Is2020over - <AUTHOR> https://is2020over.com/ <comment><USER2> _sigh_ this is the type of sensationalism that I think leads us towards many problems we have today. Did these things occur? Yes of course. Are they nearly as bad as they are made out to be here? No. Are most people who read this going to think its the end of the world? Yes.

Lets take a look at a few examples -

> More than 20% of Australia's forest is lost to forest fires

They were not "lost". Forests grow back. Fires are a natural and necessary part of a forest's lifecycle. Moreover large scale fires in Australia happen _every_ year. This years was the largest, yes. The scale is increasing due to global warming, yes. But its silly to imply that 20% of Australia's forests are now a desolate wasteland permanently.

> The UK withdraws from the European Union.

... And life marches on? I get you don't brexit, but is disingenuous to put this on the same level as the rest of the stuff, especially since its been like 4 years coming.

> COVID-19 is declared a global pandemic. Hundreds of thousands die.

The only really important item here. This one is bad. This is what 2020 should be remembered for.

> The Pentagon releases UFO footage.

... really? Now I'm just not taking you seriously.

> Microsoft breaks Windows via update, again.

Now you're just running out of ideas

<comment><USER3> Good work, Detective Killjoy.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I know. I suck. What sucks even more is when people point to stuff like this and, with a straight face, say the world is ending. That is what really annoys me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well. November 2020 looks to be mostly quiet at least; looks like only one major disaster is forecast.

<comment><USER5> And we all know which one it's going to be...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd already forgotten that Brexit was this year. Folks at Munich Re are probably having hard times now.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anyone trying their hands at when/how a second phase of covid-19 could start? I'm thinking people hope this dies down due to warm weather and since the planet stays warmer later these years it might not peak until like mid November. (I've lived in hot climates for all my life so I don't really know when cold starts...)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is this flagged? If it contained misinformation it would be useful to know what.

<comment><USER9> > White people in ths United States riot to get haircuts.

This is both misleading and racist, for a start.

<comment><USER8> I think this is meant to be a joke (like the whole site). Kinda like those "white people be like/black people be like" videos people make on social media. Of course you might disagree but I think this is not so bad as long as it's not hateful or indecent and flagging for that is a little over the top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is microsoft breaking windows even on that list? lol. Seems a bit irrelevant w/ all the other shit going on. But then I've been on arch linux for like 7 years now. You can trust me when I say that because only those of us who use arch linux say we do whenever we have the opportunity to do so.

</comment><comment><USER11> > White people in ths United States riot to get haircuts.

Loving the casual racism. Keep up the great work.

</comment><comment><USER12> Clever site! Quick typo I noticed "antartic" should be "antarCtic"!

<comment><USER13> And another one: "ths" should be "the".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Green day releases a new song: "Wake me up when 2020 ends"

</comment><comment><USER15> At least the stock market looks amazing! /s

</comment><comment><USER16> December is concerning...

<comment><USER17> "Fat lady sings."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's a typo —

White people in ths United States riot to get haircuts.[>]

Also murder hornets are missing :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is 2020 over ?

<comment><USER19> I'm not a specialist on this. I recommend trusting the experts on [https://is2020over.com/](https://is2020over.com/)</comment></comment>


Pushing your website to Android without an app - <AUTHOR> https://beaconfreaks.com/2016/09/pushing-your-website-to-android-without-an-app/ <comment><USER2> It would be very annoying if everybody were doing that. Notifications at every step. Luckily I keep bluetooth off. How many people keep it on all the time?

<comment><USER3> It's a quiet notification - no sounds or buzzing, only visible if you pull down the top bar. It's intended for contextual use, ideally you'd pair it with a physical call-to-action.

Google are sensitive about the spam potential, to the point where they proxy beacon URL resolution through their servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To be clear: You dont need anything special installed on your phone. Just Google Play Services and Google Chrome..

Currently the feature is muted by Android. [https://developers.google.com/nearby/notifications/overview](https://developers.google.com/nearby/notifications/overview)

So its not working currently.

However the idea is to move to the Physical Web: [https://google.github.io/physical-web/](https://google.github.io/physical- web/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Title should be "Pushing your website to Estimote or Beacon Tools users on Android".

<comment><AUTHOR> Android itself gets the notification not the tools that are used to setup the beacon. I have noted that in the article.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the clarifications! I misunderstood the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think it is so easy to find people with bluetooth on and estimote app installed!

<comment><AUTHOR> Estimote app is only to setup the beacon, not to get the notification

<comment><USER7> You should probably note that in the post, it's not very clear at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Post updated to state that.

Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These will also show up in the Chrome widget in the nofication center on iOS

</comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a practically perfect way to target individuals with trojans.

</comment><comment><USER10> You will need an Android phone with the following applications installed:

        Estimote
        Beacon Tools

You need at least 1 beacon (we recommend Estimote), you can buy beacons here

<comment><AUTHOR> That is just to set up the beacon itself

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sorry the page is down for me

<comment><AUTHOR> Hug of death :-( Working on getting Cloudflare up

<comment><USER12> If you use Wordpress, take a look at WP Super Cache.</comment></comment></comment>


V8 Release 6.3 - <AUTHOR> https://v8project.blogspot.com/2017/10/v8-release-63.html <comment><USER2> [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=4698&q=tail%...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=4698&q=tail%20calls&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Owner%20Summary%20HW%20OS%20Component%20Stars)

Proper tail calls is the last ES6 feature not implemented by Chrome. Can anyone shed more light on the backstory for the hold up? I've read the challenges with debugging without a stack, but Safari's implementation of tail calls seems pretty sound and was shipped about a year ago.

The last V8 blog post on the topic is almost 18 months old:

[https://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/04/es6-es7-and- beyond.ht...](https://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/04/es6-es7-and-beyond.html)

The TC39 topic they site hasn't been touched in _two years_ :

[https://github.com/tc39/proposal-ptc- syntax](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-ptc-syntax)

<comment><USER3> In recent chrome Dev summit it was mentioned "The last missing part of ES6 all browser vendors agree was a bad idea"

I think they are not shipping that anymore.

<comment><USER2> I hadn't heard that. How disappointing and a step backward for the world's most ubiquitous programming language. All very subjective, of course.

I guess Safari on desktop isn't considered a mainstream browser vendor anymore? Or do they regret implementing it also?

The appeal of the explicit syntax makes sense, but the argument that proper tail calls are hard to identify/create seems silly to me. Devs have any number of ways to create memory leaks which have even harder to diagnose problems than the stack overflow of an improper tail call. The stack without tail calls overflows quite quickly unlike memory leaks which only a minority of users can experience on certain code.

<comment><USER4> Given the example that one side of || is a tail call, it seems quite easy to accidentally have overflows that only occur on specific data and call time environments for situations like writing a bad binary heap traversal function. Without tail calls, any traversal to some depth either does or doesn't trigger a stack overflow.

But I find the need for step debugging to catch and unroll a virtual equivalent to tail calls a better argument given that this is for a sandbox for adversarial code with strong incentives to obscure bad behavior.

<comment><USER5> It is already trivial to break up logic and destroy the stack using async, if for some reason we are to believe that the call stack is somehow a way for us to somehow figure out we are being attacked. (Also, is it really surprising that the right-hand side of a returned || expression is a tail call? That seems extremely obvious :/. Regardless, the "syntactic tail call" proposal seems like it fixes that issue.)

<comment><USER4> Features like async now have a few debugging options that can help users identify origin and report malicious redirects, pop-unders etc that try to obfuscate history and here comes a potential replacement.. So worrying about debugging first isn't such a bad idea.

It's extremely obvious to think about tail calls when you know you are supposed to be thinking about tail calls. The life cycle of JS Code doesn't usually make anything obvious to people who inject the last edge conditions in a function.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would be nice to have [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=5866](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=5866) resolved so embedding/extending V8 would be a lot easier.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the release many of us have been waiting for!

The performance enhancements will lead to better embedding and extending V8. Chrome should probably implement proper tail calls. More now that even safari has this feature implemented.

Great job and thanks you very much !

</comment><comment><USER8> Excited to see function parsing performance enhancements[1] and more ES stage 3 features being implemented!

[1] [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TqpdGeLmURL2gc18s6PwNeyZ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TqpdGeLmURL2gc18s6PwNeyZOvayQJtJ16TCn0BEt48/edit#heading=h.un2pnqwbiw11)

</comment><comment><USER9> someday v8 Release v8.0 :D</comment>


Is the new Zuckerberg fake charity an estate tax avoidance scheme? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/12/03/is-the-new-zuckerberg-fake-charity-an-estate-tax-avoidance-scheme/ <comment><USER3> Man, is anyone else seriously bummed out by how cynically everyone is viewing this announcement?

There's a rich guy who founded an organization, ostensibly with the hopes of doing something good with all that money that he owns. Maybe the organization doesn't go anywhere, or maybe he winds up paying less in taxes. Can't we all hope for the other side of the coin -- that he does wind up doing good for the world? Why not wait and see?

<comment><USER4> Better a 5% chance it does good than a 100% chance it's squandered on bureaucracy and inefficient solutions to problems other tax dollars went to creating.

