Please Request Your Personal Data Held by Cambridge Analytica - <AUTHOR> http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2017/10/uk-and-us-citizens-please-request-your.html <comment><USER2> On May 25, 2018, when the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation) comes into effect, EU citizens will have the right to ask this from any company doing business with EU citizens, under its "data portability" provision ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation#Data_portability))

<comment><USER3> GDPR has significant scope to enable DDOSing of commercial organisations with information requests - it will likely become a tool for political activism as the new information request system has no fee.

It also has potential to spawn new greasy organisations that facilitate mass requests for personal info on your behalf which could lead to some new PPI- style compensation claim situations.

It's a good step for custody of identity information but I'm not sure impact has been completely thought through.

<comment><USER4> Lawyer for the U.S. business I work at said that we can look at it more in the coming year since he suspects it won't come to life in its current form for the exact points you make.

Guess we will see. I'm all for individual rights and privacy, but there should also be options that are reasonably achieved by all parties.

<comment><USER5> I suppose that would depend on your view point. I am of the view that much of this data collection is something companies have no right to, especially when it's done to people who have not agreed to it ala Facebook's shadow profiles. From that viewpoint I say tough shit if you get swamped by these requests.

If we found that a group of companies had made a business model of dumping garbage in public areas through a legal loophole, Id hope that people wouldn't be saying that we have to figure out some solution that's reasonable for all parties when the government goes to stop that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Supposedly, this path is open to even non UK residents, since the processing likely happened in the UK.

 _" According to the UK Data Protection Act 1998 implementing EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC, any individual whose data is processed in the UK has the right to access it (Article 7), regardless of nationality. "_[1]

[1][https://medium.com/personaldata-io/cambridge-analytica- demon...](https://medium.com/personaldata-io/cambridge-analytica-demonstrably- non-compliant-with-data-protection-law-95ec5712b61)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure if this page will send a similar request

[http://datarequests.cambridgeanalytica.org/](http://datarequests.cambridgeanalytica.org/)

Found it at the bottom of their home page.

<comment><USER8> How can I be sure to get more data then what I would give away in that form?

<comment><USER7> Haha, nice catch. It seems there is no way to know that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cambridge analytica is propped in a major way by Robert Mercer of Renaissance Technologies. See, [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the- reclusive-...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive- hedge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency).

I happen to work near their corporate headquarters in NY, and I can't tell you the number of times I had to fight the urge to get into their network.

</comment><comment><USER10> Did you send it to this address (the one in their website's footer): 55 New Oxford Street, London, WC1A 1BS ?

</comment><comment><USER11> Can't we do a little better? If this is 'So important' \- why is it relegated to one small blog and why is it entirely up to us to mail this letter? Truthfully, I don't know what this 'high stakes' fight should resemble, but I hope it does not consist solely of a bunch of people mailing letters.

<comment><USER12> If you don't think it's important, and the fact that you put 'so important' and 'high stakes' in quotes implies that you very much don't think it's important, then you'll make much more of an impact if you instead post about why you don't think it's important. Otherwise you're just indirectly insinuating things without evidence, a la the "hey I'm just asking the questions" people on AM talk radio, /r/conspiracy, etc. Asking questions is great, but most people's interpretation of what you wrote is that you're not asking a question, but rather making a statement in the form of a question so that you're not obligated to present a counterargument to support what you're strongly implying.

Alternately that's not what you were trying to communicate, and instead you're just innocently misusing quotation marks, in which case sorry for misunderstanding your point. Anyway that's probably why you're getting downvotes from some people. Little details like the quotes can completely change the interpretation of what you're communicating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hey guys, I don't come to Hacker News to read about doxxing targets.

<comment><USER14> It's your own information...

<comment><USER15> whois 127.0.0.1</comment></comment></comment>


Digitizing Books One Word at a Time - <AUTHOR> http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I might be in the minority but I didn't know this about recaptcha and found it interesting as well as the pdf they provide: <http://recaptcha.net/reCAPTCHA_Science.pdf></comment>


Why neither the law, nor a helpline, is enough to tackle gender/harassment - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@khor/why-neither-the-law-nor-a-helpline-is-enough-to-tackle-gender-discrimination-sexual-harassment-abd8f7663697

<comment><USER2> I remain puzzled that the Statute of Limitations for many civil offenses such as medical malpractice is four years, while offenses such as workplace discrimination for reasons of age or disability is just five months.

The Equal Opportunity Commission and US Department of Justice are quite vigorous at pressing Americans with Disabilities Act complaints. They just about always win.

But despite that I commonly have standing to file an ADA complaint, because my most-pressing concern when I am denied work over my mental illness is that I find some other job, I always let the timeout expire.

I intend to look into who backed the five month statute - who introduced it to the legislation, who supported it in committee, and who contributed their campaign funding.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The subjective nature of gender discrimination/sexual harassment makes it difficult for not only the law/helpline administrator, but even the victims themselves to ascertain its occurrence. The lack of genuine support on offer to the victims to voice out perhaps is the missing pieces. Thoughts?</comment>


Ratings inflation on Uber and elsewhere - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1244155/good-luck-leaving-your-uber-driver-less-than-five-stars/ <comment><USER6> The problem is that a 5-star rating system is almost never a good fit. The stars are meaningless and it ends up coalescing into some tiny fractional scale.

My uber ride either gets me to my destination safely, reliably, and timely, or it doesn't. It's just a yes or no, and should be rated as such. This would smooth out the subjective reviews and give drivers a much more fair rating. Support requests can take care of any specific complaints. Likewise tips can do the same for positive signals.

<comment><USER7> I guess this would be a nice solution. Yes or no, and then create a percentage. Just like Netflix and some services.

So let's say, if you have less than 30% or something like that, you get out of Uber. And if you have more than 85%, you can be part of Uber X VIP (at least here in Brazil, if you use a lot Uber, you earn one month of Uber X VIP, so just works with drivers with top ratings. If you use a lot again, then you'll earn another month and so on)

<comment><USER8> What if it didn't get you on time because of you or because of an external event that couldn't have been planned for? Life is not black and white.

<comment><USER9> That's why it's not a no-tolerance policy. But, you will probably find that some people tend to "attract" such external events. Because they don't leave enough time to account for _any_ externalities. Or, in this particular case, maybe they actually are a bad driver that does not know routes good enough to avoid anticipated traffic patterns. And so on...

If Uber really cares about _why_ the service was bad, they can always break out multiple yes-no questions. (They probably don't, though.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> V-2 The thing that annoys me with Uber is that one common (at least where I'm located) misbehaviour doesn't get penalized with their rating system at all... You find a ride, but the guy doesn't even start the car in 10 minutes. Then they simply cancel it, and now you're late.

Besides, I don't want to be connected again to someone I ranked negatively once (even if other people gave them 5 stars). I don't think such blacklisting - even in mild form, eg. with some sort of expiration period - is implemented. [EDIT: apparently it is, although the app never explicitly states that].

This is to say that inflation isn't the only, or even main inefficiency of Uber's system; from my perspective.

<comment><USER10> This is an ENORMOUS problem in Kenya. Many drivers do this to "protest" Uber as well. Some of the drivers will accept the fare and then just not come if you're paying by credit card.

I would happily pay the minimum fare to give these drivers a 1 star review.

<comment><USER11> I think it is only fair. These drivers had reasonably good jobs until Uber came along and took part of their income.

<comment> V-2 So it's like protesting against eBay by tricking ordinary people into putting orders you have no intention of ever shipping?

Just because someone has a beef with Uber doesn't mean it's a good excuse for making me late by trolling me into a transaction they are not willing to fulfill to begin with. I'm not Uber. It's like getting a job at McDonald's and sabotaging from the inside (because they made your hot-dog stand go bust).

If that's the level of social ethics they demonstrated at their prior reasonably good jobs, I'm not too surprised about their losing them.

<comment><USER11> I don't think that's reasonable. Stuff like this (delaying people) happens with strikes all the time. Besides, Uber has a history of ignoring laws and regulations themselves.

These people are being sent into a race to the bottom by an outsider. An outsider who just happened to have attracted a big pile of money in a faraway country.

<comment> V-2 > _Stuff like this (delaying people) happens with strikes all the time._

It's not the same thing at all. Strikes may delay people, and they do, but they don't involve deception.

Strikes, especially, though not exclusively, transport strikes, are _announced_ \- and announced in advance.

Even if - say - your local surgery strikes, surely they won't book you an appointment, then trick you into sitting in their waiting room, while noone is actually going to see you.

<comment><USER11> The comparison to surgeons is not adequate. We're talking here about people with little savings, and little to no other job opportunities.

The rebellious acts of these people and the collateral inconveniences they cause are rather small compared to the moral injustice that is imposed on these people.

And yes, you, as a client of Uber are also guilty to some extent.

Perhaps ask yourself this question: what amount of money would be necessary to put _me_ out of business? Imagine that someone stands up and brings together a bunch of VCs and collects that money. Imagine that you have invested a lot in your current business, and you have nowhere to go if you lost that business. That's the situation we're talking about here.

