Math Quiz: Why do men predominate? - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/math-quiz-why-do-men-predominate

<comment><USER2> "Hyde and Mertz found there are more girls in the top tier in countries such as Iceland, Thailand, and the United Kingdom–and even in certain U.S. populations, such as Asian-Americans."

I don't buy this at all, if you mean "top tier" in the sense of people who are at the Olympiad/math professor level. Look at the numbers- there have been ten Fields/Abel/Wolf Prize winners from the UK, all of whom have been male. The odds of this happening given "more girls in the top tier" are less than 1:1000.

"Furthermore, they noted that a small math gender gap correlated with a higher rank on the World Economic Forum's 2007 measures of gender equality, in which the United States ranked 31st, between Estonia and Kazakhstan. A similar correlation was found for the number of girls on International Mathematical Olympiad teams."

Yes, but _what was the correlation_? 0.02? 0.2? 0.9? The article doesn't tell you, conveniently for them.

<comment><USER3> Did you even understand the article? The argument is not that there are more women Fields medalists from the UK; rather, it's that supposed 'innate' differences in mathematical aptitude between young men and women turn out to be not so innate at all.

To get Fields medal, it's not enough to be a brainiac. You need someone to step up and give you a good mathematical education in your formative years, take your questions seriously when you're a more advanced student, and so on.

See the biographies of Sophie Germain or Rosamund Franklin if you want examples of how being the 'wrong' gender can hold back a first rate mind.

<comment><USER2> "Did you even understand the article? The argument is not that there are more women Fields medalists from the UK; rather, it's that supposed 'innate' differences in mathematical aptitude between young men and women turn out to be not so innate at all."

The claim was, specifically, that "in (presumably less sexist) countries, the difference between male and female mathematical ability goes away, so sexism must be the cause of these differences". She named the United Kingdom as an example of a country which is supposed to be less sexist. Yet, we do not see a single Fields, Wolf, or Abel medalist. If math in the UK _is_ sexist, then why attribute the better female performance in the UK to lack of sexism, rather than luck or genetic differences or climate variation or some other random factor? If it's _not_ sexist, where are the female Fields medalists and IMO team members?

"To get Fields medal, it's not enough to be a brainiac. You need someone to step up and give you a good mathematical education in your formative years, take your questions seriously when you're a more advanced student, and so on."

Then why don't British IMO teams (<http://www.imo-register.org.uk/>) have a larger proportion of women?

"See the biographies of Sophie Germain or Rosamund Franklin if you want examples of how being the 'wrong' gender can hold back a first rate mind."

(I presume you mean Rosalind Franklin?) You mean, fifty years ago, when it was perfectly legal standard practice to openly discriminate against women (and blacks, and Jews... ) in employment? No surprises there. But the article is talking about today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Then there's the cultural perception of math achievers–the nerds who are heckled in one society are exalted in another. Irina Mitrea, a math professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts, who finished high school in Romania, says she never felt discouraged there ..."

in my experience (with a sample size of ~10), the only women i've interacted with who were super excited about (and good at) pure math and theoretical CS (Ph.D. students) grew up in eastern europe or india, and when i asked them about their experiences growing up as females who loved math, they said that it felt completely normal in their home society and that they were shocked that there was this stigma against girls being able to do math in the US ... [again, this is only my tiny biased sample size, just my 2 cents!]

</comment><comment><USER5> It must be easy to publish research like this in a journal.

How could a reviewer -- even an anonymous one -- object? Doing so would put his/her career at risk.

Maybe it's best not to do research like this at all.

<comment><USER6> I don't know why you were voted down. Yes, speaking out against the conclusions of the article has harmed people's careers. Even mild speculating that maybe there's inborn cognitive differences between men and women can derail a science career.

It's crazy that people can't investigate the topic thoroughly - arguing "all culture no biology" demands a really high burden of proof. Arguing "some culture some biology" shouldn't be academic suicide, which it currently is.

<comment><USER5> But maybe for the good of society, this sort of research should be banned.

<comment><USER6> This could work. In the interests of truth, perhaps it'd work best if we did it very explicitly and publicly: "All research on potential mental differences between men and women are hereby banned for the good of society." Then we could start brainstorming what other research to ban for the good of society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The original paper by Hyde and Mertz can be found at <http://tctvideo.madison.com/uw/gender.pdf> . In it, the authors reference data from the Program for International Student Assessment as their primary evidence in attempting to discredit the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis (apart from their discussion of differing degrees of female membership on IMO teams). Careful examination of the 2006 PISA data, however, indicates a positive correlation between variance ratio and mean performance amongst OECD countries with above average performance (selected to control for availability of educational resources, and overall social stigma against mathematics). This suggests that countries which have taken action to reduce Variance Ratio in order to equalize educational outcomes have also reduced overall mean outcomes.

In other words, countries which have successfully suppressed greater male variance (if it is inherent) or have through cultural engineering increased apparent female variance, have done so at the cost of reducing mean outcome.

It is worth noting, however, that this result was achieved by looking at countries that were assumed to already have adequate educational resources, and have already achieved above average mean outcomes--presumably through some sort of cultural emphasis on the value of mathematics. Both of these effects appear greater than that of suppression of male variability.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. Men have more variance in aptitude but there is same amount of boys and girls in math olympics (in countries with gender equality).

That might mean that people able to achieve olympic level of math skill are actually abundant enough so small random pick from all available people with such potential does not show differences.

<comment><USER9> Once more,

It's been shown that for a few cultures on a small norming sample on particular tests (IQ, SAT) that standard deviation on math related scores is greater than that for women. The bulk of the standard deviation is accounts for by people testing around the mean, because most of the scores are _around_ the mean.

Knowledge of the standard deviation does not, as our financial markets recently showed, correlate so well with extreme outliers, as those with Olympic level abilities are likely to have. And the sorts of thinking demanded by those taking an IQ test or the SAT are not so similar to those required by Olympiad level problem solving (correlated and similar though they are). And the sort of thinking required of Olympiad level problems is not so similar to that required for success in research mathematics (helpful and correlated though they are), as shown by the large numbers of people who attain great honors in such competitions and do not end up really producing much original work. _And_ it's been shown and is frankly straightforward to see how cultural influences can effect both interest and resources available for bright young minds of any background or gender.

We just don't know enough about one's aptitude and its interaction with the environment to make such blanket statements. Men have more variance in aptitude! It's like a difference of a standard deviation of 14.5 points for women and 15.5 points for men. Keep in mind also that a core component of most IQ tests and the SAT is time pressure. In the SAT it's raw time pressure, and in psychologist administered IQ tests you have several factor: one being an explicit time weighting, two being the the fact that the speed of one's response can give you a much higher score, three being that your answers are subjectively weighted by the psychologist (which could already introduce bias), and if you seem unsure you'll be docked points, and if you seem sure but speak vaguely you can often turn a yes into a no, and four whether or not they move forward in sections depends on how quickly you're answering. It's been shown by Benbow et. al. that, at least in America, girl's confidence with mathematics is astonishingly uncorrelated with their performance (unlike with boys, who, if they're good, tend to think they're even better.) It is completely reasonable that if you're more unsure about your own abilities you might hesitate for just a bit longer, sound a little less confident, hazard fewer guesses. This will, by itself, reduce variance in one's score. You'd need to account for only a 6% difference to explain the variance in score.

(Also, from what I know, too, the selection processes of countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, China, and the USA are anything but a random pick. They can be quite grueling, actually.)

<comment><USER8> Thank you. I should have realized that differences in standard deviations can tell almost nothing about differences in number of far outliers.

> (Also, from what I know, too, the selection processes of countries like > Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, China, and the USA are anything > but a random pick. They can be quite grueling, actually.)

I didn't mean that getting into Olympic is random pick from general population. But since not every person that is able to achieve Olympic level is in the Olympics (some smart students might not care, some not so smart teachers might not care) it is kind of random pick of all who could theoretically pass the grueling trials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "In a 1990 study, Hyde had found that high school boys solved complex problems on standardized tests better than girls. But 19 years later, test scores of 7 million students across 10 states show that the gap is close to zero."

That's because many of the tests were redesigned in the 1990s to eliminate their correlation with _g_ , the general intelligence factor. This was explicitly done to eliminate the gaps between sexes and races.

<comment><USER9> What? Cite, please.

Girls have been closing the gap in the study of mathematically precocious youth, and the international science Olympiads, too. The SAT and the IMO et. al. have been re-engineered? News to me.

How the heck do you make a math test with the _g_ correlation eliminated, anyway? That seems pretty hard.

<comment><USER10> American MENSA has cut-off dates for various U.S. standardized tests: [http://www.mensafoundation.org/Content/AML/NavigationMenu/Jo...](http://www.mensafoundation.org/Content/AML/NavigationMenu/Join/SubmitTestScores/QualifyingTestScores/QualifyingScores.htm)

I'm not entirely sure if the _g_ -loading changes were made in the math portion, or just the verbal. As to how to decorrelate math, I suspect it canbe done by simply reducing the number of chained dependencies. For example, have one question involving sin(x) and another involving x^2, instead of one question involving sin(x^2).

<comment><USER9> I don't understand how reducing chained dependencies will eliminate _g_ loading.

