The Story of Japan's 'Lost Decades' was a Hoax - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2013/08/11/now-for-the-truth-the-story-of-japans-lost-decades-is-the-worlds-most-absurd-media-myth/ <comment><USER3> It's important to realize that this article is by Eamonn Fingleton, who has been pushing a fixed idea for decades now: that Japan is secretly a terrifying power. He has written several books that touch (in whole or in part) on this theme:

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search- alias%3D...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Eamonn%20Fingleton)

I read Blindside back in 1996 and I thought his argument was interesting for that time. However, when you read him, it is important to remember that he has not changed his opinion in 20 years, and there are new facts to be accounted for. At that time he seemed certain that Japan would be the worlds #1 economy by the year 2000. His prediction was wrong, but he has not much changed his opinion: he still believes Japan is an important success story.

Japan suffered a long depression in the 1990s. That is not fiction. That is a fact. However, it is also true that some of the stagnation of the period 1990-2013 should be attributed to demographic change.

Paul Krugman offered a partial counter-argument to Eamonn Fingleton here:

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/japan- reconsider...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/japan- reconsidered-2/)

Also, it is worth noting that for the last 20 years Fingleton has constantly harped on the fact that Japan has a trade surplus, sometimes a very large trade surplus, and he thinks this represents economic strength. Numerous economists have made the point that a large trade surplus can be a sign of economic weakness: perpetual insufficient demand at home in the domestic market. Fingleton has rarely taken this view into account.

<comment><USER4> Michael Crichton was excellent for identifying the latest "worry" that was making the US anxious (sexual harrassment, nano-technology etc) and writing a novel about them.

Rising Sun was written when a lot of people were worried that Japan would overtake the US as an economic power. We all know how that turned out. It's also why I'm sceptical when people talk about China being the next economic superpower.

<comment><USER5> I have no doubt China will become an economic superpower. They are investing heavily in the African continent and central and South America. Those are long term, strategic investments.

<comment><USER6> It's a little disturbing to think that autocratic China at least _seems_ to be able to plan decades ahead, while free America is largely stuck in quarterly business cycles and two-year political cycles. An oversimplification in both cases to be sure, but our culture could definitely learn some things about being patient and thinking ahead.

<comment><USER7> If you look around a bit you'll find a lot of people who are rather bearish on democracy as practised in the first world west - professional politicians with no real world experience, being voted in by the cynical, uninformed masses, propagandised by bought and paid for mass media. Democracy has collided with the middle class and a free press concerned only with their own interests and come off second best - bitter, entrenched political paralysis at best. Like unions, it was a wonderful idea at the time, but now the cure is basically worse than the disease.

Frankly, the age of democracy is over, and we now have the age of the permanent civil service. The good news is, it is almost certainly an improvement. China, Japan and Singapore are run exclusively by their civil services (democracy in the latter two is an irrelevant sideshow), and they are run much better than most western countries, or at least with more long term strategy. In fact, pretty much everything wrong with Japan can be blamed on the idiot government trying to save face by not admitting reality. The USA would be pretty well served, IMO, by taking control of budget away from congress and giving it to - well, almost anyone. The GAO, maybe. The Fed, the SEC, the commerce dept, anyone, so long as they're not elected. Being accountable to the electorate turns out to be the worst idea ever for people who are actually trying to do their jobs. It means never being able to admit you're wrong.

I don't mind if they keep parliament/congress around for show but they're going to go the way of the Queen of England - a figurehead, kind of a sounding board for the people, a super-ombudsman. A hundred years from now we're going to look back and wonder how we ever could have been so mad to think that giving _politicians_ the reigns of power could ever have been a good idea.

<comment><USER7> To the person who replied quoting the Economist about democracy in Japan, then deleted their comment - thanks for the link. Well yes, on a superficial level, I suppose democracy is kind of healthy in Japan. It sort of misses the point though.

Japanese Govt, like that in Singapore and South Korea, is characterised by the extreme strengths of their bureaucracies. It would be fair to say that the Japanese Diet, their government, is basically a peer to the JR railway company or MOFA. Imagine if in the USG, all the departments basically operated at the level of the DoD or Dept of State - frankly at the same level as congress. Congress can declare war on the DoD, sure, but would only do so under the most dire circumstances. In practise they cooperate.

Well, in Japan, that's how it is. Basically, the government could probably, if it came down to it, fire the heads of the bureaucracies, but it won't come to that and never has. They are peers for all practical purposes. They are like competing departments in a large corporation. You might think that is a recipe for wastefulness and corruption, and you would be absolutely right, but in a crazy sort of way they keep each other honest, somewhat, and it's better than Fox News making all your decisions.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not some fanatical Japanophile - I don't even live there anymore. But man, at least they can get at least some stuff done. In the west we could not even dream of having a 50-year high speed rail plan. Just think about that. What does that say about us? Look, we're not a dystopia, but we're still basically coasting on past success. The car is still moving, but it's slowing down. Maybe we ran out of gas, or maybe we're so caught up in fight about which way to drive we can't even put our foot on the accelerator.

Corporations that lose the ability to invest in or even think about the long term go out of business. I don't believe countries are any different. We are going to have to change, radically, or we'll simply be taken over - it's only a matter of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't see why he keeps trotting out this thesis that just isn't supported by data. Japan's GDP has been stagnant over the past two decades:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+GDP](https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+GDP)

Adjusting for working age population shows a similar trend. And if data doesn't work for you then there's a ton of other signs that the economy is not doing well:

\- Interest rates have been stuck against the zero lower bound

\- Stock market is 1/4 of what it was at it's peak

\- Property values have still not recovered in major cities

\- Debt as a percentage of GDP has ballooned to over 200%

Now with that being said - if I had to choose a country to spend two lost decades in, it would be Japan. Local savers have allowed them to issue debt at very low interest rates which has been able to cover shortfalls. And there is signs that Abenomics is taking hold.

<comment><USER9> TL/DR: Worker productivity in Japan is high and has risen like all other western countries. Other factors, like lacklustre respons to zombie banks, must explain "lost decade".

I look at the Penn World Table.

In: * Real Income per Population, * Real Income per Employed Population, and * Real Income per Employed Work Hour

Japan has lagged the USA pretty consistently. That is consistent with all other major economic countries. In the '90s Japan actually outperformed on the Income per Worked Hour.

That means there are still 99 problems left for the Japanse economy, but worker productivity ain't one.

Still zombie banks and government reponse to zombie banks might have created a consumption crisis (just as, for example in the Netherlands at this moment, consumers must pay for increasing bank buffers), but I would venture that corporations have retained profitability through the crisis.

Japan didn't grow compared to it's neighbours. But that's catch-up growth for Korea and China. You can't blame Japan for already being first-world in 1990.

Stock market isn't a good indicator for welfare of general population. Japan just might have been overvalued, or other countries overvalued. Property markets have gone beserk pretty much first worldwide, only in Japan first. Another pointer that we are just mimicing their banking crisis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's always hard to tell what's really happening behind the GDP growth figures when comparing countries. The population of US and UK are currently increasing around 0.7% a year, while Germany is around 0%. That's a lot of additional GDP growth for both UK and US, even when excluding the fact that immigrants are at their prime working age and usually more beneficial for the GDP than an average citizen. This has a fairly big impact on what's seen on the news. Since depression is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, it's much easier for countries like US and UK to avoid "official" depression, and much easier for news outlets to talk about the "stagnating old Europe" or such; and of course, at the same time the living standard of an average German might be increasing and that of a UK/US citizen decreasing.

<comment><USER11> GDP is anyway an extremely biased thing to look at. There are many ways you can influence it to make it look like you are growing.

<comment><USER10> Absolutely, personally I dislike how it's the single most powerful figure for decisionmakers. There have been many alternative measurements developed for measuring overall progress of an economy, but unfortunately they haven't taken much foothold.

<comment><USER12> Would you care to list the one you find relevant ? I'm interested.

<comment><USER13> If we stick to "economics" without even going to "well-being," I think median net worth is the best bet. But you know, governments find it easier to "book" corporate profits as part of GDP and call it a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I cannot see several administrations plus the upper echelons of corporate Tokyo agreeing for two decades to "pull the wool over the world's eyes".

But I also can see that Japan is not a basket case, and indeed is doing well for a world in recession.

So, the question I have is what is the meme - presumably there is some lie that Japan tells itself, that means when a variety of people speak they agree "our economy is in bad shape, we have lost a decade" even if on many measures its not true.

As a Brit, our government would love Japan's growth rates or export levels. But we tell ourselves memes, about a special relationship with US, about European bureaucrats, about recovery being linked to house prices - well, I think we do, but its like a fish trying to describe the colour of water.

Interested in hearing from some Japanese fish, as it were.

<comment><USER15> I can only speak from the people I've met personally, but:

Older people are worried that all of Japans 'gijyutsu' is going to China now (which literally means, art, or craft, but basically they mean, all making- new-stuff skills are going to china now). Especially the retired folk seem really concerned about it.

Young people complain like crazy they can't get decent jobs.

I think you'd be hard pushed to find someone who are generally speaking positive about the Japanese economy over there.

I certainly didn't encounter anyone (Japanese) who was positive about it when I was there (a year ago now), or met anyone who has been here since.