<comment> V-2 > _The comparison to surgeons is not adequate_

I meant a surgery as in primary care physicians or dentists, not surgeons. It could be a barber though, or whatever really. You're missing the point I laid out explicitly - strikes aren't based on deception, and are _announced_.

And it's for a reason: to maximize the impact it has on the employer, while at the same time minimizing it for the "guilty to some extent" average people. Which is the exact opposite of the strategy you described.

<comment><USER12> Deception is required when you're fighting against an adversary (Uber) where there is a drastic power imbalance.

Uber does not fight fare, so therefore, neither should those fighting against them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Has anyone else observed that ratings inflation is even more extreme in the USA than in Europe or Asia? This goes back to eBay, where "A+++ five stars" basically means "I got what I ordered and it arrived in time" or "I didn't but the seller resolved it reasonably and in time".

As others have stated, a single-dimension scale is difficult in Uber where it compounds the basics (get to my destination in a safe and hassle-free way) with the extra mile (some drivers are extra nice, offer you water and snacks and let you play your music etc).

If everyone who fulfills the basics are supposed to get five stars, how do we signal the extra mile except for tips?

<comment><USER14> Ask a Brit how their day is they'll say "Not bad" \- meaning everything is going fine and they're happy. Ask a Californian how their day is they'll say "Not bad" \- meaning something is seriously wrong, and you need to ask about it.

Some cultures in America naturally tend to 'Fantastic' as their base line of descriptive language. This probably translates to ratings too.

<comment><USER15> Ask an Estonian the same question and they'll answer with "it's OK", "meh" or they'll just shrug. Which means the same - everything is going fine and they're happy :)

<comment><USER16> As a Lithuanian, I feel an urge to give a full story of my day when asked "how is it going". Don't want to hear the long story? Ask if everything is OK..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I once took an uber with a driver who was deaf and couldn't speak english. In a normal situation, these two qualities were forgivable: but when he drove away with my luggage, I struggled to even communicate, let alone chase him down.

Being told in clipped, broken, heavily-accented sentences: "Go to Uber", "call Uber", "it's with Uber". But Uber _where_ , exactly?

While I was calling all the nearby Uber locations, I kept thinking, "If this guy got 4.6 stars, do the stars mean anything? At all?"

I would retrieve my stuff, finally, when his daughter took the phone explaining that he accidentally took it and then dropped it off at his local Uber... two-or-three cities away.

All in all, an unpleasant eye-opener.

<comment><USER18> What do you think we should learn from this anecdote (especially given that we don't know what the driver's rating was)?

<comment><USER17> >this guy got 4.6 stars, do the stars mean anything? At all?

<comment><USER18> Ah, I interpreted the "if" (missing in your quote) as a true conditional (not implying that he actually did have 4.6). Thanks for clarifying. In my experience, anything below 5 is potentially a red flag on Uber/Lyft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is extremely relevant and overlooked. Sharing economy relies heavily on ratings for trust. That's literally the only thing that separates Uber from Taxi services and AirBnb from hotel services, and why it is considered OK that they don't have to go through the same licensing and vetting process. I am surprised that the companies themselves are not as concerned about this. This whole gig economy is going to fall apart real quick if this isn't brought under control.

Edit: I think I see why the companies don't need to be too concerned. They only need to remove the worst actors. The ones that could get them into media (e.g, someone ends up with an Uber driver showing criminal tendencies). For that, this system probably works. Anyone who didn't make you feel like your life is at risk is a 5-star. This situation is unlikely to change unless there is competitive pressure on these companies. So it is very important to prevent these companies from monopolizing the sharing economy. Once older cabs and hotels are gone, and these companies have monopoly, we could be left with no option but to take an Uber/AirBnb with unreliable, terrible and probably even dangerous "service" and no legal recourse.

<comment><USER20> While I'm in full agreement on the need for more competition in these industries - which thankfully seems to be happening - I don't think it's important to prevent this particular issue.

Uber has no incentive to keep bad drivers around; after all, it costs them little to fire them and onboard a new one, and there's plenty of people willing to drive a car.

Besides, it's not such a big problem. What ends up happening is that they raise the bar; e.g. an average of 4.6 becomes the equivalent of a 3. A friend of mine has a house on AirBNB with a rating of 3.9, and it's essentially invisible - you'll only find it if you set very specific filters.

Specifically, they can use percentile ranks to do the "translation": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile_rank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile_rank)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Much like how YouTube abandoned ratings in favor of a simple thumbs up/thumbs down, I wonder if Uber and Lyft will do the same.

[https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/03/18/youtube- thumbs-...](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/03/18/youtube-thumbs-stars)

<comment><USER22> Yeah same with NetFlix. To be honest though: I don't get it (I've read the Gruber piece btw). The reason, I don't get it: now with all the thumbs up and down, how am I as a customer supposed to make an informed decision? Before, Netflix would suggest shows and I had a very strong (crowd based) filter mechanism I could rely on. Now they take your feedback and feed their machine and you have to trust them whenever choosing new stuff. It hasn't improved my experience yet. I start watching stuff and then quit frustrated after a short time.

<comment><USER23> In Netflix's case I think that's the point. A ton of their originals had terrible ratings. The new system doesn't display ratings anymore so their originals look better.

<comment><USER24> > A ton of their originals had terrible ratings.

Maybe for you. The Netflix ratings were always a personalized rating (which is explained in one popup on sign-up but never mentioned again). I think people not understanding that was also one of the reasons they abandoned the star ratings and changed the language to "90% match" in the transition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> V-2 It could be replaced with concrete questions. In case of Uber:

Was your driver late?

Was your driver polite?

Did you feel the way they drove was safe?

Did you have troubles communicating with the driver?

(Yes, no, kind of).

ASK FOR FACTS, NOT OPINIONS.

I understand customers can't be bothered to complete a full-blown questionnaire, but the system could pick one or two questions at random after every ride. It could even incentivize answering two instead of one, or three instead of two (as in Google's "Local Guide").

Over time, data will accumulate.

<comment><USER25> > Was your driver late

This would be a poor question. Any perceived lateness is because Uber underestimates the time-to-pickup.

In Manhattan they pretty consistently underestimate by 50% it feels like.

<comment><USER26> On the contrary, it's definitely not a poor question, it's very valuable feedback -- for Uber. I agree it's not something that should be levied on the driver, though.

<comment><USER25> Maybe? They definitely have exact data on how long it takes drivers to arrive. But yeah, I'm referring to using it as a judgment of the driver.

I wouldn't even the least bit surprised if they already figured out that people are more likely to take trips if they intentionally underestimate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Even within an office, it's a general rule of office politics that when asked, if you can say something good about someone without lying, you should do so, and you should generally avoid saying bad things about other people.

I mean, there are exceptions, but at the individual contributor level, that's a pretty good heuristic.

<comment><USER28> IMHO this is a good comment. It explains why ratings tend to be inflated, but I think it also indirectly asks in what kind of society we want to live.

(I think our profession is vulnerable to unadjusted people making the rules for the rest.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This seems like something that can be corrected via normalization, at the per- user level. Find the average rating (and variation) for each individual user. Use these 2 metrics, in order to transform all user-supplied-ratings into normalized-ratings. For example, if someone always gives a 5 rating, then treat all their 5 ratings as 3s, and any sub-5 ratings as 1s. Conversely, if someone mostly gives 2s, then any of their 3s/4s should be treated as 5s.

<comment><USER30> I once had similar thoughts about, say, movie rating systems like IMDB. But you can pretty quickly convince yourself that straightforward ways of implementing this would open themselves up to horrific levels of system gaming very easily: a user who gives everyone a 2 but occasionally gives their best friend a 5 will wind up having that "5" normalized to some astronomically great rating (which even by itself could heavily inflate the friend's average). And every fix for that sort of thing that I came up with opened the door to yet another exploitable flaw or failure to accurately reflect user preferences.

It's a hard problem. And especially in cases like Uber, I don't think there's a technical fix: as long as the company puts the cutoff for continued employment above the second-highest rating, there's a high perceived moral cost to giving a rating less than the maximum.

<comment><USER29> _> a user who gives everyone a 2 but occasionally gives their best friend a 5 will wind up having that "5" normalized to some astronomically great rating_

You can just cap the max-value at a 5, to avoid someone getting a _" astronomically great rating"_.

Rating normalization isn't meant to prevent rating-fraud, nor does it make the problem significantly better/worse than it currently is. But it will solve the problem of rating inflation.

Not to mention that once users know that their ratings are being normalized anyway, they won't feel the need to give everyone a 5-star rating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is probably also related to what happens with the senseless custom of tipping. Does anybody actually spend time evaluating the service they got? Do people carefully adjust the tipped amount to correspond to quality? Unless the service was a real disaster (happens maybe once a year), I just give 20% all the time, because I don't even want to think about it. Same thing with Lyft or Uber, five stars and move on.

