Time Has No Meaning at the North Pole - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/time-has-no-meaning-at-the-north-pole/ <comment><USER2> At the South Pole station, NZ time is used since it's supplied from McMurdo (which is supplied from Christchurch). However the tourist camp a km away is on Chile time since they are supplied from Union glacier and Punta Arenas. The tourist camp people were nice enough to invite us on Christmas, even though for them it was like 3 am when we visited.

<comment><USER3> 3 am to me means in the middle of the night while I'm sleeping. So I'm curious, do people at the South Pole typically follow a similar sleep/wake cycle despite the time zone they follow?

<comment><USER2> I think the staff at the tourist camp just tries to accommodate the tourists, so I'd guess they'd mostly stay on Chile time, but I don't really know.

At the research station though a normal schedule is mostly followed, at least for meals. Some people keep odd hours of course, and I think there are people on night shift for certain things (e.g. meteo is always manned).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I bet they still have Daylight Saving Time, so the bureaucrats get one last win.

<comment><USER5> Norway's Troll Station, in Antarctica, follows UTC (geographically accurate for them) in the southern summer and UTC+2 in the southern winter (to facilitate communication with Norway) - so they do daylight savings time, but backwards! (Source: [https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2014-March/020705.html](https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2014-March/020705.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The ship is filled with 100 people from 20 countries, drifting at the mercy > of the ice floe, farther from civilization than the International Space > Station.

That probably depends on where the ISS is, doesn't it?

<comment><USER7> Edit: Not sure what the orbital path of the ISS is. I suppose it would indeed depend on where it is. The question would be: where in the path is more than ±417 KM away from a city.

//ignore Seems like the ISS is always closer. 400KM vs 817KM.

> The ISS maintains an orbit with an average altitude of 400 kilometres (250 > mi) by means of reboost manoeuvres using the engines of the Zvezda module or > visiting spacecraft.

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

> Alert, in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada, is the northernmost > permanently inhabited place in the world, at latitude 82°30'05" north, 817 > kilometres (508 mi) from the North Pole.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert,_Nunavut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert,_Nunavut)

<comment><USER8> I always find it interesting that as I sit here on the south coast of England, Glasgow in Scotland is significantly further away (approx 450 mi) than the ISS when it orbits overhead. It's one of those details that shows that 'low Earth orbit' really does mean 'low'.

<comment> GuB-42 It is really well illustrated here [https://what- if.xkcd.com/58/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/)

<comment><USER8> Yes, I have always loved this xkcd and even once sketched a version myself to someone I was having a debate with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> IPhone users should try to ask Siri "What time zone is Antarctica in"

Edit: added screen shot [https://imgur.com/a/xw8Z7qr](https://imgur.com/a/xw8Z7qr)

</comment><comment><USER10> I do point out that polar night is not that absolute. Even when sun doesn't rise above the horizon, there is still quite discernable day-night cycle from twilight to midnight and back, especially if you are not exactly on the pole.

<comment><USER11> Sunsets/-rises take much longer the closer to the poles you get, because the sun moves "sideways" across the sky, not up/down.

So even when the sun is technically "set", it is often just under the horizon, and lighting things up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another edge-case highlighting the usefulness of global time; maybe a soft rollout of UTC at the North Pole is a good start in wait for the rest of the world to catch on?

<comment><USER13> But what's the point of a global time when the sun rises and sets at different times across the world anyway? Humans live by the 'sun clock', not by UTC. For instance, to arrange a remote meeting you still need to check what time will be convenient for the people around the world, and a global time doesn't make that any easier (arguably even worse). Just because UTC makes sense for machines doesn't mean it makes sense for humans. And machines should adjust to humans, not the other way around.

<comment><USER14> Interestingly, you highlight an error in the article that gave me pause:

> _Coordinated Universal Time, which is based, ironically, on the position of > the sun relative to Earth._

As you say, UTC is not a sun clock. It is based upon Atomic Time.

I also wondered who, knowing history, would consider the concept of December _not_ to be fabricated. (-:

<comment><USER15> > As you say, UTC is not a sun clock.

UTC is most definitely a sun clock. It is coordinated to correspond to within 1 second of mean solar time at 0º longitude.

<comment><USER16> If it was a sun clock it wouldn't have to be coordinated, it would just be.

<comment><USER12> Not true, since it has leap days and leap seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One wonders, why don't they just use UTC ?

<comment><USER18> The article mentions that many of their instruments do. Not sure why the researchers don't follow suit, it would certainly make life easier. Perhaps fiddling with time zones keeps them entertained.

<comment><USER19> The article hints at that.

It's to make coordination with people on land easier. If that's Russia, use Moscow time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> They could use swatch time, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)

</comment><comment><USER21> A very nice article. It just made me observe that "there is no time when there is no motion"

<comment><USER22> Can there be an impact on how organisms age in such places?

<comment><USER23> Hard to imagine how that could be the case, other than with messed up circadian (and diurnal, etc) rhythms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The sun doesn't only rise and set once a year at the north Pole! Is this a joke?

Edit: -3 for correct science. Good work HN

<comment><USER25> > The sun doesn't only rise and set once a year at the north Pole! Is this a > joke?

> Edit: -3 for correct science. Good work HN

You have to explicitly say that you are a flat earther. Otherwise people on HN assume standard science as source of knowledge.

If you are not a flat earther, you might consider watching this video while closely observing the north pole: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLRA87TKXLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLRA87TKXLM)

Also Stellarium is an outstanding piece of FOSS software, you can play with your position, time of day and time of year. Please dont file a bug report because the sun does only set once per year at the north pole. Stellarium is not made for flat earthers.

<comment><USER26> How does that even make sense for a flat earther? Is their explanation for the posted article is that it's part of some round earth propaganda machine?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Twitter non-existent among my age group? - <AUTHOR>

I am in my late teens and currently going to college. None of my friends either at my college or friends from home who go to other colleges use twitter. Those latter friends at the same time don't know anyone else who uses it. I've come up with a hypothesis that maybe Twitter is mostly popular among people who have already started professional careers. Is this correct?
Otherwise, it amuses me that so many people, especially corporations, view Twitter as the "cool" thing to do and that all the "young" people are doing it. If anything, seeing someone promote Twittering has the opposite effect on those I know. So I'd like to ask HN if they have any clues to this, why is it that Twitter is huge on the Internet, but rarely spoken of among people I know? <comment><USER2> Twitter is caught in a massive media hype feedback loop. Everybody is writing about Twitter because everybody is writing about Twitter. However, there's an entire demographic that doesn't read any of this press, and doesn't care about Oprah or Ashton Kutcher.

</comment><comment><USER3> i know people who use twitter across all age groups. not really that many, though, and none in my real core group of friends.

i think that the biggest correlation to twitter use is actually iphone ownership. at least, thats the case with the people i know. and that probably tends to skew towards younger professsionals.

<comment><USER4> I agree with this but also think the OPs sample size may be a bit small :) , look at the timeline for an example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> some social media demographics:

<http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/78505></comment>


Mac-dev-playbook – Mac setup and configuration via Ansible - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook <comment><USER2> Ansible is great and all, but I've been using a bash_profile to set up my workstations for years and it's worked great. Doesn't require third-party tools and uses bash, so it can literally run on anything, including Cygwin and LXSS (Windows).

