. I have tinnitus from my time in the military, and this would be a huge thing. I hope it comes to fruition in the next several years.

</comment><comment><USER22> i remember about a call for volunteers for an experiment treating hearing loss with some proteins and/or adenoviruses (not a specialist). this was a couple of years ago and it sounded pretty much exactly like what this article describes. a 90% success rate was expected.

as this was in the u.s. (washington dc, iirc?) and i'm not a citizen i didn't apply. i thought it to be a game changer, but found no follow up articles.

the original search even was on HN, but i have little hope of finding it again.

edit, after a little bit of googling:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4464776/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4464776/) and [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5225386/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5225386/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm curious if this will enable not only the recovery of those cells but also allow us to extend our hearing range

<comment><USER24> it cannot. The frequency limits of hearing are set by the length (and material properties) of the basilar membrane, not the density of innervation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Quite a few hearing impaired people had their cochlea hairs "burnt" by audiotoxic drugs. More specifically, they caught a serious infection in the meninges when young, and aggressive drugs were needed to save their lives.

It would be amazing if these cochlea hairs could be repaired.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was diagnosed with Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss years ago and haven't found any cures despite some kind of Chinese acupuncture wasn't of help.

<comment><USER27> I as well was diagnosed with SSH about a year and a half ago. This was shortly after I fell on my head in a yoga handstand class. I went to an Audiologist/ENT and was classified as having Meniere's and ultimately there was nothing I could do according to the doctors. I accepted this as truth because that's what the experts say and my Meniere's wasn't so bad at the time. Over time, the symptoms got worse and it was unbearable. My quality of life was at the lowest point of my existence and I had to do something. I did some research and found an article documenting people with Meniere's and how a specific niche of Chiropractic has helped them. This isn't the original article, but it's a copy of it:

[https://drthomasforest.com/menieres-disease- treatment/](https://drthomasforest.com/menieres-disease-treatment/)

I did my research and started going to this doctor and within weeks I was getting relief. Now it's been about 6 months since I started treatment and I would say my hearing is back to normal for about 2 months now. I'm not saying this would resolve your SSH issues, but it's an avenue worth looking at especially if the article makes sense to you.

<comment><USER15> Yea same, correcting my posture and doing some mind-body work has made my symptoms go away basically. I'm still improving to this day almost a year later.</comment></comment></comment>


The viridis color palettes - <AUTHOR> https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/intro-to-viridis.html <comment><USER2> The matplotlib palettes are available in several formats at cpt-city [http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/cpt- city/mpl/index.html](http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/cpt- city/mpl/index.html) (disclosure, I am the site maintainer).</comment>


You don't have to accept or decline a job offer - <AUTHOR> https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/you-dont-have-to-accept-or-decline-a-job-offer/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=hackernews.com <comment><USER2> Or in the real world:

"I like your offer, but I will have to consider my options as..."

"Okay - don't worry - we have plenty of other people applying."

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a pretty common misconception about salary negotiation—that the company will retract the offer if you negotiate. But it's _extremely_ rare and you're much better off negotiating than worrying about such a rare occurrence.

The worst-case scenario is usually just that the company doesn't budge on their offer.

By the time you're far enough into the process to get an offer, the company has invested significant resources to determine if you're a good fit and someone they want to bring on board. They're not going to forfeit all of that investment just because you say, "Thanks for your offer. If you can do [thing you're negotiating], then I'm on board."

I wrote about this and other common misconceptions about salary negotiations here: [https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/why-you-should-not- neg...](https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/why-you-should-not-negotiate- your-salary/)</comment></comment>


Your Startup Needs a Website (even if your product isn't ready yet) - <AUTHOR> http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/05/your-startup-needs-a-website-even-if-your-product-isnt-ready-yet.html <comment><USER3> While I agree a sales website would be useful, it can often be a lot of wasted effort. Startups can pivot significantly before they launch, and building up a sales website before you launch could be wasted effort if you end up targeting a different audience.

Still, once a startup is reasonably sure that they're sticking with their plan, no reason not to get one out there ASAP.

<comment><USER4> A sales website doesn't have to be complicated at all. A simple website with traffic driven to it with advertising, blogging or other marketing can help validate the existence of a market before you've invested a lot of effort in engineering.

I'm doing this with a placeholder site at <http://codeboff.in/> and a blog that drives traffic to the site (and private beta list) at <http://blog.codeboff.in/>

(I hope sharing these links will not be treated as spamming in the context of this discussion)

I went with the more time-consuming blogging approach instead of the traditional and quick advertising pilot because I'm bootstrapping this from India and web ads are more expensive to me by 6x to 8x (or whatever the purchasing parity difference is) and I can't justify that expense, especially in the light of my previous startup ideas which in retrospect have been more or less cuckoo.

I agree that startups do pivot before launch. I think you have to agree to take that risk against the market research advantage you're getting. It might help to keep the blurb on the sales website on the vague side to absorb minor pivoting.

edit: Spun off in the middle. What I was trying to say was that interest in the blog justifies the much greater investment in engineering that's going into my startup.

Without that interest, making up my mind about the idea would have been pointless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree that the product/solution will change drastically after it is launched so having a site oriented around product features is pointless. What this article is suggesting is that you should have one for 2 main reasons - <USER2> to explore the problem (you can do this with a blog or other info on the site) and secondly to start gathering names for a mailing list. The product will change but you will have a sense of the broad problem domain. There are many examples of startups doing a great job on this. Mint for example launched a blog and collected thousands of email addresses well in advance of releasing their product into market. When they did launch they already had an established audience and some traffic built up, which takes time no matter when you start.

</comment><comment><USER6> You need a separate website for _advertising_ your product/service and another one for the actual _service_</comment>


Reason Won't Save Us - <AUTHOR> http://m.nautil.us/issue/77/underworlds/reason-wont-save-us <comment><USER2> _In his classic 1980s experiments, University of California, San Francisco, neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet noted a consistent change in brain wave activity (a so-called "ready potential") prior to a subject's awareness of having decided to move his hand. Libet's conclusion was that the preceding activity was evidence for the decision being made subconsciously, even though subjects felt that the decision was conscious and deliberate. Since that time his findings, supported by subsequent similar results on fMRI and direct brain recordings, have featured prominently in refuting the notion of humans possessing free will._

and it's probably a data processing bug in the analysis! [https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free- will...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will- bereitschaftspotential/597736/)

<comment><USER3> Nice article. I don't believe in free will, but I never liked that Libet experiment. So many tenuous connections had to be made to connect electrical signals with free will, and most of the time people didn't even bother trying - they just asserted that because the impulse starts before you remember making a decision, you have no free will. That sounds like a non sequitur to me.