And note that tipping also saw inflation. If you read old newspapers, the standard amount used to be 15%, and 10% before that. At least with stars it's capped at five.

</comment><comment><USER32> My experience with tripadvisor:

4.5: Should be fine if there are many votes and the top ones don't look forged

4: average

3.5: Avoid at all cost

People are so bad at giving objective ratings. I often see people mostly rate their friends and the good time they had: "had a very good evening with my friends, blabla" Ok, what about the food, the service? seriously.

<comment><USER33> Also bear in mind, it's almost impossible to give a rating lower than 3 on a lot of these sites (not sure about TA, specifically though?).

<comment><USER34> why?

<comment><USER33> Last time I tried there wasn't an option to give an overall review, it was split into stuff like:

Cleanliness: 1-5; Reception: 1-5; Location: 1-5

There were about 6 or so of these and I gave a 1 for each (since zero wasn't an option). MY final score was 3.5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me of Airbnb. I've stayed in several dumps that somehow garnered amazing reviews.

<comment><USER36> I've found the text reviews more useful.

If the reviews all say "Place was a bit messy but the price was right and the location was great" versus "too bad this beautiful home is so far from the train station," you'll know whether or not the place is right for you.

And people generally won't downvote for a negative they knew going in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The solution is simple: ratings are inflated since they are an endless resource. Let's make them a scarse resource.

It's what works in the academia, where anyone can get aribitrarily close to a 4.0/4.0 GPA, if the grades are inflated enough, but clearly only 10% of students can fit in the top 10% of the class, making this latter rating much more significant.

Simple example (I am sure there are better ways of doing so) after ten Uber rides you are given five stars, and you can distribute that to the drivers you liked the most.

<comment><USER38> Except it doesn't work in academia, because it's the same system that's commonly present in corporate-land, and in practice it's horrible and has multiple flaws.

<comment><USER37> It's not perfect, but it's much more meaningful than GPA.

<comment><USER38> Is it? Understand I am in no way defending GPA, but I don't think it can be taken as given that one works better than the other without some evidence.

GPA in practice has numerous problems on which I could write a whole other book, but where it fails it is often for social reasons which would equally apply to and be gamed by people under the "limited resource/grade to the curve" model.

You will see people start to game away and politicise how the "stars" are awarded and distributed in both. In the later specifically, you run the real risk of having to start to fail genuinely good people and pass genuinely bad people. And there is no universal algorithm used by people in their subjective distribution of stars that allows one to compare or interpret the distribution of stars after the fact or between different "ecosystems".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> seems to me like an easy fix would be to simply adjust the ratings based on the person doing the rating... if someone almost always gives five stars, and they gave a four? there was probably a reason. but that person who always gives 3 stars? four stars from them is probably a good thing.

<comment><USER39> Well, the other thing is that people know that the drivers have a ludicrously high rating level they have to maintain. Basically, giving anything less than a 5 means that they should be fired. Most people, while they may not have had an outstanding ride, don't think the ride was bad enough to warrant someone getting fired, so they just rate 5 stars.

<comment><USER27> right, I think most people give mostly fives because of this. I've probably given less than 5 less-than-five ratings, and I've been using these services almost daily for more than a year.

But, some people never give 5 star ratings. The way things are now? I think that what a driver's rating is depends more on if they get me or if they get a "nobody's perfect" rater than it depends on their actual driving ability.

If the ratings were adjusted by the rater, I think the end result would be a rating system that better reflected the things they are trying to rate than the luck of who they get rating them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I feel like this is an article that could only be written by someone who has never owned a car. One, because it's clearly about Uber. But two because rating inflation has been going on at car dealerships for over a decade.

For those who don't know, when you get your car serviced you're asked to fill out a satisfaction survey. And they all, ALL, have this disclaimer at the top: if you can't give us a 9 or 10, talk to us first. Because they're pretty heavily penalized if they don't get an average rating of 9/10 or better.

It's this bizarre game - they could just say "we want to make you happy so talk to us if you have a problem" but corporate HQ doesn't trust local dealers to do this so they survey them. And of course local dealer game the surveys.

</comment><comment><USER41> The thing with ratings like these is that they're always effectively asking "should this person continue to work for us?"

There's two answers to that question. If they should, you give them every maximum numeric rating. If they shouldn't, you file a customer service complaint.

</comment><comment><USER42> The article completely misses the reason Uber does this: it looks good when your ride request gets picked up by a driver with a five star rating, even if you know what it means. It is similar to how a takeaway aggregator company in London asks customers to rate their restaurant on a six star scale.

So, it's yet another dark pattern.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is because in general people have absolutely no idea how to properly rank and review things. The other part is people generally don't have time so they review only when they hate or love something. The last is people review for personal gain or retribution and has no basis on the product or service.

I admit until I was asked to judge an event and received a short training session on judging I also fell into this category. I now realize how bad I was. There should be some sort of how to rank/judge/review things class that everyone should take in school.

</comment><comment> oh-kumudo But people readjust it anyway. For my area, 4.8 is a like a baseline good driver, anything like 4.6 indicates some problem, 4.5 and below is like no-no area.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have the opposite problem. Here in Austria drivers give me, a passenger, bad ratings for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

I had a perfect 5 star rating for many years, then I visited a 3rd world country where I had some problem with the Uber driver that was supposed to pick me from the airport. He gave me a one star rating. Then Ubers from the same country all gave me bad ratings. I have no idea why. Perhaps because I didn't leave a tip? I don't know.

Then I came back to Austria, my rating was around 4.90, but then it continued to drop slowly, and it's still dropping. Now it's 4.62. I'm having trouble getting rides, presumably because drivers reject me. I used to be picked up by 4.9+ drivers, but now it takes up to 10 minutes to find a ride, and they are all 4.4 drivers.

I don't understand why my rating keep dropping and dropping, especially since it used to be a constant 5, in the same country, for many years.

<comment><USER41> My guess is that there's an informal "I'll rate the driver five stars if they rate the passenger five stars" system that's emerged, and once you don't have five-star history drivers suspect that you won't give a five-star rating back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm thinking Uber might be able to create a better driver quality score using meaningful user inputs rather than ratings. For example, after a ride, it could give the user the option to prefer the same driver in the future if available, or even to wait up to X minutes extra for this same driver (or something along those lines). The percentage of users who choose these options would be a very clear signal of driver quality, and would be less likely to be gamed because the user has a clear motivation to answer truthfully.

I expect there's other info that could be used to calculate the score as well. Average tips compared to other drivers in the area comes to mind, although that could have negative consequences (mainly increased pressure to tip). Perhaps if it were combined with other inputs though. I'm sure there are other options too.

<comment><USER46> That would be good as the driver would start to learn your pattern and be ready for your ride (if you're a regular).

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Homakov wrote about the uselessness of AirBnb ratings VS booking/agoda recently too

[https://medium.com/@homakov/why-airbnb-reviews-are- flawed-b8...](https://medium.com/@homakov/why-airbnb-reviews-are- flawed-b8a961e04c32)

</comment><comment><USER46> It would be nice if the questions were factual (like Google's guides) but that's too many questions. For a simple one input perhaps rating out of 110% would be clearer.

Was your job/ride successful? 0-110% ? (and probably use intervals of 10).

Then most people for the average ride where it works will give 100% as the job was done. If the driver went above and beyond, you can give them 110% If you pick 110% an extra option asks, "What did the driver do that was above and beyond?" Which stresses that 110% is for exceptional service, and also collects what makes it exceptional.

For rides where the driver didn't do the job properly, like took a wrong turn, was late, etc. You can mark it accordingly, 90%, 80% etc

<comment><USER48> I like this idea a lot, but can easily imagine Uber screwing it up by setting 100% as the "this driver is at risk of being dropped" threshold so everybody feels obligated to give 110% if the driver's been basically polite and on time anyway...

<comment><USER46> Yeah it's a social problem. But by making rating 110% slightly more cumbersome to give vs a 100% rating you ensure that people giving 110% went out of their way to give when they could have just pressed ok.

Actually making it even less options might make it simple and removing a number system all together.

Scale would be:

\- Horrible/bad/did not do the job at all/etc - For when the job/ride did not completed or something truly awful happened. Can play with wording. When choosing this you get a big box to type in the issue and a customer support service should reach out and see what's wrong. \- Did the job but slight issues - When choosing this you have to say what the slight issues were, so there is some friction still in choosing this option \- Did the job, no issues - This will be the default, friction-free option. So if they pick this they don't have to type anything else. Quick and easy. \- Exceptional service - <USER2> they pick this they are also forced to type in what the exceptional service was.

You could even socially tweak/test it with forcing people to tip if they pick exceptional service (so effectively putting their money where their mouth is, if it's exceptional you need to pay why). With countries where tipping is optional this is a good play (but in USA maybe not so).

