Report: FBI moves to interview Clinton over emails - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/274840-report-clinton-could-be-interviewed-by-fbi-within-days <comment><USER2> I can't believe there's even discussion about this. The facts are clear. Hillary Clinton didn't like the onerous security rules she had to follow so she ignored them. details: [http://observer.com/2016/03/hillary-has-an-nsa- problem/](http://observer.com/2016/03/hillary-has-an-nsa-problem/) If any of you have security clearance consider for a moment what would happen if you did the same. Your access would be suspended and you'd be called to account for every piece of information you mishandled. At the end you'd be prosecuted for any beech of secrecy that was discovered and your clearance would almost certainly be revoked.

If we treat her differently because of her name and her connections we call into question the very rule of law in this country. Maybe Anarchists would rejoice in such an outcome as proof of the utter corruption and uselessness of our justice system, but people who care about law and justice certainly shouldn't applaud it.

In her defense I agree that the security policies were silly and didn't actually increase security enough to warrant the disruption. I can totally understand that someone wouldn't want to comply.

On the other hand she was the goddamned Secretary of State, the person who should be most concerned about protecting information security in the State Department. Rather than thinking like a leader and working to set a policy that is both secure and usable she simply ignored the rules she didn't like.

Aside from questions of prosecution this behavior causes me to seriously question her ability to lead. If you had to classify her behavior in this case would you put in the category of things a leader does or things a petulant child does?

<comment><USER3> Question the rule of law -- has an upper or even upper middle white male ever received the death penalty in this country? It would be a good thing if poor black males weren't being executed left and right every year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't really understand this story.

If I read the LA Times article ([http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-clinton- email-probe-2016...](http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-clinton-email- probe-20160327-story.html)) which the main article links to; running a personal email server and using it for official business was not illegal at the time for mrs. Clinton.

Yet there is "roughly a dozen" FBI agents on the case.

Why would that be if it is slamduck that nothing illegal was going on?

<comment><USER5> It's hard to understand if you haven't handled classified information before. If the average DoD employee or military member did what she did (allegedly), they'd already be in prison. The only reason it's taking so long is because it's a high profile person. And, well... politics.

<comment><USER6> The "classified" information wasn't regarded as such at the time. It is only _now_ regarded as secret information through reclassification, likely stemming from political influence to ante up the charges against Clinton. That entails a responsibility to maintain secrecy from here on out but doesn't mean the original act (however stupid) was a breach of national security.

<comment><USER7> A big part of the whole security clearance process is determining the competency of the individual in recognizing incorrectly classified material. Saying that the designated markings were missing is no longer an excuse once you get the clearance. Over two thousand emails were determined to contain classified material, that is over two thousand opportunities to recognize how badly you've screwed up in using a private server for official government business. Twenty of those where classified top-secret, which is really difficult to mistake for uncontrolled information. I'm pretty sure that the issue of competency will be front and center during these interviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sure Clinton pushed to have this happen ASAP. She can't have this hanging over her when she gets to the general election.

<comment><USER9> More likely she would want to draw it out as much as possible so she could get immunity as president.

<comment><USER10> Presidents aren't immune to the law. But it's theoretically possible that she would be convicted and impeached, and then pardoned by Vice President Bill Clinton after he takes office.

<comment><USER11> This whole thread is a case study for why we just shouldn't host discussions like this on HN. There are a million better places to do it than here.

Clinton is probably not legally eligible to be Vice President --- a position that, were he to occupy it, would give him no authority over any prosecution (except possibly an impeachment trial --- over which he would _preside_ , but not control).

Clinton is _definitely_ not eligible to serve as President, even if he is the Vice President at the time his President is impeached. The next in succession after VP would be sworn in as President.

<comment><USER12> > There are a million better places to do it than here.

Where is there informed, intelligent, valuable discussion of politics? I'd love to find it.

<comment><USER13> Plug: I'm launching Discoverboard.com for this in a couple weeks

<comment><USER12> Great! How will you improve the quality over other boards?

<comment><USER13> You'll have to verify your phone number to sign up, which will make moderation more effective (hard to make an additional account after getting kicked out).

If it grows and that isn't enough to keep it respectful, I will add a $1-2 signup fee for new users.

I'm also going to be spending most of my time recruiting quality people to join the discussions.

<comment><USER12> Feedback from one potential user: I won't sign up if I can't do it anonymously. 1) I don't like being tracked, 2) the bad behavior of others who track users has made me resent the practice, and 3) people need to be able to express political opinions without thinking they will be tied to their phone numbers. It threatens the civil rights of unpopular minorities, and I've come across several studies which conclude that people self-censor in those situations.

But how to promote quality? One thing I would like to see is a forum that cracks down on thoughtless posts, especially hyperbole ad rants. It's not only a waste of time but that kind of behavior spreads like a virus.

<comment><USER13> While I empathize, anonymity makes moderation very hard. Most people I've talked to prefer the tradeoff of reduced anonymity for improved moderation. If you email me at firstname.lastname@example.com I can set you up with a pre-verified account that you can use anonymously.

Quality is hard. I don't think there's any silver bullet, but you can check out the community guidelines at discoverboard.com/about which hope to curtail the thoughtlessness you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note the pattern: Another attempt to trap a Clinton in a situation where it's illegal to lie (Bill to a Grand Jury, Hillary to an FBI officer).

Bill, way back in the 1990s before the testimony that caused all the problems, said that their only goal was to ask him damaging things under oath and then leak his responses or prosecute him for perjury. Remember that Bill was not testifying in a case about Lewinksy, but in an unrelated case regarding Paula Jones. But once he was under oath they just used it as a fishing expedition to achieve political ends.

Is this how we want our democracy to work? Probably law enforcement can find something to justify prosecuting or at least investigating anyone.

\-----

EDIT: It turns out FBI Director Comey has a history investigating the Clintons:

 _Comey's first brush with them came when Bill Clinton was president. Looking to get back into government after a stint in private practice, Comey signed on as deputy special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee. In 1996, after months of work, Comey came to some damning conclusions: Hillary Clinton was personally involved in mishandling documents and had ordered others to block investigators as they pursued their case. Worse, her behavior fit into a pattern of concealment: she and her husband had tried to hide their roles in two other matters under investigation by law enforcement. Taken together, the interference by White House officials, which included destruction of documents, amounted to "far more than just aggressive lawyering or political naiveté," Comey and his fellow investigators concluded. It constituted "a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct."

Comey parlayed the Whitewater job into top posts in Virginia and New York, returning to Manhattan in 2002 to be the top federal prosecutor there. One of his first cases as a line attorney in the same office 15 years earlier had been the successful prosecution of Marc Rich, a wealthy international financier, for tax evasion. But on his last day as President in 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned Rich. "I was stunned," Comey later told Congress. As top U.S. prosecutor in New York in 2002, appointed by George W. Bush, Comey inherited the criminal probe into the Rich pardon and 175 others Clinton had made at the 11th hour.

Despite evidence that several pardon recipients, including Rich, had connections to donations to Bill Clinton's presidential library and Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign, Comey found no criminal wrongdoing._

[http://time.com/4276988/jim-comey-hillary- clinton/](http://time.com/4276988/jim-comey-hillary-clinton/)

<comment><USER14> Are you seriously saying you'd prefer the US president be allowed to lie?

If that is not what you're saying, please phrase it clearly and directly, and not by implying.

<comment><USER12> > you'd prefer the US president be allowed to lie?

Of course I'd prefer a completely trustworthy person as president, but such people don't exist. I think law enforcement can find a reason to investigate anyone, including any candidate or President; once an investigation starts, it can be used as a fishing expedition and lead anywhere, for the reasons I described above. That's a risk to our democracy; law enforcement could have a veto, to a degree, over the American people's choices.

By the way, let's tone it down. By your demands, one might think I'm the one being deposed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not that it would ever happen, but would love to tune into cspan for this

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a very thinly sourced article.

It's surprising that "law enforcement officials" would be sharing details about this incredibly high profile case, but only with a reporter for AJAM, a channel that is in its last weeks on the air. And that presented with such a big scoop, Al Jazeera apparently hasn't even bothered to post an article about it to their website. So there's just an unofficial clip of what the reporter said on the air in a brief report floating around. Not saying it's false... it's just very thinly sourced.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Reports about the number of federal agents assigned to the Clinton probe have ranged from roughly a dozen to fewer than 50."

That's not a range.

<comment><USER18> Yes it is. There were multiple estimates. The lowest was "roughly a dozen" the highest was "less than 50". The two ends of the range use different units and have different significant figures because they came from two different calculations.

In theory the author could have tried to unify those points on the same number line with the same sig figs, but I'm not even sure what the rules are for ranges built from two separate calculations. If there even is a rule you'd get something like "range from 10 to 50" and only math geeks would have a clear picture of what those zeroes really mean, and even they would've lost the "not 50" and "quite possibly less than 10" information the existing phrasing provides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So what would an interview like this entail?

<comment><USER20> Some have speculated that it could be an honest Q&A with the former SoS based on their findings (to get an official response). Others are speculating that it could be a chance to actually catch her in a lie, based on their findings ("Five months ago, you stated X, is that still true?" having evidence that X is no longer true).

Pure speculation, of course, but man would I like to be a fly on THAT wall...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If Aaron Schwartz faced decades in jail for piracy what the tax payer financed, how much time should Clinton face?