For those interested: [https://github.com/carlosonunez/setup](https://github.com/carlosonunez/setup)

<comment><USER3> I don't have a problem with third party tools or need to run a setup scrip on Cygwin or LXSS, but shell scripting just seems easier than a tool like ansible because you have a full programming language (albeit a terrible one), and you can use familiar command line utilities to do everything. (You can use them in ansible too, but it is frowned on -- you are supposed to relearn how to do everything using modules that are usually less powerful than the equivalent command line utilities.) I have never had to manage a huge fleet of servers, so maybe ansible has advantages in that setting, but for setting up a single box it just seems to make everything harder.

<comment><AUTHOR> When you have three+ Macs to configure, it starts looking more like a fleet and less like a single computer :)

The main advantage I see is at it's a lot easier to reason with Yaml configuration than shell scripts with a ton of conditionals, and it's also easier to use Ansible's modules to make sure you can reprovision whenever you want to get new things added or old things removed.

<comment><USER4> That's exactly my use case as well, which I detailed in a writeup:

[https://www.stavros.io/posts/provisioning-your-computer- one-...](https://www.stavros.io/posts/provisioning-your-computer-one-command- awesome/)

It's a great way to synchronize state between computers, including installed packages, fonts, Vim plugins, etc.

It goes much further than dotfiles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since I've been playing with NixOS, this project reminded me of [https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin](https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin) which lets you use a system-wide configuration.nix on OS X. Never tried it but it looks neat.

<comment><USER6> I actually use this, using it to replace my old ansible setup. I've got a lot of things I need to merge into there after more testing but yep its neat.

Not as great as the nixos version but every bit helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice, but I think the days of Chef/Puppet/Ansible-based setups might be gone. Boxen is deprecated in favour of the excellent Strap: [https://github.com/mikemcquaid/strap](https://github.com/mikemcquaid/strap) which I have customized to use a post-completion script to configure defaults (e.g. [https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos](https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos)) and initial setup of Vim. Homebrew and shell scripting.

What more could you need? :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought several times about having an automated environment setup for my personal laptop, but I usually come to the conclusion that the time it would take me to maintain these scripts would probably exceed the time I spend doing the setup every 3-4 years (xkcd [https://xkcd.com/1319/](https://xkcd.com/1319/)).

I usually now just install things as I need them and I feel that it is a smooth process. Installing software and managing packages has become much easier in recent years.

<comment><USER9> Me too. I've settled on just storing my dotfiles in dropbox as good enough. Just upgraded to a MBP and it was no issue.

<comment><USER10> In addition to dotfiles I keep a Brewfile around, so I can run the 'brew bundle' command and install everything, including brew casks.

<comment><USER11> `brew bundle` has become quite handy. There isn't much I can't automate the install of now that it supports the Mac App Store too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://github.com/geerlingguy/macos-virtualbox- vm](https://github.com/geerlingguy/macos-virtualbox-vm)

Thanks for this. I'm going to have to try these instructions at some point. A while back I was trying to do this, and couldn't make any of the instructions work. TL;DR: Installing macOS in a VM is more trouble than it's worth. I gave up and switched to VMWare instead, but I'd prefer to stick to VirtualBox since it's what I use for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very nicely done, I do a clean install every point release of macOS so having automation such as this has been crucial.

</comment><comment><USER14> First one of these in ages I've seen that isn't riddled with settings that will silently reduce system security for anyone foolish enough to run it.

Be aware it does apply some pretty idiosyncratic settings from his dotfiles, though, like disabling sleep and hibernate. I'd take some time to edit those prior to using.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is you'd point the thing at your own dotfiles. I just have it use mine since I built it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> wow - this is really cool, and it is a great initiative.

If someone would take a similar approach to installing (on linux) a particular version of ElementaryOS or linux, and puts together a set of recipes that would get it all souped up for development etc, that would be really great!!

One can even take it further to use an OS like Bodhi Linux which seems stripped down for the task, and use ansible instead of the native scripting etc.

One can get a superb development environment even with an older lower powered laptop; a lot of the grunt work can be automated away.

This has to be an open-sourced effort because a thousand combinations are possible and one needs a easy way to select what one needs, and this was my issue with ninite. It would install everything, and it also would configure etc .

</comment><comment><USER16> This seems interesting. I use a Makefile to bootstrap my machine and manage my dotfiles.

I understand the appeal of Ansible, but I think it's more robust features are most useful in more complex environments than a personal laptop. My Makefile seems to do the trick.

<comment><USER17> Do you have your makefile on github?

<comment><USER18> Looks like this is it:

[https://github.com/ttaylorr/dotfiles/blob/work- gh/Makefile](https://github.com/ttaylorr/dotfiles/blob/work-gh/Makefile)

<comment><USER19> Yuck. What's the point of a Makefile if every single rule is phony?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Windows equivalent for application installs(no configuring) [https://ninite.com/](https://ninite.com/).

<comment><USER21> I'd say that the Windows equivalent is [https://chocolatey.org/](https://chocolatey.org/). It has the largest amount of "packages" from all other similar efforts that I have seen.

<comment><USER5> I second Chocolatey. There's also a (supported by Choco) puppet plugin which makes client installations as simple as

      package { 'notepadplusplus':
        ensure            => '6.7.5',
        provider          => 'chocolatey',
      }

I've used it on a few client machines with no issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> itd be cool if theres way to install apps too

<comment><AUTHOR> It is integrated with mas (the CLI helper for the Mac App Store). You just pass in the IDs of whatever apps you want installed, and it will do the rest (even prompting for the App Store login).

See the role it's using: [https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role- mas](https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-mas)</comment></comment>


Ethereum Is Struggling with Scaling, Despite Lack of Actual User Base - <AUTHOR> https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/ethereum-struggling-scaling-despite-lack-actual-user-base/ <comment><USER2> Why are token sales not considered applications? If kickstarter or seedinvest or gofundme had been doing the kind of volume eth is doing, would you say those platforms have no "actual user base"?</comment>


Scientists call for ban on lethal, autonomous robots - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/technology/science/article-scientists-call-for-ban-on-lethal-autonomous-robots/ <comment><USER2> Lethal robots are not a technology that can really be regulated by ban.

It's not like nuclear weapons, where you need a huge industrial operation with tens of thousands of high-tech centrifuges running for years before you have enough fissile material for a bomb. Even the rulebreakers, like Israel, couldn't hide the fact that they were doing it and had to rely on America's UNSC veto to save them from the consequences.

But lethal robots are a trivial step away from the current state of robotics. Hobbyists have already mounted guns on quadcopters. Tesla and Waymo have made robots that kill people accidentally. Any robot can be made a killer robot with minimal change to its software and hardware.

<comment><USER3> There's a big difference between a jerry-rigged bomb strapped to a quadcopter and a purpose-built killbot produced by a nation state. Strong international sanctions against warbots are a good idea, even if it won't prevent every terrorist from making their own low-rent version.

<comment><USER4> > produced by a nation state

Why do people always say 'nation state' in these situations? It's not a fancy word for 'major country' - it means something specific. For example the UK is definitely not a nation state. The US is arguably not a nation state either, due to its cultural and lingual heterogeneity and tribal sovereignty.

<comment><USER5> "nation state"

Dictionary result for nation state noun a sovereign state of which most of the citizens or subjects are united also by factors which define a nation, such as language or common descent.

so you can call anything a nation state as long as that thing issues a passport i guess?

<comment><USER4> > so you can call anything a nation state as long as that thing issues a > passport i guess?

What? No - you just gave the argument against that!

> are united also by factors which define a nation, such as language or common > descent

This means the UK isn't a nation state - we have four nations in the UK, with different cultures, descents, and in some areas even languages.