The tipping part is just an idea. But the idea is to make choosing exceptional a bit more friction then just choosing job done. And also how to translate that culturally to other markets. By making them type in more for those situations it should funnel only users willing to type to give those ratings.

And an option is for users to see not only the ratings of drivers but what other people typed in the exceptional (or typed in the slight problems) categories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> V-2 What I think about drivers' ratings:

4.5 - he (or she) is gonna be polite

4.6 - ooh, I (mildly) wonder why that is

4.7 - <USER5>

4.8 - <USER5>

4.9 - <USER5>

5.0 - oh gosh, they're still learning

</comment><comment><USER49> Meta-reviews might help; for instance, on Slashdot, periodically being shown random comments from others, with ratings, where you can say whether or not you agree with the original rating. At least that way, _some_ additional scrutiny occurs (maybe not objective individually but probably an improvement when aggregated).

I guess in Uber's case this might be implemented as: randomly showing previous riders a rating for a driver they had, and asking if they agree.

</comment><comment><USER50> What's wrong with the driver's own solutions, except put into the app and displayed to every customers and adjusted with descriptions are actually reasonable, eg. "exceptionally bad", "acceptable" and "exceptionally good", and follow up to make sure the median driver lands squarely on "acceptable"?

</comment><comment><USER51> Why is it that so many people are volunteering to act as free management consultants to Uber in the first place? They have billions of dollars, they can hire secret shoppers to evaluate their employees.

</comment><comment><USER52> Eponymous reviews are a double edged sword. One the one hand there's trust: other customers know it's a real person assessing a service they actually used. On the other hand that person can't be 100% honest because there are social repercussions.

Making the reviews private (as the study suggests) may solve the social pressure issue but it will damage trust (how do I know the 2 stars are legitimate and not a company's way to oust specific contractors/landlords/etc?)

</comment><comment><USER53> This is great news – it makes the service economy more ethical. If a negative rating is left only when people were truly dissatisfied with the ride, and not every missing smile or snippy response receives assessment like in the dystopian Netflix show Black Mirror, we are actually treating our service contractors as humans.

I also think it's completely fine that people are rating apps and toasters more negatively, because most of the time, the source of dissatisfaction (e.g. a bug) can be weeded out once and for all, while being an Uber driver is emotional work 10 hours a day.</comment>


Tell HN: Yahoo Has Never Acquired A Single YC Company. - <AUTHOR>

I was looking at my list of YC acquisitions earlier and noticed an interesting fact: Yahoo! has never accquired a single Y Combinator startup, either for talent or technology ( http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies.php?status=acquired ).
One interesting note about that fact is that Yahoo! was the purchaser of Viaweb back in 1999, which formed the genesis of Y Combinator itself.
Another interesting detail about Yahoo!'s lack of start-up acquisitions is that Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has stated she may not return the cash from selling Alibaba to Yahoo! shareholders, which may signal a very positive and healthy buying spree by Yahoo! for talent and technology in the near future. <comment><USER2> I don't know that this is actually surprising. There are only 38 companies acquired. None have been acquired by Microsoft, IBM and many other large technology companies.

Consider this from a founders point of view, many of these companies may have had multiple offers. If you had an offer from Yahoo! and Facebook, or Microsoft and Google, which would you be more likely to take?

This is part of what Marissa Meyer is going to try to change. At the moment, Yahoo! isn't a cool place to work.

Plus, if you had the option of Yahoo! or pre-IPO Facebook equity, I assume you'd go with Facebook as well. Not a lot of faith in Yahoo! (or even Microsoft to a certain extent).

It is believed (not sure if it's true) that Google and Facebook are more start-up friendly.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree that it makes perfect sense for Mayer to go on a buying spree. I am very happy that Yahoo is finally getting out of it's rut. It is pretty crazy to see Yahoo disband it's R&D and then spring this far in the other direction.</comment>


Federal Reserve officials say they 'can't afford to ignore' climate change - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/federal-reserve-officials-host-climate-change-conference-121222994.html <comment><USER2> Century of Enslavement: The History of The Federal Reserve - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IJeemTQ7Vk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IJeemTQ7Vk)</comment>


AMD-SEV: Platform DH key recovery via invalid curve attack (CVE-2019-9836) - <AUTHOR> https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2019/Jun/46 <comment><USER2> Elliptic-curve cryptography is full of edge cases, math pitfalls, and side- channel traps.

* Your implementation produces incorrect results for some rare curve points.

* Your implementation leaks secret data when the input isn't a curve point.

* Your implementation leaks secret data through branch timing.

* Your implementation leaks secret data through cache timing.

This is why NIST curves should be retired in favor of Curve25519 and other newer designs that care actual secure implementation in mind, not only theoretical security.

Curve25519 is designed to be more immune to implementation pitfalls. There is no invalid curve attack in Curve25519, secret-dependent branching can be avoided easily, etc.

[https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/](https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/)</comment>


Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard - barry-cotter http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html <comment><USER2> This article is great fun to read and overall very informative. Yet I had a few gripes about it.

* Ridiculous writing system: First, the term "ideogram" is no longer used, since it has the connotation (wrong, but older philologists believed this) that these symbols _directly_ refer to an idea; "logogram" is the correct term.

The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".

* Writing system not phonetic: Any other European language than English would have formed a much better argument, since English is notorious for its haphazard mapping of mapping phonemes to the alphabet, partly caused by the fact that early printers in England were Dutch with bare knowledge of English.

One can argue that languages spread "hardness" in different aspects. Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial, to the point of nonexistent. Compare with, say, Greek grammar which has baffling complexity or Lithuanian that still has noun 9 cases! Some exotic native Indian languages have 10-15 noun classes (German has three, which we call gender). In pure writing complexity, some people rate Japanese to be even more complicated (with its three sub systems). Or for an older example, consider Mayan hieroglyphs.

<comment><USER3> Chinese major who later worked for years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator replying here.

 _Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial_

He didn't say that, because Chinese is chock-full of difficult grammar. Take a look at the page count (847 pages) of the book A Grammar of Spoken Chinese by late Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao. His book is thorough, but by no means exhaustive. Li and Thompson's Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (713 pages) is familiar to many English-speaking students of Chinese. It too is far from exhaustive. Many of the mistakes made in speaking standard Chinese by second-language speakers that impair understanding are GRAMMAR mistakes, and that is true even of native speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") who don't know Modern Standard Chinese as a first language. And almost half the population of Chinese, according to a survey by the Chinese government, self-rates as unable to converse in Modern Standard Chinese.

[http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...](http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm)

Moreover, despite what that article says, written Chinese characters are frequently a barrier to understanding among Chinese citizens from different regions too. There is first of all the problem of high rates of illiteracy in China, because of the old-fashioned writing system Moser mentions. Many literate Chinese persons tend to write in the regional vocabulary and grammar --there is that again--of their native Sinitic language when they write, and I have seen numerous occasions of Chinese people traveling out of region and not being able to read hand-written signs at markets or even printed official signs posted by the local government.

<comment><USER4> I'm also a Chinese major who later worked as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator.

Compared to German (which I know) / Japanese (which I've studied) / aforementioned exotic languages Chinese grammar is trivial.

There may be many inconsistencies (and difficulties when you encounter literary Chinese), but grammar rules are pretty basic.

<comment><USER3> A list of languages I have studied before can be found at

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415>

Suffice it to say that Chinese grammar is NOT "trivial" to anyone who digs into it deeply. No linguist would say so. Chinese grammar, being based in large part on word order and function words, rather than on inflection, is friendly to native speakers of English, and that is one of the reasons I preferred learning Chinese to learning Russian at university while I was taking courses in both. But there is plenty of grammar in Chinese, and plenty of misunderstanding of grammar among Chinese persons that impairs understanding among people who speak differing Sinitic languages.

<comment><USER4> Is not the "grammar" you refer the largely loose particles because of the lack of formal grammar, rather than the reverse? If so, I standby my original statement that the grammar (meaning formal grammar) is trivial.

Why not give an example of a grammar point that you think I am missing?

<comment><USER3> I've already cited books in this thread, and they list dozens of features of Modern Standard Chinese grammar that are confusing even to speakers of other Sinitic languages.

An example I often bring up to English speakers who are learning Chinese is that they have to learn that the Chinese verbal system is based on aspect

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

rather than on tense. Many native English speakers misspeak Chinese as a second language because they struggle to impose their sense of tense on a tenseless language, and meanwhile get Chinese aspect marking all wrong. That can lead to misunderstandings in either direction, as my extensive acquaintance with persons who speak both languages often shows.

<comment><USER4> Aspect is trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Some interesting facts about the Chinese writing system:

* The consequences of not having an alphabetic script are large. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no anagrams, and no Morse code! To get around the last problem, The Chinese have devised a system where each word was assigned a number, e.g. "Person" was 0086 [ __The Mother Tongue _]

_ Massive statistical tests in the past two decades have repeatedly demonstrated that 1,000 characters cover approximately 90% of symbols in typical texts, 2400 cover 99%, 3,800 cover 99.9%. Based on the study of other logographic systems (Mayan writing, Egyptian hieroglyphs), it seems that there's an upper limit on the number of unique forms that can be tolerated in a script. For most people, this value seems to be in the range 2000-2500.

