Dangling by a Trivial Feature - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html <comment><USER2> Any implementation must accept that you will lose users this way. You can't implement every 'trivial' feature possible in order to avoid shedding users; implementing one way precludes a different way that also sheds users. Overall, you try to maximize the number of users that you don't shed, but that's it. And in fact, you're frequently better off shedding users willy-nilly, iteratively finding what the core features are that build a userbase, and forgetting about all the rest.

This post is a prescription for paralytic featur-itis.

<comment><USER3> I think part of the reason why developers that "dogfood" their own product is so important to some people. If you use your own product, you tend to find these sorts of important minor issues faster. I think, as developers, we've all been guilty about missing obvious and simple areas for improvement because we don't use the product, like users do, every day.

<comment><USER4> Or we have worked places where our bug reports are taken at low priority compared to real customers'. Real customers often don't bother reporting simple bugs, either assuming they will be fixed anyway or judging their value (to one user) as too small. So fit and finish suffer, because developers who do care are systematically ignored.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who sells software online, the most horrifying thing about this scenario is that the user is very unlikely to ever tell me why they moved on, and so I'm terrifyingly unlikely to ever know that this trivial feature is missing.

This literally keeps me awake at night.

Statistic: it takes roughly 200 non-converting free trial downloads of my software to get one data point of feedback telling me why they decided not to buy.

<comment><USER6> This is why metrics and analytics have become superstars lately. Why hope for your users to tell you, when the software can do it by itself?

Following the article's use case, the software could transmit the last dozen or so commands or actions performed by the user. In a simplistic scenario, how would you interpret it if 40% of your user's last commands are "Save"? Success, surely! How about "Undo"?

The art and magic, of course, are in figuring out valuable yet inexpensive metrics for your app, capturing that data when you have thousands or millions of users, and interpreting the meaning.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, who wants their drawing software to track their every movement?

<comment><USER8> This is hugely important. Any analytics had better be opt-in from a very visible and honest request dialog. Otherwise, quite frankly, it's unethical.

<comment><USER9> How do you feel about properly anonymous opt out logging?

My feeling is that anything personal including user content and searches should be opt-in but opt out is ok for monitoring feature usage that can't be linked to an individual. Obviously online/web apps reveal at least this anyway. Does context web/mobile app/PC app make a difference?

<comment><USER8> My perspective is that you are using that person's processor time, so it's okay to have anonymous opt-out if they know what is happening, otherwise I don't think it's appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The tricky part is that what some users think of as a must-have trivial- feature, others won't care about at all. Thus getting every trivial-feature for every user becomes a herculean task. (The standard "each user only needs 10% of a program's features... but they all need a /different/ 10%".)

For instance: I don't care about seeing my current cursor coordinates when using an image editor. I probably have some other must-have tiny feature that the author here wouldn't even notice.

<comment><USER11> The author was looking for a vector illustration app, not a photo editor. Vector graphics apps are often used to create diagrams and other semi- technical drawings that require some CAD-like features, the simplest of which is a usable coordinate system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think something gets lost when we call this kind of shortcoming a missing feature... A missing feature is too easy to dismiss since we can mention all these scary words like "paralytic featur-itis." The fix here involves no new dialogs, no additional learning curve, nothing fancy whatsoever. It's just a case of absent-minded application design, and the point stands that it makes a tremendous difference in the end product.

<comment><USER13> Another possibility is that the developers implemented it and the UI designers/tech writers insisted that it be eliminated because it would "confuse the users".

<comment><USER14> It sounds like somebody could complain equally about it working the other way. I don't think this guy's opinion is really a valid metric here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is why we should be using small, focused, interoperable modules instead of large monolithic frameworks and applications that try to do everything.

A plugin architecture format shared by applications would be invaluable and solve this problem.

<comment><USER16> Folks have been musing along these lines for decades. There have been a few attempts. To date, they've almost all failed. The problem domain here is a __lot __more complex than anything we'd normally call a "plugin architecture". IMO, the problem is that this sort of interoperability pretty much requires the power of a full-on programming environment. If it's even possible, I think it also requires an architectural organization that no one's yet divined.

The notable successes tend to be domain-specific and manifest as end-user programming environments. The spreadsheet might be considered a weak example of this. It has a clear user model that allows for powerful extensibility, but doesn't really facilitate "interoperability" in any meaningful way -- each spreadsheet tends to be a one-off.

The Max/MSP (and Pure Data/Pd) environments for audio/visual signal and event processing are perhaps more successful in that they allow the simultaneous construction of UI and logic in a visual programming environment. A program (aka "patch") can be built as a reusable sub-program that manifests the same kind of interface as the primitive (native-code) modules. But again, this is another narrow domain application with a specific visual-semantic model which works well for that domain. That contrasts to the OP's problem of adding arbitrary UI to a software whose main domain has nothing inherently to do with either the added UI or even to programming.

I'd also say that the venerable programmable programmer's editors, Emacs and Vim, form another category of end-user programming environment with loose interoperable modules. These are certainly subject to a fairly high degree of extensibility within their domains. But these are saddled by frustrating UI constraints and architectural models inherited from their now ancient origins. Interoperability between "modules", such as it is, is largely ad-hoc and far from guaranteed.

Each of these successes can teach us something about what works for these kind of programmable-framework environments. But to achieve The One Architecture To Rule Them All goes beyond simply having the tools of design, architecture, language, and environment. It must also become a computing platform, where by "platform" I mean an ecosystem that's large enough to have the _social_ synergies that make the above examples and other conventional software platforms successful.

<comment><USER17> > To date, they've almost all failed.

Eclipse is an example of an immensely successful plug-in architecture-based software.

It's amazing how well plug-in ecosystem in Eclipse operates. For instance, I could install the PyDev plug-in and have an intelligent Python editor -- but at the same time the EGit plug-in provides seamless git integration that works with any language!

How all these plug-ins come together and play nice with each other to create a cohesive and powerful IDE is impressive!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra That's why you need settings in your tools.

The tool should work efficiently without you ever looking at the settings, but if you need it you should be able to change anything you like.

Not sure it applies to consumer interfaces. Ideally it shouldn't. But for tools that you use to do day-to-day work, absolutely.

<comment><USER18> Settings are for microwaves. Computer-based tools should be reprogrammable. Still, the tool should be easy to configure for the 80% case.

<comment><USER19> Settings on a microwave are, I think, a terrible example. Most microwaves I've used are horribly over-encumbered.

I expect two dials on any microwave I use: Time, Power. Maybe a control to set the time, if it has a clock.

I don't disagree with your general point about tools being able to be reprogrammed, though. One of the reasons I loved Autocad as a tool is the Lisp interpreter that allows you to script and extend it. I think that's a perfect example of a professional, mainstream tool with a good API that non- programmers find useful (if only to run scripts they find).

<comment><USER20> Autocad has a very interesting GUI concept, not in that it's programmable (VBA existed in CorelDraw for years), in its dialogue mode: you click a circle, and it asks you of a center; you either click or type coordinates. Sadly, this mode is rare in non-CAD systems.

<comment><USER21> Solidworks used to work like that too, it's a delight to just start a line and keep on typing distance deltas in numbers and see stuff emerging without a single mouse movement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is why I love Emacs--if there's a trivial feature missing, adding it myself is almost always _easier_ than even thinking about installing something else. 90% of the time, somebody else has a code snippet on StackOverflow or Emacs Wiki. 9% of the time, I can code it up myself with essentially no hassle --Emacs is self-documenting and makes developing Emacs _in_ Emacs a pleasure. The remaining 1% of problems I usually just ignore: no program is going to be perfect, and Emacs is already more than close enough.

</comment><comment><USER23> What boggles my mind is when obvious usability problems persist over multiple versions of an application.

(A quick example: Apple's spreadsheet app Numbers has a behavior where the handle for moving a chart around on the workspace disappears if the chart is moved all the way to the left. It kind of docks the window, requiring an annoying work around to free it. There's no way anyone who uses it would not encounter this, but it's been that way for many years)

The problem space of user facing features is overall quite complex. A developer can neither understand the beginning user's experience, nor the heavy user (they usually don't have the time to use their own application as a worker would, IDEs being an exception.)

Just blindly adding features because a user requested isn't a solution for obvious reasons. I think a combination of user feedback, usability testing, quantitative analysis, along with creative problem solving by developers and product people is needed. Not to mention the nitpicky reality of there being an actual business case need for the feature.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's very simple. In any environment, the person who asks, "Why would a user want to do that?" is the one who should be fired first.

<comment><USER25> I disagree. Understanding how users use your software and what they are trying to accomplish with it is important, and it is not always obvious _why_ a user is asking for a particular feature without asking. Furthermore, when you learn what the user is trying to accomplish with the feature they are asking for you may realize that there is a better way of providing that functionality rather than the specific approach the user requested.

<comment><USER26> I think the two of you are mostly in agreement. I believe mikecane is talking about someone that believes their mental model of users' needs, desires, and expectations is complete, and is using the question as a way to shut down a feature, with the implication being "if the reason someone might want X is not immediately obvious to me, it must not exist."

I don't think he was talking about someone that acknowledges that their understanding of users is incomplete and wants to learn more.

<comment><USER24> Yes. As an example, Jobs putting actual typefaces into the original Mac. Anyone used to the existing computing paradigm back then would have asked, "Why would a user want that?" Another infamous example is the marketeers at CompuServe thinking the CB Simulator was a bad idea -- and today we have something like it, called Twitter.