It'd be pretty interesting to see some japanese news paper / blog sentiment analysis work and see how wide spread that goes in general. You could probably use kanji as a pretty decent marker (negative words tend to make common elements, etc). hm...

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra "Japan's seeming underperformance is an illusion that stems not from economics at all but from demographics"

Guess what, people in Japan don't care about how their economic perform once it is decoupled from their well-being.

And that's what he is suggesting: output grows, all that matters.

</comment><comment><USER16> tl;dr Japanese stock market was way overvalued so it _had to_ crash but industries have grown since then. Japanese officials were complicit in spreading the story that they are in a bad shape so that trade barriers on import don't have to be lifted. Per capita, they are doing just fine.

</comment><comment><USER17> Strange he didn't mention women entering the workforce when he talked about demographics and the US increasing workforce, just about every article I have read about Nippon's economic stagnation does.

Perhaps because it is too taboo to suggest the feminist revolution was unnecessary, that we could have achieved both economic success and personal wellbeing without it, as Japan had apparently demonstrated.

So we continue to perpetuate the myth that Japan is on the verge of death - <USER2> even recall a UN committee calling for "urgent" gender equality to stave off economic disaster - it was the "only way" Japan could regain growth.

Perhaps not.

<comment><USER18> > Perhaps because it is too taboo to suggest the feminist revolution was > unnecessary, that we could have achieved both economic success and personal > wellbeing without it, as Japan had apparently demonstrated.

Utterly ridiculous definition of "unnecessary."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> tl;dr -- whether "lost decades" is a misnomer or not, evidence on the ground suggests something is going on, and it doesn't seem to be good.

Some anecdotes from someone who has lived and worked in Japan on and off for about half of the past two decades:

\- The quality and quantity of jobs available to young people have dropped precipitously. Twenty years ago, university graduates from good schools seemed to have a choice of offers from high-prestige jobs (the one's they were after) like banks, megacorps, airlines, etc. These days, you see some good graduates selecting from much farther down the prestige chain (e.g., small, local corp., cram school teacher, etc.) with fewer choices (if any).

\- The overall quality of students seems to be lower in schools that have the same prestige. Even Todai and Kyodai students, while still impressive, don't seem to be what they used to be socially, intellectually, or academically. This isn't really directly related to the economy, but the universities are the feeders into the economy.

\- The corporate folks seem to complain that the quality of applicant has dropped over the past two decades, and the quality has sometimes dropped (they say) to a point below a threshold of acceptability. As such, they do not hire, hire temps, or hold their nose and hire. Some of this is certainly hubris, but none of it bodes well for the workers, the corporations, or the economy.

\- The number of small businesses seems to have dropped precipitously. The most obvious is bars/snacks and restaurants (e.g., once popular nightspots now seem dead even on their busiest nights), but the number of small support businesses (e.g., small light industrial shops, distributors, etc.) seem to have decreased as well. Some of this is due to legal changes that took away legally-mandated middlemen, but other parts of it seem to be due to lack of demand.

\- Everyone is worried about money and jobs.

\- The famous savers of Japan seem to be mostly the folks in their 50s and higher (maybe 40s), but the folks in their 30s and younger seem to be mooching A LOT off of these savings and not really saving as much on their own.

\- There is a massive generational gap between people who came of age before the bubble crashed and those who came of age after. The older folks seem to think that the younger people are lazy and just need to be more disciplined, and the younger people think the older generation just don't get the new economic reality. This tension is ripping the social fabric of Japan and seems to create a lot of inefficiencies.

\- The velocity of money seems a lot lower. If folks are interested, I can give some examples in a follow-up post.

<comment><USER19> VELOCITY OF MONEY -- LEGAL ASPECTS

This is one of my favorite anecdotes about Japan that does a good job of exemplifying some of the changes that have happened in Japan over the past two or three decades.

Before my time in Japan, maybe up to some point in the 80s, alcohol distribution was heavily regulated. I am not sure how the regs worked, but during the regulation period, there were about 7 or 8 hands touching a beer between the time it left the factory and the time it reached the consumer. Each of these hands took a cut. After deregulation, it dropped to about 2 or 3 hands, although the prices didn't really seem to change. If I recall correctly, this delayering was made due to clamoring by "the West" that Japan's market was insulated, overregulated, protected, inefficient, etc. All of these claims were pretty much true.

The rest of the story that largely went untold at the time in western media (even in relatively informed higher brow publications like The Economist), was that this "inefficiency" effectively served as a social welfare net for the country in some obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Specifically:

\- Each of those layers of distribution created direct jobs. Some of these jobs were still needed after deregulation but in fewer numbers (e.g., delivery guys, warehouse folks, logistics managers, etc.), but some were not (e.g., most management positions that could be REALLY good for social connections but not actually needed to get the alcohol from one place to another).

\- Each of those layers were socially obligated to do some business with companies farther down the chain. A simple example is that a mid-level distribution company would make sure to hold their enkai parties at a restaurant/bar that is a client of a client of theirs. The owner of a typical bottom-level liquor distributorship (I have befriended a few) would visit 1-3 of their clients for a drink and maybe some food each night for 3-5 nights a week. It was an expected part of greasing the wheels of the economy.

The loss of these layers, a often times the loss of the high-touch layer of distribution to discount "wholesalers", meant that the money cycled fewer times in the economy.

Liquor distribution may seem like an obvious example, but this type of delayering has happened throughout the economy, and the backscratching patronage has decreased along with it. Without getting into a discussion of velocity of money, I would say that this has had a pronounced negative impact on the economy because the money just isn't cycling as much. Unfortunately this is sometimes happening by design.

For those economically inclined, I don't want to suggest that the inefficient alcohol distribution system should have stayed in place. Maybe it should have, maybe it shouldn't have -- that actually gets into a tricky discussion about the weak or non-existent welfare programs in Japan and how this leads to an inability to deconstruct and reconstruct some areas of the domestic economy. My main point is that I don't think anyone had a right to be surprised that the domestic economy took a long and big hit when a high-velocity system was replaced with a low-velocity system with no other social or political changes made to pick up the slack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice to see more people catching on to this story.

The Economist covered it previously as well.

</comment><comment><USER21> Right up there with the myth that Japan suffered two decades of deflation.</comment>


Ask YC: Favorite Philosophical novel? - <AUTHOR> Mine: Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder <comment><USER3> "The Brothers Karamazov" - Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Perhaps the very first existentialist novel ever written. Dostoevsky was an existentialist before anyone knew what existentialism was.

</comment><comment><USER4> Albert Camus - The Fall

All-time favourite. Heck, the fact that my all-time fav band is named after the same novel doesn't hurt.

</comment><comment><USER5> On Man and the Universe - Aristotle.

(Relevance other than stamping "Ask YC" to the front of it? Just curious)

<comment><AUTHOR> I just noticed the "inspiring sci-fi", "insipid sci-fi" and "fantasy book" threads recently added here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thus Spoke Zarathustra - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER7> Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance By Robert M. Pirsig

</comment><comment><USER8> Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose

</comment><comment><USER9> Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist</comment>


Making Map Operations Implicit in Programming - <AUTHOR> https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/making-map-operations-implicit-in-programming

<comment><USER2> This is an 'ancient' idea pre-dating the recent functional craze: array programming, it is so well known that it has a substantial wikipedia page:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_programming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_programming)

its also important to note that this is syntactic sugar - and like most kinds of syntactic sugar it can make code confusing to read, in order to make it prettier. being explicit is often a very good thing for readability and for compilers (they must also read your code) - i value it highly.

although there is something nice about being able to add two arrays together and it do 'what i would expect'... but what do i expect if the arrays do not match in size? how much more thinking do i need to do over being explicit?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that it is more than syntactic sugar, it's an affordance. Different notation schemes make it more or less likely to find and code particular solutions. As an example, the syntax of ML-derived languages makes partial applications a much more reasonable choice than they are in Scala or in C-derived languages: the syntax is tuned to them.

Array programming is due for a renaissance. Like any other form of abstraction, we gain leverage once we are able to internalize it and use it. The thinking you mention is, I think, just the normal hurdle of unfamiliarity.

<comment><USER2> you make a good point.

i lean heavily towards code being explicit - i think of black boxes and third party libraries as things to grudgingly use because i don't have superhuman productivity for instance, and i prefer if i can debug their internals... i know this is not entirely common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a standard feature of many languages or libraries, and generally known as _array programming_ – something APL is known for. It crops up in numerical libraries like "numpy" (Python) or "PDL" (Perl) where selected scalar operations distribute over the whole collection. This is great when using collections of numbers, but is not very generalizable: It may not be possible to distinguish whether a method was called on a collection or all items in the collection. One solution would be a "mapping method call operator" like "!" (it's like a method call "." _and_ a shell pipe "|") – but now we have an explicit "map" again.

I think an explicit "map" is more flexible in a general-purpose language. Some languages do interesting experiments with this, e.g. Perl6 which uses "hyperoperators" to precisely control how a given operator is applied.

</comment><comment><USER4> How many times will Monads be reinvented?

        name.trim.filter{ _.length != 0 }.toUpperCase

becomes:

        name >>= (return . trim) >>= (guard . ((/= 0) . length)) >>= (return . toUpperCase)

I've purposefully used >>= and return instead of fmap to show that '.' above is almost >>=.