* A Chinese character is generally confused with a word, the assumption being that Sinitic language are exclusively monosyllabic. This is not true. In modern Mandarin the average length of a word is almost exactly two syllables.

* The Chinese writing system is very well suited to writing Classical Chinese but ill-equipped to record the vernaculars (local dialects/languages) of which there are many in China. Consequently, to write Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Shanghainese, it is necessary to invent characters or resort to romanization.

The source is _The World's Writing Systems_ by Oxford University Press. I recommend this book to everyone who's interested in these matters.

[Edit] In case you're wondering, Chinese has palindromes, but not the letter- based ones like we're used to. Hofstadter in _Le Ton beau de Marot_ relates an anecdote with a Chinese professor. Prof. Wu first shows them a famous Chinese palindrome: Ye luo tian luo ye (At leaves-fall season, fall the leaves). In turn, H shows him the quintessential Panama palindrome, but Prof. Wu has difficulty understanding it because he was reading it word by word (p. 143)

<comment><USER5>
      The consequences of not having an alphabetic script are large.

The probable social consequences are perhaps the most profound. It must distort an education system to have such a large part of the curriculum accessible only by rote learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an old article, because he says he's only been studying Chinese for six years and I remember Doug Hofstadter talking about him, as a Chinese expert, in the 90's.

In fact, Moser gained some renown as being good enough at Chinese (after writing this article, obviously - but not too long, as the date that appears on it is 1991 and I heard about this in about 1996 or so) that he appeared on a Chinese _game show_ involving language mastery, apparently something along the lines of a linguistic Jeopardy.

So clearly, Chinese is in fact damned hard, but not impossible for an obsessed genius.

I wonder if anything has been done about the dictionary situation.

<comment><USER7> We have the internet, Unicode, and powerful computers now, so I suspect the dictionary situation is _quite_ different from 1991. I don't know much about Chinese in particular -- my foreign language was Japanese -- but I have recently looked up kanji using a variety of search engines, including tools that allow you to draw characters. (For example: <http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html>) If you have the kanji as text, it's not much more difficult to look up an unfamiliar word in Japanese than it is in English, although it may still be difficult to figure out the exact sense if the writing isn't literal.

For example, suppose you're trying to read something on the Japanese Wikipedia. I'm horribly out of practice, but I can still go and take something like "第六回執筆コンテストの入選記事が決定しました。結果発表をご覧下さい。" (found on the front page of ja.wikipedia.org) and reason that it means something along the lines of "The best articles of the sixth writing competition have been chosen. Please look at the results." just by copying the parts I'm unfamiliar with into a kanji search engine like Jlex (<http://jlex.org/>) a bit at a time until I get something reasonable back.

<comment><USER5>
      I suspect the dictionary situation is quite different from 1991.

The firefox extension peraperakun is damn handy.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter 1\. Because the writing system is ridiculous.

2\. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.

3\. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.

4\. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.

5\. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.

6\. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).

7\. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.

8\. Because tonal languages are weird.

9\. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.

An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question.

<comment><USER8> Criticisms 1-5 are basically identical and have no useful alternative for a linguistically diverse country like China until you finally get everyone speaking the same dialect.

Criticism 6--uhh, well, there's also Shakespeare for the English equivalent of incomprehensible classical language. The first time I heard idioms like "one fell swoop" I was totally all like wtf bro. And you don't need to know classical Chinese to be reasonably useful in day to day life.

7--who the hell uses anything other than pinyin? I see Wade-Giles occasionally but that's typically for family names.

8/9--yeah, that's about the only reason Chinese is really that difficult to learn in my opinion. English speakers belong to one language family, and Chinese speakers belong to another. Tonal languages are weird _to you._ I assure you, Chinese people find pluralization, verbal conjugation (past, present, perfect, subjunctive...), spelling (threw, through, bought, bot), "r"s, and articles to be pretty fucking weird.

<comment><USER9> I don't think I'd call these criticisms so much as _reasons_ why Chinese is so damn hard (for a Western speaker). It's not like there's anyone around who designed the language to complain to.

Anyway:

Reasons 1-5 aren't about the many languages used in China (if French & Spanish are different languages, then I consider Mandarin & Cantonese to be different languages). These difficulties are due to the lack of a concise phonetic alphabet (like the roman alphabet used in English, French, Spanish…, or the hiragana alphabet used in Japanese). If the Chineses languages all used a common (small!) phonetic alphabet of some sort, many of those difficulties would dissolve (and there is no particular reason why that could not be done, technically, except that it throws out a huge part of their culture). Even if only Mandarin existed, those first 5 difficulties would remain.

Edit: OK, so using a phonetic alphabet would mean that each language would be written differently... except that this is already true, essentially. You can actually write in Cantonese in a way that a Mandarin speaker could not understand (using the same characters), and there are those who do this. I think he says this in there (I read this a long time ago), that the Mandarin writing system is just that; Mandarin. The whole country knows how to read it (without necessarily knowing how to pronounce it), so it's more about the non- Mandarin-speaking Chinese people having 2 languages that they use: their own for speaking, and Mandarin for writing. Using a purely phonetic alphabet may make this bi-lingual usage more difficult... or not. The existing writing system is already pretty painful, whether you're a native or not (though natives have more time to get used to it before they're expected to be able to use it, I suppose).

Reason 6: this isn't like reading Shakespeare (Modern English, though an earlier version of it), as far as I understand. It seems more like trying to read The Canterbury Tales (Middle English) or Beowulf (Old English, more like German than English, really). You're completely correct about it not being relevant to practical usage of any of the Chinese languages, though.

<comment><USER10> Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) actually isn't that bad, it just looks that way. If you read it aloud, you can understand it pretty easily. Old English or Anglo- Saxon actually looks more like Danish than German and is a totally different language from modern English - modern Spanish has more cognates and other similarities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At least Mandarin grammar is relatively simple, and it has only 4-5 tones compared to Cantonese or Minnanese. But don't get me started on the multitude of Chinese dialects.

The point about classical Chinese isn't fair, the language itself has evolved little in the past few thousand years. To achieve the same utility in English, you will have to learn Modern English, Middle English, Norman, Old Saxon, Latin etc.

<comment><USER12> Having an interesting conversation with a Korean the other day. She mentioned that in Korean there are various word and conjugation choices you have to make based on honorifics. What she didn't realize is that English has something similar but we don't recognize it for indicating formality -- often as a class or education signal, or to use differently depending on audience.

I was confused but she explained...

Most English words of German origin are vulgar or informal, while most of Latin, Greek or French origin are formal. Like "shit" vs. "feces", "fight" vs. "quarrel", "drink" vs. "imbibe", etc. In general, where we have synonyms, and those synonyms can be ranked on a scale of informal to formal, German words are towards the informal end, and romantic origin words are towards the formal end.

She said it's been one of the hardest things to learn when learning English (and she's quite fluent), is this concept of "formal" English vs. "informal" that is separate from "colloquial", mainly because nobody recognizes it and nobody teaches it.

So apparently this is also something one has to learn in English - <AUTHOR> origin, in order to gauge proper usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those curious about the idiom, "It's Chinese to me," here's the directed graph of prevailing "It's X to me" idioms among world languages:

<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1024>

<comment><USER14> Japanese is missing. Does anyone know their equivalent?

<comment><USER15> Allegedly, "The Japanese use a string of nonsense syllables which imitate the sounds of unknown languages, especially Chinese"

<http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php>

^ Worth noting that 'chinpunkanpun' is the word; the rest of the phrase is accurate Japanese.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting that almost all of the reasons apply to the written language. I took Mandarin in college and found the tricks I was taught to learn the characters were mostly useless. You simply had to memorize everything by brute force.

The spoken language has a simple grammar and aside from the tones you can probably get to a passable level within a year if you live in Beijing and actually interact with people in Chinese.

<comment><USER3> Setting aside literacy is costly, and I have seen a lot of learners of Chinese who go over to Chinese-speaking places do that. But I agree with the statement that Chinese people will probably be well able to intercommunicate with a dedicated Westerner who immerses himself in the standard language of China for a year--but largely because the speakers of the standard language in China are well used to nonstandard speech from the lips of their own compatriots who grew up in other regions. I can pass for a native of China over the telephone --not because my Chinese is so wonderful, but because China is so full of citizens who speak Mandarin poorly as a second language.

<comment><USER16> It depends what you consider costly. I switched to Japanese after college and moved to Japan for a year. Rather than learning anything about the writing system, I took a 6 week conversation crash course before leaving. When I got there I just mastered the accent and some of the cultural communication idosyncrasies like "active listening" rather than spending time reading and writing anything. I ended up going on far more dates with women than I ever have in my life prior (or after) and had two really cool girlfriends. In contrast my friend who was obsessed with mastering Japanese had no friends at all for about 3 years. Nobody wanted to talk to him because his accent was so grating. I feel like his approach was far more "costly" if you consider "social cost" a real factor.