If you eliminated _g_ loading of a mathematical test, you'd need to be able to take a developmentally challenged person, and expect, statistically, for them to get the same score as a fields medalist. I just don't see how you're going to swing that.

RE: The Mensa site. They claim that the GRE and the SAT and the ACT no longer correlate with IQ. Or _g_. That's just wrong. The old SAT correlates positively with the new SAT. The old SAT correlates positively with _g_. You'd have to have an extremely unusual statistical correlation between the old SAT and some other variables to yield 0 correlation with _g._

They could be concerned that it's less well correlated. Or that preparatory courses from Kaplan, et. al. were killing the correlation.

But in all seriousness, who's keeping count. There are pretty severe conceptual problems with _g_ anyway. I mean, all it is is the principal factor in a kind of multivariate linear regression analysis of a bunch of scores on tests, which are arbitrarily selected and claimed to represent 'intelligence.' You can't expect that linear statistical relationships mapping a few scores from a few tests chosen ad hoc really capture the breadth and diversity and range of human intelligence. It's crazy! If we look for _some_ linear relationship, we'll find it. But it can't possibly tell the whole story.

<comment><USER10> To the best of my limited knowledge, general intelligence is produced by finding associations between ideas held in working memory. The machines that carry it out in the brain are unreliable and have capacity limits, so the fewer ideas and associations needed to solve a problem, the more likely success is.

For a math test, reducing _g_ loading means having simple problems that rely on previously-learned information, rather than multi-step problems and problems that require invention. This is trivial to arrange.

Obviously this will not make a dull person able to pass the test, but we're talking about college prep tests, where the competition is among the people on the top part of the _g_ bell curve.

The MENSA issue is one of grossly insufficient correlation, since the organization is based on intelligence, not educational history.

 _g_ is the psychometric measure most highly correlated with practical outcomes like annual income and mortality risk. I suspect the second most correlated measure is attentional control (focus versus ADD), which is the fuel for the brain's _g_ engine. (Time preference likely has more practical importance than either, but we don't yet know how to measure it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This again? Who the hell knows? Who the hell cares? Why do women predominate sewing circles? If women wanted to have math careers they would. Move on to something important. Geez.</comment>


Node.js and io.js – Very different in performance - <AUTHOR> http://geekregator.com/2015-01-19-node_js_and_io_js_very_different_in_performance.html <comment><USER2> Interesting results, thanks for sharing. I can perhaps shed some light on the performance differences.

> Buffer 4.259 5.006

In v0.10, buffers are sliced off from big chunks of pre-allocated memory. It makes allocating buffers a little cheaper but because each buffer maintains a back pointer to the backing memory, that memory isn't reclaimed until the last buffer is garbage collected.

Buffers in node.js v0.11 and io.js v1.x instead own their memory. It reduces peak memory (because memory is no longer allocated in big chunks) and removes a whole class of accidental memory leaks.

That said, the fact that it's sometimes slower is definitely something to look into.

> Typed-Array 4.944 11.555

Typed arrays in v0.10 are a homegrown and non-conforming implementation.

Node.js v0.11 and io.js v1.x use V8's native typed arrays, which are indeed slower at this point. I know the V8 people are working on them, it's probably just a matter of time - although more eyeballs certainly won't hurt.

> Regular Array 40.416 7.359

Full credit goes to the V8 team for that one. :-)

<comment><USER3> I can explain what happened to Array case. 100000 used to be the threshold at which new Array(N) or arr.length = N started to return a dictionary backed array. Not anymore: this was changed by [https://codereview.chromium.org/397593008](https://codereview.chromium.org/397593008) \- now new Array(100001) returns fast elements array.

I will check out what happened to Buffer/TypedArray. Should not degrade that much unless something really goes south here.

<comment><USER3> Ok reporting back. There are two issues here.

The first major one is related to mortality of TypedArray's maps (aka hidden classes). When typed array stored in the Data variable is GCed and there are no other Uint8Array in the heap then its hidden class is GCed too. This also causes GC to find and discard all optimized code that is specialized for Uint8Array's and clear all type feedback related to Uint8Array's from inline caches. When we later come and reoptimize - optimizing compiler thinks that cleared type feedback means we need to emit a generic access through the IC (there is reasoning behind that) because this is potentially going to be a polymorphic access anyways. I have filed the issue[1] for the root cause (mortality of typed array's hidden class).

Now there is a second much smaller issue (which also explains performance of the Buffer case) - apparently there were some changes in the optimization thresholds and OSR heuristics. After these changes we hit OSR at a different moment: e.g. I can see that we hit inner loop one that loops over `j` instead of hitting outer loop which leads to better code. In V8 OSR is implemented in a way that tries to produce optimized code that is both suitable for OSR and as a normal function code - this is done by adding a special OSR entry block that jumps to the preheader of the selected loop we are targeting with the OSR. This allows V8 to reuse the same optimized code without optimizing it again for the normal entry - but this also leads to code quality issues if OSR does not hit the outer loop because OSR entry block inhibits code motion. This is a know problem and there are plans to fix it. The hit usually is quite small unless you have very tight nested loops (like in this case).

Disabling OSR (--nouse-osr) not only "solves" the second issue but it also partially fixes (hides)the first issue: 1) we no longer optimize with partial type feedback - so we never emit generic keyed access but always specialize it for the typed array 2) we no longer emit OSR entry - hence no code quality issues related to it.

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=3824](https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=3824)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting. After reading your comment, I tried allocating another Uint8Array and keeping it allocated throughout the entire test as a workaround for the issue you mentioned. Time for Node.js was unchanged, but io.js was down to about 5.5s now. Almost the same time as Node. Only about 10% slower.

The same happens when I use the --nouse-osr parameter that you mentioned.

<comment><USER3> Is it 10% slower even if you keep array alive _and_ apply --nouse-osr (to both node.js and io.js)?

On my machine results are fluctuating within the same ballpark (though I am on Linux and benchmarking 64-bit builds).

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I hadn't tested with _both_ before. Keeping the array alive _and_ using --nouse-osr makes io.js only 2.3% slower than my original measurement for Node 0.10.35. Median of 5058ms.

And Node 0.10.35 shows basically the same results as before. I see less than 1% difference. Maybe just random fluctuation. Even if not. 1% is irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are two very good comments at the bottom of the article. Here for your consumption:

Author: (Unknown) 2015-01-19 12:54 UTC

io.js based on node v0.11, so you need compare

\- v0.10 (nodejs)- v0.11 (nodejs) \- v0.11 (nodejs)- v1.0 (iojs)

Author: Michael Schöbel 2015-01-19 13:01 UTC

I also downloaded sources and compiled the latest master branch of Node yesterday evening. Performance was within 2% of io.js for all three tests.

But most people won't compile themselves. Most will use the latest stable release.

<comment><USER5> >But most people won't compile themselves. Most will use the latest stable release

I mean there is a good reason that

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reporting benchmark results on a single OS, on a single CPU type isn't really benchmarking. It's an isolated case of results.

I'd recommend to perform an accurate suite of performance tests, use different OS (CoreOS, Ubuntu) that are actually used in server environments. Also different machine hardware will play a role.

There's not enough data at this point to come to any conclusion at this point imo.

This result set is like saying that 95% of the people on the web use the safari browser on the Apple website.

<comment><USER7> ... in the apple store

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > This can be extremely important if you have a project with heavy CPU-use

Would you recommend using something different than JavaScript when writing CPU heavy apps? I was under the impression that it's better suited when dealing with high I/O.

<comment><USER9> A few folks have replied with the usual "use C/C++/Java instead", but in the real world it's often either impractical (or rather commercially indefensible) to fork out a different environment with its own training, testing, environment, automation, documentation and maintenance overheads. A blanket rejection of Node for CPU-heavy tasks is naive.

On the issue of performance, V8 lets Javascript run pretty quickly. Yes, there are languages that broadly offer faster execution, but that's far from the only factor in choosing a solution.

The main issue from my perspective is that the event loop can easily get blocked by CPU-bound tasks, preventing it from doing other things, e.g. responding to HTTP requests. You hit a similar problem with a Java servlet runner, eg. if a couple of your threads are bogged down on CPU-heavy tasks then they can't be responding to requests.

My personal preference would be to split CPU-heavy operations out so that they happen elsewhere, regardless of language, e.g having large PDFs generated by an internal microservice rather than by the webserver, or maybe via a queue in some cases. But that's just a personal preference.

<comment><USER10> Really?

Companies I worked for always had two environments, one for new features and one for performance.

Like PHP and C, new features where implemented in PHP and if they caught on, they got reimplemented in C if they needed better performance.

<comment><USER9> Sure, if the companies you've worked for are in a field that needs incremental performance gains and are willing to pay for it then that's totally rational.

Typically I see client-side performance concerns outweighing server-side performance in a ratio of 70/30 or so, with the remaining server-side performance biased towards I/O concerns like waiting for data, or file system reads with a ratio of 90/10 or more. That puts the actual saving available to language or algorithm changes in the app layer to be less than 3% for the kinds of apps I've worked on.

I usually work at companies who are starting out, looking for Product Market Fit, where those marginal gains aren't worth the cost of reimplementing.