<comment><USER5> Fallacious nonsense like this: "[Tax revenue is]squandered on bureaucracy and inefficient solutions to problems other tax dollars went to creating"

...is today's version of "down with the capitalist dogs; long live the proletariat and glorious socialism!" of eras past.

Global capitalism taken to its extreme is an ideology that promotes a massive transfer of power to private individuals and the dismantling of the state. Libertarianism, in other words. Unfortunately, utopian ideologies have a nasty habit of becoming tyrannical dystopias when put into real-world practice.

Extreme capitalist ideology paints government as cartoonishly hopeless and inefficient, maybe even evil, run by inept bunglers that steal our money and waste it on paperclips and perks for bureaucrats. The solution, they say, is let private for-profit business take over and watch efficiency skyrocket and costs plummet. Sounds wonderful...except it's a hopelessly naive utopian fantasy (or, depending on your outlook, a scam to transfer even more power and wealth to the world's billionaires).

My own view is that unfettered capitalism taken to its logical conclusion will result in a feudal society...or violent revolution.

<comment><USER6> As against unfettered socialism which actually did in the USSR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I posted this on a different thread. I think it is tax avoidance.

One way to look at this is that Zuckerberg just robbed the treasury of $45B. Part of that would have come in through capital gains taxes and the rest through the estate tax.

What they do with that money is up to them, not the state. It's a pretty sweeping end run around the taxation system.

Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll use the money to good end like Gates is doing. And maybe not.

This is a heck of a tax code we've got, it's trickle down on a grand scale.

reply

<comment><USER8> I don't understand. This is how the tax code works. If you give the money away to charity the Government doesn't take income tax on it. That is a law that was passed. The whole point is to get people to give money to charities because that's a good thing.

<comment><USER9> Eh, but you're assuming that money to charities is always a good thing. There are a) some pretty terrible charities out there and b) some patently fake charities that are designed as money laundering schemes.

The tax code works because it was written by people who had huge amounts of wealth and were pissed that the federal government (the People of the U.S.) created an income tax.

No other developed country has such crazy laws regarding charity donations as the U.S.

<comment><USER10> So why is everyone already assuming Mark's charity is going to be one of the terrible ones? I don't see why he wouldn't give an honest shot at improving the world, as a young idealist. Maybe he won't do a great job at it, but people should reserve judgement til then.

<comment><USER11> I'd say you're making the assumption that it will be used for good, when so many charities are indeed used for tax evasion (and other more nefarious purposes). When you condition these probabilities on how most charities actually operate, and on Zuckerberg's past behaviour, a high level of cynicism proves to be the rational position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Greenspun would read the worst into whatever Zuckerberg did here, as seen by him starting the post criticizing the timing of Zuckerberg's marriage.

Why not assume the best? Zuckerberg said he planned to give away 99% of his wealth to help other people. That's a good thing. Why criticize him now? If he ends up not doing it, criticize him then. If all he was doing was trying to avoid some estate taxes, he could have done that without any announcement at all, certainly drawing less scrutiny.

Scrutiny is important here, because the IRS could disallow the application of the LLC estate planning loophole here just by saying so. The 40% discount for non-management shares is an accounting judgement, not a law, and not one the IRS need accept if it believes the sole purpose is to evade taxes.

<comment><USER13> He didn't say he would give away 99% of his wealth. He said he would use 99% of their Facebook shares to fund their agenda. And he said they would do that with 99% of his shares over their lifetime... if they were 'giving away 99% of their wealth' they could just do that today. As it happens, they can still realize significant returns from those funds in the meantime, and probably end up richer than when they started.

The pattern of manipulative billionaires sheltering their legacies like this is not new; see Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Gates, etc.

<comment><USER14> What the fuck? You don't even make an argument with this comment. You just bashed the rich.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how many wealthy people are reading all of this criticism of Zuckerberg and are thinking to themselves: "On second thought, I'll just buy another boat." Remember how cool it was when Larry Ellison spent $500 million on that Hawaii island?

<comment><USER16> Generally speaking I'd say it's far healthier world when we don't think we're all dependent on billionaires to make the world a better place. Also far healthier world when billionaires don't actually believe they're responsible for illuminating the world's path to salvation.

IMO the criticism is warranted, and there is a clear path Zuckerberg could take to quash all of the bad publicity. While he may be surprised people are calling him out, I say good for them. Why let anyone pull wool over your eyes voluntarily?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If it were are tax avoidance scheme, Mr.Zukerberg would have been well served if it was all kept silent from public. For all his flaws, Mr.Zukerberg seems to be a guy who cares, and he will have my benefit of doubt until proven other wise. The vitriolic reaction to his announcement is uncalled for.

<comment><USER18> You're mixing the meanings of tax avoidance and tax evasion.

Zukerberg is not breaking the law, he's legally structuring his finances to avoid capital gains. The fact that these gaping loopholes in the tax code is combination of incompetence and corruption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> More generally I've never understood why charity is tax free. When I or others to give money to charity that is great and I support that. But why do so many expect they can take from the governments pocket when funding a cause they believe in? Dont get me wrong, I understand 'the logic' to encourage charitable giving this is a net positive.

In my home country charities are often abused by business and individuals. Given increasing sophistication and selfishness of individuals non-profits and charities should be taxed like any other organisation. Ideally real charities would have very low tax rates anyway. They typically distribute income to causes creating expenses against income, basically turning them into very low margin and subsequently low tax business. And those that abuse this structure or hoard income can pay tax like any other business. Little bit controversial I know but I find this tax-free relationship is taken as 'its the way it is' without further thought.

<comment><USER20> The simple reason, at least in democracies, is that voters want charities to be tax free. If they did not care, you can be damned sure tax-free status would be dropped.

I don't think there is any more complex moral reasoning than this.

I for one would never vote for a party advocating taxing donations. As to what constitutes a charity ... well that is another debate [0]

[0] [http://mentalfloss.com/article/18575/ikea-worlds-largest- cha...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/18575/ikea-worlds-largest-charity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's no way to know; only time will tell. He either genuinely wants to maximize his charitable contribution to the world, or he just wants to avoid capital gains and estate taxes, and the smart choice of action (that which he has taken) is the same in either case.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't think Zuckerberg is trying to avoid estate tax but even if he is and if he's doing it legally, this is something we should complain to the Congress for writing bad tax code.

</comment><comment><USER23> At issue here is _not_ whether this one instance (Zuck) is a tax coward or a much needed 21st century philanthropist. Instead this is about whether our tax-code can raise tax rates on business-owning millionaires and billionaires to arbitrarily high levels and capture the desired revenue.

Economic historians have documented this type of tax avoidance in previous era of high taxes. When an executive was taxed 90% of his income, his salary was greatly decreased and instead got 2-weeks time on the company's (pre-tax) yacht.

These type of "global charities" are very disturbing at this moment when it is becoming clear that tax rate will need to be increased substantially in the future to pay for our growing deficit. Which means it will become increasingly desirable to be employed or make deals with one of these shell corporations (zero tax), while all the boring but actually essential things like construction will face huge tax burdens.

Ultimately, the big fear is that it will become completely rational to spend more effort trying to game the IRS then it will to do IRL value-add. (see Michael Lewis's piece on Greece in the run-up to '08 to see what this looks like)

</comment><comment><USER24> It would be pretty strange to tell the IRS that he's discounting the transfers 40% after publicly stating "we receive no tax benefit from transferring our shares."

If you believe in the government's ability to allocate money, you should probably believe in its ability to collect it, too.

</comment><comment><USER25> Estate tax avoidance scheme? They've got about 60 years before they hit estate tax and giving away 99% of your money is a crap avoidance scheme.

</comment><comment><USER26> Somehow from what I know of Mark Zuckerberg, he's not exactly looking to sit on all those billions. The motives the article is imputing to him are wrong.

</comment><comment><USER27> Okay, so now I'd like someone honest to read this whole thread and tell me with a straight face that Hacker News is "full of libertarians", as I read here from time to time.

I mean, there's someone here who doesn't understand why some people try to lower their tax bill by "taking from the government's pocket", and it goes completely unnoticed.

I can't be the only one to find this hilarious?

</comment><comment><USER28> There probably is a sneaky aspect to all this, but having seen the benefits of private philanthropy up close (to whit: Gates Foundation providing otherwise unaffordable HIV medication in southern Africa) I'd be slow to dismiss outright. It's not ideal, but for the people to whom this matters it makes not a jot of difference.

</comment><comment><USER29> If it is, good on him. Estate tax is just tax on something that has already been taxed.

<comment><USER30> The money you use to buy stuff also (usually) pays consumption taxes. Yet that money was income that you've already paid income tax on. Should consumption taxes be abolished?

<comment><USER29> If it were possible, yes. It is actually a big problem, specially on countries that heavily depend on it (such as Brazil), since the poor can't escape it and it affects them badly. The poor are the ones who pay more taxes proportionally because of that, in Brazil[1], whereas whoever owns a business (small or big) can usually avoid some taxes.

