Bokeh – Interactive web visualization library in Python - <AUTHOR> http://bokeh.pydata.org/

<comment><USER2> I wanted to point out one important distinction between Bokeh and anything that's currently out there - we have a full blow python/js object bridge that synchronizes client side models with objects you can interact with in python. The significance of this, is that someone can select points on a scatter plot, and then you can retrieve the indexes of those points on the python side, and use that to further dive into your data.

It's worth mentioning that the IPython guys are implementing a similar json/python bridge to support the new interactive tools in the IPython notebook. Once that is up and running, we'll probably just piggy back off of that bridge, when you're running in the notebook.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a "database guy" who uses Python for most things not bash, is this an approach for viz apps that would eliminate (most) of the need to muck about in JavaScript?

D3 and its children produce some awesome visualizations, but the bandwidth does not exist for me to begin developing apps in a language I don't have much experience in.

If something like Bokeh allows me to live mostly in Python, it becomes even more interesting.

<comment><USER4> That is exactly the point of bokeh. It allows you to write python code and get browser based plots. Currently we have a python interface, but we intend to build interfaces in other langauges. Look at the examples gallery, which include the code needed to generate the plots. [http://bokeh.pydata.org/gallery.html](http://bokeh.pydata.org/gallery.html)

A relatively simple plot (scroll down to see the code): [http://bokeh.pydata.org/plot_gallery/correlation.html](http://bokeh.pydata.org/plot_gallery/correlation.html)

The simplest example plot in the repo: [https://github.com/ContinuumIO/bokeh/blob/master/examples/pl...](https://github.com/ContinuumIO/bokeh/blob/master/examples/plotting/file/line.py)

<comment><USER5> This is really cool, but what about adding interactivity with the charts? My first thought when I saw the headline was that this python library just generates D3 code, but it seems to be generating some sort of a static SVG object.

<comment><USER6> There are already some tools available, pan and wheel zoom, plot resizing, selection (on some plot types). Many more tool types are planned.

As for the architecture, BokehJS is built entirely on top of HTML canvas. The python bokeh library sends data and plot specifications to the browser, which uses BokehJS to render the plot and handle interactive tools, etc.

<comment><USER5> Gotcha, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a photographer, I gotta say I really love the name. :)

For those who aren't photography nerds, "bokeh" is a Japanese word that means the out-of-focus areas in a photograph. Different lenses have different kinds of bokeh, and beautiful or ugly bokeh is an important dividing line between good and bad lenses.

<comment><USER8> As someone who likes photography and analytics, I disagree about the name.

As you say, bokeh is about out-of-focus blur. That's sort of the opposite impression you want to present in a tool that's intended to give you "clarity" via its visualizations.

<comment><USER9> Actual, bokeh is about the quality of the blur. Yes, blur can have quality. If you simply removed everything that was not in focus, you lose context and texture about the subject. If you use a pinhole camera and present everything in sharp focus, you lose the insight.

This is actually mentioned in the documentation: [http://bokeh.pydata.org/#technical- vision](http://bokeh.pydata.org/#technical-vision)

""" Photographers use the Japanese word "bokeh" to describe the blurring of the out-of-focus parts of an image. Its aesthetic quality can greatly enhance a photograph, and photographers artfully use focus to draw attention to subjects of interest. "Good bokeh" contributes visual interest to a photograph and places its subjects in context.

In this vein of focusing on high-impact subjects while always maintaining a relationship to the data background, the Bokeh project attempts to address fundamental challenges of large dataset visualization... """

<comment><USER8> >> Actual, bokeh is about the quality of the blur.

Yes, you're right. But most people tend to treat out-of-focus blur synonymously with bokeh (the quality of the blur) -- they're related but not the same. In this particular library's case, I think they're talking about out-of-focus blur, not bokeh.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I kinda glossed over that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's nice, I've heard of it a while ago. But I just had a crazy thought of combining this with UTFGrid for interacting with data points, but that's probably silly :)

<comment><USER11> No - that's not crazy at all.

In fact we are working on (and open sourcing) similar ideas

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0-4xtFeaT8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0-4xtFeaT8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are mouse hover interactions in the timeline (display value of selected point)? Don't see any references but otherwise this is a very interesting project.