<comment><USER4> I prefer Hitchens answer to the question: "We have free will, we have no choice."

<comment><USER5> Try choosing to not be yourself or like the things you like or do the things you do.

We're not so free.

I've always worked off a model of "constrained will". We have will, it is just subject to a large number of constraints with a few degrees of freedom.

<comment><USER6> "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."

\--Arthur Schopenhauer

<comment><USER2> so much for propaganda, then!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Courage is the solution to despair. Reason can provide no answers." –Ernst > Toller (First Reformed, 2017)

I've felt the despair of this article for a time (and the quote above gave me some peace), but some recent hope came from Daniel Schmachtenberger[1]. He postulates that our conception of debate in our current information ecology selects and _optimizes_ for bias. He refers to the Hegelian dialectic as an alternative to debate—of an earnest synthesis from understanding both a thesis and its antithesis, resolving paradox with a higher order model. I've heard this described as steel-manning[1] another's argument to find its signal (as opposed to straw-manning the noise).

But Schmachtenberger, as well as Bret Weinstein I believe, proposes that the game-theoretic win/lose dynamic of our current system is so entrenched that it really selects for this type of narrative warfare which doesn't promote this type of open and honest information ecology for this to really work yet. So there's something to their post-game-theoretic frameworks (Bret's "Game B") that make me a lot less fatalistic and anarchist about the whole complexity game.

[1] The War on Sensemaking: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ)

[2] a.k.a purva paksha: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purva_paksha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purva_paksha)

<comment><USER8> Interestingly, this is quite easy to do if you focus yourself on achieving knowledge (i.e. you attempt to falsify your hypotheses and test your beliefs adequately). The real problem is that this isn't, maddeningly, a winning approach. You can be right[0], know you are right, follow a logical chain to the rightness and still lose. Superior knowledge guarantees nothing!

It's sort of like the amusing story of _The Wandering Earth_ (the short story, not the movie). In an ecosystem where other things win, the smart approach if you find truth is not necessarily to champion it. Sometimes you have to take the Kolmogorov Option [https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376) Related: The Parable of Lightning [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov- complicity-...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity- and-the-parable-of-lightning/)

0: Or to hold a reasonable prior of a hypothesis, if you want to be strict

<comment><USER9> Prof Daniel Cohen gives a Ted talk that I haven't watched but which, based on write ups, gives a nice antidote to this. Simply adopt the attitude that "losing" an argument is a good thing because you come away with a more refined view of the world. the real winner is the person that makes cognitive gains.

<comment><USER8> That wasn't what I was referring to. The winning there isn't winning the argument, which is really a trivial position to avoid. I first achieved it when I was a teenager and consistently achieved it in my early 20s. I have no reason to believe this is exceptional for anyone with a mild interest in epistemology (Crocker's Rules, etc. are examples of these being rapidly realized by individuals)

The thing I was referring to is winning at life. You can be less wrong (in the sense described above) and lose at life.

I.e. the more refined view of the world does not monotonically move you towards most conventional victories (improved prosperity, happiness, life standards).

Sibling comment has a link to more (and reinforces the triviality of achieving the more-information-mindset), besides SSC and Scott Aaronson [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298154](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298154)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Take a group of diehard anti-free-will determinists to the deciding World Series game and have them watch their home team's batter lose the Series … how many would bother to attend the game if they accepted that the decision whether or not to swing occurred entirely at a subliminal level?_

It's interesting that whenever the discussion of free-will comes up, it's always in the context of someone making a decision on how to interpret if or how someone else has free-will. The diehard anti-free-will determinists have no choice in attending the game, and if they do or not is not dependent on how they see the outcome of the game as deterministic or not. In this vein, the classic free-will argument of if criminals deserve punishment if they don't have free-will is an argument made from a hubristic point of view, as if those deciding the punishment exist outside of determinism. This is often an attempt to get anti-free-will types in a contradiction, similar to the claim/argument that there no atheists in foxholes.

<comment><USER11> Related to this, I'd recommend looking into Philosopher John Searle and his thoughts on consciousness. He's pro-determinism and gives a good argument for why free-will is an illusion but one an illusion we can never 'escape' from.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_c...](https://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousness?language=en)

<comment><USER12> He's also famous for the Chinese Box thought experiment, widely derided by everyone apart from his own students as the most high profile, idiotic, uninformative, trivially debunked thought experiment of all time, which teaches us negative information (in that it actually wastes time bringing up useless shit that otherwise wouldn't receive scholarly discussion except that he's an old white guy that was in the field early).

Searle is an absolute waste, nobody should engage with his drivel, ever, period.

<comment><USER13> Because of one thought experiment? It certainly generated a lot of conversation for being so trivially debunked. But it's not like it's the only thing he's ever talked about. And the old white dude reference is unnecessary.

But anyway, I think Searle had a point about semantics not being syntax with the Chinese Room. They system doesn't understand anything other than how to translate from A to B. And that's not what understanding language is about (see the later Wittgenstein or any philosophy of language).

However, as Daniel Dennett pointed out in his rebuttal, although one can produce a somewhat convincing fake to some people, similar to "passing" the Turing Test with ELIZA or any bot we've created so far, a genuine Chinese room would have to know the nuances of language at such a level that there would be no question that it understands what Chinese words mean. So Searle was wrong in his setup of the thought experiment, becuase it assumes the room is only following syntatic rules, instead of understanding the web of context and meaning that words take place in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Such pessimism! But why not instead begin with a different set of assumptions. Consciousness may well not exist, it's just a word. People have made up words for patterns they perceive but do not exist all the time. Osiris does not exist, afterlife does not exist, yet they moved thousands of tons of rock to build pyramids.

\- Free will does not exist either, let's face it, the evidence will keep getting more and more conclusive. So, why despair? Our brains are not "magic machines acting on a dangerous world", our brains generate the world. Free will is our little game.

\- All of our thinking is ex-post facto rationalizations. We seem to be good at creating models of this generated world. There is no distinct boundary between "reasoned thinking", "a hunch" and "trust your feelings", they re all beliefs that stem from different sets of assumptions.

\- Our feelings are calculations, for which we don't yet have a model, but a hunch (e.g. time is absolute) is not to be discarded lightly, but only when reasoned thinking provides a much more satisfactory view of the world (time is relative). Very few tools are of guidance in that respect, only Occam's razor.

\- The world that our brain generates includes the AI machines of the future, for which we will have to somehow rationalize and reason about even without a good model.