EDIT: I've just noticed a type error in the use of guard, but you get the idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the big thing is to make the case for one and the case for many look exactly the same in the language. Is that nicer to look at with do-notation?

<comment><USER4> With do notation, it becomes:

        do
          n <- name
          let trimmed = trim n
          guard (length trimmed /= 0)
          return (toUpperCase trimmed)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't it be nice if it was just:

        toUpperCase . guard (\x -> length x /= 0) . trim

I think that is how it would be if it was part of the language.

<comment><USER4> I like my code to do what it says. You can pretty much do that in Haskell. If you allow me to add a definition first:

        mfilter' :: MonadPlus m => (a -> Bool) -> a -> m a
        mfilter' f = mfilter f . return

Then it's just:

        toUpperCase <=< mfilter' (\x -> length x /= 0) . trim

Which is pretty close. No need to change the language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem I see is that implicit mapping restricts the scope of operations that can work on collections -- if there is no distinction between applying an operation to an single object and applying the same operation to all members of a collection, then no collection can directly support the same operation as anything which might be a member of the collection, because you can't disambiguate between attempts to operate on the collection and attempts to operate on the members.

This would seem to be a problem in general, and a particular problem for nested collections. Explicitness makes intent clear.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting to see how the array programming languages have handled this. The way it works (loosely) is that everything is an array. A scalar is kind of a degenerate array, and a vector is an array of rank 1. Matrices can be seen as arrays of arrays of arrays..

Each operator defines its extent. The count operator '#' in J works at the top level. If you have a 3 x 4 matrix, it returns 3. Take '{.' works the same way. If you have a 3 x 4 matrix and you take 1, you will get a 4 element vector which is the first row of the matrix.

Something like decrement '<:' applies to all of the elements in a matrix regardless of the dimensionality.

This isn't like OO where collections have operations attached to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The example in the article was taken directly from the Scala documentation for [Option]([http://www.scala- lang.org/api/current/index.html#scala.Optio...](http://www.scala- lang.org/api/current/index.html#scala.Option)). The map _is_ implicit if you use Scala's for notation. From the linked docs:

        val upper = for {
          name <- request getParameter "name"
          trimmed <- Some(name.trim)
          upper <- Some(trimmed.toUpperCase) if trimmed.length != 0
        } yield upper
        println(upper getOrElse "")

In Scala, an implementation of flatMap (bind), map, and filter allows you to use for expressions like the above. Objects that support these operations are not strictly monads, but they're close enough for most practical uses. Haskell is great, but give Scala a little credit.

<comment><USER5> for expressions (and Haskell's do notation, etc.) are alternative syntax for explicit mapping: implicit mapping would be syntax that would make applying an operator to all members of a collection (including one with limited cardinality like Option) indistinguishable from applying the same operator to a simple value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is somewhat similar to the List monad in Haskell:

[http://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Understanding_monads/...](http://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Understanding_monads/List)

Bind is concatMap and return puts something into a singleton list. This allows "nondeterministic" computations, where applying functions over all elements in the list is implicit (via bind). Using the monad is not the same as having map be implicit everywhere, but it allows cases where you need several chained implicit (concat)maps to be cleanly implemented.

This is arguably a better design than making all functions polymorphic over lists, and having implicit maps be a global rule (rather than something constrained in a monad's context).

</comment><comment><USER8> How difficult will code be to read if implicit operations are happening without any mention of the language construct executing them? As far as this goes, Haskell's Maybe monad is the simplest system I've ever seen:

      let x = Just 3 in
      do
       value <- x
       guard (value > 1)
       return (value * 4)

If x was 'Nothing' then the whole operation would short circuit and 'Nothing' would be returned. If the guard fails, then 'Nothing' is returned.

</comment><comment><USER9> My favourite example of a language with 'automatic functorization' is Icon/Unicon. All functions, when applied to generators, themselves become generators.

So e.g. `read` is a generator that reads lines from the input, `write` writes a line to output, and the composition of them, `write(read())`, is a generator that copies lines from input to output. To run the generator, you can write `while write(read())`.

</comment><comment><USER10> > What would our languages look like if we made them shape polymorphic? If we > moved in that direction it would be like baking the Composite Design Pattern > deeply into language machinery. It could be very powerful.

In addition to APL and J, that would look a lot like SQL as well.

<comment><USER5> SQL uses explicit mapping with syntax that is more like list comprehension syntax in general purpose languages than function application syntax; it doesn't use implicit mapping.

(Though SQL often uses nullable values rather than a collection-like type for the use case where Scala uses Option types -- so the specific example used at the head of the article might look similar in SQL, but not because SQL is an example of the general approach the article is discussing.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> R also doesn't distinguish between applying an operation to a scalar or a vector.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Erik Meijer points to this as research in this area: [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.146....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.146.5411)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is already the case in Haskell. Look up functor

<comment><USER13> No, fmap is still an explicit operation.

<comment><USER8> There should be some degree of explicitness so that when you look at the code a year later it doesn't look like voodoo magic.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to nab and block a creepy user? - <AUTHOR> We have recently created a marketplace app. Which allows users to message other users. We have found one user making lewd comments to other users.
After first report we blocked that user.
That user created another account & started doing same thing. How do we block such users? This is a mobile app built with Flutter. We have our own DB + Firebase for messaging. <comment><USER3> Many apps nowadays use phone numbers for verifying new accounts. Obviously, it is far from impossible for a malicious user to get a new phone number if they care enough, but it does usually have a monetary cost, which will keep a significant portion of malicious users out. This also can help prevent some forms of fraud.

This is somewhat obvious, but take care in designing social interactions on your app, and introduce easy reporting systems and user-controlled blocking systems (e.g., even if you don't respond to a user's report in a timely manner, a user should still be able to block communications from another user using a button in the app). You may want to allow users to choose to only allow messages from users who have been on the site for a certain amount of time, or have some kind of additional level of verification. Also consider introducing active, paid moderators who actively respond to reports as they come in, if your budget allows.

Allowing users access to open text fields on the internet is inherently dangerous. I have tried to avoid it in all of my apps (for example, I've made games that use randomly-generated user names rather than allow users to input their own, and I only added user comments to an app I was building _after_ I'd built a user reporting system and ensured I got an immediate alert on my phone if a user sent a report). It is your responsibility to try to design your app, and moderate your community, to mitigate these risks.

<comment><USER4> > a user should still be able to block communications from another user using > a button in the app

Adding to this - when you do act, your ban should be that all users are effectively blocking this user, ie a shadow ban.

That way the bad user, to themselves, still seems to be interacting with the site, just nobody else seems to care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure it's applicable for you since it's a mobile app but I encountered the same issue with a single specific user, which would cause chaos everywhere.

The right answer for us has been to make the website utterly annoying for him, slowing down pages, disconnecting him randomly, removing the styling randomly, throwing a 500 page randomly, his experience was truly miserable.

<comment><USER6> There was a plugin to do this on Vbulletin forums.

It was somethink like a shadow-ban but where you would give random timeouts/slow loads to the user

<comment><USER7> "Tachy goes to Coventry" was the first implementation I know of. And I can't believe I remembered that off the top of my head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here are some strategies for IOS:

1) use device identifer / advertising identifier to identify the user and block them. problem: user can reinstall app and these identifiers are recreated

2) store a random identifier on the disk or in nsuserdefaults or some other app storage. problem: user can reinstall app and these locations are wiped

3) store a random identifier in icloud keychain. my understanding is this doesn't have the same problem as above but its possible for user to wipe this.

4) use apple device check API. [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck) this allows you to associate 2 bits of information with a users device. you can use 1 bit to control whether the device should be banned.

5) use a third party device fingerprinting solution or roll your own device fingerprinting. my understanding is there is enough entropy on the phone to uniquely identify it. for example you can find out what time the original OS was installed in the Foxconn factory. i think apple should ban all apps that do this but a lot of apps do this. :(

<comment><USER9> Possibly off-topic ...

Can you provide a reference for "find out what time the original OS was installed in the Foxconn factory"?

<comment><USER8> You can stat files in the filesystem. We found some apps were stat'ing some files and these had different dates on different devices and they seemed to be around the time the device would have been manufactured. I can't remember off the top of my head the what the names of the files were.

You can also determine when the last update was installed by stat'ing files in the filesystem. But this is less useful for fingerprinting a device because it is prone to change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, a slightly sketch thing to do is to shadowban the user, so that they don't know that nobody can see their posts. They might get bored. You might need to modify some of your application code though. You can do this by their IP if they haven't caught on.

<comment><USER11> Something I've seen people do in the past on older forums is to degrade the experience for the offending user as well, adding things like load speed delays etc. The idea being that they get frustrated and eventually move on. It's also somewhat sketchy but it was quite popular in forums / bulletin boards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shadowbanning in its different forms would be the best option, don't let the user know they have been noticed.

Let them think they sent messages and comments to other users, but don't actually deliver them.

<comment><USER13> I can't count the number of times I clicked on a dead comment's user profile only to see a shocking number of dead comments, sometimes going back months (years, even?). Out of some morbid curiosity, I suppose, I'd just keep clicking on 'more' and regularly the number of comments would be in the hundreds.

One the one hand, this approach seems very effective, but I can't help but feel pity for this person and even some sense of cruelty if I were to implement such a feature myself (although I probably would).