<comment><USER6> [Another bokeh dev chiming in] Additional tools like crosshair, data and color inspectors, box zoom, more types of selections (point, lasso, etc), and measurement tools are all planned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is badass. I wish there were something like this or Seaborn [1] for Matlab. Anyone know of anything similar that can make the ugly default Matlab plots turn into beauties like these?

[1] [http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/index.html](http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/index.html)

<comment><USER2> This doesn't directly answer your question, but in regards to seaborn, our goal is to support enough of the mpl API so we can get seaborn to work with bokeh. Either that or we would write our own ggplot interface. Which ever approach ends up being easier

<comment><USER13> Yes! Is would be crazy awesome if I could do 'from bokeh import pyplot' or something similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know if anyone else noticed but we owe DARPA's XDATA program a thank you note too for funding this project.

<comment><USER9> They've been great supporters of this effort, as well as Blaze[1] and Numba[2].

[1] [http://blaze.pydata.org](http://blaze.pydata.org)

[2] [http://numba.pydata.org](http://numba.pydata.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What does 'large datasets' mean here? We are building a visualization service to abstract users from fiddling with d3 and other libraries. We want users to be able to use all of viz libraries out there with just providing data input and tweaking settings, so this looks interesting.

<comment><USER2> Part of the 0.4 release is to incorporate the concept of abstract rendering - which means you render on the server, and then send the necessary information over to the client on demand. For example, if someone tries to scatter a billion points, instead of just drawing a useless point cloud, you would figure out where all the points fit inside your 512x512 canvas (or whatever size you have), figure out how all the points stack up, compute an alpha that is meaningful for that number of points, and then send the heatmap to the client.

You can easily imagine as similar approach for line plots which does selectively downsampling of datapoints in order to preserve interesting features in the plot.

And then we'll build interactors on top of that, so you can actually treat it like a scatter plot, even though it's a heatmap that's being sent to your browser.

So the answer is - large datasets, means, as large as our abstract rendering algorithm can handle on your hardware, so those data sets should be pretty big.

<comment><USER16> I have a project involving multi-gigabyte datasets of line plot data. With your 0.4 release, will it be possible to show down-sampled subsets of these plots, with the ability to pan/zoom around and get more data on demand without having it all held in memory?

<comment><USER2> Well, we'll be able to do that without sending the data to the client, not sure if our implementation right now will work without loading the data into memory, though long term that is definitely the plan (we will leverage [http://blaze.pydata.org/](http://blaze.pydata.org/))

If you want to discuss further, please email email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Has anyone used it in production ? I would be very interested to hear about interoperability potential with other platforms - some json-based protocol perhaps? In D3 I can just point it to csv and do whatever I need to. Is it just as easy in BokehJS?

<comment><USER4> We will be adding stream datasources (which allow pulling from 3rd party jsonp feeds) for bokeh 0.4. We expect to release bokeh 0.4 in early 2014.

It is incredibly easy to use bokeh from python. The burtin example in the gallery reads from CSV [http://bokeh.pydata.org/plot_gallery/burtin_example.html](http://bokeh.pydata.org/plot_gallery/burtin_example.html) . Scroll down a bit, and you can see the code.

I am a bokeh dev at Continuum Analytics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I realize this is nitpicky, but it seems obnoxious to call these[1] "candlesticks" when it would make much more sense to call the page box plots[2]. Wouldn't it?

[1] [http://bokeh.pydata.org/plot_gallery/candlestick.html](http://bokeh.pydata.org/plot_gallery/candlestick.html)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot)

<comment> T-A Nah: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlestick_chart](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlestick_chart)

<comment><USER18> Awesome! I fell for the superficial resemblance, clearly. :) (I even searched for the term candlestick on the wikipedia page for box plots... )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is really awesome. I just added it to my IPython Notebook Mac app: [https://github.com/liyanage/ipython- notebook/wiki](https://github.com/liyanage/ipython-notebook/wiki)

<comment><USER9> Cool! Thanks!

Let us know if you ever have any problems with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just for reference, here is the actual 0.3 announcement: [http://continuum.io/blog/bokeh03](http://continuum.io/blog/bokeh03)

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone comment on how this compares with matplotlib?