It also means that the US is not a nation state - the people there have very distinct descents. Today Americans literally still say they're 'Italian' rather than 'American'. Many Americans don't speak English. The US literally describes tribal lands as 'dependent nations', so it isn't one nation even by their own federal definition.

Examples of nation states are places like Iceland and Portugal. These are the major military players that the original comment was trying to refer to.

<comment><USER6> It's possible for a person to be a member of multiple nations. In the eyes of many Americans (USian), American most certainly is a nation.

MAGA-style nationalism is quite popular and powerful at the moment...

<comment><USER4> Yes establishing your own nation as a state is a goal for many nationalists. And you can see some nationalists pointing at Japan (a nation-state) and saying that they'd prefer their state to be more homogenous like Japan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's going to be interesting to see how the circle is squared regards defending against autonomous weaponry. There's probably a large design space of offensive autonomous weapons that could only effectively be countered by a system with no human in the control loop. If the design / use of autonomous defensive systems is also prohibited, that would give an overwhelming advantage to any aggressor willing to defy any such a ban on offensive systems. If they're not banned, then the difference between a weapon designed to auto-target other weapons and one designed to auto-target humans is so blurry as to be virtually indistinguishable in terms of verifiable arms control.

<comment><USER8> > _If they 're not banned, then the difference between a weapon designed to > auto-target other weapons and one designed to auto-target humans is so > blurry as to be virtually indistinguishable in terms of verifiable arms > control._

There's no such thing as purely defensive weapon. I don't remember who said it, but I recall a quote that went similar to: "if your weapon can shoot enemy planes over your cities, it can just as easily shoot enemy planes over _their_ cities".

<comment><USER9> Well, what if your weapon is a fixed turret built on top of your city hall?

<comment><USER8> Put that turret on a trailer truck and drive to enemy town.

Or put your city hall on a trailer truck, if that's what it takes.

<comment><USER10> That's much easier to do if you develop a mobile turret from the beginning. The idea is that there are technologies which are fairly harder to use offensively than others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What about current weapons, such as the UK Brimstone missile that apparently:

"includes essentially the ability to find targets within a certain area (such as those near friendly forces), and to self-destruct if it is unable to find a target within the designated area."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimstone_(missile)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimstone_\(missile\))

When does something become fully autonomous rather than temporarily autonomous?

<comment><USER12> Exactly when a guided weapon is launched many of them are autonomous eg ATGM's that do top attacks on MBT's

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMO wide, blanket bans on dual-use technologies (and many things in our high tech lives can be effectively weaponized with some effort) do more harm than good. Especially where, as in this case, violators would be hard to detect and classify into "OK" or "bad" bins.

This would deter some researchers working on general topics (easy to label / threaten as law breakers) while having no impact. Organized crime has bigger laws they already broke and already have enough COTS parts to build nasty things (and are often OK with 80% reliability, thus need no cutting edge research). Many / most militaries would ignore such bans and fund development quietly, justifying this by national security.

IMO the only way to make this approach tractable is to choose a _narrow_ list of technologies we do not want developed and see if there are technologies that exist or can be developed that would effectively detect violations. And choosing even a narrow list of technologies to ban would make for lots of debates and unhappy citizens. My 2c.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm not really clear on what the moral difference is between an artillery shell, a criuse missile, a drone strike, and an autonomous robot that targets the wrong individual. As far as human agency is concerned, all three are weapons of war that kill indiscriminantly. How is the autonomous system worse? Is it the illusion that we might be able to delegate moral agency to the machine?

<comment><USER15> Makes me think of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov)

Imagine an AI in such a scenario. Count me as one of those people who thinks we are headed into a kind of hell.

<comment><USER14> I think this comes down to my last sentence -- delegating the decision to kill to a robot is not really different from deciding to kill. But we may do it anyway, and wash our hands. I suppose this is the source of the unease about autonomous drones. Not that they're worse than other killing machines, but that we might deceive ourselves into thinking that they're better.

Maybe a better analogy than a cruise missile would be a land mine. A device that kills, possibly much later than when it's deployed, and often an unintended target.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this a proposed ban on AAMs, SAMs and all torpedos? Because they are all basically exploding robots with advanced tactical systems to bypass defenses and autonomous systems that track their targets and control their rotation.

<comment><USER17> Don't forget CIWS.

<comment><USER16> That is a defensive weapon, but perhaps I forgot to mention ASMs, which are normally released from stealth bombers and drones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Currently reading a great book on this topic:

[https://www.amazon.com/Army-None-Autonomous-Weapons- Future-e...](https://www.amazon.com/Army-None-Autonomous-Weapons-Future- ebook/dp/B073VXYD5P/)

</comment><comment><USER19> We often forget that by the time the tech world is playing with something, it has perhaps already done the rounds in military.

Automated sentry guns on the Korean DMZ have existed since around 2003, developed by a company that was associated with Samsung (not sure if it still is).

Therefore this isn't, quote, "at best, a few years away". Unless that quote was from around the year 2000.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGR-A1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGR-A1)

<comment><USER20> And of course land mines have existed for decades longer, and "covered pit of spikes" centuries before that.

No situation is totally new, though sometimes the equilibrium shifts so much that the top 3 driving factors in an environment are qualitatively different

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So this is why weapons have manual aim in sci-fi movies! You'd think that war would be fully computerized in the future, but all sides must have decided that was a bad idea.

<comment><USER22> i'm reminded of the prologue of Ian Bank's Excession which describes how a ship Mind (a vast incredibly powerful AI) is overwhelmed and subverted, its ship taken over by an excessive and overwhelming force, and only a solitary drone is able to make it off the ship after running a gambit as the force tries to stop the drone. most of the attack, the attempt to defend against it and the final hail mary by the drone takes place within thousands of a second.

also i'm reminded of battlestar galactica and how deeply distrustful they are of computers and tech because of everything that has happened to them.

<comment><USER23> Not to mention the Butlerian Jihad in the backstory of _Dune_, and the enduring ban on thinking machines. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They'll have to pry my autotracking Nerf ADS off it's hot, charred turret mount. Better tell Aperture Science as well.

On a more serious note, where do unmanned turrets and gun platforms fall? They're not making the kill/no kill decision (they're always in kill mode) and don't have a human directly at the trigger.

<comment><USER25> I'd imagine they'd be fine. They're not deciding. as you say

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "What's the point of robotics then?"

</comment><comment><USER27> A lot of people on here are talking about radio control drones, and there's a huge difference between unmanned and autonomous, both in terms of difficulty of execution (exception: landmines) and moral responsibility.

A radio control drone bomb is equivalent to a gun with a really long range. An autonomous drone bomb is equivalent to a gun with a motion detector. It's not about the power of the weapon, it's about the relinquishing of human control and accountability. This is why landmines are so evil, and why they are also trying to ban lethal autonomous robots. It's not about capability of killing at a distance, it's about who pulls the trigger.

</comment><comment><USER28> A strict reading would include self driving cars.

<comment><USER29> It doesn't even have to be strict. Driving vehicles is the most dangerous and lethal thing most people do regularly. Software is the most unreliable system most people interact with regularly. Autonomous cars will be lethal and will cause deaths. It's crazy to me that they are being allowed to drive on public roads in such a haphazard fashion. There's no way these cars would pass a driving test.

Additionally, in a quarter of the USA for a quarter of the year driving conditions are such (permanent snow cover) that there are _no_ visual indicators of where to drive or park. Cars would need all roads pre-mapped with ground penetrating radar at the least (a giant data set). And even with that it would be difficult. I know this because it's difficult for me as a human and I often have to rely on my contextual knowledge of how human society works and how people behave to know where to drive on a surface, avoid getting in crashes, and figure out how and where to park. None of this is possible for current or near term computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think it is too late. The genie is out of the bottle and there is no way of putting it back now. The tech is not some obscure, super complex thing where the expertise can be gated and it doesn't require controllable materials or preproduction technology.