Of course, I'm also the person in real life who will eventually 'engage' with that "one person" in a group who everyone has been tuning out for a while. I don't get the impression doing so matters to said person, because clearly they're oblivious, but at least it makes me feel better or less guilty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Captchas. Do not block him, but make him solve a captcha if you detect a bad word. He'll lose the fun.

Took idea from this talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kBhvM9OIaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kBhvM9OIaI)

</comment><comment><USER15> Don't block them, degrade their performance to annoy them out of your platform. Or treat them the way you would any spambot,add registration difficulty,cumulative but minimal interaction cost(performance,financial,points,etc...) and as a last resort ban or set restrictions on their connectivity network (subnet,isp,email provider, vpn provider,asn,country,etc...)

<comment><USER16> Shadowbanning is also an option: they'll think they are sending messages to other users, but those other users will never see them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> We need a thing whereby a person can only sign up to a service once - <USER2> disturbing the on-boarding process (too much). Maybe a contradiction in terms but I'm putting it out there since there are some mighty clever people in here, and someone may just have a solution.

<comment><USER18> Login with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc...

Let them handle account creation and detect misuse.

<comment><USER17> So, when a user only gets as many tries to be a jerk as there are oauth services? Could work some extent, but not optimal imo.

<comment><USER19> Is it that hard to create an additional Google account?

<comment><USER17> no you're right. The idea doesn't work at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How about creating rules?

      A talks to B
      B blocks A
      A registers as C
      *not too much time passes*
      C talks to B

At this point C is considered to be a harasser and therefore it will be hidden for B. B can of course lift the ban if it's just a false positive. To further specify who's who in this graph, the logic can find the smallest time between ban and the creation of a new user with the same behavior (writes to B) as the reported one.

I think this is way more easier than handling those who abuse the actual service you're selling.

</comment><comment><USER21> Make it very easy for people to report these messages, then put in a temporary block on a user after the first report, until it can be checked by a human.

</comment><comment><USER22> Related question for folk in similar situations: What are your experiences bringing these sorts of abuse to the attention of the ISPs?

<comment><USER19> What if they are just annoying enough to want them off your app, but not quite bad enough for their ISP to turn off their account? My guess is that most cases would fall into this category, and only a rare few would be so bad that an ISP would actually take action.

On your app, you want them off if they are a jerk. The ISP doesn't care about that level misbehavior.

<comment><USER22> I'm all for brushing off a transgression, but once a user starts ban evading then I would side with reporting them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> On top of what many users have stated here, shadow blocking! If the malicious user doesn't know that they're blocked, they'll keep using their account. If you shadow ban them, you just don't show their comments and posts to anyone else than themselves and they can't harm anyone.

</comment><comment><USER24> Slightly related, does anyone know any solutions to this for a public slack group? I'm a member of one that has a public invite link (temporarily disabled) and it's constantly plagued by one troll account that comes back whenever the invite link is enabled again.

</comment><comment><USER25> Additional to this, can some one help with this -

* Under GDPR, user can request for it's account deletion where we have to delete all the user's reference. If a user signup again there would be no way whether it is the same malicious user, how to overcome this?

<comment><USER26> Lie about it. Let them try to prove you did what they asked.

<comment><USER27> GDPR penalties are steep, I'd highly recommend not doing this. You only need one lawyer with too much free time to test you and ruin your life.

<comment><USER26> No one has ever been ruined by GDPR.

<comment><USER27> So, you're banking on not being the first person to get caught?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> perhaps have some ai that detects lewd comments and autobans those users. Oh and the standard thing of checking both ip and mac addresses whenever people log in or register against a blacklist of IP's/MAC's used by banned users.

<comment><USER29> To be fair I don't think it'd be a bad idea to have some wordfilters for sexual language etc, and if detected, not necessarily autoban but flag for a moderator to review.

<comment> jon-wood Depending on what the app is for there's probably some nuance needed to that approach - you want to catch people harassing other users early, but you also absolutely don't want to be snooping through legitimate conversations of that nature between two consenting users. I guess its less of an issue if you're at the sort of scale where you have external moderators, but most things like this start off with a few staff members and maybe some community members doing the moderating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> rate limiting by ip, force recaptcha, shadow banning the user

<comment><AUTHOR> Are there any SDK or APIs which can help do this?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What impact will Starlink (satellite internet) have on China? - <AUTHOR> Starlink will be able supply internet to anywhere in the world, making geography largely irrelevant. Users will need a terrestrial receiving station, but these could be cheap to produce.
China has the "great firewall" (GFW) filtering its internet, operating at chokepoints of terrestrial connectivity, i.e. the points where physical wires exit China.
What impact will the availability of satellite internet services like Starlink have on internet filtering regimes like the GFW? <comment><USER2> Either Starlink will go through the great firewall or China will just execute anyone found in possession of the equipment.</comment>


Ask HN: News more Deliciously. How's the tweaked idea? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jaxly.com/2008/08/news-more-deliciously.html

<comment><USER2> I really like this idea, thanks, would implement it on my site too.</comment>


YouTube Suspect Was Popular and Ridiculed in Iran - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/100000005833316/youtube-shooter-was-popular-and-ridiculed-in-iran.html <comment><USER3> Wow - It's an amazing omission how the end of this article skips over any kind of attack on YouTube employees.

> "Then, just after noon, she parked her car at a business near YouTube's > offices. She walked into one of YouTube's parking garages, and then emerged > into an outdoor courtyard where employees were eating lunch."

> "Emergency officials arrived at YouTube's offices two minutes after the > police first received 911 calls about shots being fired. When they arrived, > they found Ms. Aghdam dead. A 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun, registered > in her name, was found at the scene."

> "By Tuesday night, YouTube, as well as Instagram and Facebook, had taken > down her pages and videos..."

<comment><USER4> When I saw it earlier today, the video accompanied a longer story about the shooter and what she did: [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/nasim- aghda...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/nasim-aghdam- youtube-shooter.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This video is also featured in the article "'Vegan Bodybuilder': How YouTube Attacker, Nasim Aghdam, Went Viral in Iran" [0] which I came across after submitting story.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/nasim- aghdam-y...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/nasim-aghdam- youtube-shooter.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> > By Tuesday night, YouTube, as well as Instagram and Facebook, had taken down > her pages and videos.

Her videos seemed quite harmless - home exercise, veganism, animals.

I don't understand the motive for YouTube to take down her remaining videos.

<comment><USER6> Are you serious? Maybe YouTube isn't so keen on hosting videos of attempted mass murders. Doubly so if the person attacks their employees.

Don't conflate social media site hosting policies with the first amendment.

<comment><USER5> Her livelihood was destroyed by a YouTube algorithm change and she couldn't handle it emotionally, and attacked YouTube headquarters, as a result YouTube takes down her remaining home exercise and vegan videos.

It doesn't need to be said that she is in the wrong, there's no excuse, no defence that can be offered - but I said it anyway in case you misunderstand me in my next statement:

Tech companies and employees and the people who use their products live in the same world. Even if there is no legal or financial responsibility between ourselves and others, it doesn't mean we can forget about the fact that we all live on the same planet. Whenever we are thinking about making a change in the code, we have a responsibility to be empathetic and also think about its effects on other members of the same society we all belong to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am not sure if this incident would/should cause any review/discussion of youtube's or any site's policies relying mostly on user generated content ?

Should there be a broad industry standard / governing body / laws to make sure attackers don't go crazy after innocent employees ?

<comment><USER8> What would be effective is a real-life way for families or friends of a mentally ill and possibly violent adult to have some useful recourse.

Banning her videos wouldn't have made her less violent, and a tech company wouldn't have any resources beyond what her family had. The problem wasn't the effect her videos had on other people.

In the U.S., it's already illegal to threaten violence against others. "Conspiracy to commit" charges and "terroristic threats," for example.

Select illustrative incidents:

Florida night club shooter - mentally ill and violent in word and deed - <USER2> dad warned the FBI and police and asked for help.

Florida school shooter - mentally ill, violent in word and deed, multiple instances of minor run ins with the law - family and friends warned the FBI and police.

This woman - mentally ill and voicing intent for violence - family warned Law Enforcement and tried to get help.

<comment><USER7> I am not sure why i got down voted, but I was wondering if it is possible to isolate policy + enforcement of policies by the industry, through an independent body (say w3.org) over all, instead of individual companies. This will make sure that the policy is uniform no matter where the content gets posted, be it youtube or face book or any site. Think about movie ratings by Motion picture association. If a movie is rated R, it is R no matter where you watch it, be it netflix or any movie theater.

<comment><USER9> I believe that different countries have different ratings systems. This is part of the problem as well. Germany for instance has recently crafted laws to try to financially punish companies for content on their site that is deemed "hate speech". [0]

Should this "universal" body be established country by country?

Should laws in Germany affect what people in the US can see?

What about competitors who want to have different policies in an attempt to give themselves a competitive advantage?