\- Until we build a better model of our individual and collective behavior, our motivations and our beliefs, we must stick with the current political/judicial model. Neuroscience has not yet deciphered human intention to a comprehensive mathematical theory. Patience, we 'll get there.

<comment><USER15> If "free will does not exist", are we free to choose whether to despair or not?

<comment><USER14> What if we are not? What does that change?

<comment><USER15> Your question "So, why despair?" becomes redundant then.

<comment><USER14> oh that's fair, however, not having free will does not mean one does not have will at all. We re still motivated by our constitution as persons and animals, we will choose to despair or not, just that decision won't be ex nihilo. In a way it s rather comforting, like deciding to "sit back and enjoy the ride" .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Gawd, each decade we extend our "reason" beyond what we thought possible. We've always been at our limits. His weak example of batters is simplistic and silly. Batters study the hand position so that they can recognize the pitch type and make a probabalistic decision. Same goes for goalies who stop unseen pucks, position, probabilities, stick/ice/shooter all rolled up into "Only god saves more!".

</comment><comment><USER17> I agree with the overall premise, but I disagree with conflating our physiological perceptual limitations with the psychological biases that color our attempts to exercise pure logic and reason.

If you experience an optical illusion and it's explained to you, your reasoning power will enable you to fully accept that your perceptions are incorrect. But if you have a bias that causes you to have a strong opinion on a controversial subject, even if someone tries to point out to you that your bias is rendering your perceptions invalid, and even if you accept in theory that that is the case, it likely won't change your strongly held belief.

For example if you have a _strong_ opinion regarding the existence of the Christian God, and someone tells you that your bias is affecting your opinion, you might concede that you have some kind of bias, but most likely you'll continue to believe that your opinion is right.

<comment><USER18> I believe that the strongest root of bias is society. Paraphrasing Sartre, bias is the others. So I disagree with the other thing the author is conflating: that society often holding ridiculous opinions is because _individuals_ can't think rationally.

It's the other way around: individuals can't think very rationally because they're pressed by society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Whoever you are talking to, you need to be on a similar place when it comes to the balance of reason and emotions. Otherwise you talk a language that is too different.

So in one culture you talk with reason; in another, you talk with emotions. In the full scale of the world - in the context of civilisation as discussed in the article - there is too much variation among the people; especially among the mix of cultures there are now in every country, so it can become very difficult to come to agreements. This is because if you are not careful what you are trying to say will make no sense to anyone.

One effective way is to identify who thinks how, allow themselves to organise into groups based on how the ratios of reason or emotions, then address each group in a manner that that group would understand.

</comment><comment><USER20> I too have come to wonder whether what we call "reasoning" is merely the same faculty we use to make sense of observations in the outside world, simply turned inward. Just a read-only abstraction layer on top of a complex mass of patterns encoded into a neural network.

</comment><comment><USER21> An approach to "free will" is to notice that it is an useful concept for organizing our experience, and so, why not use it? How it's useful:

\- when we can say "this ought to happen", and work towards that to happen.

\- when we can say "I desire this but intend that", and follow-through our intention rather than our desire.

\- when we can not model a person's action on a purely cause-and-effect basis, and there appears to be an inherent unpredictability in their decision.

It is useful to say/think that there's "free will" at play, as there's a certain character to the situations (and why not name it, so it's easier to recognize).

Above three scenarios owing to Kant (Critique of Practical Reason). The first two, we generally do not ascribe to other species, which might imply that they have less free will than we do.

</comment><comment><USER22> Some people are more prone to be dictated by feelings. The other part are more prone to be dictated by logic. These groups will never agree!

Studies show people with brain injury unable to feel, are unable to make sound decisions (pure rational thought). We know what happens when only feelings decide, that would wreck society overnight.

Luckily, the way our brain works. Intuition/feelings come first, and then we can rationalize and filter, based on logic!

<comment><USER23> > The other part are more prone to be dictated by logic.

you are right to say "prone to", because as a matter of fact what is happening with logic is usually to give ourselves a reason to fall back on what we believed in the first place. It's very hard to truly convince very rational people that they are wrong (most people don't switch opinions)

<comment><USER24> It's a popular meme, but to me, it doesn't seem to reflect reality well.

Also, there's a parallel comment thread that points out the research conclusions on which this meme is based might have been an effect of bad data processing.

See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21296422](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21296422).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> denton-scratch Thanks for the article.

I wonder if he's a Buddhist?

Most of the way through he seems to be making the case that consciousness and will are illusory, and that we are indistinguishable from mechanisms. But towards the end, he seems to allow that we can take measures to improve our decision-making abilities.

My interpretation of Buddhist psychology is that, for the most part, our behaviour (decision-making) is the result of "causes and conditions", i.e. our actions are generally not "voluntary"; but that we can nevertheless, through introspection and practice, improve our understanding and decision-making.

I think his poker-bot needs an "introspection circuit" to oversee and direct the learning process. I do not accept his contention that poker-bots demonstrate that deep-learning/AI can ever model a conscious mind without such a circuit.

[Edit: I spent several decades studying Buddhism; I returned to an uncompromising rationalism about 10 years ago, and I'm much better now. Doesn't that suggest that people can change their minds?]

<comment><USER25> From a traditional Buddhist perspective free will is necessary. If everything was predetermined, the entire path of practice to freedom from suffering would be pointless. However the past karma has an large influence on the present and cannot be ignored.

<comment> denton-scratch I thought that it was karma that led to your being born in an age in which a Buddha had existed, karma that led to you encountering the teachings, karma that led to you being able to become a monk, karma that led to your introduction to a teacher, and karma that led to your success in your practice. Nearly everything about the path is determined by karma, no?

But all of that kind of karma results from kind (or skillful) actions, and I think the idea is that those moral/immoral actions have to be deliberate, to have any impact on your karma. The way I heard it, most actions that bear at all karma, only bear on karma for this life; actions that create heavy- lifting, multi-life karma are rare.

See why I think the guy might be a Buddhist?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > We spectators are equally affected by the discrepancy between what we see > and what we know. Take a group of diehard anti-free-will determinists to the > deciding World Series game and have them watch their home team's batter lose > the Series by not swinging at a pitch that, to the onlookers, was clearly in > the strike zone. How many do you think would be able to shrug off any sense > of blame or disappointment in the batter? Indeed, how many would bother to > attend the game if they accepted that the decision whether or not to swing > occurred entirely at a subliminal level?

im kind of a determinist even though I don't enjoy it, I think if you're a determinist and you still get up every morning, you've made some kind of arrangement with the paradox of having no choice yet "having" choice such that enjoying a baseball game is pretty low difficulty level among determinist daily challenges.