I mean, the sort of tech they are warning against can be put together by lone operatives using commonly accessible electronics and concentional arms.

Why not call for banning mines or cluster munitions? Those remain functional for decades after deployment and kill/maim indiscriminately.

I'm not trying to appeal to whataboutism here, I'm trying to point out the futility.

Perhaps I'm too jaded, but I can't see any scenario where military robotics can be prevented.

<comment><USER31> It doesn't matter if the genie is outta he bottle. Bio weapons were well out of the bottle when countries largely agreed to put that away.

I think the problem is main countries won't see the massive deaths as a problem for them but an assets and the race is on to develope the best.

To stop this essentially we need to get US, China and Russia to all agree to ban these and the world will mostly follow..but in todays political environment I can take see that happening.

<comment><USER17> Bioweapons aren't effective weapons of war though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if there was similar opposition to the first autonomous weapon before it was deployed. I'm talking about the humble landmine.

<comment><USER33> I would suggest that the first autonomous weapon was likely to be animal in nature - like Ceaser's "dog's of war". Train dogs to be as vicious as you can, and let them loose on the battlefield.

I don't think "opposition" in the sense of an organized political movement was as much of a feature of life back then. You did whatever you could to win, and there was no "international community" to tut at you for it.

<comment><USER17> I think a hole in the ground is an even older "autonomous weapon".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This brings to mind a microwave beam developed by Raygheon to down drones [0] and an article I read well over a decade ago about EMPs. Wonder how these are doing on the consumer front?

[0] [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hlmf032NmHU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hlmf032NmHU)

</comment><comment><USER35> How is an ICBM not already a lethal, autonomous robot? I think they may mean affordable lethal autonomous robots.

<comment><USER36> I think they don't want algorithms to make high level ethical decisions like whether to fire the ICBM. It's a thin line though between firing and correctly navigating to a target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> We've had lethal robots for decades. They were called rockets.

The only thing that changed is - now everybody can make it's own lethal robot.

I don't see why guns/explosives on robots should be treated differently than explosives/guns without robots.

<comment><USER31> Not really. A person fired that at a particular target. Those sci-fi bullets with find that improve aim are not leathal autonomous robots. It's still manual, just with aim assist.

<comment><USER37> Modern rockets can automatically change target after human fired it.

There are even anti-tank rockets you fire when you don't even see if there is a target, just suspect it. Then, when it flies over a hill and sees a target - it locks on and destroys it.

There are also bombs which spread small explosives over a large area, each of these small explosives has passive control surfaces and try to target the closest armored vehicle under them.

So that you only decide to deploy the bomb in some area, and the bombs decide which target to choose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Gun control. Simple. Don't worry about the robots, worry about the guns.

<comment><USER39> How about a ban on all weapons? If people want to go to war, they can fight with their bare hands.

<comment><USER40> The incentive to break that rule would be overwhelming.

<comment><USER41> Reminds me of Scot Aaronson's Malthusianisms: [https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The problem with autonomous robots is that there's never cold dead hands to pry them out of. Both a robots hands are always cold and dead and they're autonomous so no hands at all.

<comment><USER43> Would that make robots the true zombie apocalypse?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Chemical weapons are banned. The Unites States and others still make them. There is no way to enforce such a rule as nation states do not abide by them.

<comment><USER45> That's needlessly reductive. Chemical weapons are banned, but Saddam didn't use them against US troops in the US invasion.

Bans are probabilistic, not binary. Anyone violating a ban must weigh the advantage from doing so against the consequences and probability of getting caught. A high degree of revulsion and a consistent track record of enforcement greatly increase consequences and probabilities, and make a ban more effective. Just shrugging your shoulders and saying it's not always possible is a sure way to increase the probability of unwanted action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Drones are potentially lethal and autonomous, not sure how on earth that would be done.

</comment><comment><USER47> The Chinese and Russians will do it whether you ban it or not.

</comment><comment><USER48> Also ban lethal, autonomous humans, colloquially called soldiers, psychopaths, or just the neighbor. Is this the way we treat our artificial children?

<comment><USER36> well we sort of do with prisons and death penalties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The Harvard Classics [0] (or Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf[1]), is a 51-volume anthology of 'the classics' compiled by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot and published in 1909. It is _the_ WASP collection of literature and gives a very interesting eye towards the first Gilded Age and into the minds of US leaders during the first half of the 20th century.

If it were to be updated, nearly 110 years later, many works would be left out (like, nearly all of the middle French plays) and MUCH would be included. Without a doubt, one of the books to be included would be _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ by Richard Rhodes, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer[2]. This book goes from start to finish on _how_ the A-bomb was made, the major and minor players, and their thoughts about the bomb all along the way. Rhodes takes us into the heads of the physicists and clears out all the calculus and gets to the human parts of the endeavor.

All the players in the race for the nuke knew the bomb was unavoidable for mankind. Leo Szilard was the first person to really conceive of the bomb while waiting for the stoplight to change where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury[3].

There _were_ thoughts, groups, and people that entertained the thought that they could form a group of 'priest-scientists' that would keep the uranium safe from politicians and warlords. Keep the power flowing but stop the chain reaction from going critical and taking out _billions_ of people. But as the race progressed, all the real players for the nuke _knew_ that such a utopia was impossible. That this particular genie was out of the bottle the second that Leo, or any other physicist, had made it across Southampton Row.

These robots are a microcosm of the same issues that the atomic physicists faced nearly 100 years ago. They know the damage that the ideas will have upon us all, they know that the semi-bucolic world we now live in will fall away to violence, and they know that they can't stop it. But, bless them, they are trying to sound the alarms and maybe, just maybe, change the minds of some of the politicians and warlords.

Looking back at the first Gilded age, with all their knowledge, they had no templates for the power of The Bomb and finally facing the mortality of all humans. Fortunately, we do have the templates, at least in terms of the use of lethal robots. We know how this plays out, we know how to make an atomic bomb, and we programmers need to learn from the physicists of the '30s and '40s.

[0] [https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212](https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212)

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

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

[3] [https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2617750W/The_making_of_the_a...](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2617750W/The_making_of_the_atomic_bomb)

</comment><comment><USER50> IMHO delaying the inevitable is not a plan. We need to find a way to survive the inevitable use and deployment of technology by others. This stuff is no longer rocket science. Any idiot with a raspberry pi and some basic tooling can build some quite effective weaponry. Most of the AI you need for this is OSS and getting easier to use by the month. This is not at all like nuclear warfare where you need a lot of skills, knowledge, infrastructure, and capital expenses to be able to put a weapon together. All this stuff will take is a bit of ingenuity and access to commodity hardware and software.

IMHO hoping that others won't go there is not a plan because ultimately somebody will. We need credible defensive capability against this stuff. Given the adversary is going to be autonomous AIs with lightning fast responses, having humans in the loop when defending means being defenseless effectively.

Most current wars are asymmetric guerrilla wars where there is a powerful but reluctant to engage party and some highly motivated individuals fighting an unwinnable fight. E.g. the conflicts in the middle east are basically premised on men with primitive weaponry moving around the country trying to stay hidden from air surveillance, satellites, or simply hiding among civilians. Countries like the US are reluctant to go in and fight on the ground because things get ugly in terms of casualties and 'collateral' damage. You can bet drones will be popular on both sides in such conflicts.