In terms of real economic value I have come to the conclusion that a native english speaker mastering another language rarely pays off, in a financial sense. The main benefit is establishing relationships with people you wouldn't be able to meet, otherwise.

<comment><USER17> Accent seems to be way more important than vocabulary or grammar for social situations. It's easier to "fix" an imperfect sentence construction in your head and infer missing meanings from gestures and pictures than it is to decipher an extremely thick accent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's really hard to get that kind of straight-talk from instructors or native speakers.

The best rationalization I can think of for someone learning this language, is that if you enjoyed the meditative focus of learning how to write cursive as a child, or you miss the wonder of constantly discovering new words as an adolescent, you can re-live that for the rest of your life with Chinese!

Fortunately for Chinese (Mandarin at least), it _is_ a very beautiful language, and every dose of that beauty seems to make you want more.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am from China, my advise for western Chinese learners is:don't learn it based on Pinyin which seems helpful at the beginning but leads you to nowhere at all. If you just want to be able to read CHinese books or novels you simply don't have to know how to speak it. Most of the European Chinese experts in the last century were like that. And if you just want to speak it fluently, find a Chinese gf/bf,in two years you can flirt with others in Chinese.

</comment><comment><USER20> I read hundreds if not thousands of articles on a daily basis. Most of the time, I skim them. But this essay/article despite being so long, kept me interested the whole way, and made me laugh several times. Amazing writer.

<comment><USER21> Me too, it's five in the morning here and I'm afraid I woke up my roommates when I (repeatedly) laughed out loud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There ain't too much Chinese characters as one perceives. A Chinese character is like a word in English. They are just using different vehicles to load meaning. For example, the Chinese character 早 is equivalent to "morning" or "early" in English. When you learn to write it, it is the combination of 日 and 十. When Chinese learner struggles for the combination of components, English learner struggles for that of letters(, or stem root). They are pretty the same. It is much easier to remember that 早 (morning) is associated with 日 (sun). Once you master the skill, it is as easy as spelling. You can complain too much characters when comparing the number of words in English.

I like classical Chinese. It is the minimalistic form of Chinese languages. Concise and Poetic.

Modern Chinese is heavily polluted by Western languages, both English and Russian. Modern Chinese text is crippled by Western grammar. This makes the text filled with empty words, and long sentences, and odd construction, mechanical, and confusion.

Writing Chinese never emphases grammar, but the sequence and context. It is dramatically different approach from Indo-European languages. For example, In English "When the rain falls, there are fewer and fewer people on the street." Alternative, you can write, "there are fewer and fewer people on the street when the rain falls." The order of words and phrases is not so important. In Chinese, it can be "天雨,街上人漸疏"(sky rain => on street people fewer), or more concisely, 雨下人疏(rain fall => people fewer), or 天雨人疏(sky rain => people fewer). You can't reverse the word order in Chinese. You can forget grammar completely but write the consequence of your thought and scene. It is what the idiomatic phrase from. For example, if you describe a person fails to break up a relationship, you can say 欲斷難斷 (want to break => (but) hard to break). This saves lots of words.

<comment><USER23> _You can forget grammar completely but write the consequence of your thought and scene._

Linguists call this a topic-comment language: 雨下, 人疏 -> [as for when it] rains, [there are] fewer people [out].

It does makes for some nice poetry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Chinese: the language so hard the Koreans made a new language!

<comment><USER22> You are misleading. Koreans have their own languages. Only the written form is drastically changed. It is not a new language.

It is more than hard and easy. Remember there is politics and culture. The disuse of Chinese character is pretty recent, post-WWII.

Recently, some Koreans suggest to pick up Chinese character in Korean. In the past, Korean culture and history are written in these characters. After a few generation, only very few people can recognise them properly. Also, Characters differentiate homonym. With characters, it would cause much confusion with numerous homonyms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if this is true?

From: <http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/chinesewriting.html>

"Since Cantonese, Shanghainese, and other nonstandard varieties differ from Mandarin not just in sound but also in vocabulary and grammar, the characters cannot bridge this gap by themselves, even with their relative neutrality toward sound.7 Much of the core vocabulary of non-Mandarin Chinese has no counterpart in Mandarin and no recognized character representation. Conversely, many Mandarin terms for which characters do exist are foreign to non-Mandarin speakers. The fact that nonstandard speakers can read a text in the standard language simply means that these speakers are bilingual. They have learned written Mandarin as a second language. They know enough vocabulary and grammar to make sense of Mandarin texts, much as I know enough French words and grammar to read that language (without being able to pronounce it convincingly, much less to speak it fluently). If Chinese characters have unified the Chinese languages, then the alphabet has unified French and English.

"The characters do allow nonstandard speakers to use their own pronunciations to read Mandarin texts. So instead of acclimating to the national standard, nonstandard speakers reinforce their own speech habits and add to the vitality of their "dialect" by introducing new vocabulary from Mandarin, which they pronounce their own way by analogy. Whether alphabetic scripts should be used to provide China's non-Mandarin speakers with the means to become literate in their own language is a political question outside the scope of the present inquiry. But one thing is certain: since non-Mandarin speakers are forced anyway to learn a second language, it would make more sense from the viewpoint of those promoting unity if this bilingualism were achieved through Mandarin written in the pinyin alphabet.8 The incentive to learn the national standard, including its pronunciation, would be higher than it is today if one's ability to read depended on it. As it is now, nonstandard speakers work their way through standard texts using whatever pronunciation comes naturally, not fully learning Mandarin and not reading their own languages either."

<comment><USER3> "Since Cantonese, Shanghainese, and other nonstandard varieties differ from Mandarin not just in sound but also in vocabulary and grammar, the characters cannot bridge this gap by themselves, even with their relative neutrality toward sound.7 Much of the core vocabulary of non-Mandarin Chinese has no counterpart in Mandarin and no recognized character representation. Conversely, many Mandarin terms for which characters do exist are foreign to non-Mandarin speakers."

Yes, the quoted statement is true. Observing examples of this phenomenon (in either direction, whether Mandarin speakers not being able to read other Sinitic languages in Chinese characters, or speakers of those languages not being able to read quite standard Mandarin in Chinese characters) was what motivated some of my earlier comments in this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's a lot of words to say "because there's too damn many characters".

BTW, the Japanese also believe they speak the most difficult language in the world. Probably a lot of others too. That means very little.

</comment><comment><USER27> And then there's Dashan (Mark Roswell) who studied Chinese in Canada for four years and then went to China. Within a year he was appearing on Chinese television and now is a huge superstar performing xiansheng, which is an oral comedic tradition that even native speakers find pretty frickin difficult. I'd love to know how he managed to learn Chinese so well, so quickly. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashan>.

</comment><comment><USER28> I studied Japanese for about 2 years in college. I estimated that to learn a single kanji, it took the time to learn 40 other vocabulary words.

I wished I had focused on speaking instead. Academic japanese seems to treat starting students like they're going to get a PhD in the language. That is absurd. Written Japanese beyond hiragana and katakana (the two phonetic alphabets), should only start in the 3rd or 4th year of undergraduate study.

<comment><USER29> I don't understand this sentiment. Kanji are an integral part of the japanese language, and much of it doesn't make sense without them.

You can and should start studying kanji as soon as you have a reasonable command of hiragana. Every time you learn a new word you should at least check the characters it's written with instead of pretending that it's okay to use hiragana for everything.

My experience has been that I sometimes actually understand words I've never heard before because I can connect the syllables with kanji whose meaning fits the context.

It's up to you to balance your time between learning the written language and learning the spoken language, but they are not independent of each other, and ignoring kanji in the beginning is a mistake.

<comment><USER28> Kanji are important for written language. I see no reason the language should avoid eliminating kanji, given the available alternatives.

In my experience, there wasn't a single case of being able to infer meaning from context or radicals or anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Chinese is not hard. For example the most complicated object in the world, human being or people, is written using just 2 strokes 人. Simple.

</comment><comment><USER31> David Moser (author of this article) appeared in the Sinica podcast this week along with Gady Epstein, Jeremy Goldkorn and Kaiser Kuo. All familiar names for China watchers.

[http://popupchinese.com/lessons/sinica/maos-legacy-and- forei...](http://popupchinese.com/lessons/sinica/maos-legacy-and-foreign-self- censorship)

Quite a good episode. Strongly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER32> Unsurprisingly the article seems to focus a lot on the non-phonetic script.

I've been thinking about this — considering the difficulties even with the simplified characters and even for native users of the language if this article is to be believed, what are HN's thoughts on potential official shift by China from simplified to pinyin or a derivative of pinyin?

</comment><comment><USER33> Pardon my cynicism, but, those who haven't learnt Chinese well tend to exaggerate its difficulty as a pretext to their failure, and those who have do the same to accentuate their achievement. If you are weighing whether to learn Chinese and deterred by its supposed difficulty, I hope you'd take that into account.