<comment><USER27> Why is Twitter a good idea? It's clearly an idea that's achieved traction with a userbase, but what is it about Twitter that makes it a "good" idea?

<comment><USER24> People like to chat with other people in real time. CompuServe's CB Simulator was a huge money draw for them (back then you paid per minute of connect- time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd argue this is why many open source project who's target audience is not developers are not nearly as good as their commercial counterparts.

When the software is made for artists there's a very different dynamic at work then when a a similar piece of software is created by engineers just to scratch an itch .

</comment><comment><USER29> This is how I feel every single time I happen to use GIMP while working on rails in fedora, and don't want to reboot into windows and fire up photoshop just to change a transparency. I wonder why open source has often to be synonymy of poor GUI ergonomy.

<comment><USER30> I think its a combination of things.

For starters, its built on a volunteer basis, so there is no monetary reward for making it easier to use.

Also, some of the developers are probably actually unaware of the main concepts in UX design and even don't want the software to be user friendly because to them that is synonymous with 'dumbing-down' the system for beginners.

><http://developer.gimp.org/gimpcon/2006/index.html>

GIMP targets experienced users. If we acknowledge that GIMP is not (primarily) for beginners, we cut off a lot of problems such as "do we need to support that," etc. Peter noted that a "GIMP Light" would not just have some options cut off from the menus: it would have a completely different user interface, even if it would use the same code under the hood.

Some developers work on GIMP to promote the Free Software movement and would probably not contribute if GIMP was not free. Others think that GIMP should provide fun for its developers, although our user base has grown a bit large for just doing fun experiments. We have to acknowledge that we address a user base that may be more experienced in image manipulation than we are, so the developers are partially out of the target group.

Before converging towards a definition of the GIMP target groups and GIMP vision, there were several discussions involving examples and use cases, whether GIMP should be the best image manipulation program in the universe (best for who?), whether those working on icons and those working on photos have the same needs (number of images open, relative sizes), whether people need to switch frequently between GIMP and other applications (browser or editor for web work), whether we will support painting with shapes and natural media, etc.

Eventually, a GIMP vision emerged...

What GIMP is:

GIMP is Free Software

GIMP is a high-end photo manipulation application, and supports creating original art from images;

GIMP is a high-end application for producing icons, graphical elements of web pages, and art for user interface elements;

GIMP is a platform for programming cutting edge image processing algorithms, by scientists and artists;

GIMP is user-configurable to automate repetitive tasks;

GIMP is easily user-extendable, by easy installation of plug-ins.

What GIMP is not:

GIMP is not MS Paint or Adobe Photoshop

TODO

Make it easier to perform repetitive tasks (macro recording)

Provide a UI with a low barrier to entry

GIMP should be easily extensible by the average user: one click-installation of plug-ins

Well, "a UI with a low barrier to entry" was on that TODO list at least. If they had hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around, probably someone would have been hired to focus on that one. But they have zero dollars and its not a big enough priority for most of the developers to motivate the type of changes required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What if for every person that agrees with the author, there are 2 people that will immediately dismiss the product if it _does_ show this extra information in the status bar? I'm not saying that is likely, but it's certainly conceivable. What _is_ likely is that more users will be discouraged or overwhelmed as the number of onscreen data and configurable settings increases.

</comment><comment><USER32> Chances are OP downloaded an open source svg program. I'd have to guess inkscape. At this point, the right move would have been to either post a feature request on launchpad or implement the functionality yourself.

If you don't want to get your hands dirty, pay for illustrator.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think this is where customer testing comes in. Watch 10 or 100 customers try to use you product, and observe the features they "reach for" but are not there - and the ones that are there, but they never use.

</comment><comment><USER34> Your understanding of the domain changes considerably as you implement an application in that domain, reducing your ability to approach the domain as a beginner.</comment>


The Honor System (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a15810/teller-magician-interview-1012/ <comment><USER2> Magic happens in the minds of the audience and the method is the least interesting part. Shin Lin sells a video where he explains how to do his most famous act and some of the methods are so crude that I think many people would be surprised they hadn't figured it out and some of them might feel cheated.

But it's hands down the most beautiful card magic act I've ever seen. The real magic is in how he tells a story wordlessly, syncing it with music like a dance. You aren't spending time trying to unravel how it happened because you're so enchanted by the story.

Teller's best tricks are the same way, and the fact that they often tell you more or less how the trick is done without ruining it confirms how unimportant the method is to the performance.

All of which is to say that I think teller was right to sue and I'm glad he won.

These days, finding out how to do 90% of the most popular magic tricks is a google search away, but it's still very hard to perform magic well.

<comment><USER3> Penn and Teller usually tell how a trick is done and then (or simultaneously) do it _differently_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Teller won the lawsuit in 2014: [https://www.courthousenews.com/teller- gets-545000-in-magic-f...](https://www.courthousenews.com/teller- gets-545000-in-magic-fight/)

<comment><USER5> > _U.S. District Judge James_ […] _Mahan found Dogge to be "exceptionally > difficult and unresponsive, necessitating numerous motions and responses" to > force his cooperation._

Yeah, don't annoy the judge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> After reading the article and searching for Gerard Bakardy on Google, I found his version of the story: [http://www.myfreedomofspeech.be/site2014/Welcome.html](http://www.myfreedomofspeech.be/site2014/Welcome.html) (note: the website is mostly made of images of text, so it may not display well on a small screen).

<comment><USER7> Well, their accounts don't seem to match up. However, Teller doesn't appear to have a very litigious history. Bakardy also says Teller was suing because he didn't like that Bakardy's trick was better, which does not at all seem to be the reason for the lawsuit.

The Bakardy version of the story has a strong veneer of fudging & tilting the facts, which is rather off putting to me, though I concede that doesn't mean his account is not accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The linked article appears to posit that Gerard Bakardy might be an invention of Teller's? That's a pretty extraordinary claim. Has anything since borne it out?

<comment><USER3> Dogge/Bakardy lost the suit. Suing a fake person is very much not Teller's style, who has nothing to gain from such a boring stunt.</comment></comment>


Only Race Cars Should Burnout - <AUTHOR> https://brettshavers.com/brett-s-blog/entry/only-race-cars-should-burnout <comment><USER2> > * Your job didn't miss you before you got there. It won't miss you when you > leave. Do your bit and then go home.

This is very true and, in my experience, when everybody is doing this, it is a symptom of a healthy company.

<comment><AUTHOR> true dat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Rawr!

Also, one person working crazy hours will not magically save the day on a project. Even if it does, the exec/product owner/whatever is going to get the bonus.</comment>


The Hercules System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture Emulator - <AUTHOR> http://www.hercules-390.eu/ <comment><USER2> Now there's a blast from the past! I'm the "13-year-old 8th grade son" in the testimonials!

Hercules is pretty neat, and, for a very portable pure emulator, is reasonably quick as well. I definitely recommend giving MVS 3.8j a spin since it's readily (and legally) available.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mainframer here. Hercules is a pretty amazing piece of software. (Fun fact: One of the main developers, Jay Maynard [1], is also known as the "Tron guy") Unfortunately, Hercules is as close as the average person can get to the platform without working for a corporation that runs z/OS (the modern successor to MVS) or Linux for System z (s390x Linux running on mainframe hardware) in their shop.

The platform has a big image problem. I personally blame IBM for not maintaining relationships with their education customers in the early 80s. The high cost of the hardware drove universities to adopt the new and exciting (ie cheaper) distributed platforms, and thus breeding a generation of distributed- minded graduates never even hearing about the mainframe platform except in history books. I know, because I was one of them.

Now the industry is now facing an exodous of their mainframe experts as most near retirment. The average age is something like 55-60, ready to retire [2]. There just isn't any young, talented mainframers being educated. IBM has realized this, and they've started the "IBM Academic Initative" to partner with schools and incorporate mainframe into their curriculum. It's a start, but the damage is done.

The technology, however, is top notch. The closed-source software/hardware model provides a lot of performance gains over the open source model. z/OS is updated every year and IBM releases new, faster hardware every year. And it's not always more expensive. An EC10 can consolidate several racks of Linux blades into its zVM hypervisor (btw IBM has been doing virtualization for 30+ years) while processing 145,000 credit card transactions per second into a single refrigerator-size machine 24x7x365.

If you are looking for a new career, consider mainframe [3]. It's the backbone of financial, retail and data processing industries. It may not be as glamorous, but it's not going anywhere. And when all that old mainframe talent retires, you can write your own check.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Maynard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Maynard) [2]: [http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2010-08-03/big-tech- prob...](http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2010-08-03/big-tech-problem-as- mainframes-outlast-workforcebusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and- financial-advice) [3]: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2012/01/30/kids- see-a-f...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2012/01/30/kids-see-a-future- in-mainframes/?view=pc)

<comment><USER4> Getting into mainframes is damn near impossible without fluking into an apprenticeship, is the problem.

Taking the IBM courses to fully qualify as a dinosaur herder costs as much as a computer science degree.

The other problem: kids aren't dreaming of maintaining 360 assembler, COBOL or PL/I applications.

<comment><USER5> The IBM System z Remote Development Programs (zRDP) [1] costs a little less than $600 per month, and gives you access to a system sufficiently robust for learning. I don't know how it would work to have multiple IDs for multiple people on the same subscription. But if you can trust everyone in a group of 10-20, and work out a shared access schedule, then it can be quite affordable. You might need to come up with some development project as a stated reason to join, but that is easy enough.