<comment><USER10> Fair enough. The companies I talked about didn't do this right from the start. Most of them after a few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On a slight tangent, there's an article using the Sieve of Eratosthenes demonstrating the use of Communicating Sequential Threads (CSP) on Russ Cox' website (one of the developers of Go)

[http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/](http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/)

</comment><comment><USER12> These are very interesting findings. On a higher level though: Are there any significant performance differences between the APIs of node and io? E.g. tcp package processing, file system access etc? I know that a lot of them are effectively C, so independent of the V8 version.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Depending on what your Node application does, my > findings may or may not > apply to your use-case.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the proportion of real world Node apps that will be noticably affected by this is less than 1%

</comment><comment><USER13> The competition between these teams is going to make both of them better. They will not only be competing on speed, but also on features. A huge win for developers.</comment>


Buy This Movie Or Legally Download It For Free: Your Call - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/01/buy-presspauseplay-or-legally-download-it-for-free-your-call/

<comment><USER2> Creativity is universal. Just because you're making something "mediocre", or the same thing as everyone else, doesn't mean that it's not worth making.

Maybe I would agree that mediocre stuff is getting too much coverage. If we could limit the stuff we make to just friends and family, instead of making it public to everyone, then we could all make mediocre stuff without flooding strangers with mediocre crap :)

ETA:

I think the tradeoffs are worth it though. It's much easier to identify talent now that the barriers to entry are so low. You don't have to judge them by some proxy like whether they have decent equipment, or if they're friends with someone famous.

Example: Hannah Hart made a stupid drunk video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq7G-Q9ZwC0> but people realized that she was pretty funny and had good editing skills. So they encouraged her to make more <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLYxeJjxc8s> and she got the attention of internet celebrities <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oLsTc_kETY> and she got to do a music video with a musician she likes <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIvOqHfia2s> and that wouldn't have happened if that first stupid drunk video wasn't available to the entire internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really wish people who did this would put donate buttons on their sites. I would rather all (or most when taking the processing fees into account) of the money would go to them and not Apple or Amazon.

<comment><USER4> If you put a donation button but not a charity, american, etc, Google Checkout will freeze your account.

[http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer...](http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=72721)

Or they could try PayPal instead...

<comment><USER5> So non american individuals cannot take any form of donations? That's strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Saw this film in singapore recently. I don't think it'll tell you anything you don't already know. If it had come out like even 10 years ago, then you might've called it prescient or atleast credit it with identifying a trend. Not today though. Waste neither bandwidth nor money on it. (just my opinion)

</comment><comment><USER7> Creativity has increased because of the Internet. There's nothing to prove that "creativity will be destroyed". If anything we'll get more original and innovative ideas, instead of the boxed ones that are made from a template to make $300 million.

</comment><comment><USER8> This interview with prior RIAA head, Hilary Rosen is very insightful.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VBrDFxA9Q&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VBrDFxA9Q&feature=player_embedded)

As she notes the RIAA wasn't the only bad guy in bringing Napster down. Napster's VCs wanted too much money from an industry at the time that couldn't match CD sales. It's a business and thus the RIAA focused on the best money channel!

A lot of readers here probably hated and or still hate the RIAA because they are viewed as laggards(even though those same ppl can't get enough of their content). This interview shows some in the music industry were laggards, some were not, while showing it wasn't just the industry who killed Napster, but the greed of Napster's VCs too.

Changing a 100 year old business model won't happen overnight and even after 12 years it is still taking shape.

My guess is the industry will see crazy Netflix like growth once Spotify, Pandora and other subscription services are built into cars; users use voice recognition to start playlists or songs. How many subscribed to satellite radio or still do?

Spotify on every IP device, even in my car is worth paying $10 a month for!

<comment><USER9> > even though those same ppl can't get enough of their content

The RIAA produces zero content, they buy and sell content as a commodity. They add nothing to the industry of music creation but parasitic impediment.

<comment><USER8> Well if you feel that way do not consume any of their content. Let them die!

Though say, you enjoy this new artist who is an awesome talent and who wants to make a living making music; have their music heard all over the world by millions. The best way to do this now is still the music industry.

The industry acts a filter, a promoter and investor of talent (their the YCombinator for musicians). It's been 12 years since Napster and the industry is still successfully doing this, yet making less money as of now.

Subjectively these music subscription services are the key to growing their revenue beyond present day. I mean why would the guy behind Napster and Facebook (Sean Parker) be an investor and promoter of Spotify if he didn't feel this way?

Further, I think just like Netflix once Spotify is built in to every IP device including cars, the industry will be financially stronger then ever.

<comment><USER9> > The industry acts a filter, a promoter and investor of talent (their the > YCombinator for musicians).

The music 'industry' is huge and complex. They're like Righthaven, Microsoft, Linux, the startup scene, and all other players on every side of helping/exploiting artists.

The RIAA has nothing to do with small record labels like the one I manage, struggling to promote great but fame-less musicians. I suppose they do effect us in that they pose an omnipresent threat of arbitrary litigation at any moment.

What's the difference between Sony, some small tour booking company, and a music venue? I guess from the outside it all looks the same.

<comment><USER8> The industry is just like Napster's VCs who most of us entrepreneurs strive to get our work funded and backed by.

For me Rosen's interview highlights this fact.

Every budding musician and entrepreneur needs a backer with financial muscle, connections and past experience to be a success.

As for small labels like your own... once you hit the big time with an artist you are bound to make deals with the big guys to increase sales/profit. I mean are you not in it to make as much money as possible?

As for your artists' if they are great then their talent will spread online (Youtube and Facebook). Once you have that artist I hope you would be doing everything for them to maximize profits and exposure.

<comment><USER10> _I mean are you not in it to make as much money as possible?_

As possible while not being a scumbag or making pacts with the devil. I'm not alone, either.

We want to do well, ideally make a living, hopefully live large. But that doesn't mean doing everything and anything, morals be damned.

<comment><USER8> Well i agree with you there but if you look at the most successful people from Edison to the current crop of luminaries you will see they all were/are ruthless!

Funny that the music industry gets such a bad wrap, yet we never saw VH1 behind the music like programs about the TV and film industries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sites like Hacker News comb the net and bring interesting web sites and articles to my attention, in a world where everyone can be a writer. And in a world where everyone can be an artist, musician or movie maker, there will be ways to filter out the good stuff from the bad. "Getting lost in a sea of mediocrity" is entirely avoidable.

<comment><USER12> That's true in theory but the number of people like PG who can setup such a valuable resource and not care about whether it costs them money are few. Most people who create outlets for art online or elsewhere have bills to pay and money becomes a factor. It is a very risky and low-profit business bringing obscure art to the masses. What is more likely is what happened with Myspace - it was a new, innovative way for any musician to create a presence for themselves online, where millions of people were also spending time exploring. But they chose not to limit it to only high quality artists and eventually the people who spent more time "friending" others than they did actually making a quality product achieved more through the platform. Creating something that works differently when this is the natural flow of such platforms is very challenging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://www.youtube.com/user/PressPausePlay>

Their channel has a bunch of interviews that I'm assuming is the contents of the movie.

<comment><USER14> These are the only ones I've listened to so far, but they were both good...

Larry Lessig: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRABcFKOXtU>

Kirby Dick: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eOm8ggE6_8>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Watched it last week. It's really good, especially Seth Godin's story of publishing the Ideavirus.

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe I see things in simple terms. But I think of artists as people who use their creative talent to entertain others (by exciting/relaxing/engaging/uplifting/etc them) in exchange for payment. And I see all these non-artists 'excited' about the 'potential' to 'express' and 'communicate ideas to the whole world' without the 'shackles' of commercial enterprise as basically being people, who care more about the spare change in their pocket than they do about artists, masquerading as new millennium hippies.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure I'm following you. Are you saying that artists [or people] creating art for non-commercial purposes aren't really artists?

That seems a little silly to me

<comment><USER16> No, but let's just say that it's like anything else, eg. being a programmer. Doing art for a living isn't some transcendent activity compared to making your living doing any other sort of job. If you're good, people will pay you; if you do it for free, people will take it. If you're bad, people wont pay you any attention (or money).

<comment><USER17> <sarcasm> Nobody ever created anything good without being paid for it.

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

</sarcasm>

<comment><USER16> That was nowhere in my statement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Rise and Fall of Nintendo's Miitomo: Why Downloads Don't Matter - <AUTHOR> https://www.surveymonkey.com/business/intelligence/rise-fall-nintendos-miitomo-downloads-dont-matter/ <comment><USER2> Comparing Miitomo with Candy Crush Saga/Clash Royale is comparing apples to oranges in the strictest sense of the term. As a result, the data visualizations are very misleading. All three games are _very_ different genres and it would be expected to have different usage patterns.

I realize this post is simply marketing for SurveyMonkey's product, but it seems like the numbers/analyses are _highly arbitrary_ and do not entice me to look at the product. At the least, the focus on only-metrics-SurveyMonkey-can- provide limits the quality of the analysis because it doesn't incorporate rankings and revenue which is relevant. (Miitomo hit #1 Free App Overall on launch and hit the death spiral in a week: [https://imgur.com/a/SXnze](https://imgur.com/a/SXnze))

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comment - I'm part of the team here at SMI and did a little work on this post.