Drone based warfare would make that a lot more one sided than it already is and would probably make this type of warfare a lot less attractive and potentially put an end to a lot of long running conflicts. This does not have to turn into the cliche dystopian mess. For that look no further than the current state of affairs in e.g. Congo, Yemen, Afghanistan, or Syria.

War is not about chivalry but about winning at any cost. When one side is fighting with their hands behind their backs thus preventing them from winning and the other side can't win, you have a stalemate. It used to be the case that the winner would execute/enslave surviving enemies. Brutal but effective. When the war was over, there was little chance of a comeback by the other side. These days we do a lot of damage to each other but it is rarely decisive. WWII was one of the last conflicts where the other side literally had no choice but to surrender unconditionally. I live in Berlin. The effects of that war are very visible still. It's also a very peaceful city these days. That war was really over when it was over.

Wars between nation states are subject to all sorts of international rules. The problem is that most wars these days do not necessarily involve nation states and nation states instead engage each other via proxy wars. E.g. the US, Iran, and Russia are not formally at war but actively engaging each other in a plausibly deniable way nevertheless. These wars are dirty, brutal, and cause a lot of misery precisely because they rarely are fought to a conclusion and fought using any means possible.

</comment><comment><USER51> What happened to Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics?

<comment><USER52> Asimov's Three Laws were a plot device, not an actual attempt to codify ethics for artificial intelligence. They were never intended to be taken seriously outside of their fictional universe.

Their purpose was to set up conflict through an apparent paradox (robots can't harm humans but then robots _harm humans_ ) by showing the Laws _failing spectacularly_ and exposing humanity's hubris in the face of unintended consequences.

Here's a big, long HN thread about it[0].

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19044387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19044387)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Why is "scientists" the name of the group?

That seems to be an appeal to authority. This group is making an ethical argument, not a scientific one.

Which probably why without "supervision or meaningful human control" is their criteria.

Is a security guard with 20 camera controlled turrets using facial recognition to choose targets "supervised" ?

<comment><USER54> Scientists, as a group, _are_ a moral authority. They're not the only authority, but they represent a generally respected tribe of intellectuals.

The title doesn't say "science calls for."

I know I'm interested in hearing what a broad group of scientists think about non scientific questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> We need robots for three reasons:

First, special forces are having a hard time recruiting and the reality, it's not just them [0].

Secondly, why not purely for defensive purposes? Want to eliminate the effectiveness of nuclear weapons? If we can have self landing rockets. Why not a missile that breaks into multiple rockets in space and destroys all nukes whilst they are inbound?

Thirdly, why should billionaires and those who can afford them have their own private security? Imagine having your own inside the home? 24 hour protection. Only calling the Police to effectively clean up the situation? Could be a new startup right there.

Finally, we should be encouraging darpa and the military to be spending billions on robots. That technology will filter down eventually to the consumer. That's better for all of us.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OFevGcLHTU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OFevGcLHTU)

<comment><USER56> > why should billionaires and those who can afford them have their own private > security?

Has it ever occurred to you that banning killer robots _not_ just for the poor and the public sector might be on the table?</comment></comment>


WeFollow.com: Kevin Rose creates Twitter Directory - <AUTHOR> http://wefollow.com/ <comment><USER2> Once upon a time, Kevin was not actually an asshole and would give credit to the people who did the work. Perhaps because of me, but more likely because of several years of advice from true assholes, he has risen to the occasion, and now says he "created" this site, when in fact I can 100% guarantee he paid others to do the actual work. Kevin couldn't write a line of code or build an html page to save his life.

<comment><USER3> If a guy who couldnt write a line of code or build an html page was able to get a startup up and running, raise funds, create one of the top destination site on the net, changed the way we consume news, and be worth millions only a few months after having an idea...then Bravo to him. You got paid, and noone had a gun to your head to do the work.

The beautiful part of this is that you can always go ahead and give us a new way to share news. Digg just scratched the surface.

<comment><USER4> It might seem a little too ranting if you are unaware of who ojbyrne is but this will help bring more light into the picture. <http://owenbyrne.com/resume/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Internet used to be a nice place for nerds to hide. Every day, we're losing turf to this . . . this narcissists' playground; wefollow.com is further evidence of the decay. Even the once-hallowed niche of geekdom is being overrun by zero-sum games of self-perpetuating egomaniacs who are entirely too obsessed with this concept of having "followers".

</comment><comment><USER6> It's a list of twitter users sorted by follower count.

Therefore it just reinforces the existing popular users and doesn't expose you to interesting and new people.

Stupid-wank-fest.

<comment><USER7> Business model: none.

Life expectancy: one week.

<comment><USER8> You could be wrong. How about having paid twitter users on the front page, or any other page as ad?. Just last week Jason Calacanis offered $250k to twitter, if twitter puts his link on the front page. Once a traffic is established,, not definitely $250k here, but even a few dollars from twitter users for paid links would make him profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I refuse to participate in what I call "forced viral" schemes. I'm not going to spam my followers with essentially an advertisement for WeFollow just so I can join it.

<comment><USER10> Actually the majority of your followers wouldn't see it, only if they have the users with the "show me replies to users I don't follow" setting enabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool, but the effort is pretty capitalist, make the rich richer :), I rather read a blog that suggest a twitter user every week that doesn't have 2000+ followers :), or maybe list the users that are more suggested in #followfriday

btw, follow me at: <http://twitter.com/i_tweet_only_with_my_friends>

<comment><USER12> Hey, thought that was a pretty good idea for finding "rising stars". Seems like it's been done <http://www.boxuk.com/followfriday/>

This obsession with large-scale followings seems rather pointless, but I do enjoy seeing other developers or interesting people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really didn't like the concept from the moment I landed on the site. It's like adding to the stinky concept of 'twitter suggestions'. Both make the flow of twitter so unnatural. @barrackobama follower count is way natural than @britneyspears counter.

</comment><comment><USER14> LOL there are some people listed as "celebrities" that are definitely NOT celebrities!

</comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of Guy Kawasaki's AllTop

</comment><comment><USER16> currently, it doesn't seem to check back if your followers have increased.

</comment><comment><USER7> Browsing tags, I wonder why porn hasn't invaded twitter

</comment><comment><USER17> Holy smokes!

I had a similar idea around a year back - to create a directory with links to blogs and public pages of guys "who have done it" (internet celebs and entrepreneurs).

WeFollow is cool.</comment>


PepsiCo's CEO Indra Nooyi Was Right. Now What? - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/06/05/pepsico-ceo-indra-nooyi/ <comment><USER2> >"The consumer has turned the definition [of healthy] upside down," she says. "If it is non-GMO, natural, or organic, but high in sodium and high in sugar and fat, it's okay."

True and important to note when you're grocery shopping. Organic, natural, non-GMO do not mean that thing you're holding in your hand is actually good for you.

<comment><USER3> I wish someone would start a no-added-sugar movement. I have a sweet tooth, but the amount of sugar added to even fruit products disgusts me. Dried mango without sugar costs 2x. Raisin bran does not need more sugar. That's the point of the raisins! I like creamer in my coffee, but I cut it with milk.

<comment><USER4> Since you mentioned dried fruit twice, I thought you might find interesting that WHO recommends counting dried fruit as added sugar (also honey and natural syrups, such as maple, in addition to what we usually count as added sugar).

<comment><USER5> My favorite (== most hated) example of this was some soy milk I saw at whole foods. In big letters on the front it said "NO ADDED SUGAR!". Flip the box around and the #2 ingredient was "dehydrated cane juice."