[1] [http://noticias.r7.com/record-news/video/populacao-de- baixa-...](http://noticias.r7.com/record-news/video/populacao-de-baixa-renda- paga-mais-impostos-no-brasil-4defa15db51a597468aec95b)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Foundation or LLC, when Mark dies only 1% of his wealth will be passed to his kids...If this is not Generosity i don't know which is

</comment><comment><USER32> > The letter to our daughter works pretty well as comedy, e.g., " _Medicine_ > has only been a _real science_ …" (emphasis added).

I'm not sure what the author is trying to say here. He cut out important context. The "..." was "for less than 100 years". While one might quibble with the exact number, Zuckerberg was reasonably in the ballpark.

> It also works pretty well as a dictionary example of "optimism", with > Zuckerberg imagining that a $1 billion annual budget is going to move the > needle (NIH spent $31 billion in 2010, according to Wikipedia, and the drug > companies keep telling us that they are spending some of their Irish dough > on research)

The Gates Foundation spends about $4 billion a year, spread over many different kinds of initiatives. Their health spending is "only" about $1 billion a year, and they move the needle there. I see no reason the Zuckerbergs can't move the needle at $1 billion per year as long as they don't spend in too many disparate areas.

Here's an article from NPR that explains why it can be more effective to do charity and activism through an LLC instead of through a non-profit foundation: [http://www.npr.org/2015/12/03/458276386/facebook-founder- to-...](http://www.npr.org/2015/12/03/458276386/facebook-founder-to-give-away- his-fortune-through-for-profit-company)

Some excerpts:

        "A foundation itself is not allowed to do what the
        Internal Revenue Code defines as lobbying," he says.
        "If you're trying to achieve a social end through
        advocacy, you're going to find yourself very
        constrained, whereas if you're just paying it out of
        your own pocket if you're a company or an LLC, there
        are really no constraints at all, at least imposed
        by the tax code."

        In a public letter to their newborn daughter, Chan
        and Zuckerberg said about their philanthropic goals,
        "We must participate in policy and advocacy to shape
        debates."

and

        Mollie Cullinane, who runs a law firm that
        specializes in philanthropic giving, says creating
        an LLC instead of a nonprofit looks like a move by
        Chan and Zuckerberg "to get more deeply involved in
        advocacy and promotion of certain causes that other
        charities and foundations can't speak out about as
        loudly."

and

        But beyond politics, there are other ways an LLC
        will give the couple philanthropic flexibility.

        "There's a whole new area opening up, so-called
        impact investing, where you invest in a for-profit
        organization that has a social mission," Brest says.

        So the couple might invest in clean energy
        companies, for example, and could make money off
        those investments. Foundations can do some of that.
        But, Brest says, "you are freer from any
        restrictions if you simply do it through a private
        company."

<comment><USER27> Someone in the comments section of the blog links to an interesting article w.r.t. your first point:

[http://www.nature.com/news/registered-clinical-trials- make-p...](http://www.nature.com/news/registered-clinical-trials-make- positive-findings-vanish-1.18181)

The snark in the original article makes the author sound like a total idiot.

But let's not get in the way of HN's Two Minutes Hate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Has there ever been a multi-billionaire/millionaire that did the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER34> A letter apologizing for his wrongs, announcing that Facebook will no longer collect personal information and that it will exist for users not advertisers, as well as promising to refrain from ever using the word "hacker" again to refer to himself or anyone at Facebook.

"Move fast and break things." Privacy: broken.

Won't fix. Sorry.

<comment><USER35> Facebook is not, nor has ever been a charity for its users benefit - <USER2> presuming you can operate a business (or a successful anything) with no cash flow is deluding themselves, advertising is a free and easy way to get cash flow.

The users freely give their personal information to Facebook for the benefits they obtain from it, its well disclosed what Facebook is going to do with that information, and Facebook gives you a modicum of control over how that information is presented to the general public.

I don't know what more people expect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> no, next question.

</comment><comment><USER37> > The letter is a significant addition to the literature of comparative > American victimhood: "Can we truly empower everyone — women, children, > underrepresented minorities, _immigrants_ and the unconnected?"

Expect FWD.us and similar outfits to be showered with cash.

</comment><comment><USER38> $45 billion dollars for me. $0 for the US government. Why did they give me this tax avoidance loophole? Same reasons those "dumb fucks" gave me all their personal information, I guess. It's good to be King.

</comment><comment><USER39> Wait a second. Mark did not steal his money. It is his money. Hence, he does what he likes with it. If you believe the estate tax department should have his money, let them set up a Facebook project. What is stopping them from creating similar value? Are they really waiting until someone else does it, to leech from him?

<comment><USER40> That is one truly crazy argument.

You seem to be suggesting there should be no taxes. After all, "it's your money" Quite how government then functions is beyond me, but I'm sure there's some libertarian argument I'm missing here.

I am sure you will disagree though, seeing as you think taxes are "leeching" people's money. I suppose on ethical grounds you don't take advantage of any government services of any kind.

<comment><USER39> Political verbiage is no match to executable technology. If you don't like something, write source code that will make a difference, and if you can't, you lose. That is why the libertarian argument will always win.

<comment><USER41> Poe's law at work.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Proposed new ANSI escape sequences for hyperlinks to URLs - <AUTHOR> http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2013-June/000975.html

<comment><USER2> Bringing the fun of goatserolling into the world of command-line applications.</comment>


Quantum Bayesianism - <AUTHOR> http://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2017/qbism-q--a-does-quantum-bayesianism-hold-the-keys-to-the-future-of-physics-hans-von-baeyer-believes-so.-.php <comment><USER2> Can someone explain what the deal with qbism even is?

Like, I get that when you do weak measurements the random walk the qubit takes [2] looks basically identical to inference. That's not too surprising, given how similar the definition of quantum states is to the definition of probability distributions. But superpositions aren't _literally_ probability distributions. In particular, unlike with probabilities, you can prove that super-logical agents can't rationally disagree about the superposition that a state is in. Superpositions _can 't_ be observer-dependent in the way that probability distributions can, because you can create situations where agents who are disagreeing about a superposition must be risking the highest of Bayesian sins: seeing something happen to which they assigned a 0% probability [1]. To me, this directly disagrees with Qbism's tendency to think about quantum states as subjective instead of objective.

1: [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=822](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=822)

2: [http://algorithmicassertions.com/2016/04/24/eves-quantum- clo...](http://algorithmicassertions.com/2016/04/24/eves-quantum-clone- computer.html)

<comment><USER3> I can try to offer something about the tension between the PBR theorem and QBism. I sat through a conference talk by Chris Fuchs not long after PBR came out, although some of the detail will probably be lost in translation.

PBR assumes that the quantum state of a system represents a state of ignorance or partial information concerning an objective, underlying (hidden variable) reality. In QBism the quantum state of a system instead represents an agent's beliefs about what will happen in future interactions with the system. There's no mention of an underlying observer-independent reality. It's not assumed that the physical state of a system can be portrayed with objective, observer- independent variables, nor that a given quantum state assigns probabilities to those variables.

A cynical summary might be that QBism weasles out of PBR type issues by sticking to radical/subjective Bayesianism, rather than objective Bayesianism.

<comment><USER2> Maybe I should put it this way... what do we _gain_ by accepting qbism?

For example, accepting many-worlds gives parsimony of postulates. The number of postulates goes down, because the Born rule is derived from decoherence and unitarity instead of being postulated from directly.

Accepting a collapse interpretation gives easy translation between theory and practice. You don't have to justify squaring the amplitudes, you just do it and it works.

Accepting a pilot-wave interpretation gives you deterministic rules and an exact single state.

Accepting a qbism interpretation gives you...?

<comment><USER3> Well, one answer is that it resolves the measurement problem, and variants like Wigners friend, in a coherent way and without the additional issues posed by those other interpretations (although collapse interpretations aren't quite "interpretations" in the same sense). As I understand it - being neither an expert or advocate, just interested in quantum foundations - the QBist attitude is that all those no-go theorems point to quantum theory being little more than a dutch book of the universe. The whole idea is you're barking up the wrong tree if you want to give a direct physical meaning to the quantum state. If you're already welded to the notion that a quantum state corresponds to an external reality then you'll probably never find QBism very satisfying. And that's fair enough.

Don't get me wrong here - what you're saying is a very valid criticism and probably what most people have against QBism. I myself find it difficult to see what value it adds, unless you already have a certain approach to scientific knowledge. I was just trying trying to clarify some of the points your original post made. There is a lot of literature about how QBism relates to various results and other interpretations. Chris Fuchs' own writings are very entertaining and worth a read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To those who check the comments before reading, note this article says nothing about what Quantum Bayesianism is. It's an announcement of a presentation and apparently a book, and a sales job on how important the idea is, but has no trace of the idea. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that per se, but it's probably not what an HN reader is expecting.

<comment><USER5> Yes but is has some interesting talk about theory vs. meaning, science vs. philosophy, and other aspects of QM interpretations.

Btw to address your concern:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article is an announcement of a lecture. I couldn't find a recording of it or any previous physics lectures by him. It looks the only recordings are of him giving religious sermons.

<comment><USER7> Is there any other type of sermon?