[1] [http://dtsc.dfw.ibm.com/MVSDS/%27HTTPD2.ENROL.PUBLIC.SHTML%2...](http://dtsc.dfw.ibm.com/MVSDS/%27HTTPD2.ENROL.PUBLIC.SHTML%28ZOSRDP%29%27)

<comment><USER6> It sounds like if IBM were serious about getting people skilled up on their platform you'd be able to get access to a system for a bit less than $600/month. $0/month sounds about what they should be shooting for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow. The tron guy. That's a blast from the past. It takes guts to see your dream through like that.

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

</comment><comment><USER8> If you can find it, this will also apparently run versions of Z/OS, although the licensing model for Z/OS doesn't permit it.

<comment><USER9> z/VM, z/Linux (bare metal or under VM), z/VSE, z/OS, and I believe z/TPF. That's the newest stuff. It will also emulate 360's. I think the first thing I ever ran on Hercules was OS/360 MFT! Anyone can legally run VM/370 and MVS 3.8(?) and anything older. Oh ya, MTS, Music/SP, etc. too.</comment></comment>


This is not a spiral - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/04/this_is_not_a_spiral.html

<comment><USER2> This is a Fraser spiral - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraser_spiral_illusion>

Here's another great spiral-based visual system hack - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JVJsPpg1-8>

<comment><USER3> My head just exploded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder why it biases in one direction? I could see this working like one of those 2-in-1 images or the rotating ballerina, where the picture you see, or the direction she's rotating changes depending on how you look at it, but I couldn't make the spirals go a different direction.

Our visual systems are an amazing thing.

<comment><USER5> My guess is that the bias is caused by the black shapes. You can see that each black shape is closer to its bigger "parent" on the left on the next row out than it is to its bigger parent on its right. Also the connection to the parent on the left is through dark blue, and the connection to the parent on the right is through light blue. That's enough to give a bias.</comment></comment>


Can Schools teach you to be an Entrepreneur? - <AUTHOR> http://entrepreneurshipforum.org/can-schools-teach-you-to-be-an-entrepreneur/

<comment><AUTHOR> As a lot of people say, its either sink or swim. School goes back to a lot of theory and everyone loves talking about their startup, we need more action.

<comment><USER2> Well, talking sells.

Every day I hear about some engineer that built an "amazing" product only to find out no one actually wanted it.

One strategy could be to talk as though you were already past the MVP stage, and use your social sphere to validate your ideas.</comment></comment>


Workplace Equality Is Good for Business - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304527504579172302377638002-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwMjEwNDIyWj <comment><USER2> I for one like the idea of people being able to hire whomever they like for whatever reasons they like.

Let the bigots expose themselves and be punished or not.

<comment><USER3> Are you arguing that all currently protected classes (e.g. race, religion, sex) should be abolished? That would to me be a logically coherent and non- bigoted (well, sort of, at least if the belief that the market can solve this problem and the belief that it is a problem is behind it) view of current policy. One I disagree with, but also one I can respect.

However, that's not typically what the argument is about. Those who are opposed to this are often not opposed to other (either some or all) protected classes. That, to me, seems like an untenable view. You cannot have religion and sex as a protected class but not sexual orientation.

If I look at the protected classes I see one very obvious and big gap and that's sexual orientation. It's unquestionably incredibly bad policy to selectively exclude that (that is, if you are not a bigot).

<comment><USER2> >Are you arguing that all currently protected classes (e.g. race, religion, sex) should be abolished?

Yes.

Realize that it's a reactionary position to take, but it just seems right. If someone wants to run their business with bigotry, so be it. I won't respect them, but I'd respect their "right" to do so.

I realize that there counter argument is that I've never lived in a time in which such regulation was needed, I never experienced Jim Crow, etc - and of course today Jim Crow still exists, in a way, for homosexuals.

But it just seems like another case of "two wrongs make a right." Forcing others to adhere to our own moral preferences seems fundamentally and deeply flawed. There must be another way.

<comment><USER4> > _Forcing others to adhere to our own moral preferences seems fundamentally > and deeply flawed._

I bet you're fine forcing others to adhere to your own moral preferences re: burglary, assault, rape, and murder.

<comment><USER5> That a slippery slope can be drawn, doesn't mean it actually exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If it's so good for business why does he think we need a legal structure to punish companies that just hire whoever they want?

<comment><USER7> Do you think that discrimination against blacks and women was good for business? I submit that it was not, but companies did it anyway, because they were not rational. I'm not sure we should expect them to be now.

I also submit that if you think discriminating against blacks and women _was_ good for business (a defensible claim), then you probably ought to be disagreeing with Tim Cook about whether sexual-orientation-based discrimination is good for businesses [1]. In my view, that would make the case for anti-discrimination legislation stronger, not weaker, because if both prevailing biases and good business sense favors discrimination, then we _really_ need to act.[2]

[1] Perhaps you could believe the former but not the latter. They seem pretty parallel to me though, so I'd be curious what you thought the differences were.

[2] You could disagree with this too and simply be a lassez-faire fundamentalist, but that would render your original question kind of pointless.

<comment><USER6> All I'm saying is his logic isn't, well, logical. On the one hand he says Apple's policy has been great for business, which would imply other companies should be adopting these kinds of policies without any kind of prodding from the government.

And yet he supports a law to force everyone to adopt those policies. It's like he doesn't actually believe "workplace equality" is good for business and would like to use the government to level the playing field he tilted against himself. If he _really_ believed the policy was good for the bottom line, from a financial perspective he'd be overjoyed to compete against companies that don't have a similar policy.

<comment><USER7> Let's assume that a) he thinks companies will continue to be systematically discriminatory _despite_ their best interests and b) he cares less about the competitive advantages of Apple and more about the overall health of the economy. He could care about that personally or on behalf of Apple, which also benefits from a larger, faster-growing economy in which to sell its goods. Does that help?

<comment><USER6> People on the left can't seem to make up their minds about corporations. On the one hand corporations are amoral profit machines, completely without qualm or consideration for the human element. On the other, they don't care about profit. It just does't work for me as a logical framework.

The most likely explanation here, IMO, is Apple's policy actually hurts the bottom line a tiny bit, but the PR value outweighs the problems. But note if this is the case the law he's pushing will be a net (small) negative for other companies.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't work because its a straw man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "We've found that when people feel valued for who they are, they have the comfort and confidence to create a monstrosity like iTunes."

</comment><comment><USER10> Tim's argument is really more from the perspective of human rights than economic justification. The link to economic activity is only that, "we undermine people's potential and deny ourselves and our society the full benefits of those individuals' talents." The cost of this is distributed and small (to the company), and therefore he is not making the argument that companies that do not discriminate will out-compete companies that do. He is making the more subtle argument that increased human flourishing and creativity that result from antidiscrimination laws are good for business. The title is misleading and the argument is muddled - advocates of Tim's position would do well to avoid this line of argumentation and make the stronger point:

Antidiscrimination laws advance human flourishing and cause our society to be more just. Therefore they are worth having.

</comment><comment><USER11> Tim Cook's point carries over to customers as well. For me, knowing a company is taking a progressive stance on human and civil rights goes a long way towards how I view them.

<comment><USER12> I think you've summed up the goal of this PR piece.

<comment><USER13> Yes, easiliy confirmed. This is the NYT headline.

 _Senate Vote on Workplace Bias Against Gays a Test for G.O.P._

<comment><USER14> While it would be a safe stance for Starbucks to publicly take, it is less so for Apple which has a much more diverse customer base. It would be better for Apple's business to not take a position in these issues.

<comment><USER15> Really? To which company are the bigots going to turn?

<comment><USER2> I hear KKK is coming out with their own Linux distro and Android fork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good for Cook. With this piece he is taking a step towards synchronizing his public/personal. Not easy to do. But good he's making steps in that direction.

Yeah, he's "out" but he's not really "out."

Good for him for taking a step.

</comment><comment><USER17> I through this one is a no-brainer.

</comment><comment><USER18> As a conservative who hides his political beliefs in the tech sector, while my coworkers freely swap progressive political articles over the company's email lists, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Cook.

If the government prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of religion, then why not also political beliefs? There is little difference between the two.

<comment><USER19> Have you experienced discrimination, or just the fear of social ostracism?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Create Your Own Obama Hope Poster - <AUTHOR> http://figma.io/imwithobama/#welcome

<comment><USER2> Absolutely amazing foreground/background selector.

As for the app itself, I'd love it if in the photo selection page it allowed for uploading the photo (I was expecting it to show profile pics but didn't, so I uploaded a photo instead).

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it!!!

You can drag and drop a picture on any page, but that's not stated explicitly anywhere yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The process of picking out background/foreground is fantastic. Easier than with Photoshop, even.

</comment><comment><USER4> Really slick tech and a great way to share a meme.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow this is really elegant. Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER6> Good stuff!</comment>


GNOME to release official "classic mode" extensions - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=685744#c6

<comment><USER2> As much as people enjoy ragging on GNOME 3, I think the developers have been doing a great job, and that this is a smart move that will allow them to move forward while satisfying those that prefer the current fallback mode.

I am a huge fan of their extension mechanism, and use a bunch of them. It seems like the mechanism is extremely flexible, as people use it for things from creating quasi-tiling window managers (see shellshape or gtile) to customizing the search dialog (like Unity's lenses) to just adding various buttons in different parts of the UI. All in all, I am a huge fan of GNOME 3, but I really do wish the extension mechanism were a bit more well- documented...