<comment><USER9> In the FAQ: [http://bokeh.pydata.org/faq.html](http://bokeh.pydata.org/faq.html)

""" Q: Why did you start writing a new plotting library, instead of just extending e.g. Matplotlib?

A: There are a number of reasons why we wrote a new Python library, but they all hinge on maximizing flexibility for exploring new design spaces for achieving our long-term visualization goals. (Please see Technical Vision[1] for details about those.) """

[1] [http://bokeh.pydata.org/index.html#technicalvision](http://bokeh.pydata.org/index.html#technicalvision)</comment></comment>


The Responsive Designer - <AUTHOR> http://simonfosterdesign.com/blog/web-design/the-responsive-designer/ <comment><USER2> Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who thinks "responsive" design is completely overblown.

I think it's absolutely necessary to have different layouts for desktop and mobile. But the idea that they need to "flow into each other", I just don't buy. I mean, I've never seen anyone (in a real-life use case) resize their browser window to be narrow on their desktop, and iPads deal quite well with desktop-sized sites (especially navigating in horizontal mode).

The problem I have with fluidly "responsive design" is that it drastically overcomplicates everything. Good design becomes a lot harder, because you can't really keep in your head all the possible variations. A/B testing is drastically overcomplicated, because maybe something works in large width, doesn't work in 3/4 width, works again in 1/2 width, and doesn't work again in 1/4 width, because of the way elements pop around. And it just severly limits the kind of layout you can do. And like I said previously, for what? People don't really use "in-between" sizes, at least not that I've seen.

To me, "responsive design" just seems like a clever theoretical idea, without any real-life benefits. When I make a mobile version of a site, it's usually _drastically_ different from the desktop site -- because it's organized vertically, because there's less that can be shown at once, because mobile users often have a completely different set of use cases than desktop users. It's a completely different beast.

In the vast majority of cases, I think it's impossible to shoehorn a truly good desktop experience and a truly good mobile experience together into a single "responsive design". I get that people are trying, but I'm just not convinced by the efforts.

<comment><USER3> > I've never seen anyone (in a real-life use case) resize their browser window > to be narrow on their desktop,

I do this very very often.

I will be watching a YouTube video or a BBC iPlayer video in one window. Then I'll open another browser window and resize it to be tall and thin.

It is infuriating just how poorly most website cope with this tall thin window. And really, most text is easier to read in a narrow column.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really good article! There's too many designers calling their work responsive when they only work on desktop and a couple of Apple devices. It's much better to design your CSS breakpoints around the content instead, so you can be sure it looks good at _every_ size.

<comment><USER5> At the begining, a responsive website was build around media queries.

Then it was media queries and a fluid grid.

Then it was media queries and a fluid grid and mobile first.

Now it's media queries and a fluid grid and mobile first and built around the content.

Tomorrow what ?

Meanwhile, responsive websites are as crappy as non responsive one, but 2x heavier because of the crazy CSS and all the async js.

If you can't detect the internet speed of your user, you can't make responsive websites, period. That's why the only good responsive websites are the text- content-only websites.

Come on, the linked post is nearly 2mb...

<comment><USER4> Sure the generally accepted 'right way' is constantly evolving, but progress is a always a good thing.

I'm not sure about your other points, I see no reason why a responsive site should be 2x heaver in file size than its non-responsive equivalent, after all it's only a few more bytes of CSS. The increase you're seeing is probably more to do with large JS libraries and in the case of the linked article, many large images.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm in the middle of a huge responsive site redesign and I'll just say that responsive is a lot of extra work up front, but having your site work beautifully across platforms, devices, browsers is cool. The really painful part is when you have many different layouts and per-page layouts. It's one thing to make a blog design responsive, or twitter responsive when it's basically the same layout. It's totally different to have tens of different landing pages each with their own responsive styles. Very few if any sites are doing that yet, so there aren't a ton of great examples or established patterns.

</comment><comment><USER7> Brilliant article. Loved the bits about 'trends' and 'experts', that's exactly how I feel about placing emphasis on certain people and concepts on the web. It's a slippery slope when everyone follows the same path.

</comment><comment><USER8> My favourite: "Apples are not the only fruit." This guy has never seens this his site on an Android browser, otherwise he would noticed that his webfont does not work on the default browser.