We look at engagement and churn because they're largely independent of genre, or if you're even a game, for that matter - those metrics are used to evaluate to SaaS companies, websites, even service businesses. This is because those metrics a proxy for whether your customers want what you're selling.

Certain categories of apps (and subcategories of games) have different averages for engagement and retention, but overall more is better for both. Candy Crush and Miitomo are similar in that they're light, broad-appeal social games (compared to Clash, a harder core game). Yet the metrics of the King games are more similar to each other than Candy Crush and Miitomo are.

App store rank is mostly a function of download velocity. Downloads tell you nothing about the forward prospects of a game. Miitomo fell in the rankings as the initial attention wore off, but if users were sticking around it could have been the start of a new powerhouse franchise.

Revenue isn't related to downloads as only people who use your app have the opportunity to give you money. This the reason we look at active users.

We looked at revenue internally, but it's not a particularly interesting story. Most games settle at a level of revenue-per-active-user and don't move all that much over time. So revenue is dependent on your active users.

Definitely open to any other feedback if you think there's something else we should look at: intelligence AT surveymonkey

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you're only referring to the peak when you talk about downloads. If you superimposed the three games you'd see that Miitomo fell off much more rapidly than the other two; to me that says as much as all of the rest of your post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem is compounded because while I've been logging on daily and participating, as my friends slowly drop off there's less for me to do and fewer people to interact with and much less incentive for me to come back the next day.

<comment><USER6> It should have had the ability to add friends over SMS from day one. I downloaded it on day one and my sister did too. However, since I have Android and she has iOS, the methods it launched with to add friends didn't work. If I could have added my sister as a friend, I probably would've been more interested in continuing to play miitomo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think Nintendo expects their games to do well since they're Nintendo. Maybe they're figuring out the hard way that mobile isn't the same.

<comment><USER5> I think if it were actually a game things might be different. Miitomo is just a social toy with a strange mini game that can be played to win clothing.

<comment><USER8> Speaking of that, This reminds me of the WII Mi persona that you had when you were asked to make when you started oup your Wii. What happened to that.

<comment><USER9> Huh? If you mean Miis, they've been in tons of games since the Wii era, feature in Miitomo and can also be created on the 3DS and Wii U.

Most Nintendo systems (and a few games) also let you choose a specific Mii to represent yourself.

<comment><USER8> I see. I didn't know that. I havent really played with them since they were introduced .</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get up and running using Nomad in a Docker container - <AUTHOR> http://charliedrage.com/nomad <comment><USER2> build does not look like a valid target. You can just says "make dev" to build a binary for the current box.</comment>


Hanna blows onshore near North-South Carolina line - <AUTHOR> http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVWjsPEiqe1tEu2mhBIRaxxGi8owD93144KO0 <comment><AUTHOR> Tropical Storm Hanna blew ashore over tourist beaches on the North-South Carolina border early Saturday at the start of a projected dash up the Eastern Seaboard that could dump heavy rain from Virginia to New England.</comment>


Perlin noise - <AUTHOR> https://eev.ee/blog/2016/05/29/perlin-noise/ <comment><USER2> When I was in high school I used Perlin noise to create some 3D terrain. Being young and naive I emailed Ken Perlin and asked him some questions about it. To my surprise he responded and was super nice :-)

<comment><USER3> As a student at NYU working with him on one of his research projects, I can confirm that yes, he's a pretty nice guy.

</comment></comment><comment> david-given See also Simplex Noise, Perlin's 2001 replacement --- it extends to an arbitrary number of dimensions, _and_ it's cheaper:

[http://webstaff.itn.liu.se/~stegu/simplexnoise/simplexnoise....](http://webstaff.itn.liu.se/~stegu/simplexnoise/simplexnoise.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Time to post his website again [http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/](http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/)

Needs to be ported to webgl some day

<comment><USER5> > Needs to be ported to webgl some day

There are many shader implementations of continuous noise. Most should be WebGL compatible.

EDIT: [https://github.com/ashima/webgl-noise](https://github.com/ashima/webgl- noise) there you go :) Includes classic noise (Perlin I guess?) and Simplex.

<comment><USER6> There's another cool WebGL simplex demo here: [http://alteredqualia.com/three/examples/webgl_terrain_dynami...](http://alteredqualia.com/three/examples/webgl_terrain_dynamic.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a really nice write up! The graphs really show how a noise signal is built up of its components. Additionally, while un intentional, it also shows how Perlin noise can exhibit "gridding" artifacts from the regular spacing at integer boundaries. This is especially true when used to create tangents based on the signal.

<comment><USER8> Yep; as described in the "Improving Noise" article, the gridding is greatly reduced if you use the "smootherstep" function which has a continuous second derivative in addition to first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fun fact: there is a C reference implementation of Perlin noise directly in the svg specification : [https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/filters.html#feTurbulenceElement](https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/filters.html#feTurbulenceElement)

</comment><comment><USER10> Ah, the classic!

There's tons of other lovely noises too. Interested in more? Check out some SIGGRAPH stuffs from Mr. Perlin.

</comment><comment><USER11> I found the following libnoise (C++ Perlin noise lib) tutorial very helpful:

[http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/tutorials/index.html](http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/tutorials/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Hmm... Perlin noise is a lot more complex to generate than I was expecting.

<comment><USER13> You don't win an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for Math.random()!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember implementing simplex noise in verilog a few years ago. It took me a while to get my head around it, but eventually something just clicked, and the results were very impressive too.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can't this be done more easily by solving a differential equation and setting some random boundary conditions?

<comment><USER16> No not at all. Think for a bit about what the closed form solution of the final generated function is for any of the examples given. Then think of the differential equation that it satisfies (with N boundary conditions for every segment of the partition). There's no way solving that is easier than what is done in the article. Even before doing that, there are plenty of other methods that still aren't as efficient, which was one of the main goals of the algorithm.</comment></comment>


I'm a mac user and I use excel a lot, help - <AUTHOR> Hi!
I have to use excel a lot for work and for school, the only problem is that I'm a mac user!
 Numbers ( the excel version for mac) lacks of formulas, microsoft office for mac sucks big time, i had 2003 and 2008 and both of them suck! and yesterday I read 33 developers left openoffice.
I guess microsoft won and I will have to get a netbook with windows just to use excel only, or what would you do? <comment><USER2> Use LibreOffice ( <http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/> ) or just use Windows. You could emulate Windows with VirtualBox/VMWare Fusion, but it is slow as hell. You can also get a lower end laptop ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1841462> ) that is bigger and more powerful than a netbook for the price of a netbook. I'd only use a netbook if you want something smaller.

</comment><comment><USER3> Office 2011 just came out in the last month and restores support for VBA and much else.

You could always run XP in VMware and use the Windows version of Excel.

<comment><USER4> VirtualBox is free. I would start with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> * Numbers ( the excel version for mac) lacks of formulas, microsoft office for mac sucks big time, i had 2003 and 2008 and both of them suck!*

I thought Numbers was Apple's thing? Did MS stop doing Office on Mac?

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know how good the new Office for Mac is. It does look a lot better and early feedback has been positive. Having said that I run Windows 7 on a VM for one and only one reason, Excel.

</comment><comment><USER7> Virtualize XP and run Office in that. Performance is great in VMWare Fusion. It's the best way to use Excel on the Mac.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does Gnumeric meet your needs? <http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/> OSX: <http://gnumeric.darwinports.com/></comment>


Tech Billionaire Backing Trump Suggests Silicon Valley Is Out of Touch - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/technology/peter-thiel-on-donald-trump-media-silicon-valley.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> For me Trump's biggest problem is that it looks like he is Putin's doll. Even if he isn't that just look like it and he would probably be outplayed by Putin and give him anything he wants which in the long term is not good for US. Russians and their KGB are master manipulators and current information war really proves it. It went as far as "Hillary is eating children". Trump's megalomaniac personality might make him not to listen to his more experienced advisers and bad decisions might be made. That's what scares me. Having said that Thiel is a smart man. Trump is also a smart man and he could be a good governor or senator, but it's too early for him to take charge of the biggest and most powerful country in the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> He knows trump isn't going to win. He is setting himself up to run in 4 years. Right?! Maybe?</comment>


Attn Bloggers: FTC's stringent new guidelines take effect Dec. 1st - <AUTHOR> http://slate.com/id/2231808 From the article:
In new guidelines (PDF) released Oct. 5, the FTC put bloggers on notice that they could incur an $11,000 fine if they receive free goods, free services, or money and write about the goods or services without conspicuously disclosing their "material connection" to the provider. The FTC guidelines extend even to Facebook and Twitter posters. If you received a gratis novel from the publicity department of a publisher and posted a tweet about it without disclosing that the book was a freebie, you become an "endorser" in the FTC's view. It could—in the name of consumer protection—hit you with a fine. The 81-page guidelines, which also mandate stringent celebrity endorsements rules, will take effect Dec. 1. <comment><USER2> Enough arbitrary regulation, and everyone becomes a criminal...