It's no surprise even the CEO of whole foods says most of the stuff they sell is crap. I used to shop at their original two stores in Austin before they decided to expand and they sold a very different class of product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr: she's been introducing slightly healthier products and sales have stoppend falling.

<comment><USER7> Thank you.

I can't put my finger on it but the first 1/4th of the article through me off.

<comment><USER8> Is there a term for this kind of "journalism?" I've heard it described before as being journalism for journalists or that the journalists have to fill a certain amount of space, so simple articles become wordy and tedious.

I see it all the time and hate it, but don't know how to describe it.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I believe the term is "churnalism." Stories which are primarily PR barely disguised. PR reps pitch stories to journalists and get them curated access to write a story. Lazy journalists go along needing to churn out stories regularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Surprise: capitalism actually works and makes companies follow consumer wishes. If consumers actually vote for these wishes with their wallets, of course.

<comment><USER11> Pardon me , but you seem have to got the terms "free market economy" and "capitalism" mixed up. Free market economy and capitalism may be entwined but they mean very different things and they cannot be used as synonyms of each other.

<comment><USER12> They are synonyms. The field of economics (the only field that could legitimately claim to give exact definitions to these terms) uses them interchangeably, and tends not to care about classification or exact verbal definitions, but rather focuses on the implications of various mathematical models.

If there is ambiguity in a verbal definition, it can be clarified by writing down a mathematical model, not by endless debates about the meaning of words or classification of the economies of different nations.

<comment><USER13> My experience of economics as a social science is the opposite - that it does not relate specifically to mathematical models. For example, the distinction between a mixed economy and pure capitalism is very clear.

<comment><USER12> In my experience (Economics PhD) the term "command economy" is used to describe a theoretical extreme where the government dictates all consumption and production decisions, while "free market", unqualified, refers to the situation where the government only enforces property rights.

"Pure capitalism" would be a synonym for "free market" although it's rarely used academically, I guess because the term capitalism is a lot less descriptive that "free market".

Terms like "mixed economy" just refer to somewhere in between these two extremes.

As I said, economists are not particularly interested in giving things accurate names, or classifying them. They mighty do this occasionally, as is necessary especially when communicating with people outside the field, but the field itself relies mainly on mathematical models, not sociological categories. That is why I feel the need to correct someone who, speaking with an authoritative tone, claims to know that "free market" and "capitalism" have precise and different meanings.

<comment><USER13> Hmm... "the field itself relies mainly on mathematical models, not sociological categories" \- I'll have to disagree. Especially with behavioural economics. I also disagree that free markets are the same thing as capitalism, as does Benjamin Tucker.

<comment><USER12> _> I also disagree that free markets are the same thing as capitalism, as does Benjamin Tucker._

Please never phrase your opinion like this ever again. Whatever interest I had in knowing what Benjamin Tucker said about this issue, I've lost due to your smugly phrased sentence.

<comment><USER13> I guess you are not open to more information about economics then. You may be surprised on how smug and condescending your own comments appear :)

<comment><USER12> I would be more than happy to hear more information, if only you would provide some. I have no idea who Benjamin Tucker was and how he is relevant.

Even though I claim to speak with authority because of my PhD, I don't consider that condescending or smug, and a person is free to judge that my education is worthless if they like. But throwing out names of very obscure people in place of an actual argument is objectively smug and rude.

<comment><USER13> You are now making me laugh :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's breathtaking to consider the amount of shelf-space that Pepsi products occupy. Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Doritos, Tostitos, Gatorade, Aquafina, Tropicana, Quaker Oats, not to mention Lipton, 7-Up, Mountain Dew and Naked. It's a planet with its own gravity and atmosphere.

It takes a special perspective to sell $66B worth of product while blaming consumers for their inability to discern healthy food.

On the plus side tho', their production requirements oftentimes bring state- of-the-art processing facilities to areas lacking in, or in desperate need of, clean water and filtration. Parts of India come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER15> > major activist investor: Nelson Peltz

I wish the press would do the responsible thing and use the proper words for those things: "corporate raiders".

Giving into establishment's newspeak is not doing anyone a favor. And let questionable people do the toxic thing they do (destroying companies for his own interest) while feeling good about themselves.

For now, I chose to keep away from any media that uses those lying words (such the ones one would use to cover up for torture, bombings, etc).

Noted: Fortune is in the no read list.

</comment><comment><USER16> Finding faults just to show the authority just like rhetorical questions. Rectification of those "insignificant infractions" need not make the company or product better

</comment><comment><USER17> I first learned about Nooyl after reading this PA comic trilogy back in '11 [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/01/03](http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2011/01/03)

…so nice to hear that her cult is still working out

<comment><USER5> That comic is right on. I remember being shocked when I met the lead engineer on Pringles. He was understandably quite proud of the engineering problems they'd solved.

I shouldn't have been shocked. He is a food engineer. Sounded like a joke title, but the supermarket shelves have more engineering in them as the shelves of Best Buy.

I threw in the towel and pretty much buy raw food, bread from bakeries that can't afford all the soy supplements etc. The manufactured stuff I guy (bread, butter etc) costs a lot more because the labor content of the food is higher. Luckily I can afford it.

I am morally unclear on the value of the engineered food. On one hand it's true, we have calories and vitamins, fibre etc in the hands of people who in an earlier age couldn't afford it. On the other hand the nutritional value available to poorer people is still lower than the wealthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder about this article. They say people are buying less orange juice because of the sugar.

But I think they are buying less because it's so crazy expensive. I know that's why I stopped.

<comment><USER19> I tried to go from Sodas to processed <fruit> juice, but doctors explained that the sugar content was similar. I then tried to by raw oranges but couldn't find anything worth eating. Acid like a lemon, crooked, dry almost solid, skin ripping the fruit apart ... Nothing like my memories when I could peel an orange and enjoy the delicious slices one by one.

To get 'normal' oranges I had to seek for expensive packages.

<comment><USER20> Don't give up on oranges! There are many different varieties out there and you may not have found one you like yet. Also tangelos can be sweeter. While oranges are usually sold year round in grocery stores, they actually have a harvest season. In North America oranges are in season November through May. I use find the best oranges around December to February. Valencia oranges are best for juicing rather than eating and navel oranges are easiest to peel. A good orange is hard to beat!

<comment><USER19> I love orange, and almost anything edible. I suspect current production strategy to lower quality drastically in exchange for lifespan and other logistic qualities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?" \- looks like Indra Nooyi doesn't.

<comment><USER22> They said healthier, not healthy. Most "healthier alternatives" are still "sugared water" they are just lower in sugar and higher in artificial flavorants than the typical sodas (Dr. P, Coca Cola, Pepsi, etc).

Honestly I really want to see a push to lower acidity in drinks. They seriously should start putting that on the bottle and talking about it. Acid drinks are a major health crisis that nobody talks about.

<comment><USER23> Acidity is bad for teeth, particularly in locations without fluoridated municipal water. Is acidity implicated in any other health problems?

<comment><USER24> I don't know about acidity, but fluoride has been implicated in many health problems. Here's a list of peer reviewed studies: [http://fluoridealert.org/studytracker/?effect=&type=reviews&...](http://fluoridealert.org/studytracker/?effect=&type=reviews&start_year=&end_year=&show=10&fulltext=&fantranslation=)

<comment><USER25> In spite of that, it's still nice to not have had any dental fillings or major dental work by the time I turn 30. This will be different from both of my parents. I think I'm happy to trade a minor increase in some other risks for the ability to eat without pain.