<comment><USER6> 2\. informal

a long or tedious piece of admonition or reproof; a lecture.

synonyms: lecture, tirade, harangue, diatribe; More

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A book just came out.</comment>


Ask HN: Recommend a Gaming Laptop? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Very happy with Alienware R13 and R15, had them for a few years. They have heatsinks that push the heat out to the back, so your keyboard doesn't burn hot like Razer laptops.</comment>


Can mobile banking revolutionize the lives of the poor? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7966043/bill-gates-future-of-banking-and-mobile-money

<comment><USER2> More than half of the world's poor don't use banks, and this is a huge problem for them and the entire system because, not only they are vulnerable to theft, lost, and exploitation, but it allows narcotics dealers to continue in their business...

<comment><USER3> This is true, it has been revolutionary.

There is a bit of a dark side to it that's not often mentioned, mobile banking isn't exactly a white knight. For example interest rates on mobile banking/microlending platforms are quite astronomical at over 80% annually (usually ~8% per month [MPESA/MSHWARI]) which is a bit predatory - I think its to account for the default rate. Secondly, some countries seize deposits after 2 years of inactivity to an unclaimed financial assets fund (2 years isn't alot considering the quite-manual processes involved in developing countries to get your assets back.

On the other hand you get a decent amount of interest on amounts which could be less than $0.50 worth (so long as you're active) and this is better than holding cash/any argument against holding cash. It's also easy to transfer money between people by far.

Competition can probably help with the predatory lending rates.</comment></comment>


A is for Alphabet - <AUTHOR> https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2016/index.html <comment><USER2> IMHO Google/Alphabet's strategy should have been reinvesting their huge profits in buying other big companies like ARM, Nvidia or SpaceX.

<comment><USER3> With EBITDA of $24B in 2016, they could buy about a 3rd of NVIDIA. With financing they could probably buy more, but its not clear this is better than putting some of that money into replication, or earlier stage companies.

<comment><USER2> I know, but in 2015 or so.

Also, Softbank acquired ARM as an investment and it is already paying off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hasn't Google Fiber been all but shelved?

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm thinking of buying some of that stock.</comment>


The HTTP 500 Solution - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2015-11-27-the-HTTP-500-solution.html <comment><USER2> > More importantly, attempting to respond to invalid inputs is dangerous, for > two reasons. First, in such a scenario we've already identified that someone > is trying to be evil;

Being incorrect is not trying to be evil. smh

> Postel's law states that one should be conservative in what one does, but > liberal in what one accepts from others; this is great advice for life, but > terrible advice for writing software

No evidence of that either. I feel like this was written just to be argumentative; a living example of "Conway's Law".

<comment><USER3> _Being incorrect is not trying to be evil. smh_

No, not necessarily. But nobody ever _accidentally_ sticks a percent-encoded NUL byte into a query string.

 _I feel like this was written just to be argumentative_

The main reason was so that I had something to point people at when they reported such "bugs" to me, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        ...no matter how comprehensive your testing is (and most isn't, since
        there's almost always a bias towards testing things which should suceed
        rather than testing things which should fail) it will never cover as many
        combinations of strange inputs and obscure environments as your code is
        likely to encounter in production. Poorly tested code has more bugs per
        line; and when you're faced with the likelihood of a large number of
        bugs per line of code — whether it's due to poor testing, poor developers,
        or merely because the code is difficult for reviewers to understand — it's
        important to minimize the amount of bug-prone code. The shortest possible
        error-handling path is "exit(1);".

This whole section is complete nonsense. Whether you choose to exit(1) or return 400 Bad Response, you should still write tests that assert you do so correctly.

The difference between the two options is that clients who receive a 400 response at least know the problem is at their end. Perhaps they can handle it automatically or perhaps they can flag it to a user or whatever.

Turning everything into a 500 is just a poorly-designed API.

<comment><USER3> _you should still write tests that assert you do so correctly_

People should do lots of things. I'm talking about a cognitive bias here -- see the 2-4-6 problem.</comment></comment>


Valve Linux Steam Client Beta Application - <AUTHOR> http://www.valvesoftware.com/linuxsurvey.php?

<comment><USER2> Already filled this in.

2 Problems with it:

For some reason in chrome on ubuntu all of the text inside the select boxes is white on white so you have to select options to read them.

They specify that they are looking for "experience linux users" so if you want to game the survey you can answer the "how many years have you used linux?" dishonestly.

<comment><USER3> I experienced the same behaviour with Chromium 24 on openSUSE Tumbleweed x86_64.

Looks like a good start for a more linux-centered experience, doesn't it? ;)

[edit] Put in a smiley at the end of the second sentence to convey my less- than-serious take on the matter, which did not succeed to keep me from signing up... [/edit]

<comment><USER4> Yeah, some CSS and GTK+ interactions is definitely useful data to make conclusions about whether or not the Steam client or Source engine run well in Linux... (Neither of which (are likely to) use GTK+ anyway at that).

<comment><USER5> Clearly a polished GUI is not requisite for good compatibility/performance, but it certainly is a canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator for other less visible bits. Basically, if they haven't had time yet to fix things like unreadable menus, that gives you an idea of how close to RTM quality the underpinnings are.

<comment><USER2> To be fair I imagine the client itself is much higher quality.

This just looks like a php form someone threw together in half an hour. Valve has a "work on what you want" policy so I imagine most of their developers are more interested in building the games and steam itself than survey websites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For the people without a steam account: They are asking about several hardware details (CPU, GPU, resolution, amount of monitors, RAM) and will notify "selected people" in a few days.

</comment><comment><USER7> One issue I have with steam is you need the client to reset your password.

I no longer have a windows machine to do that from.

<comment><USER8> Steam runs well enough with recent releases of Wine (I also had remarkably good experiences running Source games on it, i.e.: Half Life 2).

<comment><USER9> It must be great by now. I was regularly playing TF2 in Wine 4-5 years ago, it was good enough for me then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't really understand why they need to limit the number of beta testers - I think it was said that only about 1000 users will get access to the beta client.

<comment><USER2> They are soliciting feedback and testing, they would rather have quality than quantity.

What they don't want is thousands of forums full of posts saying "OMG it crashez steam4Linux sux"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It only showed me a "submit response" button and no questions. So I clicked it and now I can't redo it.

<comment><USER12> Contact support?

<comment><USER11> I did, though there isn't really a spot for it. I doubt they'll do anything, but oh well. No big deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Downvote more...I'm greedy and want to be the first to use Steam on Linux.

On a more serious note this bodes really well for gaming and software distribution on linux.

<comment><USER14> Submissions cannot be downvoted. (They can be flagged, but that is supposed to be reserved for spam and other egregious violations of norms.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can only guess this isn't being upvoted to not make other potential applicants aware of it! :D

<comment><USER16> It was already posted yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4701873>

I guess that's why it's not being upvoted.

<comment><USER17> that post only mentioned the Linux Group. At that time, there was no news about a Linux Survey. The group was empty and all you could do is join the group, but there was no mention of a survey. So it seems unfair to me that this would not get upvoted because of the post you mentioned.

<comment><USER16> I don't know if it's unfair. I know I followed yesterday's link and completed the survey there.

So in my perception, this is a duplicate and I think that's why it's not upvoted. I don't see what fairness has to do with the success or failure of a submission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why do they assume that I'll be only testing on either laptop or desktop?

</comment><comment><USER19> Being an Ubuntu user is required? or can be run on any other distro?

<comment><USER20> It gives an option on distro, and it seems to be anything that uses debs.

<comment><USER19> You can extract deb's with 'ar vx file.deb' and then manually install, but I guess they want to test only on debian based compatible distros.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why should I install this when I sill still have to boot into windows to play all the games that are worth playing (of the games I am not already tired of)?

This should not even be news IMO. So mamy people say WebOS and Windows 8/RT will never gain prominence because they don't have the games of IOS/Android - Yet Linux gets a steam client and all I hear is excitement. do yo think that game devs want to create games for a 2% desktop market?

Nice double standard there - I understand it, but it is still an agenda/bias that I wish to call out.

<comment><USER22> humble indie bundle - there are plenty of good native games/ports for linux.

<comment><USER21> Plenty for who??? not the Main Stream/Typical/Average PC gamer. The numbers are not on your side so how can you back up your statement.

<comment><USER23> They have to start somewhere. Why are you so negative about this?

<comment><USER24> It's a chicken and egg problem. At least we'll soon have the chicken.

More seriously, game developpers will be much more encouraged to develop for Linux if they have a delivery system, especially given how Unity is becoming more and more popular.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pioneering study finds more than 200,000 rats in Barcelona's sewers - <AUTHOR> https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/09/19/inenglish/1537368873_338066.html <comment><USER2> 200k doesn't seem like that much. Rats aren't very big, and Barcelona is a pretty large city, with a population of about 1.5M humans. I would have expected more, having grown up in a rural area where there's a lot more mice, rats and other critters than one per 7 humans.

<comment><USER3> A city's aewers are tiny relative the city's area. Parks, Apartments, etc are all going to increase the city's rodent population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Leaving aside the pest aspect (and I'm sure it's all too real in many places), rats are fascinating creatures with a sharp, pragmatic intelligence, loads of adaptability, and social behaviors that we primates can very easily recognize and relate to. I have seen rats perform clearly abstact thinking, brewing up complex ad-hoc plans, and show stunning degrees of spatial awareness. I have been lied to by a rat, who seemed to have worked out a decent model of my expected behavior. Which I promptly delivered - the rat won. And these were domesticated rats. I should be surprised if their wild cousins weren't up to even more hardcore mental trickery.