</comment><comment><USER27> We are possibly being driven to both great advancement and species destruction by the emergence of what we call "consciousness" \-- the evolutionary advantage of a theory of mind that allows for complex and powerful collaboration and knowledge-sharing, with a sometimes counterproductive by- product, the illusory concept of the self.

</comment><comment><USER28> I actually agree with much of this, "reason" as we know it, is not necessarily an intrinsically beneficial thing, it's just had a decently long track record of providing stability and improved standards of living.

For much of human history though, reason took a back seat to centralized power and shared belief systems (even if they were not based on reason). E.g.: Egyptian society could get a lot more done if everyone believed in the sun god, and that the pharaoh was god-like. Shared beliefs, even if false or unreasonable, increased stability and allowed society to better organize.

Roughly since the enlightenment, reason has had a similarly strong ability to organize society, and the civilizations that embraced it have tended to live longer than those that don't. In the context of history, it's arguably more of a social tool than a underlying value.

</comment><comment><USER29> The author is probably more qualified to discuss these matters than me, but it still seems to me like he is getting trapped by his too rigid categorizations.

Just because we're not good at explaining our behaviour after the fact, doesn't mean we lack agency or 'will.'

</comment><comment><USER30> It is time to stop having a white color background on internet sites, it is very aggressive for the eyes, instead, a sepia color would be much better.

</comment><comment><USER31> So, this is an interesting exhibit. When people complain about postmodernism, this is what they are complaining about.

Personally, I strongly disagree, though of course there are plenty of huge obstacles in the way, most of them bake in our "human hardware". It doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to get past them.

But make your own (rational :)) opinion.

</comment><comment><USER32> There is something apparently ironic about any article presenting a rational argument for the proposition that conscious reasoning is an illusion. I suppose they are expected to work through epiphenomenalism.

</comment><comment><USER33> Couldn't help but think of Snow Crash when I saw this title.

<comment><USER34> "See, I told you they'd listen to Reason," Fisheye says, shutting down the whirling gun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Emotions and feelings are fixed and finite and give predictable outcomes. Emotions can't save us either. Morals ... well, that's "reason" too.

</comment><comment><USER36> We don't reason. We adapt. Even if a protagonist was dumped into an crazy isekai world where science and math doesn't apply, he would still do ok.

</comment><comment><USER23> > that conscious reasoning, the commonly believed remedy for our social ills

commonly believed? by who? I have never heard that claim before.

</comment><comment><USER37> Libet's "preceding activity" is simply an example of branch prediction at work.

</comment><comment><USER38> Possibly even worse, "Rationality will not save us" (Robert S. Mcnamara)

</comment><comment><USER39> >steer civilization away from the abyss

what is this abyss author is so afraid of?

<comment><USER40> Maybe, Oclocracy or another dictatorship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Anyone decided his major after applying to it?

</comment><comment><USER42> [https://archive.is/9QhKt](https://archive.is/9QhKt)

</comment><comment><USER42> Reason + Priority + Adapt = Survival

</comment><comment><USER43> You cannot Reason a man out of Thrall.</comment>


Ask HN: Failed startup, lost $110K need some advice - <AUTHOR> My company/startup ended on the 90% side, about $110 in debt. Was trying to make it without VC money, but the company fell victim to our inexperience. Learned how hard it is to find help. Debates went on but no decisions were made. No proper wireframe we were winging the process with only one dev. What do I do now? Any one else on same boat? or have expreinced failure ? TL.DR; Failed startup, guy loses $110K need some sage advice <comment><USER2> Hard to give advice beyond the generic platitudes in a forum such as this. But some observations:

Only one dev is not so much of a problem, provided that one dev is the founder and/or is seriously motivated. VC money or lack of it is also not a problem. VC is primarily only useful to acclerate growth not find product/market fit.

Not being able to service your debt: That's fatal.

So priority #1: get revenue to service the debt. If your company is not in a position to sell anything yet to service the debt, get a job and service the debt out of salary. Going forward, cut expenses, and keep the burn rate low or even zero. Then focus on revenue. Depending on your situation this may take anywhere from a few months to a year or two. Try and hang in there, but don't be irrational about it. If your exceeding your financial limits: stop and shutdown the business. Post-failure is not as bad as you might currently imagine it to be.

<comment><USER3> I've lost over that amount in stocks before I learned to never invest in a company that is not making sales. It always takes longer than you think, and while you wait your investment declines in the form of dilution or debt.

It's the same thing for your own startup. Do not take on debt unless you have a sale, and the debt is for fulfilling the order.

On the brighter side, I eventually made the money back through my investments and you will do better next time. It seems in business there is no way to learn other than the hard way - I learned more about psychology than finance.

Also, since you were extended credit, you probably are doing better financially than it sounds. That is, you have some asset backing the debt. So the greater challenge is forgiving yourself and moving on rather than the financials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes I know the feeling. What I did was I found out the single most engaging feature/benefit of my product and built that into a business. I used contractors instead of a full team to lower costs and financed the startup from a salary I got from a new job.

Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you have any other questions.

</comment><comment><USER5> Although I don't know your particularly situation and where you live, if you are US based you might want to consult an attorney or accountant who has worked with startups.

One of the motivations behind bankruptcy (chpt 11 particularly) law was to mitigate the losses that entrepreneurs are likely to encounter given the risk that they take on -- at least this is what I've been told by accountants across the political spectrum. This may also address any personal financial losses that you may have encountered.

 _Feel free to ignore the political dig_ but this is smart business apparently: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live- updates/ge...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live- updates/general-election/real-time-fact-checking-and-analysis-of-the-first- presidential-debate/fact-check-has-trump-declared-bankruptcy-four-or-six- times/?utm_term=.fa29e3fb30be)</comment>


Spotify Said to Retaliate Against Artists with Apple Exclusives - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-26/spotify-said-to-retaliate-against-artists-with-apple-exclusives <comment><USER2> So Apple has enough money coming in from other businesses that, if they want to (and maybe they do), they can simply operate their Apple Music service at a loss. Forever. Spotify can't do that so how do you combat against Apple, one of your biggest competitors?

Burying in the search rankings and not being featured doesn't seem like a good way to handle it. If those artists are among people's favorites if they can't find them as easily on Spotify AND if they can get exclusives with Apple, why wouldn't they just jump ship to Apple Music?

Obviously I don't understand all of the nuances of the music business so I could be completely off base here but it feels like, to me, this would have the opposite affect that they intend.

<comment><USER3> "So Apple has enough money coming in from other businesses that, if they want to (and maybe they do), they can simply operate their Apple Music service at a loss. Forever. Spotify can't do that ..."