<comment><USER26> Cool anecdote, but you know what would be even better? If we had a choice.

<comment><USER27> You do have a choice. If fluoride scares you so much, stop brushing your teeth and buy a water filter.

Oh, and eat a diet that has no carbohydrates in it.

<comment><USER26> Cute answer, but I, along with the entire non-toddler population, don't ingest toothpaste. HN's propensity for "don't like it? Just buy this gadget/start your own company/move to Somalia"-style rhetoric also makes an appearance.

I have no idea what you meant with the carbohydrate comment if you wouldn't mind explaining.

Oh and thanks for the down vote, but this isn't reddit.

<comment><USER27> > Cute answer, but I, along with the entire non-toddler population, don't > ingest toothpaste.

You _do_ ingest toothpaste, albeit only small amounts. Much like you ingest mouthwash, you just try to keep it to a minimum.

> HN's propensity for "don't like it? Just buy this gadget/start your own > company/move to Somalia"-style rhetoric also makes an appearance.

What else can I suggest? In a democratic society that is your choice. You can fight to change the law, or you can work around it.

> I have no idea what you meant with the carbohydrate comment if you wouldn't > mind explaining.

Since humans developed agriculture and started consuming large amounts of carbohydrates, they have experienced tooth decay. Fluoride is necessary to prevent it.

> Oh and thanks for the down vote, but this isn't reddit.

This discussion is completely off-topic and your comments are unhelpful. A downvote is justifiable.

<comment><USER26> > In a democratic society that is your choice. You can fight to change the > law, or you can work around it.

Ridiculous. First, neither of us live in a democracy. There was no vote where the general populace elected to receive low doses of toxic minerals in our drinking water. Rather cabals of lobbyists persuaded municipal officials to add it under the guise of it being a good thing. Which has yet to be statistically demonstrated.

<comment><USER27> > Ridiculous. First, neither of us live in a democracy.

You don't know where I live! Though I'd agree that capitalist countries are not very democratic, at least not mine and the United States.

> There was no vote where the general populace elected to receive low doses of > toxic minerals in our drinking water.

It varies by country.

"Toxic minerals" is an amusing statement given that virtually all substances are toxic _in the correct dose_. As someone else pointed out, sola dosis facit venenum: the dose makes the poison.

<comment><USER26> It's trivial to find out you live in Scotland.

Your statement about toxicity is quite valid, nevertheless you can remove the word toxic and my point still stands.

I would love to know of the country that democratically elected to receive fluoride in their water.

<comment><USER27> > It's trivial to find out you live in Scotland.

Yeah, I'd just assumed from the way you worded that, that you didn't know where I lived. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't think there's much question that this company is harmful to societies and individuals around the world. Does it make sense for people other than shareholders to admire this person?</comment>


Jason, Fab CEO on the future for ECommerce and competiting against Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2012/08/15/e-commerce-startups/#comment-620674698

<comment><USER2> While building a David against Goliath image, interesting to note how fab.com competes against less funded startups: [http://blog.garrytan.com/infanticide- how-anti-competitive-la...](http://blog.garrytan.com/infanticide-how-anti- competitive-lawsuits-by) (tl:dr - nasty patent law suits)</comment>


Law schools: Still hiding the sad truth from students - <AUTHOR> http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/20/law-school-misrepresentation/ <comment><USER2> Lack of transparency is a huge issue. I remember when I started law school in 2009, the economy had just collapsed and we had zero information about how graduates were faring. The kind of stuff that's available today, at least from the better law schools, information detailing the precise number of students that went into which jobs, just didn't exist. For most schools it still doesn't.

That being said, the problem with law schools is just a microcosm of the problem facing higher education throughout the country. Skyrocketing tuition has meant that more and more of the lifetime increase in earning power obtained by a degree is being captured by schools. Indeed, these days for many people the net expected value is negative. But demand for higher education seems completely inelastic, largely perpetuated by the cultural myth that the way to improve our lot as a nation is for more education and better education. The fact of the matter is that more education isn't going to make well-paying middle class jobs come back from China, any more than it's going to break the cycle of poverty in inner city ghettos. It's just a smoke signal to justify ever increasing ranks of higher-paid teachers and professors.

Also, as ever, there are university administrators with their heads in the sand: "Sarah Zearfoss, senior assistant dean for admissions, financial aid, and career planning at the University of Michigan Law School, says law schools have growing increasingly aware of the major shift in the job landscape. 'We had not been doing anything different than other law schools,' she says, noting that graduates had gone on to prestigious private firms, nonprofits, and government jobs or clerkships. 'Our students were getting great jobs, but then the economy changed and we began to see some decline in offers.'"

The situation at the University of Michigan has declined from the point where nearly everyone could get a job justifying the almost $50k/year in tuition to the point where only 50-60% of the class can do so. That's the "new normal" and it's more than just "some decline."

Yes, people going to graduate school should be able to run the numbers, especially now that so much more information is out there, but in the face of administrators like these, is there any wonder why many choose to believe instead?

<comment><USER3> > But demand for higher education seems completely inelastic, largely > perpetuated by the cultural myth that the way to improve our lot as a nation > is for more education and better education.

I wouldn't say that. I would say that the problem is by thinking a if you don't have a B[AS], you're worthless. Trade schools are, and will continue to be, important.

Mike Rowe sums it up in an address to congress: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NwEFVUb-u0>

<comment><USER4> I believe the parent's point is true. In my location (there is variance here), a graduate of a four year program needs to earn something like $43,000 per year to earn on par with a minimum wage worker without a post-secondary education when you consider the accumulated costs and lost opportunity.

The average income of a college graduate in my location is $34,000 per year. That means the majority of these graduates are effectively making less than minimum wage, yet the enrolment only continues to rise, if anything. That definitely seems inelastic to me.

<comment><USER5> Do run those numbers on a per-major basis, though. And try (though is is hard to get data) to separate the cohort who went to study and the cohort who went to party for 4 years.

<comment><USER6> There are also some issues around job preferences not being solely based on pay. The kinds of low-ish pay jobs worked by degree holders aren't identical to the distribution of low-ish pay jobs worked by non-degree holders, and skew, I believe, more office/white-collar rather than manual labor. Some people implicitly attach a significant value to that, whether due to working conditions or status, enough that they're willing to take that route even if they knew up front that it's not a net-positive financial decision. E.g., if attending college means you effectively make $10k/yr less, taking all costs into consideration, but you have a 60% greater chance of it being at a desk in an air-conditioned office, that might be worth it to some people.

In other words, some data on job-type mix rather than solely median salaries would be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Should law schools be held to a different standard than undergraduate programs? Last I checked, colleges don't advertise the employment prospects for a typical bachelor's degree. If you are smart enough to get into law school, you should be able to do enough research to gauge your prospects after graduation based on the law school you plan to attend and your undergraduate GPA.

<comment><USER8> The issue is, in popular culture, law is viewed as a relatively easy way (compared to medicine) to enter the upper middle class. This is outdated, but the fact remains, and it's re-enforced by many people in high ranking positions having a background in law.

Many people, particularly groups of people traditionally excluded from professional life, really have no idea about the reality. The information is out there, but if you've always been told that law is the safe, smart thing to do, you might not even know to look. Known unknowns versus unknown unknowns, and all that.

Most people fall into their work not out of a rational economic analysis (which is pretty damn hard, even for people who do it for a living) but out of impressions born of the zeitgeist. When someone chose to study CS or become a programmer (or whatever it is that you did), he or she probably didn't go through heaps of research about its prospects and then read a couple of books about whether or not those would continue in the future. Most likely, he chose to do it because he enjoyed computers, had friends with big salaries out of school, and knew there was a bunch of money flowing into companies like Google. Through luck of the draw, that decision worked out.