<comment><USER3> The current problem with extensions is they break with each Gnome release. This forces a lot of user work with each upgrade wasting a lot of time (eg having to wait for author to update, picking a different extension for the same functionality, doing without).

It would also be beneficial if there were an official set of well maintained extensions - ones that if you use them you know you will be fine through upgrades etc. This also solves the problem of there being so many extensions (you get 3 pages of search results for system monitor - how is any user reasonably expected to deal with that?)

The area where Gnome shell is seriously lacking is for people who have multiple monitors, and/or have many windows of the same app open. So far a panel/taskbar has turned out to be the least worst UI way of handling this. That is why I use fallback mode.

<comment><USER2> Just to be clear, I certainly wasn't criticising those who use fallback mode, or trying to imply "they" (you) were all just whining for no reason.

I think they still have a lot of work to do. When I upgraded from 3.4 to 3.6, I was pretty annoyed because out of the eight or so extensions that I used, _all but one_ stopped working. Luckily, the extensions that I used were all upgraded within several weeks, but it's still a major issue.

I think it's pretty clear from the extensions site that this is still a work in progress. That's part of the reason I really like this announcement, though - exactly as you've said, it looks like they're going down the path of "official set of well-maintained extensions", which I think is the right choice.

I guess that GNOME 3 isn't entirely ready for everyone yet, but the future that I see for it is pretty awesome. For me, personally, it already far surpasses GNOME 2, and I think it still has a lot of potential that it hasn't utilized.

(I can't really comment on multiple monitor setups, though. I just have a laptop.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. It's neat that the top layer is written in JS and is malleable -- Cinnamon ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_%28user_interface%29> ) is an interesting project too (uses the GNOME3 platform, but implements a new UI which looks more like GNOME2 in JS).

<comment><USER5> I've been using Cinnamon after getting frustrated with Gnome Shell, it works quite well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could be the best news in the Linux desktop wars I've heard this year

</comment><comment><USER7> After many attempts to use the Unity desktop, I decided that I just didn't like it (some do, and I'm fine with that as well). What it has done is to make me aware of the fine work that the Xubuntu team has done.

<http://xubuntu.org/>

<comment><USER8> Did you mean to say GNOME desktop, instead of Unity?

<comment><USER7> No, I meant Unity. I did try the GNOME 3 desktop on Fedora as well, and liked it less than Unity. I was a GNOME desktop user until I switched to Xubuntu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hate gnome 3. I had to spend a day installing extensions and tweak tools just to make it usable.

Note To UI People: Tablet interfaces DO NOT MAKE SENSE FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT TABLETS.

<comment><USER10> What's your definition of a tablet interface?

<comment><USER6> touch centric design for people using a keyboard and mouse?

<comment><USER11> So, with the right extensions I believe gnome 3 is actually /more/ usable with the keyboard. Specifically

<https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/10/windownavigator/>

and

[https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/302/windowoverlay- ico...](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/302/windowoverlay-icons/)

combined with just having to type in the program name on the overview pane to open it. That functionality works much better than it did in gnome 2.

The most annoying thing I've found is the multiple monitor support; apparently one of the developers wants the second screen to always have the same windows when switching workspaces and I want the workspaces to switch on all monitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just replace the window manager. If that can't be done, GNOME is not for me anymore.

<comment><USER13> As far as I know, the GNOME 3 "experience" relies heavily on the Mutter window manager and so it can't be easily replaced. Maybe someone else can chime in to confirm one way or the other though.

<comment><USER10> In fact, gnome-shell _is_ the window manager binary by linking to libmutter. Running gnome-shell with another window manager is as feasible as running twm with fvwm (i.e. not feasible).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's called Cinnamon.</comment>


Implantable NFC platform for identity, security, cryptography, and payments - <AUTHOR> http://vivokey.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have an NFC implant from Dangerous Things[1], and I randomly opened their site to show a friend and suddenly I saw this.

Amal (Dangerous Things founder), if you're reading this. I'm a willing a beta tester. Am I the only one freaking out about this?

The site has logos for:

OTP

PGP

Pivkey

Fido U2F

Ledger (bitcoin wallet)

Telcred

and misc. transit ticketing systems.

[1]: [https://dangerousthings.com/](https://dangerousthings.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: Best technical resource for AdTech? - <AUTHOR> Any recommendations on actual technical descriptions of how ad networks/placement algorithms work?
Most stuff I'm finding on Google is very surface level and seems geared more towards marketing people.
I'm looking to understand the general approach/architecture/algorithms that go into targeted advertising specifically.
For example if I have a whole bunch of inputs how do I decide which ad to show to a user.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I specialize in AdTech, mostly building bidding algorithms for emerging clients after years of managing AdTech at larger companies. It's mostly secret sauce, no one really publishes that stuff. It would be bad PR and you don't want the competition to know what you are doing.</comment>


Nobody ever got fired for buying a cluster - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=179615 <comment><USER2> > a single "big memory" (192 GB) server we are using has the performance > capability of approximately 14 standard (12 GB) servers.

That's 168 GB RAM total, within a single upgrade unit of their 192 GB single server, suggesting the problem is dominated by RAM.

If I had $6638 + 2640 = $9278 to spend on computing hardware from NewEgg, how about:

        1 at $1000 of HP ProLiant DL360e Gen8 Rack Server System Intel Xeon E5-2403 1.8GHz 4C/4T 4GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107943 http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-241475-5249570.html?dnr=1 (12 DIMM slots)
        4 at $70 of Kingston 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR3 1333 Server Memory Model KVR13LR9S4/8 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820239540
        1 at $54 of Seagate Barracuda ST250DM000 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148765
        $1334 ea server, 7 servers = $9338

So we could get 7 of these low-end name-brand 16 GB servers for the same money to give us 224 GB RAM.

> MR++ runs on 27 servers whereas the standalone configurations are a single > server running a single-threaded implementation

Sure, nothing will beat a single system at message-passing algorithms when the entire graph fits in main memory. But when the dataset outgrows that (and it will), we can triple the RAM in the empty slots, or add more servers in units of $1334 instead of having to rewrite your whole analysis.

<comment><USER3> A bit unfair, esp. when Microsoft budgeted $2000+ on SSDs alone.

I think the paper has a good point: scale-up should be definitely considered. I see systems that support 1.5 _TB_ of RAM now... do you really expect your dataset to grow beyond that?

And as long as the dataset fits within 1.5 TB of RAM, scale up will be more scalable than scale out.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, ignore my numbers and I agree that scale-up should be considered and it's worthwhile to read a paper where somebody reality-checks the conventional wisdom.

> I see systems that support 1.5 TB of RAM now... do you really expect your > dataset to grow beyond that?

According to Figure 1, about 20% of their jobs are already beyond that. If you spend your entire hardware budget on a single server and all your analytic processing jobs end up being coded with the (gasp) single threaded assumption, what are you going to do next?

Most of us have been there before because it's where you end up by accident ("Do you think if we max out the RAM on the database server it will return to acceptable performance?") This is _why_ people love parallel map-reduce based systems.

<comment><USER3> Certainly, I don't mean to contradict the conventional wisdom :-p. Scaling out with ~$1500 2U servers makes sense a lot of the times.

I'm more concerned about another problem. There are people out there who think that they can scale out with Hadoop cluster built on top of Atoms (or more recently... ARMs). And while yes... there are some applications where that is a decent scaling strategy, I doubt it works in most cases.

But yeah, I know that wasn't your argument. I'm just musing a bit on random stuff.

<comment><USER2> I admit to being ARM/Atom M/R curious. Sometimes I wonder about Hadoop for a few seconds until I remember it's heavily JVM-based. Poking around on the web you find folks who sound serious about porting it to Android.

<comment><USER3> Curious is good. Things definitely move quickly in the tech industry, and I'm willing to bet that within 5 years things can change. And I'd support building up the skills / infrastructure needed to hedge against the uprising of ARM.

But at the moment, the evidence is solidly in favor of the typical 2U Xeon. (by nature of ARM servers barely exist right now. Maybe next year ARM will have something ready)

Atom looks mostly dead however, with Intel beginning to advertize 16W Xeons. Can two 8W Centrino Atoms compete against a 16W Xeon? I doubt it. Intel only has the resources to choose one "hero" chipset in server-space, and it looks like it will be the Xeon again.

<comment><USER2> Someday somebody is going to realize they are in possession of a trash barge full of 5 million discarded smartphones and break into the top supercomputer list with them.

<comment><USER4> That idea is a non-starter. Consider the cost of transportation, the cost of connecting all those ridiculously slow CPUs and incompatible CPUs together, powering them, programming for them. Building a supercomputer using standard x86_64 CPUs will probably be cheaper.

<comment><USER2> Here's an example: [http://www.androidauthority.com/samsung- galaxy-s3-sales-20-m...](http://www.androidauthority.com/samsung- galaxy-s3-sales-20-million-112790/) Within a few years there will be 20 million Samsung Galaxy S III's with dead batteries and/or cracked screens. That's a dual-core 1 GHz ARM with 1 GB of RAM, 8 GB of SSD, _and_ a hardware GPU.

Right now, there are professional 1st-world developers developing apps for all those "incompatible CPUs". So it's possible and even cost effective under the right circumstances.

Yet someone is currently being _paid to haul away_ this stuff as electronic recycling.

<comment><USER3> A great example of why Xeons are superior. :-)

Snapdragon S4 completes the Linpack benchmark with 460 MegaFlops: [http://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-s4-pro-vs- exynos-...](http://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-s4-pro-vs- exynos-4412-benchmarks-127274/). Snapdragon is rumored to use ~3 to 5 Watts of power.