But Spotify can and is also operating at a loss. They are just doing it with VC money instead of their own. The numbers for 2015 were a loss of almost 200 million dollars!

<comment><USER4> That VC money is given to Spotify on the expectation that eventually Spotify will _stop_ operating at a loss. Otherwise there is no reason to give them money at all.

If and when that expectation no longer holds, the money will stop.

<comment><USER5> But what, exactly, does Spotify bring to the table that justifies more than a couple of percent operating fee? They don't own the content; they're just middlemen. The labels / rights holders can continually raise their prices to just below (or perhaps above, if VCs want to subsidize forever) Spotify's income.

Spotify's app works at best ok (I'm on android). But even a good app plus recommendations probably gets you amazon-sized margins.

<comment><USER6> Well I guess nobody would mind if Spotify goes bust then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spotify is a money losing operation that artists already criticize heavily because they make pennies from it (because most users are on the free tier and ad revenue is much smaller than paid subscriptions)[1]. They have deep pocketed competitors for whom music represents an ancillary business. They're on month to month contracts with the major labels who want them to match Apple Music's higher cut [2].

Usually you take the stick over carrot approach when you have some leverage.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/04/taylor- sw...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/04/taylor-swift-bad- blood-spotify-streaming-music)

[2] [http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-contract- three...](http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-contract-three-major- labels-wants-pay-less/)

<comment><USER8> From what I know of the market, most of the money paid to music services goes to paying the contracts. The main issue is that the labels are the ones which get paid the lion's share, not the music service or the artist.

<comment><USER7> Which is why artists like doing exclusives with Apple.

[https://medium.com/@sdotglass/apple-music- exclusives-2d5b5ed...](https://medium.com/@sdotglass/apple-music- exclusives-2d5b5ed3ac4f#.9qi2941ii)

<comment><USER9> I don't see why if an artist can publish directly on Apple Music they can't do it on Spotify.

Artists are usually locked by their labels with pretty bad contracts that prevent them from doing anything else on the side. Labels often even can even get the majority of the revenue from live performances.

<comment><USER3> Publishing directly is the Tidal model and it really should be the future as it benefits the artist and the streaming provider and positions the record label as the middle man that it is.

I am not aware of any artists that "publish direct" to Apple Music. The reason that is a problem for a Spotify is because that is "biting the hand that feeds."

If you start encouraging artists to deal directly to you the streaming company, you can rest assured that when it comes time to renegotiate your licensing deal with the record labels the terms will not be very favorable or at least not as favorable as they were previously.

You mentioned that "Labels often even get the majority of revenue from live performances."

I believe what you are referring to is a "360 deal" I think these are largely the domain of the only biggest artists in the world. I could be wrong though.

[https://www.thebalance.com/how-360-deals-in-the-music- indust...](https://www.thebalance.com/how-360-deals-in-the-music-industry- work-2460343)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lots of people at this point basically ignore music unless it's on Spotify and fall back to youtube. I don't think anyone picks up Apple Music because of exclusives. Mostly it's a question of what platform people prefer.

I'm super happy apple music exists because it puts some movement into the space. Before it there was no real competition to Spotify.

<comment><USER2> > Before it there was no real competition to Spotify.

What about Google Music (or is it Google Play Music or just Play Music or just Play under a music category? ugh)? They were earlier and have been really good especially lately. Their initial iOS app was awful but I heard it has improved. There is also Groove music (which I guess is now XBox music?) but the Apps are awful for it. I got a Groove music subscription for the heavily discounted black friday sale and stopped using it after a few weeks simply because the apps are all absolutely _horrific_.

<comment><USER11> Play music has no desktop client so it's not even worth considering. I think apple music and Spotify are both very nice. The android apps of both are particularly good and both have acceptable desktop clients.

<comment><USER12> > Play music has no desktop client so it's not even worth considering.

It has no first-party native desktop client, but...so, what, really? Its streaming content from the internet _anyway_ , so I can't really see what the problem is with using a web client as the first-party desktop client.

(OTOH, there is at least one third-party non-web desktop client for it.)

<comment><USER13> If you have many windows and tabs open it's super annoying to track down the one with the music player on it. Much easier to Apple-Tab to an app.

<comment><USER14> Eh just open play music in a new browser window and only use it for music?

<comment><USER11> Eh just release a proper native client if you want to compete? I don't understand why people would prefer a Web client over native. Tell me one advantage. For the user.

<comment><USER15> Simple. I don't need to install another app.

<comment><USER11> Installing is a one time, one click thing. Think of it as opening another web app, except you have to do it only once :)

<comment><USER15> And this gets me absolutely nothing extra over the web app.

<comment><USER11> Nothing except better performance, better looks, better smoother playback, more features, offline playback, music key shortcuts, etc etc.

<comment><USER15> Performance is great, looks are subjective, and none of your other point are relevant to me. Like I said, there's literally nothing it gets me. Clearly it's not the right solution for you, and that's a bummer - because I love it : )

<comment><USER11> It's not about specific users. It's about the user base in general. A native app has many advantages that a user may like or may not care about. On the other hand a Web app has one advantage, not needing to install it. In my opinion, people in general would care much more about having a lot of options and features even if they have to go through the extra click needed for installation.

One way to check what most users care for is to look at subscription numbers. And I couldn't find a reliable source for that. So I guess our discussion is pending until we see user numbers.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I get what you're saying. I just don't agree. I've never thought that a native app was "missing" \- I never thought about it at all until it was brought up in this thread.

And for me, it's not at all about the user base - it's about a specific user - me. If it's not the right service for you because there's no native app luckily you have alternatives and can move on. I think it's an awesome service for 10 bucks a month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone else think Apple is fighting a petty war? Spotify is a solid product and instead of spending energy, money and time fighting them, they could acquire them and take on more ambitious fights.

<comment><USER17> Or they could compete in the marketplace w/ a better product, an integrated product strategy, and a long term understanding of the market and talent. In doing so, they deliver shareholder value without burning unnecessary cash.

Oh look! They're doing exactly that with exclusives.

<comment><USER16> Exclusives provide a monopoly of sorts to Apple by removing choices for consumer. That makes exclusives a _bad_ thing for the consumers and the market.

<comment><USER18> It works both way. The producers want to be paid for their work and they've said so many times, in uncertain words. Spotify is still at the point that they rely on new signups at the free tier. Apple doesn't do free, they pay better, and they are willing to give artists the white glove treatment.

As a listener you have a choice of pay now for access or wait until it's streaming everywhere else.

<comment><USER16> I get that artists want to make more money but at the end of the day, that is simply a function of the _total_ pot size and the money that has to be spent to get a pot that size.