</comment><comment><USER34> I took great pleasure reading aloud many sections of this humorous article to my Chinese wife. This article resonates closely with my experiences / frustrations - my dear wife had a good chuckle at my exasperated face.

</comment><comment><USER35> English is phonetic. What A JOKE ? The author forget the language which is difficult to what difficult can be BUT it depends on your effort. The language is so phonetic that even a breath won't be missed out. And a person can write a book accurately as read by other people if pronounced correctly. And the language is Sanskrit. Hindi, Nepali, Marathi are it ruined form but they bring most phonetic features.

<comment><USER21> This is difficult to understand.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Web framework do you recommend for a Java Shop? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> As per ThoughtWorks Technology Radar ([http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/#/languages-and- frameworks](http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/#/languages-and-frameworks)), they don't recommend JSF. Struts has also lost its edge in the last few years.

Play Framework is still in 'Trial' category per the radar.

However, Dropwizard framework is in 'Adopt' category. [[http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/#/languages-and- frameworks](http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/#/languages-and-frameworks)]

Interestingly, Spring MVC was not even mentioned.

What are your suggestions?

<comment><USER2> I have heard very positive things about dropwizard, but also consider Grails.

<comment><USER3> Not dropwizard. It is really really good if you are building rest services for other things to talk to. it is not so good on the web side of things, but then again, it isn't meant to be.

Spring MVC is still good enough for most things. Stay away from JSF.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really appreciated the original simplicity and abstraction that Spring brought to the Java world. But of late Spring frameworks have become very invasive for web applications and does not cleanly integrate with other frameworks (It is not seamless - Had a lot of heartburn with a JSF + Spring app. CDI and Spring DI does not play along nice at all).

Moreover, with the renewed interest in making the server side layer of the web applications to be as stateless as possible and leave the state transitions and presentation to the client side HTML/CSS & JS, I am finding it hard to justify having Spring on the backend.

Dropwizard along with a SPA type AngularJS based application seems to be a good alternative, what am I missing? Why are we not seeing much traction on this framework?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Play Framework 1.X has worked great for us and 2.X is getting there but Id only recommend to the more adventurous

<comment><USER5> I'm building a webapp with play 2.2 and it's quite a nice framework. A nice thing about play is Scala can be used if you so choose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> grails is the best framework I have seen so far. sensible defaults inspired from rails is good. you don't have to learn groovy since it is a superset of java. you can learn on the way .... very less entry barrier and learning curve

</comment><comment><USER7> jersey</comment>


A mysterious group has hijacked Tor exit nodes to perform SSL stripping attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-mysterious-group-has-hijacked-tor-exit-nodes-to-perform-ssl-stripping-attacks/ <comment><USER2> What are they even talking about? People can just casually decrypt https now? Isn't the whole point of https that something like this can't happen?

<comment><USER3> SSL stripping is more of a downgrade attack than a decryption. It relies on the fact that most website URLS are still http by default and the webservers just use an http to https redirect. If you can MITM the http request you can prevent the redirect and just present the HTTPs content through HTTP with all the MITM tampering you could ever want. It's the kind of attack HSTS is designed to try to prevent, but even that requires the victim visit the website once legitimately.

<comment><USER4> The "HTTPS Everywhere" extension should also prevent against this, right? Since it blocks all http traffic.

I always keep it enabled and there are almost no sites that require exceptions except on corporate intranet.</comment></comment></comment>


Voice Activated - <AUTHOR> http://tomcreighton.com/2011/10/voice-activated/

<comment><USER2> 37signals reference in the article notwithstanding, they're right. When you stop treating every opportunity to interact with your users as an opportunity to interact with your users, what are writing?</comment>


Continuous Delivery at LinkedIn – Gradle in the Enterprise - <AUTHOR> http://gradle.org/gradle-in-the-enterprise-at-linkedin/ <comment><USER2> > you can declare your dependencies in the Gradle syntax

It's actually the Apache Groovy syntax, _not_ Gradle syntax. There seems to be an ongoing practise in these stories never to mention Groovy's special place as the DSL in Gradle. Is someone there ashamed of Groovy?</comment>


Medal of Honor Given to Living Soldier - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/world/asia/11medal.html?_r=1&hp

<comment><USER2> The Medal of Honor has been given to quite a few living members of the service. I don't know why the author thought this was the first time.

<comment><USER3> "For his valor during that October 2007 mission, the White House announced Friday that the 25-year-old sergeant, of Hiawatha, Iowa, would become the first living service member to receive the Medal of Honor, the military's most prestigious award, for action during any war since Vietnam."</comment></comment>


Who Are the Real-Life Models of "Silicon Valley" Characters? We Have Them - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/who-are-the-real-life-models-of-silicon-valley-characters-we-have-them-3507bc890d9a?source=rss----d16afa0ae7c---4 <comment><USER2> The author deleted this Medium story

<comment><USER3> There was a server glitch on Backchannel. It's back.</comment></comment>


Web Twitter + Notifo are far superior to any twitter client - <AUTHOR> http://maxkle.in/web-twitter-and-notifo/

<comment><USER2> Is Notifo working for you? I associated a notifo account with my HN account to be notified when I get replies, and I never, ever get a notification. But I don't know which part of the chain is failing.

<comment><USER3> yo, founder of notifo here. send me an email and we'll get it sorted for you.</comment></comment>


How can services like engagedcount stay in business without shared counts - <AUTHOR> How can services like https://engagedcount.com/ stay in business even after the announced ending of shared counts via the Facebook API [1]?<p>[1] - http://www.inc.com/james-parsons/the-era-of-the-share-count-is-coming-to-an-end.html <comment><USER2> Founder of engagedcount.com here.

Facebook hasn't actually announced that they will end shared counts via their API. They have just made it much more difficult for the average programmer to get the numbers.

We're able to work around a lot of the limitations like api keys and rate limits that Facebook has put in place.</comment>


What's the best practice of making non-restful API actions as exceptions? - <AUTHOR> What do you think is the rule to make non-restful actions in the API controller? Does it make sense make specific actions like 'send' vs 'create' occasionally? Does it make sense to break down one huge action 'update' to several, like "company/update" and "company/update_payment_method"? What do you think are the rules for this? <comment><USER2> If I truly need a non-restful API endpoint, I don't worry too much about where to put it, because I'm doing it very rarely.

If I'm trying to break up a larger action into smaller ones often I'll parameterize the endpoint and use a service object or some sort of abstraction in the controller to keep the action from getting too big</comment>


How developers can charge more than $150 per hour - <AUTHOR> http://freelancecollege.com/pricing/2017/04/08/how-to-charge-150-or-more-per-hour.html <comment><AUTHOR> If anyone has any questions about this please let me know!

Currently I charge $1,000 per day doing PHP development and building secure websites for the financial markets (using Jekyll). And I freelance fulltime. So if you have questions please let me know!</comment>


According to Facebook's rules, most brand promotions via pages are illegal - <AUTHOR> http://indunanayakkara.com/2011/06/24/are-you-running-your-facebook-promotion-at-the-risk-of-losing-your-page/

<comment><AUTHOR> And a pointer to the rules - <https://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php></comment>


Ask HN: How to learn cloud tools coming from old GUI-based web management? - <AUTHOR> I have no experience with modern cloud services, professional or otherwise. I come from simple webdev for small scale apps work, involving small business clients. My experience managing things on remote servers involves,  third party hosting companies that handle the infrastructure so we don't have to worry about data center uptime. Control panel GUIs like cPanel, Plesk are commonplace, to manage DNS and set up cron jobs, alongside GUIs for relational databases like PHP MyAdmin, and the occasional SSH into the server.<p>What is the best analogue to cloud services to Azure, AWS and GCP? I want to get skilled in at least one of them, explained in terms that can make sense for someone who has only used these older hosting tools. Perhaps to demonstrate a one-to-one analogue to the concepts found in cloud storage and computing for making the transition from this older form of website management. <comment><USER2> Yesterday I came across the article with review of Jelastic cloud. The author explains this service in the following way: "It's kind of like WHM/cPanel but hosted on a cloud and can also manage server clusters rather than just one server, and integrate many other cloud services (storage, CDN, DNS, etc)" [https://wpjohnny.com/jelastic-cloud-platform- review](https://wpjohnny.com/jelastic-cloud-platform-review)

Seems as a good suit for you to start with. They have control panel and automation of some infrastructure management processes, so you can get started even without profound technical cloud expertise and dive deeper eventually.

</comment><comment><USER3> I saw this post, I'm not qualified to try to answer it, but I will say this.

If you learn how to wrap a web site/app in a docker container, and connect that site to an external database / fileshare, you have the core kernel needed to have easy access to the cloud services.

The cloud services offer various vendor-specific features. But unless you want to become an AWS engineer, etc., you will want to use each cloud platform's flavor of virtual machines.