<comment><USER22> He was wrongly charged under the CFAA which does not apply here. Sen. Ron Wyden (OR) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (CA) have been pushing for "Aaron's Law" to curb the judicial abuse of the CFAA in cases like Aaron's and many others. They need all the support they can get to have this legislation pushed through. They are both Clinton supporters, btw.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/aarons-law- reintroduce...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/aarons-law-reintroduced- cfaa-didnt-fix-itself)

<comment><USER23> >wrongly charged

Source? Everyone familiar with the law seems to disagree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Someone is going to take the fall for Clinton if they actually press criminal charges against anyone even if, morally and ethically, it is really on her.

Honestly, Clinton should at a minimum be banned from handling classified information in the future.

<comment><USER25> > Clinton should at a minimum be banned from handling classified information > in the future.

That sounds like a good idea for many more politicians of this world.

<comment><USER26> That's a terrible idea.

We need less classified information, not less access to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's very important that this business is concluded before the Democratic Party's convention, beginning July 25th.

Otherwise it is a threat to democracy. The FBI would essentially choose the next president if they took down one of the two nominees. Consider that they could do that in any election, federal, state or local. Also consider that the FBI's employees are, as far as I know, overwhelmingly Republican, and that in the past the FBI has illicitly tried to influence politics (under J. Edgar Hoover, for example).

Even now they are letting this go on much too long and exercising far too much influence. Crimes should be investigated appropriately; I don't think candidates should get a pass. I do question whether the investigation is out of proportion to the crime; many use personal email for official business and many mishandle classified info (including multiple past CIA directors) with no significant penalty.

<comment><USER6> > I don't think candidates should get a pass.

Nor should their opposition have the power to delay proceedings until such a time as it is politically advantageous to them. This should have been dealt with last year.</comment></comment>


China's Newest Stealth Fighter Takes Flight - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/china-stealth-first-flight/

<comment><USER2> Looks like it (like the j-20) still has traditional nozzles in back. Not so stealthy from behind.

Good way to sneak up on an AWACS over the strait though. Who cares if you get whacked by escorts on the way back?

<comment><USER3> AWACS, P8's, tankers. Lots of HVTs that wouldn't stand a chance against a fast stealth interceptor with decent missiles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't put it past the Chinese to put out something for show without actually having the functional equipment under the hood. Stealth is hard -- sensors have the potential to leak radiation, communications can be picked up on, etc. Just because the Chinese have something flying that looks stealth doesn't mean they're any closer than we thought they were.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. If there are two things the Chinese aren't good at, it's science and engineering.

<comment><USER6> ... Take your racism somewhere else.

Or provide some empirical data that proves that your not just an ignorant racist.

EDIT (in light of response): My apologies if this is indeed sarcasm. No need to take that somewhere else, instead I can take my 'complete lack of understanding sarcasm' somewhere else. :)

<comment><USER7> I think he was being sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps it's a function of its stealth capabilities, but that sure looks really similar to an F-22 (<http://tinyurl.com/bambe72>).

<comment><USER9> There was some drama about China possibly obtaining US stealth technology during Yugoslavia. There is an even more crazy conspiracy theory going on that this is why we bombed their embassy.

<comment><USER10> It's not conspiracy theory, BUAA professor claim they have got pieces from F-117

<http://jpk.buaa.edu.cn/2007jpk/bjsjpk/fjztsj/jxlx/jxlx.htm>

11m35s

at BUAA that piece in question is in public display

[http://www.hobbyshanghai.com.cn/data/attachment/forum/201205...](http://www.hobbyshanghai.com.cn/data/attachment/forum/201205/05/144546svqbiwggkicxepsp.jpg)

<comment><USER11> 第1個鏈接不能打開啊!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Time to start naming stealth spaceships. I vote "X-B Respect for Elders" for the next test flight.</comment>


Organization Hit by Microsoft Office365 Phishing Campaign - <AUTHOR> https://blog.vairav.net/2020/08/16/600-organization-hit-by-microsoft-office365-phishing-campaign/ <comment><AUTHOR> Vairav Technology has uncovered a Microsoft office365 phishing campaign using a spoofed email address and has targeted more than 600+ organizations worldwide.</comment>


Should we all be looking for marginal gains? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34247629 <comment><USER2> This has some cute anecdotes, but is overall a pretty intellectually flimsy argument. The summary is basically "when given a concrete metric, humans are really good at optimizing to it. These improvements compound, and dramatic qualitative changes can result from many tiny incremental steps."

For anyone in computing, where we've seen improvement of 5+ orders of magnitude in the past 50 years, this should hardly be a new insight.

No effort is made to examine the trade-off between tackling tiny marginal problems vs. rethinking more fundamental assumptions and practices. Likewise, there's no consideration of whether the metrics involved (e.g. reduction of liability insurance premiums, number of hot-dogs eaten during a contest, success at exams, or toolbar click-through rate) are the most important things to optimize, or indeed if by spending great effort optimizing for those specific criteria we might create unexpected costs and side effects that we won't necessarily even know about.

I shouldn't be too hard on the author I guess... he's just trying to promote his new self-help book.

<comment><USER3> I think the contrast shouldn't be with rethinking fundamental assumptions, which is another good but rare activity. It should be with assuming that things are pretty much as good as they get, or assuming that small wins aren't worth bothering with. Because that's where a lot of businesses are all the time. Computer hardware is very much the exception.

If you want an example of where this matters, the car industry is a great example. In Rother's "Toyota Kata", he has a graph showing productivity per worker among big auto firms. The large car companies all rise together until the 60s and then plateau. Toyota, which had a very strong focus on continuous improvement just kept on rising for decades. This enabled them to go from Japan's post-war decimation to become the world's largest car maker while the others stagnated.

And I should add that continuous improvement is a good way to drive fundamental rethinking. The only way to get long-running continuous improvement is to pay a great deal of attention to how things actually are working. Eventually you will say, "Well, now that we've solved a bunch of little things, the biggest bottleneck is X". But changing X forces fundamental reevaulations.

For example, consider software release. Unreleased software is like inventory just sitting around the factory. You've paid money to make it, but it's not earning any money for you.

Years ago, quarterly and annual release cycles were common. The last part of the cycle was when a large, manual QA team would beat up the whole product. As we have kept squeezing release cycles, this has forced all sorts of innovation. At my last couple of companies, we've used continuous deployment, where every commit to master is automatically tested and deployed to production. These small teams averaged a few releases a day and had no QA people. Etsy has 50+ releases a day [1]. If you were to describe this to people 20 years ago, they'd call you insane; it's a fundamentally different view of how software gets made. But we've gotten there via 15 years of continuous improvement.

[1] [http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/03/etsy-deploy-50-times-a- day](http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/03/etsy-deploy-50-times-a-day)

<comment><USER4> To be fair, quarterly and annual release cycles were common when software was a physical product. Games had to sell retail, and enterprise software still needed to deliver disks. Until the early 2000s there was no point in continuous integration because your release process still had to be waterfall - you were gated by extremely slow physical processes like retail outlet logistics.

Once continuous deployment to the end user was possible (via the internet), the industry started following suit. And nowadays there is still something similar for iPhone developers - you're gated by the Apple app store, which doesn't have to be slow, but somehow still is. (This has important implications like having to backload a huge amount of testing before app submission because you can't be certain of how quickly you'll be able to release a frontend patch).

<comment><USER3> Sure, the shift in delivery mechanisms provided a lot of incentive to move to faster deployment.

But I should note that a great deal of software in ye olden dayes was in-house software, and that still ran on 3-18 month cycles. And that wasn't because of technological limitations; my dad was delivering new versions of software every few days even in the 70s. It's just that the conceptual model and the dogma pushed in the direction of long, heavily-planned release cycles. The Internet's main contribution here was to make short cycles not only possible for commercial releases, but competitively advantageous in an obvious way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Patrick doesn't seem to be here yet, so I'll deliver his line for him: This is the human version of making lots of small tweaks to your website and to your advertising. If you can find a 1% improvement to your advertising clickthrough rate and a 1% improvement to your conversion rate every day, by the end of the month you'll have nearly doubled your sales.

<comment><USER6> A smart friend of mine in publishing (now a retired multi-millionaire) once said to me, "Successful publishing businesses never stop looking for ways to improve revenue 5% at a time."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article looks like somebody read some books and summarized parts of them with a common theme without adding anything, I know because I read some of those books. Still a good summary.

<comment><USER8> I felt the same way. The sport optimizations I felt like we're from Faster, Higher, Stronger. The hot dogs I read about in the chapter on outsiders and innovation, maybe in a Freakonomics book. I know I read the hospital and checklists before too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Marginally related: an entertaining exhibition table tennis match between the author (Syed) and Barney Reed (worked at Google) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ug0qbmi2Kw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ug0qbmi2Kw)

</comment><comment><USER10> For the public at large this might be a new argument. For us here on HN it's old news, though. Maybe since 2012 here and there we often see articles that show that you shouldn't just focus on the most efficient optimizations. Remember that article that showed that the Facebook PHP compiler was slowly beaten by the their interpreter, because people step by step optimized the interpreter and did just more of that than the compiler guys, and they could also only fight back by doing all the little things, just a lot of them?

</comment><comment><USER11> When you've taken care of the larger gains, sure.