The distinction between "news organization" and individual also makes very little sense to me. When someone contributes original work via twitter or a blog, why is this any less "news" than the writings of some large media company? Perhaps some (many?) blogs admit a significant reduction in "quality", but this seems a less than compelling argument. Just read the editorial section of an arbitrary newspaper...

<comment><AUTHOR> _The distinction between "news organization" and individual also makes very little sense to me._

The lack of a significant distinction becomes even more obvious when you consider a group of people sharing a blog vs. a media organization.

<comment><USER3> Yes, where is the line? Is TechCrunch a "news organization?" It's got a staff and lots of traffic, but isn't it just a really successful blog? Is Joel on Software or 37 Signals a blog or a very elaborate ad? How about Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki's which are really just ads for their own stuff. They get their own stuff for free. Do they have to disclose that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a question I haven't seen raised yet: how does this affect commenters on HN? Products and companies get plugged here all the time. It's hard to see how commenting is much different than a blog post.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you but I'm an adult. I'm perfectly capable of figuring out for myself if a blog is crap. I don't need the federal government to tell me.

</comment><comment><USER5> It should be interesting to see how this pans out. There may be an agenda at play here to get a foot in the door of forcing media entities to acknowledge who is paying for exposure. This is a serious problem with media, particularly what we call news. I'm not sure this sort of regulation is the right approach though, time will tell.</comment>


Researchers report high performance solid-state sodium-ion battery - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-04-high-solid-state-sodium-ion-battery.html <comment><USER2> How many reported battery breakthrough reports do we have per year? 20? 50? It's hardly worth digging into them anymore, unless you have a vested interested in that topic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Per the article, this will replace Lithium ion if they can get the same energy density, cost point, _and fewer fires /explosions_. Flammability is the current downside for LiON batteries.

I'm not going to hold my breath but the organic cathode does look promising.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's a credible candidate for better energy density. Lithium ions are small and light. There are plenty of applications for which energy per unit price is more important, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe once someone solve the price point issue, most industries(not sure about airliners) will change to solid state batteries.</comment>


On All That Fuckery - <AUTHOR> https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery <comment><USER6> Thanks for writing this. As a female developer with 60K followers on Instagram, I went through all this:

– "Programmers don't look like that!" – "You're fake. Some dude writes your content." – "Are you a model or a coder?"

Bullies are not happiest people on the planet: some of them have been harassed or bullied by their parents, in schools etc. I discovered the hard way that when I pay back with the hate, it makes me feel bad and also feeds their hate. The hardest and probably wisest solution is to respond with love to those unhappy folks. Or not responding at all. It's very hard, but it works.

– Julia

</comment><comment><USER7> I never stop being amazed by how much time and energy people will put into being awful to other people.

It's so frustrating that after being in this industry for over 20 years nothing's really improved, and far too many arseholes are still getting a free pass for their arseholery.

<comment><USER8> It's getting worse. It used to be socially inadequate highly educated geeks who thought it was funny and/or couldn't really cope with anything other than highly intelligent white males. Now it's far broader than that. Logically because non-phd's can (luckily) work with computers and enter the industry now, but it has the good and bad side effect that people who I would not have to mingle with and who would've never made it to software developer 30 years ago, now suddenly are clients/colleagues etc. This means a rather large (and growing) share of racists, bigots, white supremacists (I thought those were some kind of fringe types living in the woods but then suddenly some rather good coder starts to talk politics to you...) and such. And a lot of guys I know act like they see women coders as equals, but from their subtle (and not so subtle sometimes) actions show they really don't, even while she might have superior skills/experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Free speech is a noble ideal, but it seems like the current implementation of the Internet has turned that ideal on its head.

Yes, everyone should be able to say whatever they want to say, but no one should be forced to hear it. The way we implement discussion forums, chats, issue trackers, wikis, etc. is perhaps giving too many privileges to the mob.

I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.

<comment><USER10> >I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear.

Who decides? Why were they chosen? How were they vetted? Is the vetting process continuous throughout their stay?

In other words: What checks and balances are in place to make sure they don't abuse the position for the advantage or disadvantage of a group due to personal motivation?

The idea of a constant lifetime blacklist/whitelist makes me envision a world filled with small echo-chambers, all supportive of their own ideas, and filled with ire towards anything they view as opposition.

<comment><USER11> I believe you misunderstand the post you replied to. I understand it to mean "I want control over what I see" (i.e, the author is the "someone" who should decide what they see). We had whitelists and blacklists back in Usenet days, and they let you plonk bozos just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I keep thinking back of the days of the wild west of the internet, when I was a teenager. Back then, 'trolling' felt like it was done in 'good spirit', and it seemed as though everyone was sort of 'in on it', maybe because people shared similar values and knew there was no ill-intent behind the 'trolling' of the old days. But at some point (and I suspect it has something to do with money, as always), it turned into a weird team-sport. And political. It's no longer acceptable and needs to end.

<comment><USER13> I was a little shit as a teenager and I hate that I was. Trolling was only "in good spirit" because I was a heartless asshole that completely lacked empathy for others. What comes to mind to me as the epitome of my teenage years was thinking this was funny:

[https://www.somethingawful.com/news/were-all- gonna/](https://www.somethingawful.com/news/were-all-gonna/)

A writer for the SA website made fun a website of a mother who was grieving her stillborn children. Forget any opinion you might have about the mother or her presentation: this a woman who had several children die before she ever got to know them. It's potentially one of the most traumatic things that can happen to someone, and this writer decided to ridicule how this mother grieved:

>Your poison womb is making heaven too fucking crowded.

I hate myself that I thought this was funny. I hate that I used words to belittle the LGBTQ community. I hate that I was that edgelord that held to statistics about crime rates and intelligence as they related to race. I hate that I made fun of people for their sexuality. I hate that I discounted sexism, racism, and ableism.

It was never in good fun. Some people grow out of it and others don't. I am still working constantly to better myself and catch myself when I have prejudice thoughts.

<comment><USER14> I think a lot of people online don't understand how to get attention besides by acting outrageous like this. Getting attention online by doing something good that everyone else is doing is really hard. A lot of people seek out the seemingly underemployed strategy of doing the outrageous things that others aren't.

Maybe it's got to do with the fact we're competing with everyone online for attention, and the issue could be helped if more activity was in smaller clusters, where people didn't have to resort to outrageous strategies to get attention because there's less competition. (Discord servers provide one specific example of what I'm thinking of.) But it seems like as long as the global cluster exists too, people will seek attention on it too for its greater rewards, unless there's something about the smaller clusters that's even more rewarding.

<comment><USER15> Thats exactly why you hand out bans or send the teenager to timeout - <USER2> teaches them that bad attention seeking is not desirable and not rewarded with attention.

The internet lost the lesson some time ago because even bad attention is good attention when it comes to KPIs. More sharing is good sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Charlie Gerard made a Github Action recently that uses tensorflow's toxicity classifier to block some of the more horrible PRs and comments on repos - [https://github.com/charliegerard/safe- space](https://github.com/charliegerard/safe-space) \- it'd be good if Github could roll something like that out across the entire platform.

<comment><USER17> While neat, this seems like an even more protracted version of the Scunthorpe problem just waiting to happen. We already know mass-automation of morals is problematic (see YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al's attempts).

This stuff is deplorable, but for now it requires human eyeballs and judgement. Perhaps allow for more granularity on repo visibility and interactivity beyond public/private.

<comment><USER16> _We already know mass-automation of morals is problematic (see YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al 's attempts)._

This is different. On Facebook, Twitter etc is that they're trying to use AI to automate detecting _general speech_. That's a hard problem. PRs and comments on GitHub aren't really general speech, which simplifies the issue, and GitHub already has access to billions of legitimate PRs to use as a dataset for training. It is at least worth exploring.

I'll also add that while I think such an automated system should be opt-out by default for public repos there absolutely _should_ be an opt-out if people want to use one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious, what did the poster do to cause 4chan/trols to focus on her?

I know she pointed out some stuff in her article (she's a woman, mixed asian background, lists her pronouns on her page), but, usually, there's some sort of inciting incident that causes people to dogpile.

To ward off any non-constructive replies, I'll point out from the beggining that I'm not blaming her of anything, and the trolls are _obviously_ in the wrong here.

<comment><USER19> You can trace it yourself by using one of the 4chan archives, but to save you the trouble it started over someone complaining about GitHub having a readme page with a random profile as the example pic, other users looked up that profile, at which point the usual 4chan process took over. Also something about food pics.

[https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76729744/](https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76729744/)

[https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76735740/](https://rbt.asia/g/thread/76735740/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thank you for documenting and sharing your experience. Nobody should have to go through that yet it happens every day, over and over.

<comment><USER21> Yes, because we designed the internet and web "wrong". I've commented with my opinion on this, here on HN, before. In my opinion, the world should have two internets: the current internet, and a "safe for life" internet.

The former would serve as a staging area and playground for new features. Just as the internet does today, it would provide, roughly speaking, no accountability and no security. My guess is that its main audience would be high-school seniors and college-age kids. In addition, you'd have a minority of techies, and — yes — some vile wingnuts.