</comment><comment><USER9> All responsive design does is force you to spaghetti-fy your application to the point it cant be maintained. A web app using responsive design will never fit it on both android and iOS because it will not look like it belongs on those platforms, so it will to the user look like crap. But oh you say I can shoehorn iUI into the iphone version. Why would anyone bother with this when it is EASY to target these platforms separately. IMO RD is not worth the time. And that goes for phonegap and cross platform app kits. Total waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER10> The length of the article was not responsive, however. Way too long for users of small mobile screens.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure what you mean by that. The length doesn't seem to cause a problem with the design on mobile, at least on all the devices I have.

edit: Maybe you're trying to say that the length makes the article unfriendly to mobile. In that case, it's worth pointing out that responsive design is not synonymous with mobile design, but a separate process. While responsive design may affect the mobile layout, responsiveness has very little to do with factors such as article length.

<comment><USER10> Being currently steeped in responsive design (not mobile-first, which really, the opening link for this thread is a mobile-first approach, that happens to be responsive), I concur. We have 6 small screens and 9 tablets we use for testing... design is important, but design is a wrapper for content... some better, some bad, some awesome.

The question being, as we consider stepping firmly into the scenario of an unpredictably wide range of screen sizes and use-cases accessing the content we create, should we also consider the amount of copy we impose on smaller screens and/or mobile users with unknown time/bandwidth for content consumption? I think responsible creators of digital content should consider content-length as much as UI.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Are you using O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf? - <AUTHOR>

If so, would you recommend it? What don't you like about it? <comment><USER2> Yes I use it.

Yes I recommend it.

It doesn't replace dead-tree in many cases, but for those "I need to know some obscure info or recipe for X RIGHT NOW" cases it's worth the $20 (IIRC) per month, even if I don't touch it for 3 months.

For books that I really want to read in-depth, I just buy the actual book. For bits and pieces augment-my-knowledge stuff, it's invaluable.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have access to it through my employer, but very rarely remember that I have access to it. That said, I have found it useful in the past and would recommend it if an only if you'll remember you have it.</comment>


Tell HN: Merry Christmas - <AUTHOR>

Best wishes for all, and may you spend it with your loved ones. <comment><USER2> Best wishes for a peaceful new year to Hacker News participants around the world. The other country I have lived in besides the United States went through a complicated process of making 25 December a civil holiday

<http://www.gio.gov.tw/info/festival_c/law_e/law.htm>

but I am aware that in many parts of the world 25 December on the Gregorian calendar is just one more day of the year (as it was to my Puritan ancestors in New England). Whether you get the day off work or not, I wish you much happiness and much sharing of new ideas on Hacker News in the new year.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope everyone is having a better xmas than I; this year is joint first worst xmas ever.

<comment><AUTHOR> My wishes that next years will be better. May 2012 bring everything you hope for.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would a marketing YouTube channel analyzing SaaS apps interest you? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I made a youtube channel about marketing and behavioral psychology in which I plan to make 2 types of videos:
1. Maketing analysis of world events, for example:
- Did Bill Gates create Covid-19? How Conspiracy theories spread explained
- Why do scams proliferate during recessions? (and how to avoid them)
2. More in-depth analysis of marketing strategies used by companies (mostly SaaS), for example:
-Addiction marketing: How Netflix, Fortnite and social media keep you stuck to your screens
-How Notion.so is able to succeed in a saturated market?
These were a few ideas of videos, let me know which one(s) you would like to watch ! :)
FYI, i just created a video about the last topic idea mentionned here, You can watch it on my channel called Marketing Banana. <comment><USER2> Yes it would definitely interest me and a lot of people I know.

But that being said, I think it would be all about how you grow content so that more people see your videos.

</comment><comment><USER3> How do you feel about really high quality text only content compared to video content?

Lately I've been finding video content inefficient and not technically deep enough for what I'm trying to learn from it. I think that the text only medium provides a much quicker way for me to know if the thing I'm looking for is in the content.

<comment><USER4> Feel the same way. Other than conference talks I hardly watch technical stuff on YouTube. Or really much of anything.

Plus for the creator, making high-quality videos takes so much time. Seems like a part-time endeavor and given the niche it's hard to expect something big from making these videos. Text you can write a lot of without devoting your life to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand your point of view, and I know that it may be risky to create long form videos like these in such a niche, but here are my 2 main reasons for doing it:

\- The youtube channel Marketing Mania talks about these kind of issues, and it is the most popular business channel in France with 350k subs, and he also has the most successful french business podcast.