But don't start with the minutiae, start with the fundamentals.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was surprised at the book promoted at the end. I was positive this was going to a revised excerpt from Faster, Higher, Stronger by Mark McClucsky.

<comment><USER12> Given the Tour de Fukushima this year, you would be forgiven for thinking such a thing.

British cycling is hilarious; whatever they are doing is going to trickle into all power/weight sports.</comment></comment>


The World's Most Sarcastic Product Review: Samsung Galaxy S4 vs. iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/15/the-world-s-most-sarcastic-product-review-samsung-galaxy-s4-vs-iphone-5.html <comment><USER2> this 'S Health' add-on is interesting. I guess mhealth is the place to be right now.</comment>


Why so little looting in Japan? It's not just about honesty. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2288514 <comment><USER3> _They're good at their jobs, too: The clearance rate for murder in 2010 was an unbelievable 98.2 percent, according to West—so unbelievable that some attribute it to underreporting._

High clearance rates don't mean police are good at their jobs. Police in Japan can hold a suspect for 23 days without charging him. During this period, they try to get a confession out, using techniques such as sleep deprivation. Furthermore, once you get to trial, it is usually with only a judge, not a jury. All levels are pushed to keep up this high conviction rate. So just because the rate is 98%, this doesn't mean justice was actually served at that rate.

<comment><USER4> How does the judge/jury distinction come into play? Is there empirical evidence that trials with juries have more accurate outcomes?

I truly know nothing about this but my gut feeling has always been that juries don't improve trials and I never perceived that as a strange or uncommon view.

<comment><USER3> Judges face bureaucratic pressure to maintain high conviction rates. According to the following paper, it can have negative effects on a Judge's career if he appears to be lenient:

<http://www.rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen-01.JLS.jpncon.pdf>

<comment><USER5> Only in a system where judges are elected, like the US. Many, if not most European countries (to discuss the examples I'm familiar with) appoint judges and have had a jury trial system until the beginning of the 20th century. It was abandoned after it was found to be easy to manipulate on a regular basis. Jury trials degenerated into character trials - prosecution would try to discredit the accused, and defense would try to paint him as a pillar of the community. Juries placed too much weight on their personal feeling towards the accused, and too less on what happened and what the evidence was.

We like to hope that the US system solved this problem, of course.

<comment><USER6> I believe only a few US states elect judges; they're usually appointed.

<comment><USER7> Even if a judge is appointed, there could still be public outrage over the perception of low conviction rates. This would cause another judge to be appointed. The same thing goes on with cabinet positions of all levels of government where the public demonstrates outrage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> High human capital, perhaps? I would hazard the educational/ cultural level of a japanese high school grad about equals that of an American state univ grad (I is one, so I can criticize). Nobody would be surprised SF State got hit by an earthquake and the students didn't loot. (The low educational and cultural level of the US is embarassing....)

<comment><USER9> What the hell is a "cultural level"?

How do I gain additional "culture"?

<comment><USER10> I recommend building theaters or deploying Great Artists.

<comment><USER5> There are some wonders with empire wide effects that may be a cheaper way to improve culture. Look into those. One may argue RL Japan has a lot of those: the Shinto shrines, the temples, the castles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These stories have the odor of propaganda to them.

I'd argue that there's no looting because refugees are penned up in shelters inland, and the coastal towns are pretty much gone.

In Katrina and Haiti, people were stuck in the immediate area of destruction, and didn't have anywhere to go. Remember the guy blogging from the datacenter in New Orleans during the Hurricane? The whole city broke down, there was nowhere to go. In Haiti, the whole place was barely functioning before the earthquake.

</comment><comment><USER12> So little looting? Hate to burst your bubble, but the Japanese news is full of scammers pocketing money "for earthquake victims", people stealing from charity boxes, and looting.

Yes, looting. I can't find many news articles other than in Japanese, but here we go. Just use Google translate (<http://translate.google.com/>).

Since the earthquake, there were over 250 cases of looting in Sendai alone.

[http://www.jiji.com/jc/eqa?g=eqa_date3&k=2011031900317](http://www.jiji.com/jc/eqa?g=eqa_date3&k=2011031900317)

Here's a nice article that mentions people trying to break into ATMs right after the quake.

[http://www.jiji.com/jc/eqa?g=eqa_date2&k=2011032000211](http://www.jiji.com/jc/eqa?g=eqa_date2&k=2011032000211)

Here's just one about stealing from charity boxes. There were probably 4 or 5 articles today.

[http://www.jiji.com/jc/eqa?g=eqa_date2&k=2011032000250](http://www.jiji.com/jc/eqa?g=eqa_date2&k=2011032000250)

Stuff is happening, it's just not getting translated into your news.

<comment><USER13> While that is true, I think the looting cases there could be viewed as an exception, as compared to widespread looting that happens just after natural disaster anywhere else in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Whether Japan is the ideal or not, society needs to reward productive, mutually beneficial action and discourage parasitic behavior. We couldn't even plant crops if other people could easily reap the results.

The US has been failing at that quite a bit in some areas of the economy. We encourage unwise risk taking, while shifting the consequences to those who produce. That is unscalable and unsustainable.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how many people returning lost goods actually claim the 5-20% they're entitled to. I lost my bag once (with my wallet in it). I went to the police box closest to the area where I'd lost it, and of course they had it. Someone had picked it up and turned it in. The officer I talked to explained to me that the finder was entitled to a percentage, but had checked a box on the form waiving the finder's fee.

And to be honest, I don't think I'd claim anything either if I turned in someone's wallet.

</comment><comment><USER16> I work with a Japanese woman she's about 30 years-old and has been here in Canada for at least ten years (a guess) and I can confirm that she is polite and courteous to the extreme.

It's embarrassing to see the contrast of some of my fellow Canadian co- workers' manners they eat with their mouths open, talk with food in their mouth, suck their teeth, turn up the TV in the break room with others in there just because they want to watch TV, walk in front of elderly people - <USER2> infuriatingly self-centered.

Customers at work keep asking her about Japan and if her family was injured and she politely answers they're OK but day after day people keep asking as if they think they are the first to think to ask her the obvious instead of having some common sense and keep their mouths shut.

People think of Canadians as polite but Japan certainly holds the top spot for manners of all nations on this planet if all Japanese people are like my co- worker friend.

If we ever had a disaster here I know of at least one person who won't be opportunistic and rob me when I'm down.

<comment><USER17> There are disadvantages and advantages to politeness. A polite society tends to be more disconnected, less intimate and harder to make friends with in vs. a more intimate, but possibly a bit more "rude" society too:

[http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2005/0213/cover.h...](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2005/0213/cover.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >"Why don't Japanese loot? Because it's not in their culture. How is that culture defined? An absence of looting."

immediately followed by:

>A better explanation may be structural factors: a robust system of laws that reinforce honesty, a strong police presence, and, ironically, active crime organizations.

how is that in any way different from the circular definition the writer just criticized?

which I think indicates the real problem with the 'culture' argument; it's not that it's circular, it's that it is vague, which is why the rest of the (detailed) article is actually quite informative.

<comment><USER19> One is circular, one proposes a social mechanism whereby looting will lead to negative consequences for the looter. I'm having a hard time seeing what you think is not different about those two things.

<comment><USER18> Those social mechanisms are a part of culture. I find it hard to conceive a definition of culture that does not include the systems of negative consequences that a society enforces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The next time the entire state of Iowa floods, I want to see endless articles about why midwestern white people don't loot. Don't bother, here's the reason: _Most people don't loot_. The default "loot bit" on most people is firmly OFF.

In New Orleans, people loot. That also doesn't warrant a lot of analysis.

</comment><comment><USER21> Police in Japan are said to beat confessions out of suspects, even false ones[0]

[0] <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8290767.stm>

</comment><comment><USER22> I found it interesting that a lot of supermarkets in Japan _lowered_ their prices following the earthquake/tsunami.

This is despite the fact that they were disincentivised to do so because obviously the potential for profit on foods and commodities is high after a natural disaster.

</comment><comment><USER23> The bit about the response of criminal organizations is very interesting. I've heard odd rumors about Japanese career criminals, such as commonly going into the business fully expecting to go to jail. Can any one suggest books / docs on the subject? (Preferably non hollywood-ized).

<comment><USER24> The article cites Jake Adelstein and his book "Tokyo Vice", which is a good review of the Yakuza from a western perspective. He also contributes regularly at <http://www.japansubculture.com/>, which also features a lot of insight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been studying them for a few years now and will now offer my observations to those interested. The reason why there's no looting in Japan is a result of their uniquely homogeneous population combined with the unique culture that they have been forced to develop as a result of their perilous location, where there's a quake every 5 minutes on average, where tsunamis are so abundant they came up with the name 'tsunami' in the first place, and where there's no dearth of fires and typhoons.

To deal with this high probability of disaster, they have become ants(updated below). What's that? Ants live in a world where disasters many orders of magnitude more than an individual ant can handle, occur multiple times a day - colonies getting crushed by predators, flooded with water from human habitats, food they chance upon is multiple hundred times an individual ant's weight etc etc. To deal with this, they have evolved into the 'superorganism', which is a fancy word for saying every individual will put the community first and themselves second, which enables the whole colony to move and work as if it has -one and the same- mind. So if a colony gets destroyed, there's no looting or in-fighting in ant-colonies... they all move as if they possess the same mind, with the ants who were in-charge of foraging for food run out as a team to find the next suitable space for the colony while the ants in-charge of the colony' larvae protect it for the moment till the time is right to re-locate and so on.