<comment><USER5> > I have been lied to by a rat

...elaborate?

<comment><USER4> Rat teaches me to feed her when she tattles her tray. But I won't do it until everything's been eaten, also the boring bits. Then suddenly for weeks no trouble whatsoever - when she rattles her tray, it's empty, everything gone. Until one night, hidden behind a doorpost, I watch her methodically clean out the boring bits and bury them under floor pellets. As soon as the tray is empty - rattle rattle rattle. This was a supremely gifted individual. She performed similar strategems towars her cage-mates, for the most part successfully.

Oh, and I always wondered what all the fuss was about with the Japanese macaque monkeys and their cultural transmission stunt. I saw one rat getting inventive with the drinking water tap, beginning to take water with cupped paws and use it for washing her fur. Others picked up on that habit, and yes, it spanned generations.

<comment><USER6> How do you know it's deceit? It seems like you could get similar behavior if you filled two trays, one with food and the other with trash, and never provided food unless the trash tray was empty. You're training the rat to empty the tray.

<comment><USER4> Not quite. She realised I could be tricked, but only if she thorougly covered her traces. I watched the thing. It was so clearly reasoned behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of the saying _" You're never more than 6 feet from a rat"_

[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20716625](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20716625)

<comment><USER8> Neat article, for those looking to save a click:

"Urban areas in the UK cover around 16,000 square kilometres. If we distribute the rats evenly across the urban areas, which is clearly unlikely but necessary for the calculation, each rat has a rather spacious 5,000 square metres to roam around in.

Assuming you're standing at a given spot in an urban area you would be at most 164ft (50m) away."

<comment><USER9> "Assuming you're standing at a given spot in an urban area you would be at most 164ft (50m) away."

Not sure how they maintain a population if they remain 100m away from each other

<comment><USER10> At most not at least

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I lost count after 200,003 rats :)

Do rats serve a useful (for us) purpose there? If not, can we release a rat specific poison or is that impossible without harming the entire ecosystem?

<comment><USER12> [https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/13/8592817/rat-patrol-new- yo...](https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/13/8592817/rat-patrol-new-york-alberta- canada-south-georgia-eradication)

The guys who do this professionally/successfully in a sparsely populated place with everyone helping and the advantage that rats can't survive outdoors don't think it's possible in cities.

Big problems with poison: Rats are harder than you think to poison, they're both sceptical of new food and adapted to survive lots of poisons Evolution will work against you and select rats that don't eat or digest your new poison You will poison lots of things you don't intend to (wild animals, pets, humans).

You can imagine an IOT solution in 50 years though (coordinating web of mechanical cats/ferrets with amazing smell/sight that just never stop hunting).

<comment><USER13> AI gun turrets in the sewers.

<comment><USER14> Off topic, but you really think there arnt automatic turrets, seems very feasible today, especially in a situation like a sewer where you really dont have to worry about shooting the wrong (moving) thing.

<comment><USER13> We had automatic turrets decades ago, so the "AI" part was just me trying to be funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A bit of context that is perhaps relevant. As some of you know, there is a political conflict between the central government of Spain and the local, pro- independence Catalan government. El País, a newspaper published in Madrid, has quite explicitly taken the central government's side a few times. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this bit of news was singled out for publication because it's about there being potential health and safety issues in the main city of Catalonia.

</comment><comment><USER16> currently one 0 missing in the title (200 000 not 20 000)

<comment><USER17> I thought 20,000 seemed way to low, given the human population of Barcelona is 1.6 million.

200,000 still seems low. I wonder what fraction of the rat population lives outside the sewers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is interesting, but is it really Hacker News-y? Regardless, thanks for sharing :)

<comment><USER19> Of course it is! 'Interesting' is the key criterion.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


PHP is much better than you think - <AUTHOR> http://fabien.potencier.org/article/64/php-is-much-better-than-you-think <comment><USER2> This is quickly turning into a circle-jerk, I really haven't seen any new arguments for or against PHP in the past ~5 years.

Every article is just another op-ed from either a) the fan base, ever- proclaiming PHP's virtues, or b) the haters, ever-pointing out PHP's flaws. The 2 groups will never reconcile and so we're left with mountains of repetitive discourse that's as stale today as it was 5 years ago.

Just imagine if all of this time spent arguing were applied to a project (whether it be a PHP project or not)...

</comment><comment><USER3> repost of 2 week ago <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4198271>

<comment><USER4> +1, thats old :)</comment></comment>


Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurzweils-dubious-new-theory-of-mind.html <comment><USER5> Let's get this straight: Ray Kurzweil is just a few ticks off crazy. Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land, especially in the case of diets and theories on intelligence (which others have routinely criticized him for - <USER2> everywhere).

But here's the problem I have with Ray Kurzweil and other people like him - you can't just ignore them, you can't just write them off. He's like the Joker. A guy that makes proclamations on the edge of what's reasonable, and when he's right, he's really right - and the results of what he thinks are about to happen will really screw us all. I think this of all slightly off kilter people, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, Sean Parker, Elon Musk (the least off kilter of the bunch - most rational - but man, does this guy take insane risks - I'm long TSLA :), Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis (he is amongst one of the worst on the proclamations) - these are people who should be listened to, not because anything that they actually say makes any sense - because they often don't.

No, they should be listened to because of the very nature of their personalities. The way their personalities are set up makes them act like early black swan detection devices. This allows them to call the black swans out well before they're apparent to the rest of us. More often than not, they're wrong though.

They're like the canaries in the coal mine. Vigilant, plenty of false alarms, and usually ignored most of the time.

But sometimes these people, they are just so fucking right - that you better hope you are on the right side of the wave they just called out.

Too many people have been screwed thinking that the crazy fool talking about crazy things should be ignored. The counterfactual is also true:

 _> All prophets are false prophets._

So watch these guys out of the corner of your eye, don't take them too seriously most of the time, but if things come up, again and again and again - take notice, think carefully and make your own decisions.

They are just early warning detection systems - it's up to you to make the final decision as to whether or not it's time to fire the nuke (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov>).

<comment><USER6> I'm curious what it is about Elon Musk in particular you consider to be "off kilter".

<comment><USER5> Please note that he's probably the least off kilter and by far the most rational/works more from first principles than analogy of the bunch.

He quit a PhD in physics at Stanford to go chase the internet with ~$2K in his bank account. He then invested the $20 million (all in) he got from Zip2 straight back into X.com which later became PayPal through what can only be described as a series of random accidents that lead to its eBay sale. That's insane risk for someone who essentially had fuck you money.

He then subsequently plowed the $300 or so million from the sale of PayPal to eBay, and pushed it directly into both SpaceX and Tesla - well before NASA or the world really had any need for either one of them - there was no guarantee that NASA would need SpaceX, or that COTS would continue to have government support (SpaceX bootstrapped on these contracts), or that any launch vendor would go with him over proven tech.

And with Tesla, there was no guarantee that laptops/smartphones/tablets would explode from 2005-2010, driving down the cost of Li-on batteries by an order of magnitude as South Asia's factories came online with their economies of scale, hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of billions in surplus capital that all combined to help make electric cars and an upstart car company price competitive with established luxury car brands.

There can be no doubt about it - Elon Musk takes huge risks, he is very lucky, and these are not the actions of a normal person. Normal people do not do these things - the risks he took were abominations on a risk adjusted scale (if the recession continued to decimate the economy and kill demand for veblen goods and SpaceX didn't get that 4th launch - Musk would be done - as in out of money and out of luck).

Which reminds me - the best investors are mentally damaged in some way, especially in terms of emotion (a distinct lack of empathy and emotion).

Because, if they weren't, well, they'd do what everyone else did, and be just like them.

To be contrarian, is to be damaged.

This does not mean that any of the people are mentally damaged - I merely found the studies on the relative percentages of functional psychopaths in leadership and investing positions highly curious (<http://sgforums.com/forums/2092/topics/154210>).

<comment><USER7> > _Normal people do not do these things - the risks he took were abominations > on a risk adjusted scale (if the recession continued to decimate the economy > and kill demand for veblen goods and SpaceX didn't get that 4th launch - > Musk would be done - as in out of money and out of luck)._

I suspect that he just values things differently from you -- that he's less averse to losing large sums of money, and more averse to regretting opportunities passed by, than you are. You can call him crazy if his actions are a spectacularly bad way of getting what he wants, but if he just wants differen things than you do, that's a matter of taste rather than sanity.

> _Which reminds me - the best investors are mentally damaged in some way, > especially in terms of emotion (a distinct lack of empathy and emotion)._

I wonder, if you raised the subject with some of these guys, what they would say to this.

<comment><USER5> _> I suspect that he just values things differently from you -- that he's less averse to losing large sums of money_

Truth. Same argument can be applied to terrorists and soldiers - they value the respect of their group and their families (in some cases this is monetary) over their own lives.

But then again - I presume most people think most terrorists would be damaged in some way (brain washed/delusional/lost parents) and soldiers in another way (PTSD/lose a friend/people die in front of you).