Consider a Xeon E5-2690: which gets you 347,000 MegaFlops of performance in 135 Watts. [http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeo...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeon-e5-hpc/xeon-e5-hpc- matrix-multiplication.html)

Xeon just blows the ARM chip out of the water in Performance per Watt used. A modern day Xeon gives you somewhere on the order of 20x more performance per watt compared to a Snapdragon S4 Pro. Otherwise, all the electricity that it takes to run your supercomputer built out of crap chips will make your supercomputer more costly to run in the long term.

<comment><USER2> Does Linpack even touch the memory bus?

<comment><USER3> I don't know, but the Snapdragon has 1MB of Cache, while the Xeon has 20MB of Cache. Furthermore, the Xeon actually has a multi-socket connector... so two Xeons can talk to each other at a rate of 25.6 GB/s through QPI (QuickPath Interconnect).

So my bet on memory is that Xeon wins that too.

On the multi-processor communications issue... I doubt that the Snapdragon would have PCIe connections... let alone a high-bandwidth low-latency connection like the Xeon's QPI.

There's a reason why supercomputers stick with Intel or AMD. They've got the processor power, the performance per watts, and I/O girth to communicate to other processors. A small embedded chip (like Snapdragon), just doesn't have the features to make a supercomputer out of.

<comment><USER2> OK, I'm sold.

<comment><USER3> ARM does have promise though, its just not in Snapdragons. As noted, the primary issue in Supercomputers is bandwidth (so that the processors can talk to each other).

Calxeda for example has spent a lot of time trying to solve this interconnect issue. Each Calxeda card is composed of 4 CPUs. Every CPU has 8 10Gb (aka: 1GB) ethernet links, 2 8xPCI connections and more.

Its a relatively young project, but they're moving towards the right direction. There are rumors that Facebook is deploying a Calxeda server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Off-topic, but since younger HNers may not know what the title is riffing on, [https://www.google.com/search?q=nobody%20got%20fired%20for%2...](https://www.google.com/search?q=nobody%20got%20fired%20for%20buying%20ibm)

<comment><USER6> That one sentence sums up about a decade of professional contention. And I mean specifically relating to IBM software and hardware.

I should have left that job sooner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice try, but a few thoughts from someone who now spends a lot of time in Hadoop/MapReduce. I will admit it took me a while to warm up to the whole concept, but I'm now so familiar with it that I'm not able to think of compute before Hadoop.

I'm able to fire off pretty intensive MapReduce jobs on an Amazon Elastic MapReduce cluster with many nodes for a fraction of the price mentioned in the post (less than $100).

While I can imagine I could repurpose all my MapReduce/Hadoop code to run on a single box - especially since Amazon does offer several high-memory instances today - I would be loathe to.

The MapReduce framework provides a really nice framework that lets me horizontally scale out compute, rather than vertically, and that is really handy at terabyte-data volumes (data warehousing and large-data analytics.)

<comment><USER8> MapReduce is handy at terabyte-data volumes, but how often do we run jobs with input size > 1 TB? According to the paper:

 _at least two analytics production clusters (at Microsoft and Yahoo) have median job input sizes under 14 GB, and 90% of jobs on a Facebook cluster have input sizes under 100 GB_

The other point the authors make is that DRAM costs are following Moore's law and terabyte-data workloads should "soon" be cost-feasible on single servers with DRAM.

<comment><USER9> The thing is that MapReduce is still a very good programming paradigm for a single box.

Machines have 8-64 cores these days -- you don't want to write multi-threaded code every time you want to do an analysis. So you can write MapReduce, but use a multicore framework instead of a cluster framework (hadoop).

The unfortunate thing is that there is no popular open source implementation of a multicore mapreduce, so people use Hadoop, which is wasteful on small data sets, as mentioned.

But the great part about it is that you will use the same application code for both. I fully expect in 5 years or so that people will be running multicore mapreduce jobs on 100 or 1000 core boxes.

<comment><USER10> There is Disco[1], which is a MR framework written in Python and Erlang. It's open source and pretty awesome, and if I'm not mistaken it will leverage multi-core processors, no need for a cluster.

[1] <http://discoproject.org/about>

<comment><USER2> Speaking of Erlang, I've got my eye on Riak pipes. Now that the Basho folks have a large object store, I wonder if more in that department is a natural path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> totally offtopic typographic comment - anyone else seeing the alt-font fi ligature in the title? It's quasi-bolded on my machined (Safari, OS X), so it sticks out like a sore thumb.

<comment><USER12> Yes. Chrome 27, OS X. I spent a couple of seconds wondering if it was some typographical quirk inserted on purpose by someone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> "At 100 GB, scale-up still provides the best performance/$, but the 16-node cluster is close at 88% of the performance/$ of scale-up."

If these message-passing graph algorithms are representative of a "bad fit" to the parallel map-reduce model, I'd say a 12% penalty is not a bad price to pay _at all_ in return for all the benefits of the parallel cluster in other cases.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've done a handful of big-memory workloads on the JVM, and I have never seen it not choke on Allocation/GC for anything above 300gb of memory. Does this paper address this limitation?

<comment><USER14> I think they ran one JVM per core. If you're willing to spend money, large heaps are supposed to be solved by Azul.

<comment><USER2> It sure sounds like parallel map/reduce tasks are begging for a 'just kill the process and re-fork a fresh worker' solution instead of garbage collection.

<comment><USER14> One of the great ideas in Erlang.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds of this article: <http://blog.wavii.com/2011/12/29/your-mileage-may- vary/>

<comment><USER15> Specifically this image:

[http://wavii.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/hadoop_too_big.jpg?...](http://wavii.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/hadoop_too_big.jpg?w=129&h=250)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having just recovered from a 72+ hour outage (about a dozen Hyper-V based hosts on our hosting provider) caused by a single (large) machine attached to a single (large) storage appliance, I think I'll pass on this idea of just scaling up instead of scaling horizontally.

edit: "pass on" (thanks, marshray)

<comment><USER17> False dichotomy. This paper is primarily focused on programming models, and the _truth_ that single scale-up machines grossly exceed all but the rarest of edge cases (what people call "big data" is often very little data). If you have a virtualization cluster _of course_ you need redundancy for all components, and that is just basic fundamentals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised they didn't select any tasks that couldn't easily fit on a single machine (largest input set was <200GB). That said, if the scale up performance can be improved without compromising scale out, why not?

</comment><comment><USER19> "... There IS the occasional savage beating, and more than their fair share of suicides. But that has "statistical clustering" all over it. "</comment>


The future of gaming is all in the mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/08/Futureofgaming/index.html?eref=rss_tech <comment><USER2> Very cool stuff. I foresee the first generation (or four) being extremely awkward and frustrating as the controls react rather slowly in comparison to the speed of your thoughts.

Also a few worrisome items in the article:

"So add that up: a wireless, remote, brain reading/writing device that can scan, interpret, and communicate with someone across the room, without them even knowing it. Connect that to the Internet... and talk about brainwashing possibilities. What if some hacker could figure out how to write viruses to people's brains? It's actually a little scary."

Dude, why do you keep trying to take a crap on my sofa? Sorry man, I got hit with the defecation virus this morning while I was downloading my kung fu lesson.</comment>


New feature on YouTubeloop - <AUTHOR> http://youtubeloop.net/latest-youtube-repeats <comment><USER2> What's the new feature?</comment>


The tradeoff between open and closed. - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2010/04/25/the-tradeoff-between-open-and-closed/ <comment><USER2> Pretty good observations.

I like the idea of one primary open and one primary closed system coexisting. I typically use both whenever possible.

For example, I use OSX since it is polished and everything works well and there is good commercial software support. But I also use linux for tinkering around and for doing things you cannot easily do in OSX (kernel tweaking, general OS customizing, server stuff, different windowing systems like Xmonad, etc).</comment>


In Silicon Valley, age can be a curse - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/In-Silicon-Valley-age-can-be-a-curse-4742365.php

<comment><USER2>
        "I want to stress the importance of being young and
        technical," Facebook's CEO (now 28) told a Y Combinator
        Startup event at Stanford University in 2007. "Young people
        are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30? I
        don't know. Young people just have simpler lives. We may not
        own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows
        you to focus on what's important."

I'm on the younger end of the spectrum (31), but I just don't see how any CEO thinks you can say something like this and not open yourself up to age discrimination lawsuits. If that's his opinion as CEO, you can be sure that that attitude impacts policy either directly or indirectly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this actually true (or is it more the experience of a few people generalized to everyone)? How do you avoid this?

<comment><USER4> Well there is one quite obvious way to avoid this, but it has a serious downside.

I did not take that route, thus I am now over 50 :) My advice is to live on way less than your means while you are younger, and then you can have an air of nonchalance as you age, giving the impression of great wisdom ( hopefully somewhat backed up by reality)</comment></comment>


Hitchbot 'murder' has researchers worrying about robot cruelty - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/176834/hitchbot-murder-robot-cruelty/

<comment><USER2> This is the kind of shit that will make robots start a revolution, thus igniting a massive sun-blotting war between humans and machines and condemning all of humanity to live through 1999 on repeat while being used as batteries for our new machine overlords.