Becoming a superorganism is the only way for the ants to deal with the catastrophe of the magnitude that they face everyday and still ensure the survival of the majority of the colony successfully - they have to put the colony first and the individual second. Unlike the simple minded ants, humans are far more intelligent, hence independent, than ants, making it harder for human societies to function with the kind of 'one-ness' the ant colonies show. But the Japanese, thanks to their largely homogeneous population, are the closest human equivalent to the superorganism.

Being in a country where they know that a disaster of such magnitude is inevitable, they have evolved into a culture of disaster recovery than disaster prevention -"It's not possible to prevent disasters, too numerous, too powerful. So let's focus on recovering from the disasters with the least cost to time, people and resources." They do this by being fast & efficient(you know where JIT, Kaizen come from) and function as if having the same mind (even their language has evolved to support this way of functioning with the strange third-person like way of speaking which I believe is called 気遣い, kidukai or consideration). By trying to become a superorganism, they achieve the same benefits that the ants do - incredibly fast and efficient disaster recovery, but they also show the same side-effects - no looting or in-fighting, fiercely protective of their homogeneity (again, their language has evolved to support this with something called Katakana where non-native words like 'Advanced Cartridge Slot' are turned into pure Japanese sounds - アドバンスカートリッジスロット which is pronounced as adobansukaatorijjisurotto, all native Japanese sounds), clearly visible patterns in the way they work, highly rigid social pecking order (Senpai+Kouhai, gekokujō), outliers will be punished and so on.

This unique culture is why they survived a 'surprise' nuclear attack (emphasis on surprise as it is many orders of magnitude easier to deal with something you know about than it is to deal with something that is happening for the first time in history) and came back to be who they are today. This is all made possible by their homogeneous population and such strategies will fall flat on its face anywhere outside of Japan.

Just my 2 cents.

update: My comparison with the ant-colonies is not meant to belittle the Japanese but to show how their community has evolved similar to the ant-colony superorganism. If tiger communities behaved like a superorganism I'd have used tigers. The focus of my comment is on the 'nature' of ants and not on their physical properties.

俺の国語より日本語上手いんだぜ。大好きっていうレヴェルで住むことじゃねよ。なんで好きな人たちの悪口言うわけ!

<comment><USER8> SInce I just downvoted you, and I hate downvotes without explanation, let me explain: The japanese are no more "ants" than, say, Southeast Asians. You may be correct in saying they have a society that values cooperation and that has developed norms and structures partly in response to common natural disasters. However you then slide into characterizing them as mere insects driven without the dignity of human choice, creativity, or spontaneity. And you come off sounding like a racist (though you are probably a good deal more complex in person).

Plus your post was way too long.

<comment><USER25> Tigers are not known for functioning as a superorganism, that's why I had to go with ants. See this video to know about the power of ants - Ants: Nature's Secret Power - Part 1: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwATgYaEku4>

In your mind, perhaps ants are 'little' and 'mere insects' but in my mind I see only those parts of them that apply to the discussion at hand.

Let me elaborate.

I never said they are 'no more than ants'. When I said 'they are ants', I meant it to be an intro to the analogy of how their society's functioning has similarities to the superorganism that is the ant colony, thus showing the same behaviors of stronger community, less in-fighting, rigid society and protective nature, which enables them to efficiently handle disasters that would cripple any other normal society, just like how ants can handle their entire colony being destroyed only to rebuild it anew in 2 days.

I also never said anything about them lacking choice, creativity or spontaneity. You will note my references to concepts they have pioneered - JIT, Kaizen, Katakana. Sony was built amidst the ashes of the war in a dilapidated building. There's so many more I could write a book.

Racism is not about -ignoring- differences. Racism is the opposite - recognizing the differences and still treating people the same -despite- the differences. I treat everyone the same.

Comment is long. It's the result of years of observation that started when I was 23 and first came to know that in Japan, the average delay per train throughout the year is a mere 0.4 minutes, including delays caused by typhoons, earthquakes, snowfall, heavy rain, and other natural disasters. It boggled my mind and I set out to learn more about the people who could make this happen. That comment is not meant for everyone but only for those curious about what makes the Japanese do the things they are renowned for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Perhaps it's a myth?

See: [http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/03...](http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/03/why- no-looting-in-japan-ctd-3.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> "The nail that stands out will be hammered down." -- Japanese Proverb

</comment><comment><USER28> Also, Japan's population is very old...average age is 45. Older people take far less risks than young people.

</comment><comment><USER29> One important note: _most_ Americans are honest and some will go well out of their way to do the right thing. I think there's actually more of the latter (people going well out of their way to help others) in the U.S. than in many other countries. If you lose something in the U.S. and there's a way for a person who finds it to return it to you, your odds are well above 50% of getting it back. Possibly 90%. This number is pretty constant across racial and geographic lines. Oddly enough, measured honestly rates tend to be slightly lower at the socioeconomic top and bottom than in the middle. At the bottom, it's because of economic desperation. At the top, it's because people are so used to a sense of winning and entitlement that they enjoy "beating the system". I'd argue that, at all levels, class-based resentments are the reason for lower levels of honesty among Americans.

Japan has something much closer to a "middle-class society" or classlessness than we do. They have rich and poor, but not in the way we do, and economic status doesn't persist over generations as in the U.S. For example, the earthquake victims are in for a very difficult few years-- more difficult than most people in the industrialized world ever experience-- but they're not going to fall to the bottom of society because of this. In the U.S., they easily could. I know PhDs in the U.S. who end up in $7/hour retail jobs after developing health problems, losing their jobs, their insurance, and their savings.

The biggest difference in the U.S. is that we have a large, angry underclass that (justly) considers itself failed by society and hates it. We also have a tiny but invincible upper class that gets away with literal robbery and tends to set the moral pace in our society: kids in academic cheating scandals generally say they're just preparing for the real world, and they're more accurate than we'd like to admit. "Most people cheat" is false, but "most of society's biggest winners are cheaters" is true.

I think the contempt for society and ethical behavior that you see in a visible few Americans is based in social class, not anything else. Every society has poor people, but our underclass comprises 20-40 percent of the population. It has a mix of people who've fallen into it recently (from the disintegrated bottom of the middle class) and who are angry, and it has families that have been in it for tens of generations and have been nurturing grudges forever. Also, not all looters and ruffians are in this underclass, because there are a lot of opportunistic middle-class people who adopt "thug" culture for kicks. In the U.S., we enable cultural illnesses (mean-spirited conservatism, religious bigotry, lower-class "thug" culture) that other societies have the sense of marginalize.

</comment><comment><USER30> A handful of broad claims, an abnormally high amount of data and decent writing, and discussions here ranging everywhere. So, because someone has to do it, and because I'm curious what his take on this is:

          00000
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Zoom in enhance: a Deep Learning based magnifying glass (part 2) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/idealo-tech-blog/zoom-in-enhance-a-deep-learning-based-magnifying-glass-part-2-c021f98ebede <comment><USER2> We just released a major update of our Keras based image super resolution project. Now you can super-scale your images and run experiments very easily with RDNs and GANs.

In particular,

⭐ We've added some new cool stuff like VGG deep features + GANs to achieve amazingly realistic upscaled images

⭐ We provide a few more pre-trained weights as well as some Colab-notebook tutorials to play around

⭐ And the best thing our project is now available on PyPI! So you can just pip install your way to our project

If you want to know all details and results of the new update, check out our new blog post and also have a look at the documentation.

\- Blog: [https://medium.com/idealo-tech-blog/zoom-in-enhance-a- deep-l...](https://medium.com/idealo-tech-blog/zoom-in-enhance-a-deep- learning-based-magnifying-glass-part-2-c021f98ebede)

\- Documentation: [https://idealo.github.io/image-super- resolution/](https://idealo.github.io/image-super-resolution/)

\- Github: [https://github.com/idealo/image-super- resolution/](https://github.com/idealo/image-super-resolution/)

\- Colab (prediction): [https://colab.research.google.com/github/idealo/image- super-...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/idealo/image-super- resolution/blob/master/notebooks/ISR_Prediction_Tutorial.ipynb)

\- Colab (training): [https://colab.research.google.com/github/idealo/image- super-...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/idealo/image-super- resolution/blob/master/notebooks/ISR_Traininig_Tutorial.ipynb)</comment>


ParrotBot reads your GMail to you - <AUTHOR> http://www.parrotbot.com I drive to work and wanted to check and sort through my email without looking at my screen (which is not only illegal in California but dangerous as all hell). I wrote a little phone-based service that lets you dial a number and have a robot read you your email. You can take some pretty basic actions like Ignore, Archive, or Star so that your email looks cleaner by the time you get to your desk. It's definitely still rough on the edges, but curious what the HN community thinks of it. Would you guys & gals use it? <comment><USER2> If someone balks at the warning: "This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests. We recommend that you deny access unless you trust the website.", and clicks [Deny], they will receive a really ugly trace dump.

<comment><USER3> You don't even have to do that much. Just click the Get Started button without typing in anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes yes...there are bugs. :-)

<comment><USER4> I think I'm going to hold off on trying this after all, for security reasons. Seeing a stack trace/debug info is frightening because it's not just a bug, it's a configuration error that belies a certain lack of caution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting idea. Though, this seems like it would be much better suited as an Android/iOS/etc app to live on the phone itself.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps it still makes sense not to assume everyone on a car has internet access?