I'm not stating Elon Musk is, or is not, this - however I do find the parallels highly curious.

 _> I wonder, if you raised the subject with some of these guys, what they would say to this._

Kind of irrelevant if it's empirically correct.

<comment><USER8> 1\. Terrorists value things differently

2\. Terrorists are mentally damaged.

3\. Elon Musk values things differently

4\. Ergo, Elon Musk is mentally damaged (or more likely to be damaged, or this is an indication that he might be damaged, as is implied).

Total analogy fail.

EDIT: Since I can't seem to be able to reply to your reply (too nested): Bringing up the analogy in the argument and finding it curious indicates that there is _some_ reason as to why it even applies, when in fact it is completely irrelevant.

<comment><USER5> I said the parallels were curious. If you read it correctly - I didn't state either way. I can't be logically incorrect because I didn't make a conclusion.

Secondly: <http://sgforums.com/forums/2092/topics/154210>

EDIT: Not necessarily. The relative percentage of CEOs, traders and investors who are psychopaths are much higher than the general population. We normally label such people as mentally damaged. Musk is both a CEO and an investor who doesn't think like normal people and fits into this group.

This does not mean he is part of the group though. It is merely interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Long ago I read Kurzweil's "Spiritual Machines," because people kept saying he was a smart guy, and AI intrigues me. It was the first and last book of his I read. It literally had me laughing out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of his predictions and the pomposity with which he delivered them. I remember thinking to myself, "Everybody thinks this guy is a genius--but he's just writing bad sci-fi! How is he fooling everyone? What's going on here?!"

Looks like his new stuff is more of the same...

</comment><comment><USER10> >As Kurzweil fleshes it out, the P.R.T.M. is even more like the Hierarchical Temporary Memory system proposed several years ago by his fellow entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins (who founded PalmPilot). Kurzweil's weak efforts at differentiating his theory from Hawkins's—"the most important difference is the set of parameters that I have included for each input … especially the size and size variability parameters"—are likely to convince no one.

Yup. That's what I thought when the book was announced and I said this:

>So is this On Intelligence 2?

I find being an armchair cynic is even easier than being an armchair futurist, since I haven't read either book (the rip off is clear from the synopsis).

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure why there's so much vitriol about Kurzweil. Maybe it's disappointment that we don't have our brain uploads ready yet, just like we were pissed about no flying cars twenty years ago. He doesn't have to be right all the time to be worth at least considering his ideas without getting so angry.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - <USER3>

Maybe the title is too sensationalist. But even something like "A New Kind of Science" may not have been so earth shattering, but it was still a lot of fun to read and play with.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I don't get the recent backlash with Kurzweil on HN. I understand being critical of some of his conclusions, but he's had a pretty impressive career before becoming an author, and quite frankly he has the best track record out there on predicting the future.

It's amazing how accurate his Age of Spiritual Machines predictions became, even if some of them were a year or two late. Google's self-driving car, ipads, Siri, Watson, Google Glass, etc. He seems to always get technological capability correct, but sometimes misses the mark on technological adoption.

Even if a few of his more outlandish predictions like immortality are a few decades - or even generations - off, I think the road map of technological progress he outlines seems pretty inevitable, yet still awe inspiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In the preface to the book Kurzweil argues, with good reason, that "reverse- engineering the human brain may be regarded as the most important project in the universe."

\- for anyone interested, the Human Brain Project is at the forefront of this: [http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain- computer/inde...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain- computer/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Even though Ray's futurist predictions can be looney at times, in his book "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" he provides a lot of useful/applicable insights into the state of modern medicine. Like how flawed our "pay per medical service" system is, or how heart disease is preventable in almost all instances (but still kills Americans more than anything else), or how most modern humans in the US have diet's and exercise habits (or lack there of) that are extremely detrimental to our bodies and their pre civilization biological programming. Our bodies firmware is indisputably out of date and no one seems to care or acknowledge this fact. I'd rather have Ray and the likes pointing these facts out and imagining a future in which someone uses technology to change them vs criticizing them for not being able to predict the future on a %100 clip. They may introduce the problems to the minds that come along and solve them one day.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Hierarchical Temporary Memory

Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo.

He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened.

He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machine intelligence. At the consumer level, this should be as obvious as doing a search on Google. Long-hold your iPhone home button to see pretty good voice recognition, or try Google's and be blown away. Even a little deeper, there are many modern businesses with machine intelligence as part of their very fabric. If you've confused artificial personhood with artificial intelligence then it's an understandable mistake, otherwise not.

A useless distraction.

<comment><USER16> > Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50.

But maximum life expectancy has been stuck at 130 or so for as long as there have been people.

The fact that more people live longer does not mean that suddenly we'll all live forever.

Forever is a long long time, besides having to define forever (presumably as something > 130), the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death. The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years, it is not surprising that those outside religion would yearn for a pseudo-scientific version of it.

It makes for some interesting science fiction but I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.

<comment><USER15> The maximum life expectancy point is good, note that actually it's changed a bit.

"The maximum (recorded) life span for humans has increased from 103 in 1798 to 110 years in 1898, 115 years in 1990, and 122.45 years since Calment's death in 1997" - <USER4>

And "as long as there have been people" is going way too far. Your point that there seems to be some intrinsic limit stands, until medical science disproves it.

Living forever is as ridiculous as 100% uptime, but eliminating preventable deaths remains a good goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "The challenge of figuring out how the mind works is too complicated for even the smartest of entrepreneurs to solve on their own."

I would agree with that statement. The main problem is still simply understanding exactly how the brain works. PRTM I think is just one model that describes a type of functionality, as noted in the article there seem to be many more, and certainly we don't know enough about how the brain itself works. Once we have good well tested models for the functionality there I don't forsee any major problems in holding us back from replicating a brain ie. AI or singularity or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER18> Kurzweil is the epitome of [reductionist, emergentist] materialism.

The essence of this sentence is not in the individual letters.

<comment><USER19> Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?

<comment><USER20> I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific state.

<comment><USER21> _Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles._

Because no such explanation can exist, or because we don't have a sufficient understanding yet? See "God of the gaps".

<comment><USER20> Because physics doesn't even have the language to describe the feeling of pain. Similarly, physics doesn't have a language to describe how "green" looks, it can only describe the frequency of green etc.

Also have a look at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia>, it's basically what I'm talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love this part: "Google built the largest pattern recognizer of them all, a system running on sixteen thousand processor cores that analyzed ten million YouTube videos and managed to learn, all by itself, to recognize cats and faces" with 15.8 percent accuracy.

<comment><USER23> Its interesting and all, but compare it to a human baby. It takes them several months of data processing to learn things like object permanence. While 16 thousand processor cores may seem like a lot, I seriously doubt it even approached 1/10th of the power of a babies brain. Indeed, I doubt it was even 1/10th of the power of the region of the babies brain dedicated to recognizing objects.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News thread about alcoholism - <AUTHOR> There was a hacker news thread I think in February or March where someone mentioned the Sinclair method in the comments. I was hopelessly addicted to alcohol and that comment saved my life. I plan to donate to the nonprofit that pushes the Sinclair method, but I'd like to thank that poster specifically. <comment><USER2> I can't over emphasize how much I love hearing about these overwhelmingly positive things that happen as a result of this community on HN. Thanks for sharing it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps this thread/comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15775102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15775102)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, it is that thread, but it's none of those comments.

I also remember they had a weekly timeline of how much they drank in their post.

Maybe they deleted it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's great! What you recommend as a source to learn more about this?</comment>


Ask HN: Why aren't 'team retrospectives' a thing in 'traditional' industries? - <AUTHOR> Like most people on here, I work in the software industry, and my team follows a version of 'agile' methodology that (disregarding all of the software-specific principles and aspects of it) is a result of continuous iteration and input from the team itself. Over the course of months and years, we've developed a system that more or less works for everyone on the team, accomodating not only the nature of the work we do, but certain personal needs and cultural quirks of every individual. While never perfect, the system is continuously revised, as we are encouraged to regularly 'look back', voice concerns, discuss issues, and come up with action items to solve problems that arise within and outside the team that affect our productivity and happiness.
I almost take this for granted, feeling like this is ultimately the only way to get any team work done over a long period of time, as this gives room for everyone to speak up and bring to light problems that management may not necessarily be aware of (or be willing to solve otherwise).
However, most 'traditional' industries don't seem to be adopting this seemingly superior way or working. Why is that? I hear complaints from my working parents who are often dissatisfied with the way their work is organised, having concerns about their roles on their teams, the efficiency of the process, etc. Yet, my obvious suggestion of 'just bring this up at your next retro' doesn't apply here, as there is no such thing in their world.
Is there something special about software with the level of introspection workers in this industry are expected to do, which cannot (or shouldn't) be done elsewhere? <comment><USER3> I assume by 'traditional' industry you mean stuff like manufacturing, finance? If yes, then you should check out Six Sigma, Kanban etc. Those came from traditional industry - manufacturing and applied to software engineering. Scrum and Agile evolved out of these methods.

That said, you might think retrospectives work because of the method behind it. But in my opinion it works because of the intent and culture of the team.