The "safe for life" internet's network-layer would have baked-in authentication (eg: part of your IP is a user-id). It would have a protocol for notarization (ie: the ability to have a third party vouch for information. eg: the choice to tie your real name to your user-id, or remain pseudonymous). Its "web" markup would be far simpler and more semantic (no per-site styles, no dynamic features, no scripting).

When someone invents a very useful web feature/paradigm on the _old_ internet/web, the _new_ internet's web-standard could add special tags to support it. So, for example, the NewW3C could introduce a set of "store-front" tags with which one could create an entire online-store _without any scripting_. The NewW3C would include all sorts of functionality, eg: tags to host a Twitch-like site to stream video, _with no JS whatsoever_.

With this sort of accountability, the alternate internet would finally provide the ability to effectively moderate — bad actors wouldn't easily "respawn" a sockpuppet or bot account, to evade a ban. It would make commerce and data- sharing much safer (via the lack of dynamic features).

The situation today is absurd. What content do we want the web to promote: interesting photos of Japanese food, by a serious developer... or hackneyed ramblings by a bunch of 20-year old trolls? The internet we have today is "wrong" for most people.

<comment><USER22> This is an interesting idea, but it wouldn't have helped in this case. The trolling on Github was using a logged in account; this would exist within the "safe internet". The co-ordination of this occurred in 4chan, which would likely be in the "unsafe internet".

With your proposal, the trolling would still happen, but it might have been harder for her to track down where it was coming from.

Trolling is a societal issue, not a technological one.

<comment><USER21>
      it wouldn't have helped in this case.

I'm not certain that is the case.

      The trolling on Github was using a logged in account

Except, if Github bans the user, that user (the actual human being, not their worthless handle) is gone — banned _permanently_. That's both a disincentive, _and_ a rate-limiter.

Also, if the abuse is egregious enough (ie: a death threat), the troll is now in legal peril. The cost/benefit of reporting a troll to the police (even under a pseudonym) on the new internet is much more attractive. Currently, trying to track down an IP is fairly worthless. It's not tightly-coupled to a human being.

      Trolling is a societal issue, not a technological one.

We disagree on this, but — let's be honest — there's no way to prove either position conclusively. I'm tempted to bombard you comparisons and contrasts from the various historical periods, but I doubt it would convince you. There are myriad counter-examples with which you could reply.

My take is that the internet, in its current form, enforces so little accountability, that it gives bad actors far more power than good actors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Excellent post. Whenever I see the full extent of harassment that an acquaintance endures it usually turns out to be far more than I assumed. So if someone you know is dealing with this keep in mind that there is probably a lot more than they are initially letting on.

</comment><comment><USER24> Normally I don't support going to peoples employers for shit they do outside of working hours, but I am willing to bet that some of those fucknuggets were using work email addresses/accounts. If I was their boss I would want Kat/Github to reach out and let me know about this.

By using their work accounts, they are stating that the company condones their behaviour - and I suspect that isn't the case in the majority of cases. I would definitely want to know if any of my employees were engaging in this shit so I could explain in very simple terms why it is unacceptable - <USER3> they clearly don't get it on their own.

<comment><USER25> I went through a couple of these GitHub usernames, they are all first deleted, but there's some presence in other sites, and it's clear that none of them likely hold a regular job in any place of consequence. One of these accounts seems to spend time finding other female GitHub accounts and making condescending PRs while another was busy on far right subreddits crapping on various groups of people.

<comment><USER26> Do yourself a favor and don't contribute to another history of $regular_dude who got fired/life ruined because his account/name was similar to someone else's in the Internet.

<comment><USER27> when has that happened before?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >I also received an email from what appears to be an MRAsian... It's sadly not uncommon to see Asian men upholding white supremacy and targeting Asian women for living our damn lives.

This is a bit fishy. The email sender was asking her opinion on certain matters related to racial politics, and our dear author just accused him/them of "upholding white supremacy". This makes me lose sympathy for the author here.

<comment><USER29> I think you and author have different connotations of white supremacy. It seems to me as though you are thinking Skinheads, KKK, etc.

In typical equity/inclusivity language, the breadth of White Supremacy goes a lot farther. It's similar in concept to Structural Racism -- It's not that the MRAsian emailer literally supports Nazis, it's that they're parroting political and societal points that were created as a result of the White Supremacy being the default state in the USA.

White Supremacy (i.e, Whites, and in particular, (rich) White Males being the defacto "person" that US policy and culture was/is created for) is essentially the state of the world after centuries of actions and policy based on the idea that the White Man is most deserving the fruits of the world, and that their place must be defended from colored people and women. White Supremacy will remain a fact until the long and hard work of including and raising all other people up to the same level of consideration and opportunity is complete, and society stops transmitting toxic memes which are rooted in it.

At least, this is how I understand it. (as a member of the most privileged class; happy to be educated by someone more knowledgeable than I)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think the call for action by teams/management to ensure sufficient support (including time off) is a really important one. Lots of organisations are investing time and effort into trying to build a more diverse workforce, but the bulk of that attention tends to be in hiring, rather than retaining and supporting minority groups in the workforce.

</comment><comment><USER31> Lots of energy and thanks for taking the time to protocol your experiences!

Stay strong!

The amount of malice is just very sad

</comment><comment><USER32> This sounds awful and she obviously does not deserve this. No one does or could. These people attacking her are being absolutely horrible and disgustingly wrong. It's sickening.

I hope that one day their employers (and really, their friends and family) end up finding out the kinds of things they have been saying. It's a lot harder to be a horrible racist bigot in real life than it is to be a semi-anonymous one on the internet.

That said, I would have liked to see more in the "so why me?" section. There are other Asian women in tech, and her "radical" profile honestly seems pretty mundane to me. It's definitely possible that she was just targeted at random like she suggests, but it would be nice if she linked the threads (in addition to screenshotting them) or otherwise provided some more context.

<comment><USER33> She mentioned giving talks, and those are floating around online, as well as a decent twitter following. Chances are they just stumbled upon her randomly and decided that pure vitriol was the natural response, as is the way with certain communities.

<comment><USER32> I'd still rather hear her thoughts than guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Nobody deserves all that fuckery.

Interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER35> You are never going to be able to control others' speech. The internet went wrong in my opinion when folks started using their real identity and their real life information. When I was growing up and getting online in the early 90's it was the most common of knowledge to use a handle, and never endanger yourself or contaminate your real life with your online persona. I have an ongoing theory that quite a lot of modern day anxiety and stress levels is due to making this switch to always being connected to online conversations with your real identity that you cannot back out of or turn off.

All that aside and not trying to go really in depth into that whole pocket theory of mine, it's the same as in real life, it's just amplified. You can't do a whole lot about other's opinions about you, or what they say to you and if you're online and you become a target for any reason it just becomes something you have to deal with on your own terms.

It's nasty, it's petty and it's a hurtful thing to continually attack someone else, but it's the internet. All celebrities deal with the way they are talked about online in their own terms. You do understand all the mainstream Brad Pitts, Britney Spears and whoever get death/sexist/racial harassment all the time as well I assume. It's being a public persona that now becomes the problem. You are willingly putting yourself out there where essentially millions of people can online swarm you. It's a responsibility to have all your personal information online, and to talk about what you like, who you are, hobbies and passions and associate these things to your identity on platforms in which millions can hate/obsess/harass.

I think it's a very serious mental and social problem, a load that is taxing the entire human psyche right now. It's obvious to me what this is doing to humans, with everyone trying to be a public celebrity for likes and fans. I don't think it's good.

</comment><comment><USER36> ICT has a huge problem. We've been collectively in denial about it for far too long. My cohort at compsci classes in uni was a class of ten, in an industry only 20-30 years deep at best and already the gender ratio was in decline. (This is the seventies)

I might say I think gamer culture is bound up in this but it's not just about that. Something very toxic is empowered by current s/W engineering.

I'm retiring inside ten years. I worry it won't be fixed before I leave the field.

<comment><USER37> What's ICT?

<comment><USER38> It's what UK schools called IT when it entered the school curriculum. Not really sure what motivated the C, maybe it justified classes using the nascent web.

<comment><USER36> Communications. I used it, because "software engineer" is too specific, "engineer" is too broad, and we now have sociologists, artists, AI theoreticians, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, VLSI design and layout specialists, systems management, network administration, protocol design....

ICT is a useful umbrella term. I do not believe it is UK specific or School specific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > Fix. This. Shit.

Not trying to defend the bullies but people shit talking on Internet is pretty common thing. If you decide to share your photos and lifestyle, that is if you open the gate to your private space, you have to account for consequences. People mocked other people before the dawn of Internet and unless there's verifiable harm being done I think this should fall under freedom of speech. It was her decision to go public with her private life. I don't see any way to fix this except being tied into mind rewriting program like in Clockwork Orange. If people mock you behind your back, that's life. You may as well ignore them.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Fix. This. Shit.

How? I mean, what do you suggest?

> It's a white supremacy problem.

US Cultural hegemony is inevitable, but please, try to contain this stuff in your anglo world, everytime it spills over other countries it's not an improvement.

<comment><USER40> She's already done step one - highlighted the issue - I had _no_ idea this kind of behaviour was prevalent and if I ever caught one of my employees engaging in it, they'd be out the door.