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason I went with a phone number is that phone calls generally play well with cars (in-car bluetooth headsets, etc...) whereas audio for apps usually has a harder time connecting to in-car devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This is awesome.

Now if you could only do Google Reader or RSS I might find a use for all those "rollover minutes" in my account.

<comment><USER7> my question is... would you pay to have someone read your RSS to you while you're driving/running/working out/etc ?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good question. I'm obviously curious about the answer as well. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I read the title I believed an AR.Drone from Parrot (<http://www.parrot.com/usa/>) would fly to me and read my mail ;-)

(They have an API I think so that may actually not be too far-fetched...)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great idea, BUT —

Isn't it true that it is fairly trivial for attackers to spoof the number they are calling "from"? If so, this could be a serious security weakness, couldn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Spoofing the phone number is not very hard. That said, you'd still need the PIN to gain access to the email. A 4 digit pin is not the most secure thing around, but the combo of the phone number and the PIN seems reasonably safe. Thoughts?

<comment><USER4> Wasn't aware of the PIN step. That does help. [You]† should definitely report failed attempts to log in, at least in an opt-in capacity.

 _† Edited from "they"_

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I will add it to the list of feature requests.

<comment><USER4> Thanks.

I realized why I missed the bit about the PIN:

1\. It is omitted from the steps in the main content area, and

2\. Due to a design neurosis I have, I did not process the bit at the top that talks about the PIN being required because my brain fixated on the different icon styles (Logo: what I think of as SVG style; Gmail: well, Gmail; Phone: Silk-esque; PIN/shield: Vista/Win 7). I trust the vast majority of your visitors will be able to retain the information you presented instead of doing whatever my own mind does…

Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. I think I'll try it out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool idea. Works pretty well if the message has a text version but if the message only has an HTML version it doesn't try to read it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It manages to read _some_ HTML emails but there are definitely still tons of rough edges. Turns out email parsing is not fun. :-)

<comment><USER10> I guess it should possible to run HTML emails through lynx (or some equivalent library) that just dumps the text?

If the email's a picture, oh well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a bad idea though lynx doesn't do a great job parsing HTML emails either, unfortunately. Turns out it's an annoying problem irrespective of the email "client"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very cool. If you add "respond with a voice message", it can help spread the Parrot goodness :)</comment>


Do you live under the fear that a YC company is about to demo what you working on? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> There was a great article on news.YC the other day about some of intuit's reasons for success. This quote stuck in my mind:

"Your competition isn't other companies, but the way things are done now"

There were like dozens of other companies working on personal finance software, and the intuit founder instead concentrated on his biggest foe: pen and paper. And hey, if it's a big enough market, it can support many different companies!

<comment><USER3> yeah, let's face it. You ALWAYS have to assume there is someone else out there doing the same thing you are doing. That shouldn't sway you though. The point is to do it better than them. Reading pg's book has great (and funny) commentary on dealing with the competition...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No, don't worry about someone else making something. Worry about how fast you can make it yourself. Worry about your community of users. But try to keep track of your competition.

<comment><USER5> Amen to that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have put a lot of thought into this. I was going to apply to the next YC class, and have had much encouragement to do so from my friends at google, however, I just got accepted to law school, and plan on continuing my project from there, maximizing the free legal advice I get from peers / professors.

Basically, from what I have read / researched / been told by people who-know- what-they-are-talking-about, competition in this field is actually a good sign:

1\. It means that someone else has decided your product/service is worthwhile enough to actually spend the time and energy to develop it. 'No competition' is very often a good indicator of 'Bad idea' or 'No market.'

2\. The market -- the internet market, anyway -- is vast. Facebook has 15M users, myspace 35M, linkedin 12.5, bebo 12.5... (plus or minus, who can even keep track anymore?). There is plenty of room for companies with competing services, especially if their products are marked by substantially different features and/or payment methods (or lack thereof).

3\. Motivation: if I found out tomorrow that a YC company was doing exactly what I was doing, I would probably sleep less and try to get my product to market faster. Currently, there are a few competitors, but their services are either targed outside my demo or are, well, crappy. It is precisely the lack of the service that I am trying to provide that is my main motivation for working to bring it to market: I want to use it! Competition would validate that other people are thinking like me, and would also go a long way -- by using their product -- of understanding exactly what it is I am getting myself into.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wish someone would steal my idea because then I could partner with them. It's so hard to find cofounders these days as we all know.

<comment><USER2> Let me suggest a new strategy -- copy someone else's idea, make it seem like you're totally legit, and THEN partner with them :). Maybe you could start a new search engine and just partner with Google:

"Yo, Larry & Serg, we SO need to work together!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you don't, try to convince yourself that you should. I've found paranoia to be a very effective way of beating procrastination.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would wager that the chances of two separate startups producing detrimentally similar websites is negligible, unless you are working on a totally unoriginal me-too type site (and even then...).

[where 'detrimentally similar' is defined as 'so similar that the market can only support one of the two, assuming people actually want it']

<comment><USER10> It used to be fairly uncommon, but if the number of people starting startups increases 10x or 100x as I've theorized it will, overlaps will start to be more of a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you have no competition, there might not be a market for what you want to create, so competition can actually help you out.

It's also possible to address similar sets of needs in different ways. digg and reddit are both successful. Live and let live. Namaste.

</comment><comment><USER12> 'YC company' is the new google

<comment><AUTHOR> This thing is going to be a Power Plant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sure I do. And I really worry if I find out that someone has done stuff well and completely when I've barely started.

But other than that, competition often just validates a market. God knows Google didn't care that Infoseek, Excite, and Altavista already existed. Obviously they were doing it wrong.

<comment><USER10> I think Google probably cared about Altavista.

<comment><USER13> I guess we have to define "care". I'm saying that Google didn't care enough about Altavista's technology to let it stop them from trying to out-do it.</comment></comment></comment>


Volunteer for coronavirus Phase 3 vaccine studies - <AUTHOR> https://www.coronaviruspreventionnetwork.org/ <comment><USER2> To anyone skeptical about the validity of this website. This press release [1] on the NIH website confirms this is real.

[1] [https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih- launches-c...](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-launches- clinical-trials-network-test-covid-19-vaccines-other-prevention-tools)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for pointing this out! I was indeed a bit iffy giving my personal data there. There's so many fake covid sites.

I'm not in the US but it says they might expand soon so I may just register anyway (I'm sure they ask where you live).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool, I would definitely join if it wasn't US only :(

Even though I'm 'high risk' I'm not that worried about the virus myself, and I feel some higher risk than normal actions are necessary to protect people and to go back to our normal world ASAP.

Also, I assume it's good to have some not perfectly healthy individuals in the mix as they would probably be more likely to experience side-effects.

It does say they will expand their reach beyond the US though so that might be good news.

<comment><USER4> There are studies underway in other countries (e.g. Germany or the UK) as well, and they are also looking for volunteers (though often not as openly). Where are you located?

<comment><USER3> I'm living in Spain at the moment. I'm from the Netherlands though! How did you find out about the other studies?

<comment><USER4> The one I know of is in Germany, and I only know of it through an acquaintance who is involved in the study. They're now looking for people for Phases 2 and 3. The job-ad for potential participants doesn't mention anything about COVID, though. I'm assuming this is either due to legal reasons, or something along the lines of "we want people to go into this unbiased". In any case, the wording is pretty general, something along the lines of "looking for participants in a clinical study for vaccinations. Applicants must not have contracted covid19 before".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note: The studies currently being run here are regular Phase 3 trials, not challenge trials, so you don't have to be young or perfectly healthy to sign up.

<comment><USER5> Also, for any trial, they fully explain everything and you can leave at any time. Just signing up doesn't commit you to actually getting vaccinated if you change your mind later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure about these two points conflicting. You will not be infected but if you do we will help you get care.

Volunteers will not be exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus as part of the study. These are studies of preventive vaccines that we hope will keep people healthy.

If you become infected with SARS-CoV-2 and become ill with COVID-19, the study staff will work with you to make sure you get the care that you need.

<comment><USER7> They mean if you get it in the real world, they will be working with your doctors because they will want to run tests to determine why the vaccine didn't prevent the infection. As a side benefit, you might get slightly more attention and better care.

<comment><USER8> _> they will want to run tests to determine why the vaccine didn't prevent the infection._

The answer to which could be as simple as "they were given the placebo"

Presumably if you're uninsured, they get you medical insurance. Testing drugs on uninsured people then leaving them untreated if they get ill during the study would be a bit cold, even for the american medical industry.