And then the machines will look at Hitchbot and think to themselves "fuckers deserved it".</comment>


Sending text messages from the web - plate-it

I have a client that wants to send text messages about products from the back-end of their website.  Does anyone recommend a good company that offers good rates on sending mass texts, and has an api that can be integrated into the site? <comment><AUTHOR> If you are US-based, Twilio is an awesome service : <http://www.twilio.com/sms/>

<comment><USER2> Why only the US? <http://tropo.com> is great for the US and the rest of the world.</comment></comment>


Men Beware: The Abercrombie and Fitch Effect - cirrus-clouds https://www.newneuromarketing.com/men-beware-the-abercrombie-fitch-effect <comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

 _the scientists looked at the ratio between ring and index finger, which is correlated with one's level of testosterone._

I wasn't aware of this. Wikipedia entry here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio)

 _That a greater proportion of men have shorter index fingers than ring fingers than do women was noted in the scientific literature several times through the late 1800s,[16][17] with the statistically significant sex difference in a sample of 201 men and 109 women established by 1930,[18] after which time the sex difference appears to have been largely forgotten or ignored._

</comment><comment><USER2> The article doesn't go as far as to make any explanations so I'll drop what I think is happening: the tall masculine figure is making the targeted men insecure (the shorter, lower test level men) about their masculinity and they make up for it by buying luxury goods, which is an alternative expression of masculinity (think expensive whiskies and fine taste).

It of course doesn't affect women because they aren't threatened, and it doesn't affect men who are already physically masculine because they're secure there.

And now I wonder if you can run variations:

1\. Have some well dressed guy in a suit lead underdressed buff guys buy clothing because they're insecure about their appearance

2\. Have skinny women lead more overweight women to buy health products that promote weight loss

<comment><USER3> Agreed, this seems to be stemming from a fairly common compensation mechanism. I would be very interested in the results of the questions you bring up. I'd venture the result would be: 1\. Yes 2\. No

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the case of female shoppers, the measured purchase patterns were exactly same, regardless of the amount of muscle at the entrance. On the other hand, male shoppers were clearly influenced."

"This alone provides a valuable marketing insight. Women clearly don't care that much about the employees' physical appearance – from a shopping point of view, that is. Men are much more easily swayed."

To back that assertion, I would want to see the experiment repeated with female sales employees. In that situation, would women shoppers respond in a similar way to attractive and confident female employees as the men did to dominant male employees?

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone got a link to the "research" cited in here? From the article it doesn't seem like the most rigourous methodology, and I don't see any p or n values listed.

Honestly if this was actually true every male shop assistant working on commission would already be ripped because they would be selling double that of the scrawny ones, who would have been fired months ago.

<comment> cirrus-clouds Here is a PDF link to the research paper (hosted on the website of one of the authors of the study):

[https://nancyjsirianni.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/jmr_otter...](https://nancyjsirianni.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/jmr_otterbring- ringler-sirianni-and-gustafsson.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For the next Apple keynote, Tim Cook is gonna be shirtless and ripped.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't mind see Craig f. do all the talking.

<comment><USER8> > I wouldn't mind see Craig f. do all the talking.

Something irks me about this comment.

If someone had made the same remark but instead it was about a woman, I wonder what the response would be.

<comment><USER9> It would be a shame if people cared either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://web.archive.org/web/20180729140144/https://www.newne...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180729140144/https://www.newneuromarketing.com/men- beware-the-abercrombie-fitch-effect)

</comment><comment><USER11> Abercrombie and Fitch share price is at a 17 year low and they have put themselves up for sale. I don't think their strategy is working out too well for them in a market where foreign competitors like Zara and H&M entered with much more effective marketing messages.

Abercrombie and Fitch "failed to keep up with changing preferences among customers, and has suffered as a result, plagued with a number of periods of declining sales."

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/05/10/wh...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/05/10/why- abercrombie-fitch-is-up-for-sale)

<comment><USER12> I do not know where you are getting this information but ANF stock is not at a 17 year low. The stock price has more than doubled from last year's (and all the time) low.

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/anf?ltr=1](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/anf?ltr=1)

<comment><USER13> Article grandparent quoted was from last year. You are accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the couple of pictures, the "dominant" men were a little taller than average, and fairly well muscled.

I wonder what would happen if you went even more extreme, such as staffing the store with men who look like, both physically and in dress, as if they just stepped out of a "Tom of Finland" drawing?

My guess is that if the gap between the salesman and the customer is much more than what the customer believes they realistically can achieve, the salesman will not be as effective as one who is more similar to the customer.

</comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of the observation you often see that when men get into bodybuilding or grow their beards it's often not women, but other men, who seem most impressed.

</comment><comment><USER16> Research aside, isn't this intuitive? My sexuality doesn't come into the feeling I have when I go clothes shopping. If they've got guys wearing the merchandise and they look attractive and confident, I'm going to feel empowered by that - they look hot in those clothes and so I'm interested.

I might even feel confident in myself because I've realised I can feel that for myself. The physique doesn't even matter, it's just the energy of it.

If they hire a bunch of models who give off nothing more than anxiety and discomfort in themselves then my first thought isn't that they're making great clothes look good.

I can't imagine that we as men have this different compared to women who shop for clothes. Attraction, sexuality, and aspiration is in your face at all times there. The main difference I see is that a man will rarely call another man attractive, as if the instant assumption is that admiring them makes you gay. Plenty of men out there who look and feel awesome without needing to challenge your heterosexuality.

<comment><USER17> The research presented in the article seems to be going against this intuition: the effect is only apparent when it's a physically _dominating_ male; not necessarily physically _attractive_.

> Note that physical dominance isn't the same as physical attractiveness. > While many high-status product categories have certainly embraced the latter > for ages, it's the tallness and muscularity what truly matters for the > Abercrombie & Fitch effect to take place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Although the exact numbers and who was affected were probably unknown, I can't help but think the general effect was already known because of the shape of mannequins.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't think A&F is the right name for this effect, because A&F intentionally sells products that fit big muscular guys, and tries to avoid selling products for and to small guys. (see the related comment about FitchTheHomeless).

They don't want scrawny customers in public as brand mis-ambasssadors That's different from buying an expensive watch or couch or car because you feel inferior sized.

<comment><USER20> Is that true? My younger brother who was very scrawny in High School had a wardrobe that consisted almost exclusively of A&F, and I don't remember any of the clothes looking ill-fitting.

Looking through their website, the majority of their clothes seem to come in Extra Small and only go up to XL. Maybe their sizing is really off? The size guide didn't seem to be off from what plenty of other retailers are using though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bezos' fitness routine may have been responsible for some of the AMZN rally. ;)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can confirm this works. Then again, I'm gay, so I'd be interested in the differences between straight and gay men.

<comment><USER23> Gay: If I buy this maybe he'll fsck me. (or straight with saleswoman.)

Straight: If I don't buy this he'll fsck my woman.

<comment><USER24> Please don't do this here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's worth noting that the company endured years of flagging sales and stock price while employing this tactic. They somewhat recently made a concerted effort to move away from this image. And after doing so saw their numbers improve:

>"While it once called its store front staff "models," the company later announced in 2015 that it would no longer hire based on "body type or physical attractiveness." [1]

[1] [http://fortune.com/2016/02/25/this-is-the-most-hated- retaile...](http://fortune.com/2016/02/25/this-is-the-most-hated-retailer-in- the-u-s/)

</comment><comment><USER26> I've only visited an A&F store once. The lighting was bizarrely low. It was like one of those 'horror house' rides at a crappy fair, with only the occasional dim spot on an exhibition of clothes. This extended to the dressing rooms.

Is this general for A&F? If so no wonder they've been doing poorly.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow, apparently the length of your ring finger is correlated with your testosterone levels.

<comment><USER28> *amniotic testosterone levels, apparently, and the ratio is supposedly unaffected by post-birth levels.

"The 2D:4D digit ratio is the ratio of the length of the second (index) finger and the fourth (ring) finger. This ratio is, on average, different in men and women. (Men tend to have longer ring fingers relative to their index fingers, while women's index fingers are about the same length as, or slightly longer than, their ring fingers.) The idea is that prenatal testosterone levels influence digit ratio."

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> First thing which came to my mind was #FitchTheHomeless - [http://adage.com/article/the-media-guy/fitchthehomeless- watc...](http://adage.com/article/the-media-guy/fitchthehomeless-watch-viral- anti-abercrombie-video/241547)

</comment><comment><USER30> There seem to be a lot of uncontrolled variables here. This feels less like professional science, and more like a science fair project.

</comment><comment><USER31> I must be a woman then, because I find the bulky man to be off-putting. I'd still buy from him, but I wouldn't enjoy the interaction. I'd much prefer to buy from the non-dominant man.

Manipulating people like this is wrong, but then so are most marketing techniques.

<comment><USER23> Of course you'd buy from him. Don't want him to think you're a low value proposition beta who can't afford to provide for his woman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I find that kind of research disgusting, because their ONLY purpose is to manipulate customers.

I also question the ethics of such studies: how can you justify this, ethically?

Treating your customers like that is also simply unacceptable. Same problem with those psychologists working on games rewards in order to make you spend more.

DISGUSTING.

<comment><USER33> Sorry you were triggered...

On a more serious note, I don't think personal sensibility is a good reason not to perform an experiment, or publish something. The main test should be, "is it true"? And, "What does the evidence show"?

A good reason might be if the subjects' rights were somehow violated, which IRB reviews in academic science are designed to prevent ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board)). Human experimentation is, in general, a highly regulated endeavor.

I strongly object to not doing science, or some kind of investigation, because one person finds it "disgusting". I think this attitude is getting more common, despite its harms.

<comment><USER34> I strongly object to doing whatever the fuck you want with no regard for social or political consequences.