Spotify, so far, has been losing money. Overall, monetizing music is just a very hard business. I feel that point is often missed by artists who want to put the blame on Spotify as if Spotify is sitting on billions in profits that could go to the artists. Apple temporarily enabling a _few_ artists to make some extra money doesn't change the fact that music is a very hard business to make money in--as much for the broadcasters like Spotify as for the artist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So Spotify is penalizing artists who opt to do an exclusive with a company whose business model doesn't give their music away for free? That just seems wrong.

<comment><USER19> It's hard to see how this will help them? The Taylor Swift moment may be coming to Spotify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I get a bad feeling about everyone in this space operating at a massive loss in an attempt to force the competition out of business by attrition. It seems like the domestic equivalent of dumping. I'm not informed enough to make a strong judgment on it, but it doesn't seem like healthy competition.

<comment><USER21> But is Apple Music operating at a loss, though? Doing so is not their modus operandi. They don't have a free tier and the only time they're not making money is during the one month trial period. On top of that, they actually do pay more to artists/labels.

<comment><USER22> Well, it's a three month trial and they pay the musicians during that time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Do people actually take exclusives into account that much when picking a streaming service? It seems to me like the biggest differentiating factors would be price and familiarity, as long as the services in question had a reasonable amount of the content one wanted.

<comment><USER24> Exclusives are just a good way to get people to try out your service. It works best when someone doesn't already have a streaming subscription, and their favorite artist releases an album exclusively somewhere. You sign up to hear the album, you like the service, you decide to stick with it.

<comment><USER25> With timed exclusives they can also capture some amount of revenue from conversion of free trial users into "forgot to unsubscribe" users.

They got me with Coloring Book a few months ago. It wasn't available elsewhere, so I signed up for the free trial. Well before the free trial was over Coloring Book appeared on Spotify (my preferred platform). I prompt forgot about Apple Music until I saw a bill in my inbox. I then couldn't figure out how to unsub without googling the process, it's certainly not readily available as an option in-app (although that just might be the way Apple sometimes tends to obfuscate through streamlining).

<comment><USER19> The unsubscribing process is truely awful. I'd try them again as rumour has it they have got a lot better, but importing Spotify playlists wasn't possible early on. I'll have to look again to see if that's solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Subscription streaming considered harmful

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't competition great?

<comment><USER28> Exclusives are bad for consumers.</comment></comment>


The brief history of Facebook apologizing - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2014/07/02/the-brief-history-of-facebook.html

<comment><USER2> I'm always interested in the wording of the apologies themselves as well. In the most recent one: "My co-authors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described our research and any anxiety it caused." Specifically "the way the paper described our research". Not for actually doing the experiment, just that it came off wrong to the public...

<comment><USER3> In this case it seems reasonable.

1\. A/B testing is done all the time and has undefined emotional effects on users other than to maximize addiction & ad revenue. Google does this constantly and is worshipped for it's ingenuity.

2\. The whole point is that they didn't _know_ whether there would be emotional contagion, which is why they conducted the experiment. And yet similar experiments are happening all the time, so the experiment didn't add to the emotional burden of users - it just uncovered it.

[edit: I'd go further and suggest that maybe it would be unethical for Facebook _not_ to do experiments like this. They need to understand this kind of effect in order to make responsible design decisions.]

<comment><USER4> Google is most definitely not "worshipped for their ingenuity" in data mining and profiling their users. Have you been living under a rock for the past decade?

People don't trust Google. They've ruined their brand by abusing their users' trust, and Facebook is on the same path.

As for what's "reasonable". Apple is operating a large messaging network as well - iMessage. And they also published a paper recently.

However, their paper was about how their architecture prevents anyone, not just third parties, but in most cases _Apple 's own employees_ from reading and manipulating user data. No one at Apple can read a message you send between two iOS devices. Apple aren't saints, but I like their idea of _reasonable_ way more than what you're trying to sell here.

<comment><USER3> Woah - slow down. I'm not selling anything.

I think you're right about Google's brand, but I think they can simultaneously be distrusted and worshipped at the same time.

I also think that Apple is showing that compromising privacy is a consequence of Google and Facebook's business models, and not some fundamental rule of the web.

But, I don't think any of this changes my view that this particular study is not unethical in the way people are claiming given that Facebook exists and behaves as it does. If you think that Facebook operates an unethical business, I'd still argue that this doesn't make it worse, and that becoming less ignorant about how they affect people is a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apologies begin to sound pretty insincere when the company (or person) making the apology _keep on doing the same damned thing that they 're apologising for._

This particular apology is even worse because they're not apologising for _doing_ the research; they're apologising "for the way the paper described our research and any anxiety it caused."

They're not saying "We will never do this again."

They're not saying "We will never do this again without first obtaining ethical approval from an appropriate review board."

They're not saying "We will never change your Facebook newsfeed to affect your emotional state in order to make you more susceptible to adverts for particular products."

They're not saying "We will never accept payment from an advertiser to change your Facebook feed in order to affect your emotional state."

So, what conclusions should we draw here?

<comment><USER3> How is this the same as something they've done before?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not really sure why Facebook needs to apologize at all.

It's a free service that you agree to use. You should read the fine-print if you care about anything like this.

If it can be proven that experiments or anything else worth apologizing for is detrimental in some way, then something needs to be said. But otherwise, I think they're free to do with they want with their data.

<comment><USER7> Free things still aren't allowed to cause harm to the people who use them. And the fine print wasn't changed until after the experiment.

<comment><USER6> Right. Like I said, if it can be proven that their experiment caused harm of some kind, then that's when something should be done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, you know how it is. They do it once, shame on them. They do it 10 times...shame on you for continuing to use Facebook.</comment>


Tails 3 Offers Easy Anonymity for All - <AUTHOR> https://www.linux.com/learn/intro-to-linux/2017/8/tails-3-offers-easy-anonymity-all <comment><USER2> I'm a fan of Tails 3 but certainly wouldn't describe it as "easy anonymity". I've trained dozens of human rights defenders and journalists in its use and it always has some sort of problems. Mainly with wifi driver issues but also some USBs have problems running it also.</comment>


Dear tech giants, if you love someone set them free - <AUTHOR> http://www.vladalexandruionescu.com/2015/09/dear-tech-giants-if-you-love-someone.html <comment><USER2> Since it's inevitably brought up every time this topic arises:

This is one of the reasons why California is still such a popular place to do business because the law explicitly nullifies those provisions in contracts.