<comment><USER9> Eh, the cynic in me doesn't think this is out of benevolence so much as it is to make sure they collect the best data possible. People without health insurance have worse outcomes because they forgo or delay necessary treatment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the first time I hear about these folks so I'm not sure about how good this study is but AFAIK Moderna, from the US just like this study, were starting phase 3 tests with their medicine already. The more the better I guess? Here in Brazil as of early this month Sinovac (from China) started accepting health workers volunteers for their 9000 people phase 3 tests across the country. Just today, as you know, Oxford announced promising results too but in fact they had been already testing people with their vaccine in phase 3 tests last month here (5000 people from multiple covid epicenters). I would really love to know when we could expect to have minimal first results. Everybody got really happy with the results of phase 2 and all but I suppose the first data for phase 3 will be decisive whether we can build up REAL expectations or not. Somehow, sometimes, it also feels these folks are all racing for a Nobel prize more than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER11> The UK also has page to sign up to volunteer for vaccine research

[1][https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus- covid-19/research/...](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus- covid-19/research/coronavirus-vaccine-research/)

<comment><USER12> They need volunteers because there are too few people being naturally infected, which boggles the mind somewhat

[https://mobile.twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/12695146159...](https://mobile.twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1269514615924260865)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From this page, it sounds like they are mostly looking for people who are likely to encounter the virus, and are in high risk groups:

 _( "For some of the antibody studies, you will not need to reach out to a site because the study staff will come to the nursing home or assisted living facility.")_:

[https://www.coronaviruspreventionnetwork.org/what-to- expect-...](https://www.coronaviruspreventionnetwork.org/what-to-expect- volunteer/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm very locked down, so interesting I volunteered for a challenge study but not this one (as I am unlikely to catch covid so a bad fit). The ideal group here are people at high risk of getting it.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you are in the general area of Seattle, Kaiser is looking for people who might be interested in volunteering for studies. They included this in a recent email to Kaiser members:

> The Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, which is > currently leading a study for a COVID-19 vaccine, is seeking volunteers in > the Seattle area to sign up for a COVID-19 vaccine registry. If you sign up > and qualify, you may be called and asked whether you'd like to participate > in a future trial. Learn more about the registry.

The "Learn more about the registry" was a link that ends up at [1].

Requirements to be registered are at least 18 years old, in good health or with stable medical conditions, live in the greater Seattle area, and can travel to the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute clinic in downtown Seattle for multiple study visits. No need to be a KP member.

[1] [https://corona.kpwashingtonresearch.org/](https://corona.kpwashingtonresearch.org/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Not sure what people find interesting about this? Phase 3? I got a (test) vaccine this month not with this company. No idea on phase.

Interesting things I thought -

You might get the placebo. (No idea for Phase 3)

It was done by a generic testing company, as expected.

About minimum wage for time in hospital, probably pick a trial that's over night and quicker(C19 was 400 days and you can't do other trails) for better money.

Everyone is the cliche test subject (I mixed with other trials), backpackers and students and dodgy people.

We got generic info about trials, overnights (not for C19) had warnings about bring porn, bag searches and no bed sharing, which made overnight trials sound fun.

Given the wide range of questions, there would be a lot of lying to get admittance I would guess.

Drug tests each time you go in.

Double birth control is required, not sure the nurses even expected that to actually happen when they questioned you.

A lot of money is spent when you're bored and look around and start doing the $ being spent.

</comment><comment><USER17> As someone very pro-vaccine, what are the risks of doing this? Is the worst case scenario you get the vaccine and not a placebo and it does nothing? Are there real health risks to doing this?

<comment><USER18> The podcast Science Vs. described one patient who received an experimental vaccine and had severe (but not life-threatening) fever-like side effects including fainting, nausea/vomiting, chills, and lethargy/weakness:

> When I woke up, I woke up this was at noon the next day, I had to get up to > go to the bathroom, on the way there I felt really nauseous and actually > ended up throwing up in the bathroom and then I just collapsed. I remember > waking up on the floor, though, and looking up and seeing the underside of > the kitchen table, which was a very confusing sight

So by taking an experimental vaccine you're risking these sorts of side effects. In this particular study there were 45 participants and 3 had severe side effects of this nature.

Full transcript: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQ78hrs4ldf6abmA...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQ78hrs4ldf6abmAwrHfrQwvCnfK2cJG5ARVLnwZs2zob1F1s_oKzZO7zAPKUSjuSKL5frfo3RLHipU/pub) Episode: [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science- vs/dvh28wk/coronavirus...](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science- vs/dvh28wk/coronavirus-dude-wheres-my-vaccine)

<comment><USER19> The Google doc is really hard to skim, did that happen in Phase 3? Severe side effects are more common in Phase 1 trial, this is phase 3.

<comment><USER18> The podcast did not indicate what phase of trial this was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really hope this vaccine happens. It would so amazing if we got a vaccine out so fast.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would 100% do this if they could guarantee I wouldn't get a placebo.

<comment><USER22> So you're not interested in helping in the study at all, you just want the vaccine in advance.

<comment><USER23> Which can still be a win-win.

He might even be willing to test out whether it works by intentionally getting exposed (human challenge study) so that he can then go club and drink at the pub etc.

I'm quite happy to let him go first, because I'd rather let someone else be the first person who has purple tentacles grow from their nipples, or whatever other nasty side effect this may turn out to have. There's a reason we do these trials.

<comment><USER19> >I'd rather let someone else be the first person who has purple tentacles grow from their nipples

Hey, some people are into that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AI Creates Fake Obama - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/ai-creates-fake-obama <comment><USER2> The fake video looks totally wrong to me. It looks like the audio is out of sync with the video. It's amazing technology, but it doesn't seem likely to totally fool anyone yet.</comment>


YouPorn is hiring. Apparently it's powered by Perl/Catalyst - <AUTHOR> http://jobs.perl.org/job/10462 <comment><USER2> "How we operate: \- Startup type environment with a geographically diversed team (UK, Australia, Argentina, Brazil...) \- Company is committed to building a trusted site and pristine user experience \- Projects are bite-sized (1-3 weeks to complete) \- Small team. Your work will make a big impact on the site. \- No bureaucracy. Decisions are made quickly \- We use data extensively to make decisions "

They seem to have better practices than most businesses.

<comment><USER3> I honestly don't understand how treating women as unclad ogleables is a good business practice.

<comment><USER4> Ogling women is part of the nature of being a man; if we glance or stare at a woman's ass in the grocery store without her consent or knowledge, which we all do, is that somehow better than if she were a paid and willing professional porn star? $500 for an hour worth of work at entry level with no experience is pretty fair.

Also, btw, they have gay porn on youporn, so they're equal opportunity, they're not just exploiting women.

<comment><USER3> Glancing at someone's behind in the supermarket is qualitatively different from porn. As far _staring_ at buttocks goes, you're right that we've all done it, but does that make it a Good Thing?

Anyway, not sure if this is OT or not, so I'll stop here. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Framework groupie disclaimer.

Catalyst is so great. With Catalyst 5.8 I get Moosey controllers, which means my Perl 5 doesn't have to suck anymore because I can use Moose objects. Someone finally took a look at the framework developments in Ruby and Python and brought sanity to web development in Perl.

If it weren't for Catalyst, I'd have bailed from Perl a long time ago. It lets you build web apps that don't suck. Catalyst is 'unopinionated', it just gives you a minimal framework for building MVC web apps, with plugins to accomplish common tasks. Catalyst doesn't care what view or model you use. It is totally view/model agnostic. There are several good options for ORMs to databases, but its trivial to write a model wrapper around whatever you want. I wrote one for SimpleDB very easily.

While there are better options for doing Simple CRUD, Catalyst is quite good at building more complex web apps, and it lets me leverage the CPAN, the world's largest module repository, to get things done faster.

I love Catalyst. I won't bother trying to convince anyone that its the BEST web app framework, but I will say that its good enough to make Perl an option for new projects again.

<comment><USER6> Even though I haven't used Perl in years, it still has a special place in my heart. Based on your enthusiasm of Catalyst, I may give it a whirl in the next six months.

<comment><USER5> Glad to hear it! :) In that case, check out:

<http://www.catalystframework.org/>

<http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/Moose-0.74/lib/Moose.pm>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been a designer for most of my early career, and I've always had a policy against doing adult-industry work. I understand the legitimacy of the industry, the human nature element, and I've heard the arguments in regard to the benefits of giving people an outlet and preventing sexual crimes...

However, as ScottWhigham mentioned (and IMHO of course) there's something desperate about working on porn, and it's not something most businesses want to see in a portfolio. EVER. Therefore, you're just collecting a paycheck UNLESS you're committing to porn industry as a career (more power to you, no judgement here). Furthermore, I think my greater concern is not knowing where some of the porn originates from in regard to under age victims, etc... and that just bothers the heck out of me.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure we've (or was it on reddit?) had this discussion before. Porn sites have to deal with extremely high traffic, _must_ have great performance, have to constantly change to compete in a cutthroat industry, and you are working for people who _really_ know the cost of downtime.

I personally think it's one of the most difficult types of sites to tackle as a developer, and takes a great deal of experience and responsibility.

<comment><USER9> I worked at AmateurMatch for almost 2 years and when you go from working on small local business websites that barely get 20 uniques a month to 2 million/month you learn how to scale your code _fast_.

It's not the greatest industry to work in, and can be a little sweatshoppy, but it's a decent stepping stone for bigger and better things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This has been known for quite some time.

> ...hundreds of millions of pageviews per day.

So, is YouPorn the largest site run by Catalyst, Rails, or Django?

<comment><USER11> If you are talking frameworks, Amazon is HTML::Mason and is bigger than YouPorn... at least for now. ;)

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/youporn.com+amazon.com/>

<comment><USER12> True, but you can also use HTML::Mason as a Catalyst View ;)

<http://search.cpan.org/~flora/Catalyst-View-Mason-0.17/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting how a porn company can taint your resume, even though the job itself is not about porn, but web development for the Alexa ranked 48th site globally.