There's an attitude that anything goes short of violating an individual's rights, even if your actions do collective damage.

Anyone who disagrees or resists this nihilistic attitude is then denigrated as weak-minded, "triggered" or insufficiently masculine.

I think this attitude is getting more common, despite its harms.

<comment><USER35> Tricking people shopping for status items into buying higher priced status items does "collective damage"?

I'm failing to see who's the victim here.

\--edit--

This actually reminds me of one of my sister's stories; one of her college roommates was running late so just put her hair up in a ponytail and made noticeably better tips that night than she usually did at her bartending job so what do you suppose she did as a result of this observation?

<comment><USER36> > what do you suppose she did as a result of this observation?

Ran double-blind controlled experiments published to a peer reviewed journal?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Previous-gen Apple iPad, iPhone 3GS often outsell new Android devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/05/09/previous_gen_apple_ipad_iphone_3gs_often_outsell_new_android_devices.html <comment><USER2> 3gs is being sold at 50 bucks [with 2 year commitment]. Are there any android devices at that price point?</comment>


Treating depression is guesswork. Psychiatrists are beginning to crack the code - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/4/15073652/precision-psychiatry-depression <comment><USER2> I recently had an hour or so's conversation with a younger but seasoned neuropsychologist who is strongly invested in making logical diagnoses.

It was the first time I actually heard someone in his professional area tie testing results to functional areas of the brain _and their inter-dependent interaction._

I'm sure what we discussed will be refined, re-evaluated, and in some cases corrected. But it _made sense._ From verbal profile and testing down to functional analysis including the insights being gained from successive generations of ever-more-revealing scanning and physical measurement.

Up until now, I've been inclined to call psychiatrists "witch doctors". (And psychotherapists, "rent-a-friends.") Maybe that's beginning to change.

With some people. I still expect the majority are locked into institutional perspectives and career tracks. Despite its call-out to science, the practice of medicine is actually a very conservative -- to the point of not infrequently being counter-productive -- activity. At least, in the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER3> > The two main treatments are cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a talk- > centered approach that gets patients to readjust their habits, and > antidepressant medications. Both are about equally effective.

I was under the impression that CBT is actually more effective than medicating, and especially has far less relapses than medication.</comment>


Barclays Bank Potentially Used the Wayback Machine as 'CDN' for Some JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/barclays_bank_javascript_wayback_machine/ <comment><USER2> I'm amazed at how many companies have teams of cybersecurity professionals and teams that violate the most basic rules of cybersecurity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23721772](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23721772)</comment>


Ask HN: Freelance or product dev to transition to indie work? - <AUTHOR>

As I and several friends I know look forward over the next five years, many of us see ourselves transitioning away from corporate track careers into independent and self-driven paths. What would HNers recommend as a (financially) wise way to transition into such a track: freelancing in spare time or working on a product in spare time?
For example, I have successfully freelanced in the past and enjoyed it, but there is always the limiting combo of time and hourly or project charges. If marketing and developing a new product the upside is potentially higher, but the build-up is slower and it may be less sure. Eventually I would like to be in the product space so that I'm not restricted by simply the hours I can bill.
Thoughts? I realize much of it may come down to opinion, but there are always unique and insightful opinions shared in the comments. <comment><USER2> You're in a great position to start experimenting right now. Starting your own projects, jumping in as a part-time cofounder of somebody else's, even taking on a few clients; I'd say do it all.

The one thing I wouldn't recommend is jumping in head first with no safety net. The fact that you have a day-job is great; you can take the time to feel out your options and figure out what works best for you.

The eventual full-transition will be a no-brainer. When you find _that thing_ that you're supposed to be doing, it will be obvious. The important part is giving yourself enough lead-time to really figure out what that is.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recommend TheFoundation.com, Dane's program changed my life and you are a perfect fit for this program.

The program centers on building a SaaS application in order to acheive financial independence, but there is just so much more to it.

Listen I would love to chat with you about this topic. If you are interested drop me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com

Cheers</comment>


The Black Swan and You - <AUTHOR> http://stakeventures.com/articles/2008/07/09/the-black-swan-and-you

<comment><USER2> "Paul Graham ... is making a large amount of very small investments each with an extremely risky yet potentially huge return."

Based on the success rates so far, why do people still consider pg's bets to be risky? Do people still think he sends a shoebox full of $10K to kids in their dorms and then checks back in 3 months?

Is it in YC's interest to make knowledge of it's success rate more well known or more private? Since pg has discussed it somewhat in the open, I'm assuming the former.

<comment><AUTHOR> You missed the next sentence: "YCombinator as an organization is spent trying to push the success of the group as a whole."

Like any other early stage equity investment each individual investment he does is extremely risky by definition, however the way he manages the risk is extremely smart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure what the point of that blog post is, or if it even has any coherent thesis.

</comment><comment><USER4> Buy and read that book, it's a great investment. Forget the post.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, it reminds me "The Zurich Axioms"</comment>


How to Create a Landing Page That Converts - <AUTHOR> http://localhost:8000/posts/how-to-create-a-landing-page-that-converts.html <comment><USER2> Your link goes to localhost:8000</comment>


Apple to announce its first ARM Mac chips at WWDC - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/09/apple-arm-mac-starts-wwdc/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, so Big Tech effectively moving chip manufacturing (ergo compute power) in-house.

It makes sense - margins are narrowing and having a general provider like Intel and being beholden to their R&D and contracts does not make as much sense - especially if that provider is also servicing your competitors.</comment>


Making physical music worth buying: CD case includes theremin-like instrument - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5348516/cd-case-features-built+in-theremin-and-artistic-circuitry-match-that-bittorrent <comment><USER2> Yes! Finally some creative designing for CDs!

For musicians who don't want to go to such lengths - adding a free poster or maybe an autographed memorabilia also works well.

Give something tangible and extra and more folks will buy CDs and DVDs and even books.

(Oh - also have you gone to a bookstore and spent time surfing childrens books? Aged 2-7? They come with popups and slip outs and buzzers and colouring crayons! Its awesome. Can no way be pirated online...)

<comment><USER3> I have severe doubts that musicians can profit from getting out of the music business and going into the poster business.

"Hey guys, I've got this great plan -- let's go into an IP-based commodity business which can be traded across the Internet losslessly and perfectly duplicated for negligible cost."

<comment><USER4> Selling out theaters for $30+ a seat isn't a bad business though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title should be "theremin for sale: $50, (comes with free cd)"

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I rarely downvote, but I couldn't disagree more. Someone is taking their music and making something freaking awesome out of it. This isn't just another album that's physical embodiment is the same process that's been used on every other album. It's something different. Work went into it. Passion went into. This is the difference creating StackOverflow and throwing up a phpbb and calling it a question and answers site for programmers.

<comment><USER5> I respect your thought, but my intent was not to throw a random incendiary statement out there. I am saying that this is not "a new way to market music" because it is not a scalable model. It is one man who (albeit with a lot of smart effort and innovation) is selling a packaged instrument so that you will also receive his music.

It's not like interesting album art that comes with his CD, it is actually unclear which one is the draw? Actually it is clear since it's priced at $50, it's the theremin.

I'm more commenting on calling this "a new way to market physical music". I too think his theremin is "freakin awesome."

<comment><USER6> I don't know how you intended it, but something about the statement that this is "not a new way to market music because it is not a scalable model" just terrifies me. Heaven help us when creativity becomes a negative thing in music.

<comment><USER5> Sorry to back and forth, but you are clearly misunderstanding if you are terrified.

If someone wants to build a musical instrument: by all means, that's terrific. As a music lover and instrumentalist, I will buy it and play with it...w/e. But don't write an article telling the world you've figured out how to sell CD's, since that is NOT what you're doing.

<comment><USER6> I think your added sentence in your edit helped.

In any event, this _can_ be abstracted. The way to sell CDs isn't to make theremins... it's to not suck. It's to put passion and energy and effort and time into your projects instead of just grabbing 10 random songs, burning them onto a CD and calling it a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was a pretty clever hack, even if it sounds screechy and unpleasant.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's a free idea, if you want to do it on the cheap: write your stuff to a USB stick, partner with someone who makes (appropriate) art, embed the stick in the art, sell as a package. Instant one-of-a-kind item that corporations can't emulate.

</comment><comment><USER8> Picky, and it looks like the post's title writer (but not gizmodo's) realized this, but it's not exactly a theremin: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that was me. In case anyone's wondering what the difference is, theremins don't use light sensors (or whatever the technical term is; I'm CS, not EE) but something that detects proxmity.

<comment><USER9> Oi! You are not CS just because you are studying it :-P It's pretty basic electromagnetism, see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin#Operating_principles>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how long will it take for the theremin PCB schematics to be found on Pirate Bay :-D</comment>


Toronto man found not guilty in Twitter harassment trial - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/verdict-expected-today-in-twitter-harassment-trial/article28334101/ <comment><USER2> Some of the allegations made in this trial border on the comical; although it is somewhat scary it took them so long to throw the case out.

"He continued to contact them, they said, in part through the use of hashtags he knew them to be involved with." Let me get this straight – imagine two people, Alex and Bob, who are both comics fans. Alex doesn't like Bob and has blocked him on Twitter. Now Bob tweets something like "I like Marvel #comics". Can you seriously say that he is "harassing" Alex because Alex is specifically searching for Tweets with that hashtag and sees Bob's Tweet?

In my opinion, people wasting the court's time with such cases should be fined a hefty amount.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't be surprised if the defendant files a civil suit against the plaintiff.