\- It's also fun to me :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing with YouTube is that first of all it has to be entertaining. Everything else comes second.

I think many people would watch those videos, as all your ideas could be explored thoroughly and easily consumed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi. Only if they are very well sourced. One of the good ways I have is consuming content from primary sources, and then recouping it because many people talked about it, and then getting insights. Books, videos, blog posts sometimes.

This is time consuming as it can be one sentence in a two hour interview, but it is quite the education.

I'll give you examples. One of the greatest video lists is the PandoMonthly fireside chats with Sarah Lacy. These are more than 50 videos with founders and VCs. They are long, sometimes lasting three hours. She asks excellent questions and has a way with guests. It helps she's very knowledgeable and has talked with other people involved in an acquisition or an exit or whatnot, so when the guest answers, she further qualifies the information which nudges the guest to go deeper.

It also goes through eras. With the Chris Sacca interview, she goes over his time when he worked at Google. With Stuart Butterfield, they go over his time with Flickr, where he goes over the advice he got from Reid Hoffman and Esther Dyson who were investors on whether to sell to Yahoo. The tech they built for their "game", etc.

With the Kevin Systrom interview, they talk a bit about his time with Odeo, Twitter's ancestor. Or the fact he actually knew Zuckerberg when he was in college.

But say that we're talking about marketing or growth. Alex Schultz has lecture 6 (Growth) on How to Start a Startup where he exposes a few things, and the input of Sean Parker on how to grow. Recoup with another video by Chamath Palihapitya on that effort, where he talks about "someone" on the team proposing they do what they used to do at eBay.

You wonder about why, say Pachyderm, went with an open-core model, and it turns out they were in the same YC batch with GitLab, and the latter's founder sat the former and convinced him because he had tried a bunch of things.

These are anecdotes and trivia, but gruesome wars and magnificent events were born of lesser incidents. One example would be the Sequoia/Parker/Facebook thing and the change in relationships with founders many attribute to that (proxy, founder control, etc)

These and the books give context on many things, like shifts in distribution models for enterprise software, or insights on a difficult decision at a company you wondered about or why certain things were institutionalized at another.

I want that kind of content, not some bullshit video or article with no research and a title that goes "This startup..." or "Learn how X did Y" that'll talk to me about the three things to do to do x.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see, I really see the value in the examples you just gave and the goal behind the channel is to go deeer into similar issues.

For the moment I think the content can still be improved, and I will try to do so incrementally over the next few months by doing longer form essays that go deeper into marketing issues.

Thank you for your message, I appreciate it a lot! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just subscribed. Similar channels I've seen are Business Casual and Company Man, although not exactly marketing related, more company history focused. I think something like Stratechery but in video form would work well. Focus on how companies executed well as business case studies in video form.

</comment><comment><USER8> @Author, Would be interesting to understand what "Analysis" here means? Given that this is about marketing and behavioural psychology, I would certainly be interested. Do you /can you cover these examples with some kind of theoretical framework in mind? 4Ps or "Influence" or such? That might add value and give more weight to the videos

<comment><AUTHOR> As an example, for the idea I gave about Bill Gates & the Covid-19. The Bill Gates part would just be a hook to the more interesting theme: How do conspiracy theories spread.

And from that, I can talk about How a conspiracy theory is built by going deep into a few related topics:

\- How the most effective conspiracy theories allegedly happened in front of all while most are oblivious to them, this could be called the "grandeur" effect

\- How rumors spread:

1\. People Spread Rumors When There's Uncertainty

2\. People Spread Rumors When They Feel Anxiety

3\. People Spread Rumors When the Information is Important

4\. People Spread Rumors When it Helps Their Self-Image and Social Status

-How confirmation bias leads people to not even accept opposite opinions (and the help of news & social media algorithms, which encourage this bias)

-How the "mille feuille argumentatif" (french term, the MFA is used by politicians, people who debate, and conspiracy theorists), which consists in flooding someone with data and information, which is an influence tactic.