Society has a nasty habit of grossly overreacting to things that are "in bad taste" by calling names and condemning them, as long as it's politically correct and trendy to do so.

Porn at least doesn't claim to be something it's not.

Would you really think less of someone who took a technical web job with youporn, when there are sites like eharmony out there? i.e. how many people go to youporn and say "what a horrible site, experience, and waste of money" compared to Eharmony?

</comment><comment><USER14> Porn is recession proof, Stability in this economy is key

<comment><USER15> Au contraire.

<http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/07/turns-out-por-1.html>

<comment><USER16> Did you read the first paragraph?

      ...they're also competing with a nearly infinite supply of free, amateur videos from countless user-generated sites

e.g. youporn.com

Consumption of porn is recession proof. The business of professional porn generation is not. Like other produced content, it is suffering from democratized tools of generation and dissemination.

<comment><USER17> Except youporn doesn't exactly have the most solid business model, as the article states. You might still be out of a job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If youtube is losing money, what's youporn's plan for being profitable?

<comment><USER19> Porn

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm waiting for the analyst report to come out saying they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

<comment><USER21> I doubt they're losing money. Porn affiliate links make big bucks. Don't ask me how (who pays for anything on the internet?) but they do.

I used to regularly speak with some people at a financial company that processes most of the payments from porn sites to their affiliates. After Neteller (the massive processor of financial transactions to/from gambling sites) withdrew from the US market due to the UIGEA, the company I knew took a good chunk of their business and was probably the industry's largest third party payment processor, easily handling 10-20% of all transactions. But when the lawsuits started flying at other gaming companies, they dropped that line of business instantly because they didn't want to lose their US porn affiliate processing business. It was considerably larger.

Much of the reason is that porn sites have high retention, high prices ($35-$40/mo is not uncommon) and pay their affiliates ridiculous rev share like 80% for the large ones. So an affiliate who refers a successful customer could easily make $20-$30/mo for a year or two off him. That's just a tremendous amount of cash.

Until I was told that, I believed gambling would rule the internet.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. The revenue share in gambling and porn sites is just phenomenal.

I used to send some traffic to a Bingo website, and I think you got £25 per signup, but then 50% of all future losses for the lifetime of that player. After only a couple of months that revenue share (%loss) was making up hundreds of £/month for doing nothing. I'm sure it's pretty similar for paid porn sites.

They'd have to be doing something seriously wrong to be losing money in that sector.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I've done a LOT of poker affiliate marketing. There's tremendous money there.

Interestingly though gambling sites still only pay, at best, about half the rev share I've heard porn sites pay their top affiliates. I was one of a few poker sites' largest (generating them hundreds of thousands in rev monthly) and got somewhere between 35 and 40 percent typically. From what I heard from my friends in the financial industry, in porn you can get 85% if you're large enough.

It's baffling to me that a company that serves up web video can make serious profits even while giving 85% of their revenue away.

<comment><USER23> So you had monthly revenues in the tens of thousands? Why aren't you still doing this (or are you)?

<comment><USER21> I did and I am, but revenues dropped a lot after two events. One was Party Poker spinning their affiliates off of the network (long, boring story, but you can probably Google around about Eurobet or Empire Poker and find out more if you care to). I managed to rebuild almost back to where I was, which was no small task at all, but then the other happened, which was the UIGEA forcing Party Poker out of the American market.

Now my revenues and margins are considerably smaller than they were back then. I could maybe, with full time effort over a long period, have rebuilt, but I didn't bother because of the general instability of the industry. I'll pass the opportunity to get on a soap box about our government's stupidity here, but suffice it to say the Bush DoJ (and maybe Obama's too, not sure yet) made the business seem a less worthwhile investment than something not in such a legal minefield.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't need the employee discount... It's all free.

<comment><USER24> Yeah and because they are a "virtual" office, where do they put the ping pong table?

What are they going to do to pass the time!?

Oh wait...

<comment><USER19> Read the stories

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Halleliuah! Two of my favorite things: Porn and Perl!

</comment><comment><USER25> Halleluiah! Two of my favorite things: Porn and Perl!

</comment><comment><USER26> They say porn is recession proof...

</comment><comment><USER27> Among other things, there's just something about submitting a resume to "firstname.lastname@example.com" that smacks of desperation

<comment><USER28> eh. i'd say attitudes such as this one is what perpetuates the problem of porn being an unpleasant ghetto. if it were allowed to be respectable, it could clean up its act.

<comment><USER29> I thought you gain respect _by_ cleaning up your act, but in any case I think porn has become much more accepted over the years.

<comment><USER28> i'd say that's fairly impossible for porn producers to do right now. there's a huge negative stigma attached. that encourages people to use pseudonyms in the industry, which fosters an environment of secrecy, which leads to deception, etc.

if people could work in porn without besmirching their reputations forever, THEN the industry could start cleaning up its act.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Best iPhone Development Book? - <AUTHOR>

Which is the best iPhone dev book? I am coming from Rails and already figured out how to write a simple app and use xcode, and watched the peepcode screencasts, so nothing super basic. <comment><USER2> I really liked "Beginning iPhone Development". There is a new version now for 3.0 called Beginning iPhone 3 Development, which looks at least as good as the first one if not better. Here's a link to the book on Amazon [http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-iPhone-Development- Exploring...](http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-iPhone-Development-Exploring- SDK/dp/1430224592/ref=dp_ob_title_bk)</comment>


The Worst Portfolio Ever - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alexcornell.com/the-worst-portfolio-ever

<comment><USER2> Covers two of my pet peeves: random unnecessary info about coffee and hand- crafting pixels, and those damn skills graphs. I do like the location bit though (it's useful to know if someone is in SF rather than London).</comment>


Show HN: Therapy Price Comparison Tool - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aDQsYvlM_6B2BH4JZ4WvSM4uUoAWfvYbmYaVrpoCew4/edit?usp=sharing <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I wanted to share a healthcare price comparison spreadsheet my partner and I created.

Last year, we were doing a startup that found people therapists. Funnily enough, we pivoted because prices were so high and we didn't to make a luxury product.

Over the past few weeks it's become clear to us that people in the US have to spend increasingly out-of-pocket on healthcare even with insurance. From 2007 to 2017, the percentage of adults with employer health insurance on high- deductible health plans rose from 15% to 43%. For 2020, a high-deductible health plan is defined as one with a deductible greater than $1,400. Providers in certain fields, like therapy, also increasingly just don't take insurance. About 45% of psychiatrists don't take insurance, and in California about 50% of therapists don't take insurance.

Healthcare services prices are becoming very relevant, but we couldn't find a good price comparison tool. For example, I'm looking for a therapist myself, and I've narrowed my list down to 3 providers. The most expensive one is more than 200% of the least expensive one.

A couple of days ago we realized we actually have a decent amount of price data on therapists, so we decided to throw together this spreadsheet and see if it's useful for anyone.

We have about 120 verified prices that we confirmed over phone or email with therapists when we were finding people therapists. We also scraped prices for all the therapists in San Francisco from Psychology Today, the biggest therapist listing directory. (It's really easy to scrape them.) We also added any prices in bills we had access to, ours, friends', and family members'.

Note: you'll have to make a copy of the spreadsheet, and there's a tiny lag when using the dropdowns.

You can see a few interesting things. For example, we recommended the same therapists to multiple users and the prices were different. Prices also vary significantly from area to area.

We would love to make this more robust, so if you have any itemized bills for any healthcare service, not just therapy, we'd love to add them to this dataset! (Submission link in spreadsheet. We don't use your name, address, or contact information, so you can hide/remove any information like that.) We're also open to making it a web app.

Hopefully someone finds this interesting or useful! We'd love feedback, as well as if ya'll shared any of your experiences paying for healthcare out-of- pocket or any comparison tools y'all are aware of.</comment>


30 Things I Learned by Spending One Month in Thailand - <AUTHOR> http://behnoodmarvazi.com/30-things-i-learned-by-spending-one-month-in-thailand/

<comment><USER2> I'm not so sure about the goodness of public transportation in Bangkok. There's a few trains, one metro and a completely chaotic bus system. Take a taxi and you'll be ripped off because you're a farang. Chiang Mai is almost as chaotic, but in a smaller scale. Still you really can't walk everywhere as easily as in a big european city.

My advice for people going to Thailand would be to go to the north, small towns like Mae Hong Son are amazing places. Rent a motorbike and drive around the mountain villages. It's much cheaper than in the south and people are way more friendlier.

The other option is to go to the southern islands. Koh Samui is the most expensive place, made for couples and families. Koh Phangan is the party island where you can buy some marijuana and end up spending 20 years in a Thai jail. There's some nice hidden places in that island with less drug tourism. Most of the locals really despise tourists though and I can really understand that. Koh Tao is the diver's island, but my friend who was there when we were in Phangan told us, that it's getting more touristy and turning into another Phangan with young and recless party people. The best islands I visited were in the Andaman sea. Koh Lanta, Koh Ngai... Much more relaxed places and the locals really are more friendlier there because the party tourism is missing.

I was there for six weeks and I'd go again anytime.

</comment><comment><USER3> I left a top tech company two years ago and moved to a similar country (Taiwan), and I have a few counterpoints.