See California Labor Code Sec. 2870

[http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi- bin/displaycode?section=lab&gr...](http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi- bin/displaycode?section=lab&group=02001-03000&file=2870-2872)

<comment><USER3> Despite the fact that California has this law, it doesn't matter in a practical sense. A scenario I've seen play out multiple times:

1\. Employee creates side project

2\. Employee quits to pursue side project as a company

3\. Former employer decides to sue employee because they don't like it for whatever reason (this need not have any legitimate chance of winning in court, it could be entirely frivolous)

4\. Former employee then has to decide between spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees fighting a lawsuit from the former employer or simply giving up

We saw this just the other day on HN. I've seen it happen to friends and colleagues.

Best thing to do: no side projects. If you have those ambitions, work as a contractor. The legal agreements are much more rational. You get paid for the hours you bill and are allowed to do any work you want outside of your billable time.

<comment><USER4> I presume you're referring to Smule suing Shred, which I think has gotten so much attention (deservedly) because it's so rare. Off the top of my head I can't think of another such example, but I can think of scores of side projects turned into companies, including my own, without employer interference.

You should take precautions of course--read inventions agreements very carefully--but I wouldn't at all go so far as to only do contracting. Especially if you live in California, as others have noted. Half the companies in SV were started by people working at Google or Facebook.

<comment><USER3> You're right, there are plenty of examples where that didn't happen. However, I've seen enough examples where it has. Enough that I think it's a bad idea to do side projects while you have full time employment. Unless those projects are strictly volunteer efforts for which you have no intention of turning into a commercial business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wait until I have an offer, then I ask to see the company's non-compete. Then, if the document says I can't contribute to other projects, I tell them I contribute to a number of open-source and other projects, and I need anything done on my own time to belong to me. I've done this two or three times, and have always gotten the agreement to be amended.

Wait until you have an offer in hand. That is your moment of greatest leverage, when they are most invested in having you on board.

</comment><comment><USER6> > But for the duration of your employment, all your ideas belong to them.

Only in certain states, and I only if you sign such a contract. Did the author actually read his contract and say: "Please remove this part"?

I know California and Washington both have state laws limiting what companies can do in terms of taking ownership of your "outside" work.

<comment><USER7> Good luck getting a company or "remove this part" of a contract. I've always been told very clearly and angrily that that was not up for discussion.

My current employer technically forbids me from showing photographs of my dog to my mom. Naturally, no one would ever care if I did, but my contract explicitly considers any distribution of anything I produce that can be copyrighted (at work or not) an act corporate espionage.

<comment><USER8> I have had success redlining a contract with similar terms, it certainly isn't unheard of.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, I've mostly worked for very large companies.

In large corporations, an exception to a blanket IP contract would require approval by fairly high ranking people in both HR and Legal. When you have >10,000 employees, individual exceptions simply don't happen for anyone under any circumstances.

My experience is only reflective of very large companies. I doubt it's representative of smaller employers.

<comment><USER9> Are you being paid well enough by this bigcorp that it's worth losing the ability to comment on HN without violating the letter of your agreement (since comments are copyrighted by their authors by default)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I get the angst, and share it, on the other side of the table is a company paying you for your "full time" employment, they want to believe they have paid for all your time.

So the angst arises when you aren't really giving them all your time, you are keeping some for yourself to do things that are of interest to you and not in your employer's interest[1].

That is why they want you make a choice, either commit or don't, all in, or not. If you want to parcel out your time, then contracting is a much better way to do that, neither side feels like they are being taken advantage of.

Of course there are IP issues, and one which I hope will someday be rationalized by a better IP policy and framework[2] but contracting helps there too. You take ownership of your own "overhead" (benefits, vacation plans, etc) and then you sell the time you have to work on things either to someone else for direct payment, or to yourself as an investment in a future revenue stream.

[1] They would argue that if you have time to work on that you could have used that time to work further on your project they assigned you. Vacation and leisure, keeps you balanced so is in the employers interest.

[2] And realize that currently 'time to exhausting all the hydrogen fuel in the Sun' is looking like it will happen first.

<comment><USER11> The time I am committing to a company is in the hours per week that I am paid to work. There's 168 hours in a week, if you're not paying me for all of them, I can do what I like in the remaining time.

Dedicating your whole waking life to a company is plain stupid.

<comment><USER12> There are different classes of employee.

Your attitude is appropriate if you clock in, clock out, and are paid different amounts in different weeks if you show up for different lengths of time.

However I'm guessing that you are paid a fixed salary and aren't clocked. And you aren't a contractor. In that case you're a professional employee. You legally have a working relationship with them 24x7. Which is why you're not paid overtime to take clients out to dinner, or answer a page in the middle of the night.

But if that relationship always exists, who owns the intellectual property that you create away from the office? This is up to a combination of the contract you signed, and local laws.

<comment><USER10> Exactly this. If you are a professional, and in the US, this also called an "exempt" employee, you are paid a fixed salary (nominally higher than an hourly employee makes) and you don't "clock in" and "clock out", you are always on the clock. That is the nature of the employment relationship you have with your employer.

Contrast that with say Lawyers or contractors, or checkout clerks at the market who sell an hour's worth of work for $x.

This is really important to understand and internalize as an engineer. It is important because it is the way employment law looks at the relationship and that is the law which you are compelled to obey if you want to continue working/living where you are.

<comment><USER5> I'm an exempt employee, but my time certainly does not all belong to my employer. I realize there are some who do, but I do not check email at midnight. My phone has a do-not-disturb setting that goes from 10 pm to 6 am. If I was asked to forego seeing my family for an extended period of time so I could, say, work on a report until 10 pm every night -- although I would try to help, any more than a small amount of this would be abusive, and I would decline to do it. If this was a real problem, I'd find another job.

Being exempt does not make me a slave. It does not mean all my creative power is used only for my employer. If I were to accept those conditions, I would have to be paid five or ten times more salary -- not even a linear increase, because the time is non-linearly more valuable to me.

I've been at a company that behaves like this. It was completely abusive of the meaning of exempt. I have nothing but contempt for companies like this.

Simple solution, at least for me: don't sign a contract that suggests that everything you think belongs to your employer; or at the very least, take your pound of flesh when you do sign something like that.

Incidentally, even the awful company above changed their contract for me when I refused to sign the over-the-top original document.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I plan to leave my job in a few months because I want to work on an open source project unrelated to my job but possibly subject to the "land grab" IP contract I signed as other divisions in the company work on software in that genre. I live in California, but even if the provision is unenforceable I don't have the resources to fight a megacorp and I want to make a clean break. (This also isn't the only reason I'm leaving.)