Personally I'm not a fan of the direction the major tech companies have gone with free speech, but I hope and believe that ultimately these principles will win out. However, when a man is convicted by the UK government of committing "gross offense" by recording a joke video of his pug responding to Nazi references; the situation seems a bit more dire. [1]

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/17/german- of...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/17/german-officials- say-facebook-is-doing-too-little-to-stop-hate-speech)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD_QlnY8Ggg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD_QlnY8Ggg)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Arithmetic Gas - <AUTHOR> https://mathematicalgarden.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/arithmetic-gas/ <comment><USER2> woahhhhh this is deep:

"The concept of arithmetic gas provides an interesting connection between statistical physics and number theory, _for which the Riemann zeta function plays the role of a partition function._ "

I love stuff like this, that knits together seemingly unrelated concepts. I feel like by reading this article, I am gaining a better understanding of two very difficult topics simultaneously.

<comment><USER3> You might like this: [https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/02/algorithmic_the...](https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/02/algorithmic_thermodynamics.html)

<comment><USER2> I do like this! thank you for sharing!</comment></comment></comment>


Fan death - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death <comment><USER2> Fun story:

A few years ago I was backpacking around Asia met some friends in northern Vietnam. We were 6 or 7 people so we just rented out a dorm room in a hostel. There were 2 beds left, which were later filled by 2 Koreans.

That night we were all hanging out and the Koreans were quietly minding their own business. It was pretty hot, as Vietnam usually is, so we had the ceiling fans going strong.

Just before turning out the lights, I bent down to the lower bunk and asked if it was ok to turn them off and leave the fan on. I get a mostly blank stare as he murmured a word or two. It didn't sound likely anything close to a "no" do I smiled and said goodnight!

Fast forward to breakfast the next morning, and we're talking about our sleep and someone asks if we heard what they said before turning off the lights. Turns out it was "fan death." Most of us hadn't heard of it before.

Poor guys probably didn't sleep all night.

<comment><USER3> Why didn't they just keep a window or door open too?

<comment><USER2> 1) There were no windows in that room

2) Never leave a bedroom window open in SE Asia, unless you love mosquito bites

<comment><USER4> > Never leave a bedroom window open in SE Asia, unless you love mosquito bites

A bit weird. How do you guys in the west repellent bugs during summer?

In China, we use window mesh + mosquito coil + vape mat, work like magic most of the time.

<comment><USER5> Lots of places do not have that many mosquitoes.

In the places that do have a lot, mosquito nets on the windows might be installed, or you plug a mosquito repellent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a Korean it is funny to see this in HN. And yes, almost everyone used to believe this so that my parents always taught me turning off the fan before sleeping. This psudo-theory is so widespread that it is used to assassinate someone in fictions.

<comment><USER7> Years ago I first took the Wikipedia article at face value. Later on I thought to myself that it's too far fetched for a majority of people to believe in it. I had also heard that maybe it started as a euphemism for someone who had committed suicide and caught on. Can you shed any light on how common it is? Is it something that people with less education tend to believe?

<comment><USER8> These are just some of my thoughts. Even my parents used to believe in fan death, and both my father and mother are very well educated. My father has a PhD, and my mother has a Masters.

The younger generation don't believe in fan death anymore. Still, many of the older Koreans that believe in fan death are very well educated. However, talking to my parents, they were not educated to think critically, and even today that is not a value that is stressed in Korea. Essentially the majority of older Koreans were raised in a society which had dictatorships, coup d'etat, assassinations, censorship, and government controlled media. Koreans had great economic success, but less freedoms, similar to the situation in China today. Questioning the status quo is detrimental, and keeping your mouth shut is a virtue still taught in Korea today. Knowledge such as fan death is just accepted as fact, and it stayed engrained until recently.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for filling me in. I can definitely see how that history and culture could make fan death a fact.

Follow up: while critical thinking isn't encouraged or taught, does knowledge of the widespread usage of fans and the lack of associated deaths elsewhere ever come into conflict with their worldview?

<comment><USER8> I can ask my parents and get back to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Moldovans believe you can get sick from leaving a window open and the breeze coming in. You can be on a packed, sticky hot microbus and they will not crack open a window.

I don't think this superstition is specific to Eastern Europe because I've heard some Germans state similar things about leaving windows open and getting sick.

<comment><USER10> There's a variant of this in Indonesia too: [http://www.expat.or.id/medical/masukangin.html](http://www.expat.or.id/medical/masukangin.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In reality, you need a fan in an enclosed space to prevent death—at least in zero-G.

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

</comment><comment><USER12> This makes me think of all those pre 1960 American films where someone gets wet in the rain, then at best gets a cold, at worst gets a fever and dies.

I believe its quite common in southern Europe to believe that swimming after eating will lead to stomach cramps and drowning.

I'm surprised to hear the eastern European thing about breezes etc. It was quite common in western Europe and America to open windows even in winter for sleeping children, I believe the practice is still common in scandinavian countries.

<comment><USER13> > its quite common in southern Europe to believe that swimming after eating > will lead to stomach cramps and drowning.

Taking a bath and showering too...

<comment><USER12> How does that work? I thought the fear was you wouldn't be able to swim due to cramps, and drown. That isn't really a concern in the shower. And you aren't really using the same (or any) muscles in the shower, to risk a cramp anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had heard that it was a way to report on suicides without needing to specify how they died.

<comment><USER9> That seems plausible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think we have some of these things in the Netherlands as well, people believe (among others):

* Air draft causes a stiff neck

* Freezing meat twice and eating it will make you sick

* Cold in general will make you sick ("catch a cold")

* If you hold your poo to long, you can never poo (well) anymore (from the grandparents, pretty sure they believed it, actually it may be true to a certain degree but they used to go when one need to go asap.)

I'm sure I'll come up with more.

<comment><USER16> >* Freezing meat twice and eating it will make you sick

Uh, every frozen meal I have ever seen has come with the printed warning not to freeze it again after it has melted?

Freezing does not kill microbes, and additionally formation of ice during the freezing breaks the internal structure of foodstuff making it better medium for bacterial growth. So repeated freezing-unfreezing, especially if the product is taken into room temperature and back allows unwelcome microbes to proliferate. Like with all food poisoning hazards, it will not make you sick with 100% certainty, but increases the risk enough that it is not recommended.

This is near word-by-word translation of the guidelines of Finnish medical society [1] and food safety authority [2].

It is difficult to call "do not freeze stuff again" an unfounded superstition equal to fan death if it is the common recommendation by national authorities.

[1] [https://www.terveyskirjasto.fi/terveyskirjasto/tk.koti?p_art...](https://www.terveyskirjasto.fi/terveyskirjasto/tk.koti?p_artikkeli=asy00212)

[2] [https://www.evira.fi/elintarvikkeet/valmistus-ja- myynti/elin...](https://www.evira.fi/elintarvikkeet/valmistus-ja- myynti/elintarvikehygienia/hygieeniset-tyotavat/elintarvikkeiden- pakastaminen/)

<comment><USER15> Ok I didn't consider the "makes meat more permeable to bacteria" -argument. Still, bacteria do die from repeated freeze-thawing cycles. But, in any case, I doubt many people ever investigated the scientific evidence.

<comment><USER17> > _Ok I didn 't consider the "makes meat more permeable to bacteria" > -argument. Still, bacteria do die from repeated freeze-thawing cycles._

Not really. They multiply during the thawing and lie "inactive" during freezing. So repeated freeze-thawing cycles = several generations more bacteria than you started with.

Bernhard Redl, an associate professor in the molecular biology department at the University of Innsbruck in Austria:

"It is clear that freezing does not kill most of the bacteria," said Redl, "but puts them in a dormant state." (...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another interesting aspect about Fan Death is Hacker News obsession with this subject. There have been been about 15 stories on Hacker News about this so far.

<comment><USER7> Well if it's over several years that's fine. It's an interesting oddity and I'm sure the readership changes over time as well, making it new to plenty of readers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My father is the oldest of a very large bunch of kids. When I ask him to count my aunts and uncles, he always mentions one who died as an infant.

And guess what the "cause" was? Now I understand it better, I always wondered WTF he meant when he said someone left a fan on in the baby's room.

</comment><comment><USER20> Oh wow I can't sleep without a fan. I stayed at a hotel in Berlin with no a/c or blower option and I had a terrible nights' sleep. The follow year when I went back to that hotel, they had a fan waiting for me. Bless them. I even travel with a USB powered fan on airplanes, because those little nozzles of recycled farts they keep moving further away just won't cut it.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Yohan Yoon noticed that his Korean-American parents kept opening the door to his room whenever he slept with the fan on.. So what's behind this superstition and what role does culture play?"

Vid - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW2OZfcowp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW2OZfcowp0)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is no more odd than my mother's family's belief that sleeping in front of a fan causes illness & stiff muscles.

<comment><USER23> My parents believe that 'air draught' can cause the common cold. It was considered pseudo science in the 1960-1990s, and largely ignored by Medicine. As it turns out, draught and cold makes you more receptive to the virus. (I guess that's where it got its name from)

<comment><USER24> Yeah, in Poland, it seems all my family from my parents' generation and older believe in that too. As a kid, I had endless battles with all of them over opening a window. E.g. it would be too hot for me, but everyone would say, "close the window, there's a draft and it'll get you sick". smh.

"Stiff neck" 'teekert mentions and "ear pain" would be mentioned as dangers of draft too. It's so pervasive in the local culture that I even have to occasionally remind people from my generation that common cold is a virus, not a side effect of exposure to elements.

<comment><USER25> I still believe that avoiding drafts is a good thing.

When you're contaminated (and you don't know because you don't feel it yet) you shouldn't stress your immune system with additional stuff like the temperature differences between different body parts. Why do you want less of blood circulation in the contaminated areas?