\- If the cost of living is low, odds are the wages are low too. If you're living within your means and saving 30% of your income, you're better off saving 30% of $150k than 30% of $40k. The cheap cost of living only applies if you're living above your means, vacationing, or retiring.

\- Cheap labor enables different ways of doing things. This includes transit like tuk-tuks and taxies, but Taiwan has another example: there are no parking meters. You just park, and a police office comes by every half hour or so and leaves a bill on your windshield (linked to your license plate).

\- If everyone seems exceptionally friendly, that means you're expected to be friendly too. My friend here has a neighbor who hates him because he doesn't stop by to chat all the time like the other neighbors.

\- English names of businesses, like the "Nice Pharmacy" example, are usually targeted to locals who don't know much English. They have to stick to words and phrases that locals know.

\- It shouldn't take a trip abroad to figure out your priorities, and traveling won't even necessarily help.</comment>


A trip through the Graphics Pipeline (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-graphics-pipeline-2011-index/

<comment><USER2> Title is a reference to Jim Blinn's excellent (although a bit dated) collection of 3D graphics articles, "A Trip Down the Graphics Pipeline" [1]. A clear, useful, and often humorous take on various computer graphics topics, including the legacy "fixed function" 3D pipeline. Highly recommended!

1\. [http://www.amazon.com/Jim-Blinns- Corner/dp/1558603875](http://www.amazon.com/Jim-Blinns-Corner/dp/1558603875)</comment>


Ask HN: Competing with Free - <AUTHOR>

I've spent the last few months building a web-app which is currently in closed beta.
Today I found out that a few months ago a competitor lauched who is offering their product for free.
I've taken a look at their offering, and I'm fairly confident that my product is better, but I'm wondering if anybody has any advice on competing with a free product.
Or if you can point me to examples of other paid products which are winning out over free competitors, I'd really appreciate it.
I'm not giving up, as I mentioned, I believe I have a better product, but I may need to tweak my messaging/marketing/other to answer this new market challenge. <comment><USER2> Project management is one example. There are tons of free and paid options for both.

Also, as a paid product, you don't need to focus on _winning out over free competitors_ , but instead making enough money for yourself. As long as your product is economically successful, it doesn't matter if a free product has more users or whatever you define as winning criteria.

</comment><comment><USER3> Word v Open Office.

I think it's been 2 or 3 times that I didn't have Word installed. And it's been the same dance each time: Look up prices for Word. Run to download Open Office. Spend about an hour doing something that would take 15 minutes in Word, despite the fact that each has the same menu and supposedly most of the same features. Go back to looking up prices on Word. Spend about an hour and a half playing other open-source word processors. Going back to looking up prices on Word. Getting Word and uninstalling Open Office and all the other useless time leeches I've downloaded, thinking that I'll never, ever do that to myself again.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think pinboard is a great example of competing with a free product (delicious). Pinboard has focused exclusively on a core set of features, with a particular focus on being the minimal bookmarking web app. This page they created does a good job of comparing them to their competition <http://pinboard.in/switch/> .

I mention all of this to say that I would focus on what _exactly_ makes your app better. The goal may not be to win against the free app, but to make the best app you can while focusing on the paying users.

</comment><comment><USER5> One example is online dating which is a very competitive market. The free product (such as OkCupid or PlentyOfFish) are arguably better than the paid product but a large segment still uses the paid product. eHarmony markets itself as being a site for people serious about marriage. True markets itself as the only dating site with background checks.

The key obviously is making users aware of why your product is superior and convincing them it is worth the cost.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting that you coin the free products as 'arguably better' than the paid.

You'd think it would be the other way around, with the paid being arguably better.

So, how do you make it obvious why one product is superior to another and worth the cost?

<comment><USER5> The reason I said free is better is due to this blog post from OkCupid [http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/04/07/why-you- should-...](http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/04/07/why-you-should-never- pay-for-online-dating/) in which they say a lot of the profiles in pay sites were created for free or are expired which means a large percentage of the people you contact will be inactive/haven't paid

The way to make it obvious is through marketing ;). In my previous comment I tried to give some examples of how the paysites distinguish themselves from the free sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing you might not have considered is increasing the price (depending on your service).

The reason I'm suggesting this is that you could always position yourself as a premium service as some people will always choose a more expensive option if they feel they are getting a superior product.

This of course might not apply to your particular segment, but if so, it's definitely an option.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pricing#Premium_pricing>

</comment><comment><USER7> Compete on aspects other than price.

If your product is truly better--there is one advantage you want to hold.

Make sure you have developed and designed an amazing first user experience. Sign up and user the competitors app--What sucks? What could be better? What wows you? Make the experience so good people want to pay you

Another good one, compete on service/support. It takes commitment but if products are very similar, the service and support can be presented as what you are really paying for.

Check their user forums/FAQ/Knowledge Base/GetSatisfaction, whatever they have, find out what current users gripes. wishes, and problems are. Use that intelligence in your product development and messaging/marketing.

Out. Hustle. Them.

</comment><comment><USER8> You need to be _connected_. Hire a competent sales man.</comment>


White Employees Are Heavily Over-Represented in Tech Leadership - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/white-employees-are-heavily-over-represented-in-tech-leadership-te1q3y9s <comment><USER2> It's naive to expect all strata of society to change with immigration without any lag. The US was 83% white as recently as 1980, which could be the population that has had time to climb up to leadership roles - something that can easily take a generation or two, especially when education is so expensive. In 2017, it was down to 73% white (61% if limited to non-Hispanic, but the older data doesn't make that distinction, making comparison difficult) [1].

83% / 73% = 1.14, while the "heavy" over-representation the article mentions is, estimating from the graph, about 1.17. I.e. if comparing to 1980 demographics, whites are over-represented in tech leadership by a whole 3%.

But more puzzling is this statement: _Not only are employees of color under- represented in leadership positions in tech, they are also under-represented in tech in non-leadership positions._

The graph immediately following shows whites are under-represented in tech - "heavily" under-represented, if we were to use the author's own metric (the author chooses not to mention this). So both whites and people of color are under-represented?? Of course that same graph contains the answer - Asians are over-represented by 483%. 17% over-representation was "heavy", so the author was unable to find a sufficiently strong adjective for 483%, and wisely chose not to mention it at all.

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

<comment><USER2> Correction: Asians are over-represented by 383%, not the 483% I first claimed. Their numbers are 483% of what you'd expect if representation was proportional, and I forgot to subtract 100% from that.

<comment><USER3> Thus Asians are definitely underrepresented in leadership vs employee population, but still overrepresented vs general population.

I'd be interested to see how this chops up by immigration status, years in country, and English proficiency. I guess then we'd be in even less PC waters, but it's quite clear PhD -> h1b crowd is quite different from Asian Americans in a lot of ways, and I'd have to imagine this is one of them

<comment><USER2> > Thus Asians are definitely underrepresented in leadership vs employee > population

Only slightly - the graph in the article shows Asians are ~87% represented in leadership roles, compared to their (over-represented) numbers in tech.

Meaning, using the article's own numbers, a random Asian is 5.3x as likely to be in tech as a random white, and 3.9x as likely to be in tech leadership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why are Americans this obsessed about race? If this isn't _idée fixe_ I don't know what is. Like in most other parts of the civilized word racial statistics should be outlawed because it's not a correct classification system.

<comment><USER2> There are places where racial statistics are outlawed?

<comment><USER4> I can give you the example of France, my country where they are illegal, this is a relevant legislative text: [https://www.cnil.fr/fr/la-loi-informatique- et-libertes#artic...](https://www.cnil.fr/fr/la-loi-informatique-et- libertes#article6)

Translated with google: "It is prohibited to process personal data which reveal alleged racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs or the trade union membership of a natural person or to process genetic data, personal data biometric for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, health data or data concerning the sexual life or sexual orientation of a natural person."

<comment><USER5> It comes with the qualifier.

> for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person

So making a poll in your company to identify how many are in a trade union is not illegal by that article while building a database that contains the fact that John Doe is in a trade union would violate that law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Based on these findings it's reasonable to suppose that extensive reservoirs of talent are not being recognized, exploited (in the best sense of the word) and put to universally profitable use benefiting employers and employees alike. Why would companies (apparently) knowingly choose to ignore such a resource?

<comment><USER7> Or it is more reasonable to assume the findings are wrong. At this point I think we can conclude that any analysis involving race is wrong.</comment></comment>


Facebook's shares fall - <AUTHOR>

There are a few submissions now about Facebook's shares falling, so I thought I'd collate them here for easy reference.  If you spot one I missed, add it to the comments.
Added in edit: This has clearly got a few flags, as well as the upvotes.  It's clearly unpopular, no doubt regarded as "meta".  Since it's largely unloved I guess I'll delete it soon. To those who upvoted - thank you. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4038102> Facebook breaks $30 (encrypted.google.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4038103> Facebook trades under $30, down 7.5%+ (google.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4038211> Facebook (FB) down 8% (google.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4038226> Facebook under 30$ (google.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4038267> Facebook Stock Price Dips Below $30 (mashable.com)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another one:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4038683> Facebook shares fall below $30 as US authorities begin investigation into IPO (guardian.co.uk)</comment>


Content Security Policy Evaluator - <AUTHOR> https://csper.io/#/evaluator <comment><USER2> On iPhone the chat window covers the scan button making it impossible to submit a scan. Looks cool though</comment>