Azure and AWS are fine to learn. I'm nervous that GCP will either be killed as a product, or your google account will be smoked by some AI, and either way, you won't be able to recover that investment in a google-controlled product.

I had someone who was an old Perl cowboy teach me Azure, but I'm certain that Udemy has a course that will work for teaching Azure or AWS.

Hope this helps.</comment>


Life hacks to make things easier - <AUTHOR> http://mintfish.tumblr.com/post/33739276329/99-life-hacks-to-make-your-life-easier

<comment><USER3> Rubber band stretched over a paint tin seems to have a bad failure mode that flings paint across the room if the rubber band breaks.

<comment><USER4> It can also spread drops if you make it vibrate when cleaning the brush.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the key ring idea, I find that using the edge of a key works well too. If you take the key and push one of its top edges between the two bands in the key ring, it will pop open, with the key sandwiched between the two. Do this near the start of the helix and you can just slide the key on. You could also do this with other fairly hard and sharp edges to prop it open when you're putting on things without a hard and sharp edge. The staple remover idea is more elegant I guess but I can't say I've ever had one available when making additions to a keyring (best do it immediately, I'm quite clumsy). I'm a habitual nail biter too so I haven't any nails to use, let alone save, hence this little trick!

</comment><comment><USER6> Oh no... reddit's leaking.

<comment><USER7> I like how the bad Reddit PR articles that were appearing last week for the investigation of Violentacrez were all flagged into oblivion due to "not technical enough" yet we continue to see articles like these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Re: painting the lock on your sliding glass door white -- this is a good tip for gun safeties as well. Put some red paint on the part that's exposed when the safety is off and then remember "red = dead."

</comment><comment><USER9> I have seen a lot of these before except _"Put a wooden spoon across a boiling pot of water to keep it from boiling over."_ That is a new one to me. What's the science of that? How/why does that work?

Also, on the _Exit on left or exit on right_ (<http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbyisdluoz1qhkzpz.jpg>) - I don't think that applies to all cities. I know for a fact there is some signs in my city that do not do this, especially older signs.

<comment><USER10> For the wooden spoon across the pot, here's the original reddit thread with discussion: [http://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/od9at/lpt_put_w...](http://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/od9at/lpt_put_wooden_spoon_across_boiling_pot_of_water/)

The spoon breaks the surface tension of the bubbles, causing them to pop when they start to boil over.

Other people seem to be saying a metal spoon should work just as well (with the added bonus that it won't warp, unlike a wooden spoon), with the only downside that it will be hot to take off. I'm doubtful that a metal spoon would work as well though, because metal does not absorb moisture like wood and also has a smoother surface (i.e. less surface area on a microscopic level), and so it probably wouldn't be as effective in making the bubbles attach and pop. Of course the only way to know for sure would be to do an experiment.

<comment><USER11> It also depends on the foodstuff and ratio of that food to the volume of water as well. Pot diameter plays a role too, a wider pot provides more room for each bubble and less chance to "climb" one another, plus a wider surface requires more volume of foam to breach the top of the pot.

I'm no chemist, but my observations from cooking and homebrewing, pasta and wort boil over worse than plain water because dissolved starches/sugars/proteins allow the bubbles to have greater surface tension and hold together better. If you cook with more water but the same quantity of food, the bubbles have less surface tension and you can probably avoid the boil over scenario altogether.

For this particular life tip, I would expect a starch-laden foam from cooking pasta to leave a residue on the spoon as the bubbles popped that would eventually let it boil over still. It will buy you some additional time before a mess is made of your stove though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pants hanger used as a book holder is my favorite. I use two of those to attach papers to my laptop screen when I'm reading/coding at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER13> Cached: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lUyUKtD...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lUyUKtD5MxYJ:mintfish.tumblr.com/post/33739276329/99-life- hacks-to-make-your-life-easier+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER14> Hopefully in 5 years we will be able to download a 3d printer files and print out of most this stuff at home fully customized to your needs, instead of cutting bottles, or using "X" as "Y" hack.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, you mean that we can use toxic processes to create the 3D "ink" that 3D printers use, and then use those 3D printers to build things that can't be recycled and end up in landfill, rather than taking stuff, re-using it, and thereby reducing the amount of landfill?

No, I'm not being _entirely_ serious, and yes, I too look forward to the day when 3D printers are common-place and used effectively and efficiently. But even so, I hope that people will always find inventive ways to reduce, re-use and recycle, especially when they are an inventive as some of these. I've already used two of them this morning.

<comment><USER14> Yes, my post wasn't entirely serious as well. Also one more thing, lately 3D printers have started using re-usable and re-cycle "ink"[1] so it may only be increasing re-usability after all.

[1] <http://store.makerbot.com/replicator2.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> More particularly, they can use PLA filament - here's some information about that:

[http://www.faberdashery.co.uk/about/why-our-filament-is- so-g...](http://www.faberdashery.co.uk/about/why-our-filament-is-so-great/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does the toothpaste on the headlights actually work? I just paid $99 to my mechanic to use some 3M thing to fix the headlights on my 04 Hyundai Accent that were quite clouded over.

<comment><USER16> It works. My scuba diving instructor taught us, that you can use toothpaste in your scuba glasses when they get hazy all the time.

Spit also works, which is handy when you are in the sea, but not so much when you have to clean your headlights :)

<comment><USER4> What do you mean by hazy on scuba glasses? Because I don't think you mean tiny scratches and porous surface because of cleaning agents, dirt and dust (what happens with the headlights when they get "cloudy") but hazy in the sense of condensed water on the glasses (water droplets from the temperature difference). Toothpaste and spit work in this case because they are a bit greasy, and this will stop the condensation on the surface.

<comment><USER16> Sorry, I really meant cloudy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm so happy I scrolled to the last one ... so obvious, but never came across my mind.

<comment><USER7> I assume the wet paper towel speeds up the process by a little bit? I can't imagine it makes that big of a difference and still probably slower than throwing it in the ice tray of your freezer.

<comment><USER18> it will; it's about thermal contact. the air in a fridge or freezer isn't very good at conducting the heat out of things to the (antiradiator - absorber?) at the top.

The cold towel will absorb heat from both the drink and the room in a room, but only the drink in the freezer. and it will do it much faster than the air would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think there should be a blog devoted just to creative uses of the cardboard tube out of toilet rolls!

</comment><comment><USER20> /r/lifeprotips from reddit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never used reddit so I have no idea what's there, except to infer things from the comments made here. This was a link that was sent to me directly by a colleague, and I've already used two of the tips, and expect to use more before the end of the day. I found many of them mundane, but some of them surprising and truly worthy of the sobriquet "hack", and hence the submission.

<comment><USER21> First of all, I'd love to hear what hacks you've actually used. A lot of them seemed interesting, but I'll probably forget them when I actually need them. Hearing about specific ones will help.

Secondly, friendly recommendation - you should check out Reddit. You're a serious HNer, so I assume you care at least a little about the goings-on online, and Reddit is a _big_ part of the internet now. See it, if only to be able to say that you saw it.

I barely visit Reddit myself, but there are a few things it's good for - <USER2> example, information about specific topics tends to be found in subreddits about that topic. E.g., I started playing piano recently, and to get interesting info on it, searched "piano reddit" in google. Not only are there generally good discussions there, some popular reddits like this one have an FAQ which lists links to lots of previous discussions you might be interested in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Specifically, today I used the cut down milk carton to make a small "dustpan" for picking up beads, screws, and other small items, and then I used a stocking over a vacuum cleaner to pick up some of said small items that had fallen down earlier.

Later I used toilet roll core to hold some wrapping paper neatly, and I'm looking at using more to tidy some cables. I've made notes of several of the others and am putting them in my associative store. I expect I will use the "USB on TV to charge phone" idea at some point, I'll just need to remember it at the right time.

As for reddit, yes, perhaps I should go, but I have enough infinite time sinks already, and I'm disinclined to add another. If it pops up in a web search then I'll use it, but otherwise I'm unlikely to get started. I tend to be a bit obsessive, so not reading is better than reading and trying to limit myself.

And I'm not really a serious HNer, although sometimes people get the impression that I am. There are other things I do _way_ more seriously.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


San Francisco rent is so expensive that a law firm fly its people in from Texas - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-rent-expensive-houston-law-firm-employees-2017-12 <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the Londoner who commutes from Barcelona: [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/commuting- fro...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/commuting-from- barcelona-a-london-worker-who-makes-it-pay)

I struggle to see how these are signs of a healthy system.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some people in the Bay area fly in from San Diego, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Oregon and Washington.

</comment><comment><USER4> I guess everyone _has_ to live in San Francisco. Cannot be east bay or anywhere else?

<comment><USER5> Moving out of SF proper if one works in SF would be adding at least 45 minutes to the commute. I sincerely wish I could move to Oakland without tripling my commute. I guess every startup _has_ to establish themselves in the already packed-to-the-brim city of SF?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The train takes 3 hours and is $300 per person</comment>