What is called "extreme hot" for North or East Europe is a pretty normal temperature for human species anyway.

<comment><USER24> > _What is called "extreme hot" for North or East Europe is a pretty normal > temperature for human species anyway._

What is called "pretty normal temperature for human species" is barely bearable for me, and has been so since I was a kid. It completely destroys my productivity.

I recall reading here that the "productive" temperatures fall into the range I consider comfortable, so I must not be too much of an outlier.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside Nginx: How We Designed for Performance Scale - <AUTHOR> https://www.nginx.com/blog/inside-nginx-how-we-designed-for-performance-scale/ <comment><AUTHOR> Accessing it currently would result in _Error establishing a database connection_ , though.

<comment><USER2> Confirm.</comment></comment>


Improbable: What we found when we simulated the backbone of the entire Internet - <AUTHOR> http://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simulated-the-backbone-of-the-entire-internet-on-spatialos <comment><USER2> This is breathtaking!</comment>


Academic publisher uses 'Trap' URLs to identify and block automated downloading - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/publisher-under-fire-for-fake-article-webpages-1.20154 <comment><USER2> Commented on the other version of this here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027396)

I'm wondering why the researcher didn't as Wiley if they could crawl their database.</comment>


DIE.js detects IE versions and helps unsupported users find a better browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ryanatkn/DIE

<comment><USER2> I discovered today that my last few ie6 users are mostly from the NHS, and even more perversely it seems to be a minority of hold-outs stuck in back- rooms with the majority of the NHS users on ie8/9 and Chrome.</comment>


Jack Welch has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/jack-welch-legendary-ceo-of-general-electric-dies-at-age-84-11583158270 <comment><USER3> Steve Ballmer revered Jack Welch's rank-and-yank management style.

During the 2000s and early 2010s Microsoft's stack-rank reviews were infamous for the internal politics created. Didn't matter if you had a full team of top-tier engineers, the bottom 15% WAS going to get managed out. Savvy managers would hire low-tier performers to protect the productive ones.

That's the only lens through which I have to view Mr. Welch's contributions unfortunately.

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

[https://money.cnn.com/2013/11/13/technology/enterprise/micro...](https://money.cnn.com/2013/11/13/technology/enterprise/microsoft- stack-ranking/index.html)

<comment><USER4> Contrast with W. Edwards Deming's approach that stresses the systematics of the organization and considers rank-and-yank a symptom of bad management:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly_Diseases)

<comment><USER5> As far as Welch is concerned, I'm pretty certain that his system was never going to find _him_ in the bottom 10% of any possible ranking. Call it Gödel's Management Strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article has a good summary of his legacy and his gracefulness:

 _Under Mr. Welch, GE became known for consistent profit performance and a surging stock price. Much of those gains came from GE Capital, the finance arm that ballooned under Mr. Welch and would almost destroy the company during the 2008 financial crisis.

GE's profit has plunged in recent years, dragged down by hidden costs in the company's Capital unit and losses in the core Power business. The troubles have prompted the company to break itself apart, overhaul its leadership and slash its once-generous dividend. GE's share price tumbled roughly 75% in 2017 and 2018, erasing $200 billion of wealth for millions of investors.

In his later years, Mr. Welch witnessed the GE he built get dismantled. The decline of the company pained him, according to friends, and he sometimes said he gave himself an A for his execution of its operations, and an F for his choice of successor._

<comment><USER7> >Much of those gains came from GE Capital

>GE's profit has plunged in recent years, dragged down by hidden costs in the company's Capital unit

>he gave himself an A for his execution of its operations, and an F for his choice of successor

Am I reading it right that the reason GE Capital was so successful during his time was because there were hidden costs, making it appear more profitable than it was, that didn't come out until later? Or did this hidden costs actually not exist until choices that were made after he left?

<comment><USER8> Correct. GE recognized fees up front, and pushed costs to the future.

The Wall Street Journal published a massive article on GE's problems back in 2018.[0] Well worth your time, if you want to understand how big companies game their earnings.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-powered-the-american- century...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-powered-the-american-centurythen- it-burned-out-11544796010)

<comment><USER9> Voodoo accounting 101, followed by every strike-price-chasing CEO to the detriment of everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Jack Welch, head of GE Plastics that polluted Pittsfield MA and the Connecticut River, acceeded to the throne of once-solid General Electric. Through his gentle ministrations he turned the company into a graveyard, driving Schenectady, NY from a middle class heaven into a rust-encrusted hellhole. Jack's financial acumen provided for monotonically increasing stock prices through his tenure. He did this through financial manipulation that would have landed lesser mortals in jail for securities fraud. Upon the sale of the General Electric Reinsurance (GE Re) to Swiss Re, Jack's fraud was uncovered to the tune of $19.2BB. This, however, didn't affect St. Jack, who had moved on and left Jeff Immelt to hold the bag. In the financial crisis of 2008, GE Capital's "investments" into derivatives imploded and GE was within one day of failing to meet payroll and default on many obligations. Jack's good friend, Warren Buffet, however, came along with $5BB in cash and saved the company for a slight premium.

Jack was known as a sharp negotiator and a master of project management and contracts. His marriage failed one month after his wife of many years became "vested" in the pre-nuptial agreement. Suzie Welch was unavailable for comment at the time of publication. Welch demanded full commitment and high levels of performance from his employees. He trained all in the religion of Six Sigma, all the better to remove "waste" and "unnecessary costs" from GE products. He also trained all managers in "ethics" as a means for them to know and understand the limits of ethical behaviour, to know where the gray zone was in relation to those limits, and then to be able to "cluelessly" operate beyond the gray zone limits.

He is survived by countless GE customers who cheer the ongoing demise of the company, by arrogant former employees and managers who remain unemployed due to their catchphrase "this is how we did it at GE", and by many retirees doomed to eat catfood since their no-decision investment in GE stock has left them in penury.

<comment><USER11> I grew up in Schenectady (after the glory days of GE) and it's crazy how much GE destroyed the town. Still has yet to really recover. Oh, and now they put a casino in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Welch was destructive for GE and the cult of his approach has been destructive for the industrial sector.

He turned around GE for the short term, but undermined the fundamental model of a conglomerate (there are good arguments for and against conglomerates, but GE was an is one). The metrics used were ultimately all short term ones and allowed the business to become lopsided, a disaster from which it has still not recovered.

The analogy of "cutting the fat" (nicely timed for the era of the Jane Fonda workout)* was stupid. Actual healthy humans have body fat in the teens, with a few elite athletes (who do nothing but train) at the very low end. Instead the mantra was to consider anything not immediately useful -- drive the "body fat" to 0%.

It's like a community madness, and it spread to corporate America and to some extent governments as well which has resulted in the current parlous state of the economy: a Potemkin economy that looks great only because the metrics used all face the "painted side".

Good riddance to this blood sucker.

* no insult intended for the Jane Fonda Workout

<comment><USER13> > Good riddance to this blood sucker.

Really? You don't agree with his corporate style / strategy / books and that justifies saying something like that?

<comment><USER12> I could not care less that he destroyed GE and became rich in the process. That's a GE shareholder problem. But I had hoped my message was about more than corporate "style".

First: he's been fundamentally destructive to the global economy, which has had a particularly brutal effect on, IMHO, the majority of people who live in countries that were industrial economies in the 1980s. The hollowing out of the middle class and precarious economic position of younger GenXers and millennials can be laid in a large part at the unthinking adoption of the bullshit he promoted and demonstrated. (note that I am at the beginning of GenX and my child as younger than a millennial so I am not bitter from some personal hurt here).

(BTW although GE outsourced during this period, so did many companies, and I do not lay that at his feet. And the result of outsourcing is much more of a mixed bag than it is often described, and in the balance is likely even positive, though the way it was implemented in the US was a combination of this "strip to the bone" which yes has been destructive.)

Second: true, he's dead and that's a tragedy to his family and close friends which I don't downplay. But also he was an asset stripping parasite whose model has ultimately been destructive and he was a lauded champion of such behavior. His death is an opportunity for people to reflect on his immoral behavior the consequences of which we are still suffering from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My impression is that he was no management genius but rather fortunate in the timing of moving his company into the FIRE sector. All of that goodwill evaporated in the 09 crisis.

Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions? I guess he also deserves the credit/blame for the ubiquity of Six Sigma.

<comment><USER15> > Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions?

Inflicting "stack ranking" upon the world, for one.

Not all contributions are positive.

<comment><USER16> This. And if you pull if forward, stack ranking did a lot of damage to both GE and Microsoft after Ballmer implemented it.

The real failure of stack ranking is it never ends, so at some point you are firing good employees.

<comment><USER17> Also the list of "good" employees is not consistent year to year. Even if you don't fire people most will have better and worse years. Sometimes the swings can be dramatic when people find their groove or conversely when they face burnout or have personal problems.

Stack ranking is stupid, heartless and unscientific. Just like the man who invented it.

<comment><USER18> It in fact gets worse. During stack ranking's tenure at Microsoft, they would often pull the "best and brightest" in the entire company into teams to accomplish certain goals. The theoretical "best and brightest" were then stack-ranked against each other. Every manager had to pick the "worst" person to eventually get canned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> He will be remembered as one of the greatest banksters of all time. He converted Thomas Edison's company of genius inventors into a factory of paper- pushing lending trolls.