At a past employer we started Agile with bang. Our manager used a clock to ensure everyone spoke for 2 mins max. "Brevity is the Soul of Wit" he said. But once he left Agile meetings were in shambles. People rambled on about who they sent mail to, what meetings they had etc. because it showed "importance" of their work.

<comment><USER4> > People rambled on about who they sent mail to, what meetings they had etc. > because it showed "importance" of their work.

Yeah, I ran into that more than once. Scrum turns into a daily performance evaluations which tends to encourage micromanagement.

And this is something I don't get. Managers complain about getting too many emails that they have to read through, but yet they're fine with 5 minute status reports from every member on their 10 person team on a daily basis.

Every company that I worked for that had retrospectives dropped them, as they were pretty much useless. Because once a team optimized internal processes, the thing they couldn't optimize was the external managemalaise that impeded their ability to get things out on time. And that never ever flowed upwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've never worked anywhere where the end of sprint retrospective was in any way useful. Same with the huddle.

The problems I've found with the retrospectives is they become a meeting just for people to moan. And it's the same problems every time that people moan about because the team isn't really empowered to change anything.

This combined with childish themes, and nonsense like describe how this sprint went for you in terms of World Cup teams. WTAF.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Is there something special about software with the level of introspection > workers in this industry are expected to do, which cannot (or shouldn't) be > done elsewhere?

I'd say it's just the opposite: the software industry is very immature compared to other industries. We've only been writing software for 60-odd years. We don't know what our methodology should be - we haven't even figured out basic things like the right programming language to use. We expect to spend a significant amount of time and effort on process refinement because everything we're doing is (comparatively) new. Whereas many in other industries believe (rightly or wrongly) that they've got their processes figured out, and don't need to reassess them every week or two.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not a thing in most of the software industry yet. And wherever people do team retrospectives there is a high chance that it is a formal procedure - <USER2> only concerns that are voiced aloud are the ones that are known and "approved" by management or are expected to be acknowledged. Any critical concerns that can backfire at a person who raises them are never mentioned, just in case.

I'm not saying that all IT companies are like that, far from it, but really the issue is very human one - it is very likely that at least some critical issues are caused by mistakes of the management and unless management can accept blame for own mistakes retrospectives won't really work.

</comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this a question of how "hierarchy" is handled? I work in software too and here everybody is basically equal when it comes to pitching ideas and input. The decisions are bundled around the team leads and managers but they welcome input and suggestions to improve for everybody. The managers jobs is just to manage resources and not to be a king or a general in an army (and thus being full of themselves).

"Traditional industry" is based heavily in "I'm paid more, therefore I'm better than you" and those people just don't want to hear what was wrong about their decisions. These industries are driven by the magnates, the admirals and the kings of the world for centuries so that's how their structures evolved to mimic this.

Software is new, it has a different set of goals and different means to achieve it. Make it better for everyone and be more productive VS. make yourself look good and shit on everybody else that isn't directly useful for your benefit.

You will find outliers in each direction in each industry. The fundamental difference is: Do I accept others as my peers because my role is just "manager" (to perform the management function) OR Do I want to cover my ass as much as possible and gain an advantage over everybody under my command?

I worked in Kitchens, Trash removal, Callcenters, Hotels, Banking ... it all boils down to "Am I treating people as other human beings or as resources I can shuffle around to my advantage".

It is the latter that your parents are most likely complaining about and something that the lavish financial freedoms in the software world -paired with the freedom to do away with traditional hierarchy- have afforded people to deal with differently. You will still find assholes in software and good people in "traditional" industry.

</comment><comment><USER9> Have you done any research before posting? Read up on LEAN manufacturing, Kanban, and how it evolved into the methods you use today that you think are "new" :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I'm perfectly aware that LEAN and Kanban originate in traditional manufacturing. But I'm not seeing those methods being anywhere near as widespread in fields other than software nowadays, at least not in my country (New Zealand), hence the question.

<comment><USER10> Do your parents work in the public sector by any chance?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A project management methodology, widely used in Hong Kong, the UK and Europe called PRINCE2 includes an issue register and lesson log which kind of maps back to team retrospectives. These logs are supposed to be taken into account when initiating future projects.

</comment><comment><USER12> > Ask HN: Why aren't 'team retrospectives' a thing in 'traditional' > industries?

They are.

> However, most 'traditional' industries don't seem to be adopting this > seemingly superior way or working.

The software industry actually got this from a variety of related things in traditional manufacturing, particularly lean methods; it's not universal in traditional industry, but then, it's not universal in software, even in places claiming to be using agile methods (which are often doing top-down cargo cult variants of Scrum.)

</comment><comment><USER13> The point of 'agile' is that it's self-organizing. If a team isn't empowered to self-organize, there there's little value in holding retrospectives. Same goes for those agile teams that don't have the means, motivation, or too much inertia to change. A better question would be "why don't more industry use self-organizing teams (aka be agile)?" To a large part, many industries have already been optimized in some aspect and set in that way.

</comment><comment><USER14> In the military they are called After Action Reports.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been doing software for a long time and, I've got to tell you, your company is far from typical. In my experience, the typical retrospective is little more than a circle jerk session for sicophants.

</comment><comment><USER16> _Is there something special about software with the level of introspection workers in this industry are expected to do, which cannot (or shouldn't) be done elsewhere?_

It's not so much software, more engineering in general. You do find rigorous self-review and continuous process improvement in many areas of engineering (more commonly called quality control), Toyota being the obvious example.

However, you are right that most industries aren't like that. Compared to engineering most industries are very 'soft' in that correct results don't really matter or can't even be defined.

Take industries like marketing, retail, law, management consultancy. Look at the output of your average office worker in these fields. Most likely their output is in the form of Word documents, PowerPoints, maybe some Excel. Is the last ad campaign your firm ran "correct"? Did the management consultant who breezed around your corridors earlier give advice "efficiently"? Did the lawyer who botched your paperwork ever face any consequences for that or did they just go, oops, and do it again?

The vast majority of workers work in environments in which the connection between input and output isn't very clear, and in which being wrong is less important than having the right relationships with people. In such an environment a retrospective would not only be pointless but actively harmful:

\- A retro inevitably involves frank discussion of people's work, and whether it was acceptable or not. _Most people cannot separate criticism of their work from criticism of themselves_.

\- Therefore having your work be openly criticised makes you likely to dislike the person criticising you.

\- So people may simply turn around and blame their colleagues or management for their own failings instead.

\- Therefore the idea of frankly discussing a team's failures in ANY kind of setting, whether it's called a "retro" or otherwise, is largely anathema in many lines of work.

In engineering professions what we do _must_ work and it _must_ be correct, and it's very clear to everyone if we make mistakes. Therefore a culture develops in which people can separate criticism of work from criticism of themselves, in which people aren't usually called out specifically for their errors, and in which systems thinking dominates. The answer to "why did this project suck" isn't "because so-and-so couldn't make their mind up" which is the sort of answer you're liable to get from non-engineers. It's "our planned process didn't correctly refine our requirements from the start". Totally different mentality.

</comment><comment><USER17> We do scrum(sort of) and the last retro I had was last year... so, not only in "traditional" industries</comment>


Wells Fargo says hundreds of customers lost homes after computer glitch - <AUTHOR> https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/04/news/companies/wells-fargo-mortgage-modification/index.html <comment><USER2> In my experience, mortgage originators rely on box-checking to get mortgages to pass. They make no decisions; it's an amoral, automatic process which happens to be much less efficient than it could be as the industry clings to the idea that homebuyers need to talk to someone on the phone and the people in seats are actually necessary.

Around 2013, WF Mortgage denied me a refinance on a property. It was my primary home (high-rise condo) when I bought it, then it became a rental. The reason for the denial was, my condo unit was in the same building as a hotel (downtown in a city), so it was labelled a "condotel". This was a shock to me. After researching condotels, I explained that the definition did not fit my property, but it didn't matter to WF. This was frustrating to me because WF originated the original mortgage when I purchase the property in 2007, and I never missed a payment. The refinance would lower my payment significantly due to lower interest and a large chunk of the principal that I paid down. They did not care at all. They all but told me to fuck off and stop calling them. It was like they wanted anti customer loyalty. I used Quicken Loans for the refinance--no problems.

<comment><USER3> > due to lower interest

well, follow the money. why would they sell you a product that makes them _less_ money if they have a material reason to deny it? Think like an insurance company: if you have a technical reason to deny paying a claim, you should absolutely do so, because it means less money for you (the ins. co).

<comment><USER4> This is not logical. WF now makes nothing from the financing of the place rather than simply less than originally. They should understand that there's a market and someone else will do the refi.

<comment><USER3> I missed the last sentence where he said he went with a competitor

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm chronically ashamed by the degree of tolerance to shoddy work in our field.

If software engineers were held to the same standard as civil engineers, people would go to jail. I empathize humans make mistakes, but I've also known programmers who just don't care about striving toward perfect, bug-free code. In some cases it's just a job not a passion, in others they're overworked and learned it doesn't pay to go slowly and correctly.

Kudos to all of you true craftsmen out there who do take care and pride in the quality of your work.

<comment><USER6> > I'm chronically ashamed by the degree of tolerance to shoddy work in our > field.

The vast majority of people in every field are producing average or shoddy work. Just the way it goes.