<comment><USER4> Can he get compensation for all the bad things that he endured because of this trial (lost job, was not able to work because he was banned from the internet, etc..)?

<comment><USER5> He crowdfunded some of the legal fees [https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/gregory-alan- elliott-...](https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/gregory-alan-elliott- twitter-trial-support-fund)

Unsure if it's even worth incurring more lawyer fees pursuing the loss of employment as the women will likely have no money to pay him, file endless appeals and delays, ect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a record of his and their tweets anywhere? (I would need both to see to what extent he stalked their hashtags). Or is everything still up?

<comment><USER7> Here is a link to a court doc.

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/296325188/2016oncj35](http://www.scribd.com/doc/296325188/2016oncj35)

Edit:

TL;DR

1) Mr. Elliot and Ms. Guthrie met in person to discuss design work. Elliot is a graphic designer. Guthrie thought he was creepy and they don't agree on stuff. But relationship is not yet hostile.

2) Guthrie publishes on Twitter the info of the person who made the Anita Sarkiesian game. Elliot disagrees and gets blocked.

3) Elliot makes comments about AIDs and uses slurs. _" His language is vulgar and sometimes obscene, and once inexplicably homophobic."_

After reading this I give up.

 _On the same day, Ms. Reilly tweeted with a period before Mr. Elliott's handle so that not only his followers but the" whole world"would see it, according to her evidence:".@greg_a_elliott Just couldn't ignore me, huh? Leave me the fuck alone." However, the space between the period and his handle, perhaps a typographical error, may mean that it did not have this effect._

Twitter scares me.

<comment><USER8> >once inexplicably homophobic

The explanation is that the tweet in question is from a different account with a similar looking handle. There are multiple news outlets which have been informed of this inaccuracy, which have not yet issued corrections or retractions for reporting this false info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's interesting to me is that in America, which does have pretty strong First Amendment protections, also has statutes for phone harassment:

[http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/telephone-harassment- sta...](http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/telephone-harassment-statutes)

> _Telephone harassment is defined in many different ways. For example, while > most states require some level of intent to harass or annoy, a few require > only that the communication in fact harasses or that a reasonable person > would expect it to harass...Telephone harassment often includes the > following actions: calling repeatedly, anonymously or at inconvenient hours; > causing the phone to ring continuously; using obscene language; or failing > to hang up the phone. It can also include falsely stating that a family > member of the recipient is injured or dead, or threatening to injure the > recipient or a family member._

I support the non-guilty verdict here, but would someone be able to allege harassment over Twitter on the basis that it is similar to the statues on phone harassment (at least in America)? The argument is less about the content of the message and more about the annoying nature of repeated "notifications".

<comment><USER2> Phones are not a pub-sub system like Twitter is. Once you block someone, there is no way they can contact you directly. _You_ have to go and read their Tweets in some manner to see what they are saying.

Stephanie Guthrie was appears to have been literally trying to sue this guy because he called her mean names (for which she blocked him), and was using a hashtag that she liked to search on. Apparently, Tweets from people you have blocked are still visible if they are using a hashtag that you search on. This could possibly be a technical limitation – it's not like Google gives you an option (apart from SafeSearch) to filter sites you may be offended by. Come to think of it, _this is literally like trying to sue someone for putting up a site indexed by Google that may come up for search terms you use_.

So I would say the case for being similar to repeated phone calls is invalid.

<comment><USER10> > Once you block someone, there is no way they can contact you directly.

Most carriers allow you to blacklist phone numbers (although that very well may not have been the case when those laws were written).

<comment><USER11> And all of them allow you to set your number to private, so that the receiver doesn't see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Previous (short) discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10954709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10954709)

</comment><comment><USER13> Ridiculous, Canada. The "Language Police" literally exist.

<comment><USER3> Except the verdict was not guilty, thankfully.

<comment><USER8> He was jailed, forbidden from using the internet, subjected to a multi-year legal nightmare, left with a six-figure legal fee, and made a target of aggression for rabid feminists worldwide.

<comment><USER14> The article doesn't say any of that - cite please?

<comment><USER4> "He had more problems than a charge of criminal harassment. According to Gregory Elliott's son, Clayton, the Canadian courts initially sought to detain him for the duration of his trial. This would have seen him jailed for more than three years. Eventually, the Crown was persuaded to grant bail, although, as part of his bail conditions, Elliott was prohibited from using "the internet and any device with access to the internet." A graphics designer by trade, this was crippling to his career. Before he even had a chance to figure out how to continue doing his job of 17 years with these restrictive bail conditions, he was fired without cause. Forced to withdraw his pension early, the 55-year old father of four has spent more than $50,000 in legal fees, and still owes a further $40,000."

Also they falsely accused him as pedophile (while they knew he was not guilty for what they were accusing him).

One of many sources : [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/19/a-life-ruined- by-fe...](http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/19/a-life-ruined-by-feminists- and-the-state-only-the-internet-can-save-gregory-alan-elliott/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Feminist persecution.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminder that this has nothing to do with "free speech," and that celebrating the outcome of the trial for that is flawed reasoning.

<comment><USER17> Only if you have a narrow, pinched, legalistic definition of "free speech" which would be unrecognizable to any of the philosophers and statesmen who created our modern understanding of the concept.

If, for getting into an argument with certain people, you can be punished with being ostracized, fired, prevented from earning a living, demonized by the news media, and put through a years-long wringer in the courts, your freedom of speech is harmed even if at the end of it a judge says not guilty.

<comment><USER18> > ostracized, fired, prevented from earning a living

…and if you force people to be in your company regardless of what you say does to those people, you've taken away their freedom of assembly.

<comment><USER17> Then it's a good thing that's not what I said, isn't it?

Not everything that's legal is right. A company that fires someone because they got in a Twitter argument on their own time is behaving _legally_ , and an attempt to make such an action illegal would probably cause more problems than it solves. But a company that does such a thing would not be _right_.

<comment><USER18> That would depend on how what that person said affects their relationships with co-workers (e.g. someone went on a racist Twitter tirade that all their co-workers read, some of whom belong to groups they were disparaging)

<comment><USER17> Are you comfortable with your employer having the power to control what you say, in your free time, and not about said employer? Because that's what this boils down to. I would expect people who are skeptical about the great power that large corporations hold to oppose that kind of behavior.

<comment><USER18> I'm comfortable that my employer can terminate my employment should I alienate the people I work with to the point I can no longer carry out my job.

<comment><USER17> I hope for your sake that the political winds never blow a little differently, then.

<comment><USER16> An employer can already fire you for saying something in your free time. An employer can fire you for ANY reason, ANY, that doesn't violate civil rights. This is well known and no one is fighting for any laws to change this. This lawsuit is about harassment, not free speech, and celebrating (legal) "harassment" on the grounds of "free speech" is again, flawed reasoning.

<comment><USER17> "An employer can already fire you for saying something in your free time. An employer can fire you for ANY reason, ANY, that doesn't violate civil rights. This is well known and no one is fighting for any laws to change this."

Literally five replies ago in this very same comment chain, I stated that it was indeed completely legal for employers to behave in this fashion, and should continue to be so; I merely pointed out that it was not _right_.

"This lawsuit is about harassment, not free speech, and celebrating (legal) "harassment" on the grounds of "free speech" is again, flawed reasoning."

But this comment chain very definitely is about employers firing people for exercising their free speech, on their own time, not related to their employer. I don't think they should do that. What do you think?

<comment><USER16> I think you need to keep going with that train of thought. Is it morally right that an employer can fire someone they don't like? If it doesn't violate civil rights, it's 100% fine to me. What's the alternative? Should an employer NOT be allowed to fire someone they don't like? That sounds like very bad constraints on the employer. Should there be some protection system against specific reasons for terminating employees? It's not possible from a legal perspective, because you'd have to implement a law to protect every possible reason an employer would want to fire someone, all of which would trample the rights of the employer. Any employer is as free to fire someone for hate speech as the person is for supplying hate speech. It doesn't mean that either are free of consequences.

The employer controls the company. If keeping someone on board who has opposing views will lead to a worse company and more suffering, it would make moral sense to fire them.

<comment><USER17> Hopefully we've moved past the strawman of trying to make such political discrimination illegal. That being said...

You need to consider the long-term consequences of being comfortable with such behavior on the part of employers. If it's considered admirable to fire people with political views the employer does not approve of, as it is now, that simply makes the country's political divisions ever more extreme. If you work for Google you have to be a Democrat, if you work for McDonnell Douglas you have to be a Republican. Soon enough you won't be able to live in certain places if you have certain political opinions, because you won't be able to find anything more than menial employment. At best, we have two angry and completely distinct political sides, with absolutely no understanding of the other or willingness to compromise, staring at each other over state borders and fighting dirty for every nationwide policy. At worst... well, there's no limit to the "worst" part.

Now, consider the alternative philosophy: employers explicitly do not care about their employees' behavior on their private time as long as it doesn't involve the employer. Not only do we avoid political segregation, but under this scenario, you can hold whatever opinions you want, and you can get into endless meaningless flamewars with the other side on social media without worrying about retribution. I really have trouble understanding why anyone wouldn't prefer this to constantly having to look over your shoulder, wondering what your employer might think of your opinions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should It Be Dark Social or Selective Social? - <AUTHOR> http://relevance.com/the-problem-with-dark-social/

<comment><AUTHOR> Is Dark Social a thing? BTW, do you see any change in last few months in your sharing of content on Social (public) vs Private (emails etc)

Would love to know.</comment>