<comment><USER26> This issues have been highlighted by at least a decade now, when I started to read english media and sites. If you had no idea, then congratulations, you saved yourself a lot of drama.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Free speech shouldn't be anonymous speech. You can say what you think, but you should be ready to face the consequences of it as the view society has on you will change. Also I think not all kinds of speech should be free. Racism and hate speech should be something to be clearly defined and prohibited (in my country, Brazil, Racism is a crime with clear consequences).

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm so sorry people have to suffer from such awful behavior.

Last year a troll at my company Slacked his friend a horribly misogynistic remark about a women's mentorship group meeting. But by mistake, he sent it on the general channel. Within minutes he was fired and escorted out the door by security.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's alarming that github is being used for this bullshit. 4chan is a pile of trash anyway, but GitHub is supposed to be different. This makes me fearful for the future and very sad that people are being harassed in professional platforms like this.

</comment><comment><USER44> Seems there's enough of these kind of trolls on HN too for this to get flagged. Maybe even some of the same people.

<comment><USER45> I think this is uncharitable and paints users of HN who want to avoid flame as to enemy. Furthermore as shown in the article trolls are happy to comment with their real accounts. Even furthermore an internet troll craves attention. Therefore the very last thing they want is for this to be flagged.

<comment><USER44> The alternative is that there's enough people on here who find it uncomfortable when the spotlight is turned on the misogyny and racism that they share, that they flag this kind of article every single time one comes up. It's embarrassing for the community, because tech is deeply toxic and HN, arguably the biggest, most respected tech community online, shuts down every discussion of that toxicity among us. Every time this happens, I lose a little more respect for my fellow HN users, and care less about getting downvoted for calling it out.

<comment><USER46> > shuts down every discussion of that toxicity

That's far from accurate. There have been many major discussions.

It's true that some people feel that those topics are underrepresented, but that's because _every_ topic is felt to be underrepresented, including the most common topics. It seems to be a consequence of front page space being such a scarce resource [1]. Sometimes people even end up with the idea that the most-commonly-discussed topics are actually being "aggressively removed from discussion" [2].

It's true that users sometimes flag articles that don't deserve to be flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on those. We don't always do that, because not every article on a given topic (e.g. misogyny or racism) is equally likely to support a meaningful discussion.

[1] [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20scarce&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've always wondered if internet trolls are all 14 y/o boys or if some of them are like legal adults. The constructions and logic they use are are so simplistic. Is there a pervasive mental disorder common among trolls? Or are they all just a bunch of bad people?

</comment><comment><USER48> It's sickening.:-( To see so much hate directed at women.

</comment><comment><USER49> This mystifies me.

They have accounts on Github. Does Github not have any sort of code-of- conduct? If not, why not?

</comment><comment> DC-3 It's insecurity. I browse /g/ sometimes and while there's some very talented and interesting engineers there, there's also a lot of people who are trying to get into programming because it's the path of least resistance for a socially awkward young white guy who spends 18 hours a day on a computer. I think these vitriolic threads mostly involve this latter group of users.

Unfortunately not everyone is disposed towards becoming a good programmer and these guys don't tend to have the best study skills or work ethic anyway, so they often struggle to acquire the skills that they believe are their only way of finding success in life. This causes them to lash out with great ferocity at people who are both technologically able and socially graceful - <USER4> women and non-white people. It infuriates them that these normies with friendship groups and romantic partners and progressive political views are able to do the things that they are inclined to believe are the sole preserve of the lonely basement dwelling nerd, and do those things much better than they can. So they convince themselves that when a non-white woman gets hired in tech it's all the fault of the (((diversity thought police))) and that she's actually a technological incompetent, because to believe otherwise would shatter their world view and force them to come to terms with their own mediocrity.

<comment><USER50> You're employing the tactic of "poisoning the well", which is a pre-emptive personal attack. Many programmers are introverts, and you calling them antisocial basement dwelling nerds is just a hostile stereotype. There is no way extroverts are inherently better than introverts. I don't like the false dichotomy you're implying. Also, making people "guilty" by association. Also, dehumanizing while taking high moral ground.

Downvoting you, and I'm saying this openly because I despise cowardly anonymous ostracism present on sites like this. Sometimes I wish all downvoting was done with stating the reason.

There were civil ways you could have described these behaviors, but you didn't. For example covert narcissisim, passive aggressive. I have some covert narcissist traits, but at least I'm trying.

<comment> DC-3 I didn't mention introversion and I didn't imply all introverts are antisocial basement dwelling nerds. I'm just describing a particular class of /g/ users and the attitudes they hold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> You can say from the language in those screenshots that at least some of the bullies are not from the US. I don't really know how the US racial 'dynamics' work and feel, as I don't live there, so I'm not taking sides here.

There's just one thing I would like to bring your attention to.

I'm a white guy, born and raised in Europe, in an almost all-white country (+ Vietnamese and Gypsy minorities, but basically no big racial tensions). In my 20-thousand-people hometown there was a black guy and everyone knew him by name, because he was THE black guy. My country had been through fourty years of communism, then had a revolution and then went through a slow, uphill struggle to become a modern country where people vote in free elections every few years, have MacBooks and drive BMWs too fast. The living standard isn't exactly like Germany or the Great Britain, but we manage.

And yet, every time I go online, there are people talking about "white supremacy". About "white privilege". People blaming the whites for slavery and wars, people saying whites are responsible for everything bad that has ever happened to the blacks. There are people who get so offended about everything they slightly disagree with, who are so sensitive and self-righteous, they wouldn't even be taken seriously in my country.

To a white person whose ancestors never took part in any colonialism or slavery, the internet feels pretty hostile and just as judgemental as those 4chan weirdos. I don't like feeling guilty and being judged just because I don't support BLM, don't condemn Trump or don't care for "diversity" in companies whose products I use.

I don't vote in your elections, I'm not the one who doesn't greet your black neighbor, I didn't install an obscure bipartisan system in your country.

I don't feel guilty, yet every time I try to express any of those opinions online I get downvoted into oblivion by a US-centric virtue signalling mob.

I understand the world is a complicated place and I kind of let it fly, but there are people getting slowly pushed over the edge by the hostility and shaming.

Here's a link [0] to a news site discussion under a BLM related article. The opinions expressed there are pretty much in unison with what I hear from people around me.

[0] [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https%3...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.idnes.cz%2Fzpravy%2Fzahranicni%2Fseattle- usa-black-lives-matter-cernosi-bydleni- gentrifikace.A200819_162800_zahranicni_jhr%2Fdiskuse)

<comment><USER52> What you're seeing is utter dominance of the US over English-language web. It's like people in the UK, Canada, Australia and company barely ever post on the web, and Europeans just hang out on local sites instead. Hence, English- language web is pretty much 'US web', and US politics is all over it.

Ironically, you're posting this on a California-specific site where even other US people complain of too-local content and discussion.

Among top non-regional sites, one that has more Europeans than Americans is 9GAG—but I doubt it that it's very interesting to grownups.

<comment><USER35> I'd disagree and say that what we are seeing with all the constant talk about racism and over sensitivity to every little thing that can be turned into an offense of the most egregious nature, is the loudest victim using nasty speech to strongly convey negative-attention seeking behaviors. This is at global scale even if it started from the US social media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This has been flagged, and I would like to speak to why it _shouldn 't_ have been. HackerNews is a site for hackers, and among hackers there is still a wide cohort of people who will absolutely deny that women face (and more generally, marginalised people) do not face hate for who they are. This ought to stay up, just so we have another very visible example of what tonnes of people go through.

<comment><USER54> Per the guidelines, hacker news is a "site for things that hackers might find interesting."

Based on that, having the sufficient amount of flaggings suggests that hackers do not find this interesting.

I see why it is important to highlight this, but don't see a reason why HN is the right place for it.

<comment><USER55> Because it talks about harassment in IT? Those trolls or "kids" as few people names them, are in most cases HN target audience. :)

<comment><USER54> > Those trolls or "kids" as few people names them, are in most cases HN target > audience. :)

Not that I've spent a meaningful amount of time on any "chan", but based on my limited understanding just reducing HN and 4chan into "tech sites" is insufficient.

Again, the flaggings are the obvious signal of what interests people here. Why enforce arbitrary moderation on top?

<comment><USER55> Yes, for me it's obvious signal that most of them was hurt by this. It's not about interest.

<comment><USER54> > It's not about interest.

How do you know?

Example: I flag, on every opportunity, posts related to US politics. It's not because I'm "hurt" or annoyed by US politics, it's because I have close to zero interest in them and don't want that to be a content category that takes up space in HN from the actual interesting stuff.

I bet many feel the same for posts about social issues like this, _whether it 's morally right or wrong._

<comment><USER55> This social issue is tied with IT, HN and communities/companies alike. It shouldn't be flagged because it's hard for many, it should be talked about. Women in tech are treated like second class citizens.

But maybe i spent too much time in tech social media and I see those patterns regularly. Eg. Abuse woman online, if she starts talking about it, discredit her skills, and try to humiliate as much as possible, presenting it as a snowflake kind of attitude.

All of this is typical "nice guy" kind of shit.