Most people (myself included) have other things to focus on– family, health, finances, hobbies. I'd much rather screw something up at work than something that really matters to me.

<comment><USER7> _I'd much rather screw something up at work than something that really matters to me._

That's OK right up until the point screw-ups materially impact other people's lives. I mean noone cares about some cheesy website sure, but these are people's _homes_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That 20k per foreclosure is probably not going to even cover Wells Fargo's legal expenses following this. They're going to be sued not just for the loss of value/equity caused by a foreclosure but for the ongoing costs of loss of a home - possibly more expensive shorter term housing, the credit damage of a foreclosure (and increased costs due to that), legal expenses, possible loss of employment due to having to move or having no stable home, etc.

What Wells Fargo did was take people already on the edge and throw an anvil at them.

<comment><USER9> More like it took people already over the edge, and didn't throw them the rope to pull them back. These were people already going down in foreclosure, who didn't get special assistance. Very bad, but not an anvil.

<comment><USER10> Seems more like pushing them over. Foreclosure isn't a natural phenomenon. Wells Fargo had to make it happen.

<comment><USER11> True, foreclosures need to be initiated. What should a bank do about a mortgage thats 3 months delinquent? Should they just stop collecting?

If its possible that they can reasonably modify the loan to terms that make repayment feasible, they should as it's a win-win, not because they are contractually obligated to in any way. But if given what they know about the property and the borrower's income, there is no feasible way to mod the loan, prudence requires that they foreclose.

This "bug" mistakenly put people in the wrong category.

<comment><USER10> Right, so, instead of helping people back from the edge of the cliff, they shoved them off.

The answer to your question seems to be that they should examine the account and offer a loan modification if certain conditions are met. They failed at this for these people. That other people aren't eligible for modification and would be foreclosed on regardless is not relevant here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With a company like Wells Fargo that's moving from scandal to scandal I wonder when is it enough and we should just close the company? They repeatedly have demonstrated that they are not able to engage in ethical business practices.

<comment><USER13> Sadly, they are too big to close/fail.

<comment><USER14> Ok. How about we forgive every outstanding mortgage they hold? They're so big, they can take a hit, right?

What's that? They don't hold many mortgages? They sell them all upstream? Then why are they foreclosing? But it's a good point that they have such easy access to the secondary market. How about we cut that off, too?

Maybe they are too big to fail overnight. But we can do it in bites. Diminish one piece of their business at a time. Eventually (sooner than you think) they can be trimmed back to a manageable size. But we should start right away. With their track record, each new infraction should result in the death penalty for some piece of their empire.

Then again, we don't need the government to punish them. We just need account holders to close their accounts. If people are not willing to do this, why should the government that represents those people get involved? One reasonable thing that the government could do is require WF to pay the refinance fees for anybody who wants to move their mortgage (or even the servicing of their mortgage) away from WF. Then people can impose a personal penalty on WF without any cost to themselves except the time and effort to go through the process. If we are fed up enough, we could even require WF to buy down the refi to the same interest rate. But that would only benefit recent mortgages who should have known better to begin with.

<comment><USER15> I'm a Wells Fargo account holder. I haven't closed my account. I don't really see a reason to. The other big banks are just as amoral, and they would screw their customers in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it. The main difference between Wells Fargo and other banks is that Wells Fargo got caught.

I wouldn't consider a local bank or a credit union, because I like being able to find a branch anywhere in the country, and small/local financial institutions are not exempt from bad behavior either. They also tend to have significantly inferior online banking and mobile apps.

Closing my account would just mean moving from one amoral giant bank to another.

<comment><USER12> Do you really need a branch anywhere in the country? My credit union has ATMs everywhere which is good enough for me. I go to a branch maybe once per year if at all.

<comment><USER16> I'm with the parent on this... I switched from BoA to a local bank after having a fantastic customer service experience getting a mortgage there, and wanting to support local instead of megacorps.

No online check sending, no mobile check deposit, very few ATMs, doesn't accept Zelle, and doesn't integrate with Mint (Mandatory 2FA issues). I miss the BoA features and regret the move.

<comment><USER12> My credit union (Baxter) has all of these. I think it's still good to avoid the big guys but I guess you have to check if your local bank or credit union is suitable for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> i work for a bank. my coworkers are mostly not very competent. also sometimes when we move to a new system we don't get the actual business logic. we just reverse engineer it from the data. the people who knew how it worked were laid off a long time ago

<comment><USER18> Why is that? Is it because of low pay?

<comment><USER19> Government style bureaucracy with MBA management culture, heavy risk management, and constant growth by acquisition.

Some roles pay very well, but are inflexible and boring. I knew a guy making $180k as a contractor to be a storage engineer. His _entire_ job was fulfilling SAN zoning requests. He ended up bootstrapping a startup just to stay sane.

<comment><USER17> Yeah there's a thousand vice presidents at my location that make 160k which in TX is a high wage. they don't have high productivity compared to a real tech company. it's all manual bureaucratic work.

<comment><USER19> I had a grand-uncle was a bank Vice President. His main responsibility was reading the obituaries of about 25 papers and making sure relatives didn't open the safe deposit boxes before probate.

Not sure of salary, but his schtick was 12 month leases of black Cadillacs, so it was pretty good. :)

<comment><USER17> vp is nothing at a bank but i guess it looks good on a resume lol

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting that mistakes like this tend to be in the big co's favor. You never read about 400 people getting a free home due to a bug.

<comment><USER21> There are stories about people who stopped paying their mortgage and got away with it because the mortgage had been resold several times and there wasn't clear paperwork about who owned it. But these may be urban legends.

<comment><USER22> Nope, it really happened:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/business/economy/25gret.h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/business/economy/25gret.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When the result of a decision is to _kick someone out of their damned home_ , why the hell isn't it someone's job to read that family's file cover-to-cover before pulling the trigger? That is NOT the time to rely on any auto-push- button software.

<comment><USER24> Because it would cost money to pay someone to read the file.

For a corporation, _every moment_ is the time to rely on auto-push-button, wage avoiding software.

Corporations are amoral at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> To spare a few the arithmetic: Wells Fargo set aside $8 million for compensation; divided among 400 persons, this works out to $20,000 each.

<comment><USER11> That actually sounds like a pretty reasonable amount, given that the borrowers likely had close to 0% equity in the homes they owned.

<comment><USER26> I guess you don't realize that closing costs on a home are between 2 and 5% of the purchase price?

There's something called the "the five year" rule, which is generally considered the amount of time it takes to recoup the closing costs of a home purchase [1]

Now add the price of two relocations - moving into the house and moving out of the house.

These folks are like if they net anything more than a few grand on this.

[1] [https://moneyning.com/housing/the-five-year-rule-for- buying-...](https://moneyning.com/housing/the-five-year-rule-for-buying-a- house/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Do you Bank with Wells Fargo?

I do. I've beeen gradually winding down my account, and will soon feel even better than I did when I got rid of Comcast.

Check out the Credit Unions in your area. They're usually great!

<comment><USER28> Good for you and you should celebrate when you finally close your account. I'll go so far as to say that anyone who willfully banks with Wells Fargo has blood on their hands. This is an immoral company.

To say that you won't switch banks because they're all just as bad is absurd. That's just a lazy excuse by a lazy person in my opinion. I'll take downvotes for my negative post but Wells Fargo screwed me any my family over severely during the recession and it took years to dig out of that mess. Not a single Wells Fargo employee so much as feigned an apology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This 'glitch' feels like a stretch. People were going to lose their homes so they would have followed up with the bank, so there would be support staff, escalations, and multiple departments and chains involved to fix any genuine glitch, so is Well Fargo saying that their entire process failed?

For instance if a billion dollars lands in your account, do you think there will be no process to fix the 'computer glitch'?

<comment><USER30> Yes, funny how these errors seem to always work out in the big company's favor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can't wait for the next round of apology commercials.

<comment><USER32> Established 1852. Re-established in 2018. Re-re-established in June 2018. Re- re-re-established in August 2018.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This affected my sister's friend supposedly. He's been living with her and her family for the last few months. Nice guy, but it is a bit awkward having this stranger show up whenever she stops by with the rest of her family.

</comment><comment><USER34> I know GDPR isn't very popular with some users of this site, but the rights related to automated decision making are a wonderful thing.

</comment><comment><USER35> Did this happen to you?

If you or anyone you know lost a home because of Wells Fargo's error, reporter Deon Roberts would like to hear from you. Contact him at firstname.lastname@example.com or (704) 358-5248.

</comment><comment><USER36> Buy Bitcoin, let the crooked bans.

<comment><USER37> Don't confuse evil for incompetence.

<comment><USER38> There's a scene in The Big Short involving discussion over the rise in subprime mortgage bond prices despite an increase in mortgage defaults:

Mark Baum: "That's not stupidity. That's fraud."

Jared Vennett: "Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal, and I'll have my wife's brother arrested."</comment></comment></comment>


What Is Apple Secretly Downloading From Your iPhone at Night? - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5599621/

<comment><USER2> Nothing. If you read past the flaming click baiting headline you will find that this is just an AT&T billing anomaly where they aggregate transfers and bill them late at odd times.</comment>