Looking for a new job is tricky. Being able to work on this and other open source projects is a non-negotiable requirement for me. Similarly, I want to work fewer hours and would be satisfied accepting proportionately lower compensation. How do I make those conditions clear and avoid wasting everyone's time?

I have a very strong open source resume and finding a ordinary job is no problem. You want me on your team.

I'm tempted to just quit outright then start the job search by putting out a full resume along with my conditions. Is that wise?

<comment><USER14> Just state your requirements in a reasonable way. You'll quickly filter out non-OSS friendly companies, which given your post here looks like you would not want to work for anyway.

The less work for less compensation is a harder nut to crack. From a companies standpoint it is hard enough to find people and if the people they do find are good, but only want to work 1/2 time then the company must find 2x as many.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The truth of this post strongly depends on both where you live, and who you work for.

If you live in New York, what this post says is absolutely true. Anything you do, on your own time, on your own equipment, belongs to your employer. And it sucks. I believe that this is a hidden drag on startups there. And it is one of the reasons why I do not want to live in New York any more.

If you live in California, this post is mostly wrong on IP ownership. The exception is that if you're doing something that relates to your employer's business, then you've got a problem. Even if you didn't know it related. Which is a problem if your employer has a lot of irons in a lot of fires like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and so on do. However it isn't a problem if you work for a small company.

<comment><USER15> Well, this post was specifically complaining about working for large tech companies. I mean, it is right there in the headline of the post.

<comment><USER12> In that case the tech companies are hardly at fault for California law.

Push comes to shove they don't generally assert their theoretical rights too aggressively in my experience. However their lawyers don't want to abandon any rights that they have without examining them on a case by case basis. The ones that I have see balance that out pretty well and do have a release process where they approve personal projects.

If that balance doesn't appeal to you, then you can solve the problem by working for a smaller company where it is less of an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Also, if a company does threaten and/or actually sue a former employee (or worse, make statements like "If we're wrong, we'll win" [1]), they're going to permanently be on a lot of potential employees' shit list.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/smule-ceo-shred-video- lawsuit...](http://www.businessinsider.com/smule-ceo-shred-video- lawsuit-2015-9)

</comment><comment><USER17> If you sign a contract that makes all your ideas the property of the company you work for, that is a problem. But I suggest pushing back on that contract - ask them to take out those clauses. If they say no, you then get to decide if it is a deal-breaker for you or not. But I suspect most of the time, they will work with you.

<comment><USER18> >they will work with you

Not so sure about that... Tech giants have the advantage of being able to pick from the best applicants out there. In the same way you could say "having these clauses is a deal breaker for me", it's very easy for them to say "NOT having them is a deal breaker for US".

The difference is that if you refuse the offer, you still have to find a jobs elsewhere (and I suspect that most giants will have the same clauses by default). But if they refuse the offer, there is already someone being interviewed that will accept the clauses.

Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but I think that unless these clauses are deal breakers for _most_ developers out there, then this practice will continue to be done.

<comment><USER19> > But if they refuse the offer, there is already someone being interviewed > that will accept the clauses.

I bet most companies wish that was so. Probably it isn't, especially if you follow fashion and reject anyone who doesn't know how to invert a binary tree ;).

If you turn down a job because of a bad contract term the company is probably not going to have someone else waiting to jump on! This is one of those cases where market forces would probably indicate that it's worth negotiating but in practice companies will be reluctant for reasons of bureaucracy

<comment><USER20> Probably not one, but ten people being interviewed that will accept the clauses. These days people are lined up for blocks for work.

<comment><USER21> > These days people are lined up for blocks for work.

There are lines of developers waiting for work?

Please let me know where I can find such lines. I could earn some hefty referral fees from the dozens of hiring managers I know who are desperate to find good developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash This model works perfectly fine in higher education, as does the idea that if you treat employees as people to be invested in and cut some slack when their life doesn't align perfectly with your plans, they reward you with creativity, energy, and loyalty. I like Elon Musk and the work that he does, but chewing out an employee for skipping out on work to witness their child's birth is more than enough reason to never work for a person like that.

<comment><USER22> FWIW he explicitly claims he never did this (while admitting to other extreme behavior towards his employees): [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/598065854736044032](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/598065854736044032)

Frankly, I'm inclined to believe him given that he has five children of his own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I thought that the way you solve this in the states is by setting up an LLC and copyrighting under your LLC all of the code you write during hours you are not working for the other company. Doesn't that provide adequate additional protection? The strict IP agreements I've signed usually exclude work done for other companies.

<comment><USER24> Some contracts have a clause where you work exclusively for this employer.

<comment><USER25> Often referred to as a 'moonlighting' clause and by lawyers as 'duty of loyalty'.

<comment><USER26> Love how loyalty only works one way.

<comment><USER27> When you sign up to work for the company, you agree to do X and they agree to pay you Y. You are disloyal to them if you don't do all or part of X (for instance, if X includes thinking up ideas for them, taking your really valuable ideas that you thought up while working for them and leaving and using them yourself), and they are disloyal if they don't pay you Y. Those are the terms, after all! So I don't see how loyalty only goes one way...

<comment><USER28> If I'm at home, on my own computer, on my own time, I am not "working for them".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This kind of thing is what unions are for.

<comment><USER30> Exactly! And every day it surprises me more and more that one such union doesn't exist for developers. I understand 100% the implied anti-authoritarian nature "a lot" of the members of this demographic exhibit, but I also think "a lot" of this demographic is smart enough to see past that to the benefits of unionizing. It's just crazy to me there isn't a Guild Of Function Writers And Machine Tenders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hear hear!

I'm currently trying to fix this culture at my current startup, and frankly it's rolling a boulder uphill. I'm not going to be here much longer, I don't think.

Folks, don't don't _don 't_ sign these contracts if you actually care--they won't be easy to fix later.

</comment><comment><USER32> When I had a startup, I put a "We own your brain" clause in the employment agreement. However, I also called it to the attention of everybody I hired, and encouraged them to carve out any exception they wanted. Every hire except a couple of pure secretary/office manager types had a carve-out.

That said, I suspect that that's not a common way of doing things. About 30 years ago, I came up with it for a friend who was joining McKinsey, but had published a book based on her PhD thesis. They claimed to have never gotten that request before. But they also didn't object to granting it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Employers are, by default, going to look out for themselves.

I'd argue that the onus is on the developer to understand and fight for better contracts. If more developers were taking these matters seriously then companies would have to respond. However, I doubt they'll be making the first move.

In the meantime nothing stops you from finding jobs that better suit your needs. "No thanks" is an acceptable answer to an employment opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER34> Ironically my company block that DNS.</comment>