<comment><USER20> Basically a very successful management crank.

The tragedy wasn't Jack Welch, the tragedy was a financial and economic system that actively rewarded his bizarre beliefs and actions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My father worked his way up from the foundry to "Business Leader" (management) at GE, starting in the mid 1970s.

GE was a mess internally, all the way down to the shop floor, before Welch took over. His impact cannot be understated.

We were big Jack Welch fans - if he hadn't grown GE the way he did, my hometown - where it was the largest employer for decades - would have been a lot poorer.

<comment><USER22> Would you mind expanding what you think he did right? I'm curious to have a counterpoint to the other top comments, which are pretty negative.

<comment><USER23> In some fields, acclaimed works seem cliched and obvious from where we are today, because the innovations that brought their acclaim have been so universally adopted.

I'm not a historian of management theory so I don't know if the ideas are original, or even of how well Welch followed his own advice, but plenty of the things in his books are straight-talking common sense:

* You should know your business well enough you don't need management consultants to tell you what to do

* HR and hiring are important and should be represented in your senior team accordingly

* If you want candour (which you do) you need to reward and praise it, not punish it

* When there's a crisis, don't deny there's a problem

He's not the first person to come up with every idea in his books, but even 40 years later there are companies that need to learn these things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the guy we have to thank for for introducing stack ranking and other predatory employment practices.

In my culture we're taught to never speak badly of the deceased so I'll say nothing about Jack Welch.

</comment><comment><USER24> In upstate New York he held back for over a decade any effort to mitigate legacy PCB pollution from GE's mostly closed factories there. He funded AstroTurf organizations and downplayed research showing connections between PCB pollution and health problems.

<comment><USER25> For claims like that it helps to link to a source for the data. Making inflammatory statements without backing evidence makes for poor discourse IMO. I found this article that seems to cover the topic: [https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Dredging-up-the- tru...](https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Dredging-up-the- truth-5294643.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "'Neutron' Jack Welch, who led GE's rapid expansion, dies at 84" (Reuters)

 _...Welch - known as "Neutron Jack" for cutting thousands of jobs - <USER2> and sold scores of businesses, expanding the industrial giant into financial services and consulting. Under him, GE's market value grew from $12 billion to $410 billion, making Welch one of the most iconic chief executives of his era._

 _But his push to build out the GE Capital financing business nearly proved the undoing of the entire enterprise during the global financial crisis more than a decade ago, and GE now trades at a fraction of its peak value...._

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people- jackwelch/neutron-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people- jackwelch/neutron-jack-welch-who-led-ges-rapid-expansion-dies- at-84-idUSKBN20P20T)

</comment><comment><USER27> Given that every single comment I've seen so far is a joke or a negative, it's worth offering a more respectful perspective of his accomplishments and story from Wikipedia [1]:

Jack Welch was the child of a railroad conductor, born and raised outside Boston. He worked as a golf caddie, newspaper delivery boy, shoe salesman, and drill press operator, throughout middle school and high school.

Welch joined GE in 1960 as a junior engineer after his PhD in Chemical Engineering. He was frustrated with the bureaucracy, and planned on leaving, but decided to stay after an executive insisted he'd work on creating a small- company atmosphere.

In 1981 at the age of 45, he became the youngest-ever chairman & CEO of General Electric. He dismantled many layers of management, finally fulfilling his wish that nearly led to him leaving GE to begin with.

In his 20 years as CEO, he grew the company from $12 billion to $410 billion in market cap. Fortune magazine named him "Manager of the Century."

He fiercely believed in free markets. Even despite the comments in this thread on his anti-Climate Change perspective, he believed that "every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business", as that's what the people, and thus the markets, wanted.

Another interesting note: "Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products".

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

<comment><USER28> They always make you sound nice in the obituary.

<comment><USER29> What a nice, capable man he was:

THE death of Stalin, like the death of Lenin 29 years ago, marks an epoch in Russian history. Rarely have two successive rulers of a great country responded so absolutely to its changing needs and piloted it so successfully through periods of crisis. Lenin was at the helm through five years of revolution, civil war, and precarious recovery. Stalin, coming to power in the aftermath of revolution, took up the task of organizing and disciplining the revolutionary state, and putting into execution the revolutionary programmes of planned industry and collectivized agriculture. He thus equipped the country to meet the gravest external peril which had threatened it since Napoleon, and brought it triumphantly through a four years' ordeal of invasion and devastation.

That's from the Times obituary.

<comment><USER30> That is almost ... impressive. And scary. I am tempted to say that it would be more civil to write badly about dead people after all, cause the above civil framing basically glorifies mass murder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here's a reprint of an old WSJ article from the "Neutron Jack" era:

> EVERYONE FIRED

> Wall Street Reacts Favorably

[http://www.angelfire.com/hi3/ideology/fired.html](http://www.angelfire.com/hi3/ideology/fired.html)

Michael Moore used it as the introduction to his '90s-era book "Downsize This!".

Welch is quoted in the article:

> Jack Welch, chairman of General Electric, had more concrete advice for the > downsized workers.

> "We've got 40 openings at our Tijuana facility right now," beamed a jubilant > Welch. "I'd be more than happy to accept applications from any of our US > workers who would like to relocate there. Just give our personnel department > a call - and it will definitely help if you can speak Spanish!"

<comment><USER31> I was posting because I remembered reading it decades ago and seemed factual, but after re-reading it in detail this article is obviously fictionalized and satirical, and isn't a literal WSJ article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> My only memory of Jack Welch was a PBS interview I caught a slice of where he was asked what his number one piece of advice for management was. He said that a CEO's job was to create and promote culture.

I can see a lot of negativity for the man in the comments here but I agree with him on the culture issue. I can understand the negative feeling people get with some of Welch's personal cultural choices. However, it does seem he was successful at articulating a culture and bringing in a team that believed in that culture.

I think it is wise to try to learn from people even when you dislike them, maybe especially when you dislike them. Even if you don't like what he did, you can change your view to respect how he did it.

<comment><USER33> It's not so much that we don't want to learn from someone we dislike. It's that we don't want to scour the haystack of awful traits to find a needle we can compliment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Jack Welch is indirectly the reason I got fired at Oracle, because some group of bean counters thought it is smart to fire people regularly based on some subjective measurement.

However I am very sad he died because I subsequently got a raise and met my wife at my next company.

<comment><USER35> There is something to be said about your comment: this illustrates the value of free markets and the efficient allocation of resources; you were allocated more efficiently and you made more money and got your wife.

<comment><USER36> Purely luck though he could've also alternatively remained jobless with a bout of depression and became homeless after spiraling into ruin.

<comment><USER37> I wouldn't call it luck; it really depends on a lot of factors. If he's a software dev like most people here, then he's in an industry where there's a high demand for his talents, so it's generally not that hard to find a new job. Unfortunately, this is of course not the case for all workers; laid-off coal miners for instance will have a much harder time.

<comment><USER34> Can confirm I am a software developer and it was relatively easy to find "just any" gig, but I am not working for Google or anything like that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> [https://www.perdoo.com/resources/stack- ranking/](https://www.perdoo.com/resources/stack-ranking/)

> Stack ranking is harmful because it creates an environment which encourages > unproductive behavior. Instead of teamwork, it tacitly rewards backstabbing. > The fear of losing one's job makes people unlikely to speak their mind, > leading to a closed environment, in which innovation suffers. Finally, it > leads to the emergence of "brilliant jerks," who don't recognize or care > that running a successful business is more than just hitting quarterly > targets.

</comment><comment><USER39> >Under his leadership it became the largest company in America, switching from manufacturing toasters and television sets to fostering faster-growing businesses such as the NBC media business and the in-house financial arm, GE Capital.

Yeah, levering up, firing people, deindustrialization and financialization about sums up the dude's career. "Business guru decides burning the furniture more efficient than heating with coal."

</comment><comment><USER40> I read about Welch back in the days when some of my management friends admired his magic to bring GE to the status before he left.

I'm also reading some books and articles about the root of modern US corporate management, which went back to the second World War and the 10 Whiz Kids. Very fascinating reads.

However after the '08 financial crisis a lot of people took a different, more critique view and I think we have a lot to learn from those guys, positive and negative.

</comment><comment><USER41> duplicate: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464246)

</comment><comment><USER42> This thread is relevant.

[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234474399694237696.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234474399694237696.html)

</comment><comment><USER43> Like many leaders, Jack made a lot of good decisions but the lure of quick profits playing financial games has taken more than one long lived company down.

I worked for Westinghouse starting in 1986. Westinghouse went through the same issues investing in real estate loans in the 90s and did not survive.

I remember my manager telling me in the late 80s that the Financial Services division was making more money than the rest of the company combined. This did not make a lot of sense.

It ended up taking the entire company down a few years later.

</comment><comment><USER44> Someone call Jack Donaghy

</comment><comment><USER45> I think his contributions are valuable but his ideas have been over- implemented -- it's time the swing the pendulum swings back.

</comment><comment><USER46> [https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/123447439969423769...](https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1234474399694237696)

</comment><comment><USER47> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464246)

</comment><comment><USER48> From wikipedia [1]:

>> He stated that global warming is "the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring", and that it is a form of "mass neurosis". Yet, he said that every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business, "whether you believe in global warming or not...because the world wants these products".