<comment><USER35> This is not an issue tied to IT any more than it's an issue tied to a corner store gas station. You cannot regulate morality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> How is this post flagged.

<comment><USER57> I am glad it was flagged.

People are mainly talking about US politics here. And look at the discussion. Every different opinion is downvoted and dead.

<comment><USER58> How is gender bias, discrimination and online harassment US politics? Can you point out something in this discussion to me that gives you the impression that this is _mainly_ about US politics? Because I was not under that impression at all.

<comment><USER57> All of those harassments and trolling mainly happens as a back and forth between two streams of culture within the USA. And typically revolves around the topics of: "Black lives matter", "Racism", "Sexism in tech", "Transphobia" \- all these things are internal US politics stuff.

From the perspective of where I live (Eastern Europe):

"Black lives matter" \- We have very few black people living here. And very few problems with police in general. When something bad happens it typically happens to the police, not by the police.

"Racism" \- we have no history of slavery nor racism, except being subjected to it. Even more - originally the word "slave" was derived from the word "slav".

"Sexism in tech" \- there is no sexism in tech here. Tech is not even a prestigious field. People want to work in law, medicine and finance. Some can even be quite ashamed to admit they work in a technical field.

"Transphobia" \- even such things as thinking about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts are quite US specific. i.e. where I live we typically refer to people by their sex, and don't even have a term for a separate concept like gender.

Yet these things are so pervasive on the internet. People even post their pronouns on twitter and (in this case) fill their GitHub profiles with that stuff. They can do it of course, it might even be a good thing to do. But I do not think this deserves a front page of HN. Hence why I am glad it was flagged.

<comment><USER59> "all these things are internal US politics stuff"

I do not believe your statement is correct.

Literally the first search I did was "police Poland" in a DDG news search on DDG and the third link was to earlier this month [https://www.out.com/news/2020/8/10/polands-stonewall- police-...](https://www.out.com/news/2020/8/10/polands-stonewall-police- attack-and-arrest-queer-protestors) titled "Poland's Stonewall: Police Attack and Arrest Queer Protestors" :

> Nearly 50 people were arrested following the arrest of trans activist > Malgorzata Szutowicz, better known as Margot, on Friday. The protests come > amidst a rise in homophobic hate and rhetoric, and the recent re-election of > President Duda who called LGBTQ+ rights a foreign ideology that seeks to > destroy basic Polish values.

Or from [https://euobserver.com/justice/149112](https://euobserver.com/justice/149112) :

> Police were also investigating a separate case, in which a man on a balcony, > next to a rainbow flag, grabbed his crotch during a World War II memorial > march last weekend, Marczak said earlier. ...

> "No democratic country should allow the kind of incidents we saw, in which > police enters people's private homes," [Rafał Trzaskowski] added, referring > to police efforts to stop the balcony protester last weekend.

A DDG news search for "racism in Bulgaria" (literally my second search) includes this summary at [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world- europe-50060759](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50060759) about repeated racism by Bulgian football fans. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/20/bulgaria- sofia...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/20/bulgaria-sofia-racism- roma-everybody-hates-us-anti-gypsy-abuse) points out "While racist abuse of players inside stadiums attracts attention outside Bulgaria, within the country it is the Roma who are the principal targets of thugs in black and men in suits."

A DDG news seach for "black lives matter Croatia" finds [https://balkaninsight.com/2020/06/10/balkan-protesters- show-...](https://balkaninsight.com/2020/06/10/balkan-protesters-show- solidarity-with-black-lives-matter-movement/) where we read "Activists in Zagreb, Belgrade, Podgorica, Warsaw and Sofia rallied to show solidarity but also to point out the problem of racism and police violence in their own countries. ... Dozens of people took part in a protest march in the Montenegrin capital Podgorica on Monday evening. "There is no doubt that racists are also hiding among all our local Balkan fascists.""

<comment><USER57> I do believe my statement is correct.

You find some articles via google search about things like "black lives matter" in Croatia and claim it is relevant there somehow. There was a BLM protest in Lithuania too (where I am from). There were maybe 10 black people in that protest. Half of them when interviewed said they were traveling through different countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Poland) to create and initiate those protest. Then if you look at the people who attended - <USER5> teenagers. When asked why they are attending this protest they came up with "to show solidarity for US". Which is to say - they are being fed US politics over the internet and found an opportunity to join an event here.

So that's how I see it. These US political things leak to other countries. Through media, through twitter and instagram, and now even through HN.

<comment><USER59> Are LGBTQ+ rights a foreign ideology that seek to destroy basic Polish values?

Is Malgorzata Szutowicz an Eastern European who thinks about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts?

I quoted a BLM protesters as saying they were there "to show solidarity _but also to point out the problem of racism and police violence in their own countries_ ", which includes racism against the Roma people.

<comment><USER26> Hammering it won't make your point across. Most of this issues are not really very relevant to those societies. What you're looking for is activists (now journalists) writing pieces, and drinking from US narratives.

People in other countries is worried because every time a problem is framed under anglo-narrative constraints it becomes distorted, unnecessarily confrontational, and it distracts media from talking about the real problems people care about.

BLM protests in particular were weird in many places. In my city there was a bunch of people (mostly whites) and it wasn't very well received, because there were other very pressing issues (like people dying by the thousands by a virus).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Why is this flagged?

<comment><USER46> Users flagged it. This is in the FAQ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

 _What does [flagged] mean?_

 _It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News._

 _Moderators sometimes add [flagged] for the same reasons, and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair._

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> The fact that this was flagged so quickly shows that HN and its readers are part of the problem :(

</comment><comment><USER62> The behavior demonstrated by the mob is utterly abhorrent, and we should all oppose it as vigorously as possible.

But the "suggestions" section is not constructive.

> When these events happen to your employees, are you investing actual money > to support them?

I'm sorry, but you don't even know the human beings on my team.

> It's easy to dismiss these trolls as incel 4channers that we shun and don't > associate with. Lol no. These are your people. They work at your companies > and write your code. They are harassing or doxxing your other employees. > This toxic behavior is still very much a part of your tech culture, and you > keep rewarding it.

Well, after building an airtight case for incredibly gross behavior on the part of the mob, you lost me completely. The implication is that "incel 4channers" _are_ mainstream programmers. They are not. Not even close. I have worked with hundreds, and not one of them is like this. This is the vocal minority that the internet enables to speak out of proportion to their numbers, and make us all miserable. And the phenomenon of a vocal malignant minority is present in every domain, so why are we making this about our colleagues in the tech community?

No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other things to do has time for this. They are either children, or bitter social and emotional pariahs.

I'm extremely sorry this talented programmer had to deal with them, but becoming bitter only fuels their sense of importance.

The best revenge is living well.

<comment><USER63> > No normal adult with a job, maybe a family, maybe a pet, and a million other > things to do has time for this.

This is simply not true. "Normal", regular people do this too. I remember a while back a Finnish journalist wrote an article about meeting one of his online abusers[1], who had - on a Finnish copy of 4chan - wished that an immigrant would stab him and his whole family to death. Turned out the offender was a regular family man with a job and young children. He could not offer an explanation for his words and was not politically active.

These boards, their super hateful environment, and the presumed anonymity can get even a normal person to sling online hate. Even this person in the article said that his public persona in his normal life was completely different and not representative of his online comments.

[1] [https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/05/30/nettivihaa- tyossaan...](https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/05/30/nettivihaa-tyossaan- kohtaava-sami-koivisto-tapasi-miehen-joka-toivoi-hanen) (in Finnish)

EDIT: Found it in English: [https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/11/06/face-to- face-with-a...](https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2019/11/06/face-to-face-with-a- man-who-wished-an-asylum-seeker-would-kill-my-family-the)

<comment><USER62> that's really interesting. thanks for the relevant anecdote.

But say that guy works for me, and he is hiding his behavior well.

What am I supposed to do with that possibility?

<comment><USER64> As an employer or manager frankly it's neither your responsibility nor your business to investigate how your reports are spending their personal time.

First of all, don't lose any sleep over it. If one of your guys is a huge troll it's not your fault that you didn't know. These assholes are going to look like everyday normal people in RL. Secondly don't go snooping on your employees without cause. This should go without saying.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A JavaScript memoizing function decorator. - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.pageforest.com/#js-patterns/decorators

<comment><USER2> There's nothing more fun than stomping on an existing object hierarchy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Us JS programmers do like our monkey-patching. I suppose I could have done this with a stand-alone function ... but the syntax would not be 1/2 as "cool".

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just wrote this simple _decorate_ function that I'm looking forward to using in my programs. It worked out quite nicely in this fibonacci example.</comment>


Envato takes a 55% cut from creators who don't sell exclusively on their site - <AUTHOR> https://help.author.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000472943-Envato-Author-Fee-Schedule <comment><AUTHOR> For those who aren't familiar, the envato market includes themeforest and codecanyon- a commonly used site for web developers/programmers to source assets.

</comment><comment><USER2> that is steep . but nowhere even remotely near to the lock-in that apple has in its ecosystem, so not sure how it s relevant

<comment><USER3> zero mention of apple. also irrelevant to COVID and the protests going on, if that needed a disclaimer. not sure why you're trying to link it.</comment></comment>