<comment><USER5> Number of Google m/billionaires who saw many people getting rich from a CS degree when they were in school: 0.

Fighting the previous war is always foolish. Money is made by leading the pack, not following it.

<comment><USER9> People don't go to law school to become billionaires. They go to law school because it used to be a pretty good odds ticket for a lifetime in the upper- middle class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the basic problem is that law is taught in the USA as a graduate degree, so the stakes are higher.

In Australia, most universities teach law as an undergraduate degree. It's basically viewed as the replacement for the Arts degree of the 50s: a generalist degree that shows a comfort with doing large volumes of work with verbal abstractions.

Lots of Australian law students discover that they don't want to be lawyers. They go on to other professional careers instead -- the public service, management etc etc. In my case I quit and did computer science.

I don't regret it. Legal thinking is unusually thorough and careful.

<comment><USER2> That is of course the proper way to do it. You can thank Big Academia for getting rid of the sensible LLB here in the U.S.

Indeed, even if you are an American and really want to be a lawyer it's not necessarily a bad idea to try your hand at an Australian or British law school then do an LLM in the U.S. Or learn to speak Cantonese and head over to Hong Kong (or Hindi and head to India, or Portuguese and head to Brazil) where economic development has created a large demand for lawyers.

<comment><USER10> The biggest switching divide is between common law countries (broadly, everywhere the British were) and code/civil law countries (broadly, everywhere else). They're actually quite different _systems_ of law, not just similar systems with different _contents_.

<comment><USER2> I was thinking of going abroad to study, though I don't know if they are as accepting over in Asia of Anglos as we are of Asians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is part of the reason why I decided not to apply for law school despite scoring well on the LSAT (176). I couldn't commit to working 80 hours a week at a big law firm to pay off 250K of debt unless I was sure I loved the work.

<comment><USER12> With a 176 LSAT you probably would've gotten some rich scholarships barring unusual circumstances.

<comment><USER13> My 50% scholarship at a top 15 school (one of the cheaper ones too) still left me looking at a 40K per year bill with COL. You might be able to get a close to full ride if you are willing to go to a less prestigious school, but most aren't, since law is such a prestige obsessed world. It doesn't make much sense, given that there isn't really any difference in education quality or breadth between the schools. Law firms might as well just look at undergrad LSAT and GPA's, since that's about the extent of the filter "which law school you went to" applies.

<comment><USER2> It would save everyone a lot of money and cut out the middle man if all employers could just look at SAT scores and LSAT scores along with high school GPA. There would be no more need for academia as we now know it.

<comment><USER6> If high SAT scores meant that someone had learned the equivalent of a 4-year CS degree, sure, I'd be willing to consider them equivalent when hiring for a technical position. But high SAT scores just mean that you know basic, high- school-level arithmetic and reading comprehension, which is not quite the same thing.

It would be interesting to have some kind of exam showing equivalent knowledge, but I haven't seen attempts in that direction that aren't worse assessments than the degree/GPA. For example, as weird as law-school is, the bar exam is even weirder (deliberately so), and generally a terrible model to follow.

<comment><USER5> Some states allow legal apprentices (paralegals) to sit for the bar without going to law school, if their mentor approves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have a relative who got into of the top 15 law schools. Despite getting a scholarship, he's still borrowing 30K per year. He was having doubts about being a lawyer; he was doing it mostly because people were saying "you're smart; you should do it." and he saw the JD as a means to an end. (I'm not sure what the "end" is, but he had no intention of being a lawyer "for life".)Anyway, though he did well his first year, he hated almost every second of it. He's cutting his losses, getting a job (hopefully - he's had promising interviews) and leaving after 1 year with _only_ 30K in debt.

</comment><comment><USER13> I dropped out of a top-15 program. The legal education is in crisis mode right now. Last I looked, applications to law school were lower than any year since they started counting them. Formerly "competitive" schools like American have dropped all pretense of admissions standards. In my opinion, at least one school will have gone belly up in the next year (and without significant reform, that's just the tip of the iceberg).

<comment><USER5> Well American only had pretenses to begin with.

Georgetown and then GWU had reputation, and UDC was a nice decently priced "local" school, like the one whose name escapes me (Suffolk?) in Mass where all the Mass politicians went.

American was always a tuition soak for rich wish-they-could-bes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not in the best interest of the individual colleges that make up a university to discuss the prospects of their graduates. This article could be written about many of the liberal arts degrees or even about the lower-end students in science degree programs.

<comment><USER16> Those aren't trade schools with a public perception of solid return.

The bottom dropped out of law about 5 years ago, when jobs were cut and law school enrollment went up. Not everyone has gotten the memo.

There was never a time where people assumed they could pull anywhere near six digits their first year out of school by getting a graduate degree in writing poetry.

<comment><USER6> The fact that lawyers with jobs _are_ still extremely highly paid in many cases also skews the perceptions, I think. Lawyers at the big firms are still making $150k+. That's different from areas like some parts of the liberal arts, where you don't really see people pulling down those kinds of salaries at all, so nobody is under the illusion that $150k+ jobs exist. In law they really _do_ exist: salaries at law firms are comparable to those at tech firms. It's just that the odds of getting one of those jobs have significantly decreased over the past 5 years.

Why that situation remains, I'm not as sure. Why has the glut of lawyers not brought down salaries or prevailing rates? It seems instead that incomes have become bimodal, with one group of highly paid lawyers, and another group of very poorly paid lawyers with unstable employment.

<comment><USER2> It's not a new phenomenon: <http://www.nalp.org/uploads/0812Research.pdf>.

As for what keeps the upper peak going, ironically law is supply constrained. Not by the number of JD's (if you just need legal services you can get them on Craigslist for $10/hour), but by available training opportunities. You're not going to hire a lawyer to do a $100 million bond offering who has never worked on one before, and there are only so many of those that are done each year which gates the number of new lawyers that can be trained to do them. This gating is the same reason you see similar or higher salaries in consulting or finance. There is no shortage of fresh BBA's and MBA's who'd love to be doing M&A deals, but MS/JPM/GS only need so many people each year to handle the deals they have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The number of law school graduates has always exceeded the number of computer science graduates (yes a comparison of a graduate degree to an undergraduate but CS majors rarely need another degree).

</comment><comment><USER5> We mock the fools who joined CS programs in undergrad to pursue a love of money but didn't care about computers. Why should we pity the law students? There is still plenty of work available for someone who wants a law degree in order to defend the defenseless and fight tyranny. But the market for predatory loan paperwork and anti-competitive M&A's s drying up. Those lawyers can cry into their beers with the RIAA lobbyists and the infamous buggy whip manufacturers.

<comment><USER2> There actually isn't. My friends from law school who sold their souls to corporate American mostly found jobs. It's my friends who wanted to defend poor people, fight racial injustice, or save the environment that had problems finding jobs. Corporate America is doing fine--it's the public sector that's really been gutted by the recession.

Not that I think this is a positive state of affairs, mind you. Karmicly, those people are a lot more deserving of jobs.

<comment><USER5> I didn't mean to suggest that good works would pay well, but I guess I implied that.

<comment><USER2> The public sector has never paid well, but now it doesn't pay at all. I know more than several people who could've easily gotten six-figure jobs in private practice that can't get $30k/year jobs in the public sector. Even if they were willing to work for free, public organizations don't even have the capacity to train people right now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>