From [2]:

>> A vitality curve is a performance management practice that calls for individuals to be ranked or rated against their coworkers ... Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has long been a controversial practice due to its negative effects on employee morale and potential for bias and discrimination. Many companies have abandoned the system in recent years

All said and done, RIP.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Personal_opinions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Personal_opinions)

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

edit: added [2] link

<comment><USER49> I have never liked or understood the popularity (at least for a time) of the 'vitality curve'.

Indeed, if you think that 10% of your employees must be fired every year then, to me, it is a sign that something is horribly wrong and you should really focus on that, not to mention the horrible effect this practice has on company culture and atmosphere.

<comment><USER50> I think the core idea makes sense, at least intuitively. Remove the worst performers. Make room for better people.

The issue is that you will always have "worst performers". There needs to be a minimally acceptable performance level. And you also need enough slack so that the churn isn't affecting overall performance.

<comment><USER49> Removing the worst performers is the issue, as you somewhat suggest.

You don't want to remove the worst performers. You want to remove those don't do their jobs or don't fit in the company. This is very different.

<comment><USER50> It is, but I was offering a suggestion as to why the concept is popular.

It passes the "gut check". It "feels right".

And that's because it's vaguely in the right direction of a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> what exactly did he die of? It's so amazing the super rich really don't have access to any extra health care than regular middle class.

</comment><comment><USER52> Please no black bar for Neutron Jack.

</comment><comment><USER53> Technically he's not dead, he's just been downsized to increase shareholder value.

<comment><USER54> Public figures are still human, with families...

<comment><USER55> Yeah, I have a hard time dancing on a persons grave. Unless they've done something totally evil, they should be afforded some respect. That said, hearing about Limbaugh's condition tested my ability to live by that principle.

<comment><USER56> > Unless they've done something totally evil

Well, according to a comment upthread:

> In upstate New York he held back for over a decade any effort to mitigate > legacy PCB pollution from GE's mostly closed factories there. He funded > AstroTurf organizations and downplayed research showing connections between > PCB pollution and health problems.

<comment><USER55> Yeah. That qualifies as evil in my book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Plenty of heartless comments in this thread. It's a shame really. Rest In Peace, Jack.

<comment><USER58> I don't have a strong opinion on Welch, but a) he fired lots of people from GE, and b) introduced stack ranking to the world, which got lots more people fired. Whether or not he was good for GE, he was a heartless man. Of course he gets a heartless response.

<comment><USER59> Yeah bullshit. Look at the reception Fidel Castro got: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041886)

Anyone conservative you people dance on their grave.

Anyone socialist, including brutal dictators, you praise them.

It's as simple as that. I can find you many examples of this. Common theme between them all is their political ideology.

<comment><USER58> "I don't want to be fired for a stupid reason" is a political ideology? Firing people for stupid reasons is a core conservative value?

<comment><USER59> It's debatable whether they were stupid reasons, that's your opinion.

But yes, it's called Right to work.

> A Right To Work law guarantees that no person can be compelled, as a > condition of employment, to join or not to join, nor to pay dues to a labor > union.

This results in less powers to unions, which means employers have more freedom of discretion to fire employers, but also means employees are not forced into massive corrupt labor unions that halt efficiency.

Right to work states are mostly red states.

<comment><USER58> What does that have to do with anything we're discussing? I was talking about stack ranking, which has zero to do with unions.

<comment><USER59> I was answering your questions.

Yes, the freedom to fire workers for what others might consider "stupid reasons" is a core conservative value, stack ranking included.

Tighten your speech if you want specific responses.

What I don't seem to get is how a business tactic is worse than mass-murdering 10,000+ people. Hacker News has a strange moral compass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> HN needs a obituaries section. Seriously. Until then, stop upvoting these constant "... has died" links!

It's morbid and unenlightening. There is a large demographic that is reaching mortality age. HN is going to be filled with nothing but daily "has died" items for the next several years.

<comment><USER61> [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20streaks&sort=byDate&type=comment)</comment></comment>


The Shocking Disparities of Labor Cost [infographic] - <AUTHOR> http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2010/6/16/the-shocking-disparities-of-labor-cost-infographic.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure why this seems to think we're richer in the UK than they are in the US. It would be nice if it were true, but...</comment>


Context for the "Ethernet will never work" memo - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1xz13/in_1974_xerox_parc_engineers_invented_ethernet/c043yl0/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is to provide some much-needed context and balance for the submission here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22517113](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22517113)</comment>


HTTP/2 Server Push and ASP.NET MVC – Cache Digest - <AUTHOR> http://tpeczek.blogspot.com/2017/01/http2-server-push-and-aspnet-mvc-cache.html <comment><USER2> Another (actually, the first) implementation of "http2-casper" (referenced in the article) can be found in h2o [[https://github.com/h2o/h2o](https://github.com/h2o/h2o)]: [https://h2o.examp1e.net/configure/http2_directives.html#http...](https://h2o.examp1e.net/configure/http2_directives.html#http2-casper)

The main author – Kazuho Oku – is to me a http2 wizard (and just now joined Fastly). You can read his thoughts on the matter: [https://github.com/h2o/h2o/issues/421](https://github.com/h2o/h2o/issues/421)

</comment><comment><USER3> Also relevant: "Cache-Aware Server Push (Client Side)" [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HhmyzKUPuWcCs8wG_GLSu3mv...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HhmyzKUPuWcCs8wG_GLSu3mvptygXtO2mBl5xlmEB-4/edit#)

The Chrome team is hashing out potential solutions to the server push <-> browser cache problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've started reading more about HTTP/2 recently because I removed nginx from a project I work on and exposed a bare Golang webserver (which nicely comes with HTTP/2). As far as I understand, HTTP server push is only beneficial if you serve assets from the same machine as the initial HTML page. If you have them on a CDN like CloudFront you can't really get any benefit from push. Is this incorrect?

<comment><USER5> Probably incorrect - the HTTP/2 push specification is a way for a server to send files the client along with the original request - it makes no mandates about where the files must be sourced from. It doesn't even say the data needs to be static. Cloudflare already supports push - you set a special header, and the CF proxy will GET the URLs you specify and bundle them along with the original request. No technical Cloudfront or any other CDN can't do this as well.

<comment><USER2> The point here is to re-use the already open http2 connection; so I'd argue that you should strive for same-domain transport.

<comment><USER4> That's what I meant - if the HTML page (which knows which assets it will require) is not being served from the same machine as the assets will be, you cannot take advantage of HTTP/2 push.

<comment><USER2> Well, you can still utilize it. For instance, if you serve `/static.css` from your CDN; you would (should) also add `Link` headers to all same-domain assets tied to it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Incentivised Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking with Untrusted Cameras - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/coinmonks/multi-target-multi-camera-tracking-with-untrusted-cameras-c8efeb2a06a8 <comment><USER2> Although you make a good case that informational asymmetry is a problem, I suspect you underestimate the willingness of the average person to stick one's head in the sand, focusing only on what they'll perceive as the privacy violations of this system.

After all, they don't have any control over the many public cameras controlled by others, but they do have control over whether or not they install a camera of their own.

I fear you've spent quite a bit of time on the technical aspects and theoretical human aspects, but will run head-on into the practical human aspects and bounce off.

<comment><AUTHOR> > you underestimate the willingness of the average person to stick one's head > in the sand, focusing only on what they'll perceive as the privacy > violations of this system.

I see your point but remember this is all public information gathered from public areas where there is no expectation of privacy. There are few circumstances in which you can stop anyone from taking a picture (or a series of pictures) in a public place, let alone from their own property.

> ... they [the average person] do have control over whether or not they > install a camera of their own.

That's true but let me show you why whether or not the average person installs a camera of their own doesn't matter. Take my neighbours for example; I have over 170 of them, identities, historical movements and current location estimates tracked and searchable from just the FOV of one web camera in my living room window. And that's from below average residential traffic.

That's 1 person out of 170, far from the average. They didn't need to install a camera to be part of the network. They were part of it long before they'd even heard of it.

<comment><USER2> I'm reminded of the adage that, for most authors, piracy isn't a challenge, obscurity is.

You mention 1 person out of 170. Okay, I think I have more than 170 neighbors whose windows I pass in order to leave my neighborhood. I can't imagine even one choosing to install a camera. _That 's_ the point I'm making: Many/most people will not rationally weigh the costs vs benefits of this system. They will see only "more cameras, less privacy," and that's that.

BTW, there is no _legal_ expectation of privacy, but that's a far cry from the average person's understanding. We live in a world in which people attach notes to Venmo payments spelling out their illicit activities, in large part because they seem to not realize just how public that information is.

The network you describes seems to rely on a regular series of periodic updates to track movement. I can't imagine uptake being high enough in most locales for that to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> David here. I'm the author of this article. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

<comment><USER3> Did you upload the full version or just the lite version? It looks awesome by the way, really cool idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

The full version has a lot of my own personal configurations in there so I haven't uploaded it yet. It also requires a good video card so it's expensive to run.

I'm still working on the lite version as you've probably seen. It comes down to trying to make the right tradeoffs when computational power is scarce. I'll be uploading the lite version's tandem Detection Server as a Docker file along with it.

Which one are you interested in?</comment></comment></comment>