\- A sort of collective Persecutory delusion, because of the common thinking that "the rich always harm the poor for profit"

And I could still do more research about the topic, hope the kind of content I'm striving to make is more clear :)

For the moment I made 2 short videos which do not go as in depth, this is because I had no editing and filming experience beforehand, and I want to ship a few projects before making more longform videos. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah anything that can help growth will be well received. I think the key is not just rehashing the well known stories- Dropbox etc

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I thought, I think that striving to create content about current and well mediatized issues or more obscure but still helpful marketing examples may also help with having fresh content :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds interesting. Do you have a link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, here it is: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d63Q0oID8S8&t](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d63Q0oID8S8&t)</comment></comment>


Amazon patent reveals 'voice sniffer algorithm' that could analyze conversations - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/Business/amazon-patent-reveals-voice-sniffer-algorithm-analyze-conversations/story?id=54175793&cid=social_twitter_abcn <comment><USER2> Shocking news that a company aiming to put a microphone in every house is also working on how to analyze all the voice information it can gather.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ugh. Auto playing sound.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alternate: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/business/media/amazon- goo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/business/media/amazon-google- privacy-digital-assistants.html)</comment></comment>


The Abortion Debate Is Stuck. Are Artificial Wombs the Answer? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opinion/sunday/abortion-technology-debate.html <comment><USER2> I've had this thought for a while too and I've wondered if I was the only one. It seems almost obvious but I've never heard it articulated in public like this.

For it to work you would need the procedure to be cheap and you would also have to radically reform and clean up the adoption process.

The effect on politics would be dramatic. I know a whole ton of people who vote straight R on this issue alone. Killing the abortion issue would allow all kinds of realignment. For that reason you'd probably see hard opposition from the right to any attempt to actually end abortion. They need it as a "get out the vote" issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> almost certainly not.</comment>


Trump releases rule forcing hospitals and insurers to disclose negotiated rates - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/15/trump-releases-rule-requiring-hospitals-and-insurers-to-disclose-negotiated-rates.html <comment><USER2> > Implementing the changes is likely to cost hospitals less than 1% of their > revenue, an official on the call said. Hospitals could be fined $300 a day > by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services if they don't comply with > the new disclosure rule, officials said. The administration is also > proposing extending the disclosure rules to health insurers.

Interesting. I wonder what that (1% revenue) is in terms of percentage of profit. I would've gone after the insurance industry long before I touched the hospital's bottom line - my grandmother comes to the US, whenever she has an operation, for a reason. That reason is that the money is here, the technology is here, and the best doctors from around the world often end up immigrating here.

But at the same time, plenty of Americans can't afford a basic checkup.

Ideally, we preserve the incentive for the medical and technology communities to come here (money) while reducing the immediate monetary burden on everyday consumers that need to access that healthcare.

The obvious middle-men are the insurance companies. Then again, this isn't a single-variable equation.

<comment><USER3> THere are other middle men also, there is an industry of insurance brokers that take a cut to help companies wade through the plethora of bs associated with getting quotes and choosing an insurance company. There are also insurance company reps at every stage of the healthcare process, they review prescriptions, visit your hospital room to try and get you discharged sooner, they maintain call centers and data centers. The middle man aspect of marking up the services is just one layer of the insurance industrial complex. Also many Americans can't afford a checkup because they spend the money they do have on bullshit, it's not that we wake up one day and realize we don't have Medicare for all, we know we WILL have to pay for some healthcare (preventative or emergency) and still elect to eat out and spend beyond our means.

<comment><USER2> > Also many Americans can't afford a checkup because they spend the money they > do have on bullshit, it's not that we wake up one day and realize we don't > have Medicare for all

Trust me, I agree with you more than you know.

Reddit just trained me to try and sound less like I'm blaming individuals for making poor financial decisions (if I want my opinion to be heard rather than downvoted into the ninth circle of hell) and to never directly state that I don't support (current interpretations of) medicare for all.

<comment><USER3> Reddit is a cesspool, I know what you mean, any hint that you think people might be able to avoid the trouble they are complaining about by planning ahead is down-voted into oblivion. As a conservative leaning commentator I have to abandon my accounts every once in a while

<comment><USER4> who cares about internet points? Say what you think.

<comment><USER3> If you earn enough negative karma or points you get shadow banned, or your posts are auto deleted.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Moving to Octopress From Wordpress - <AUTHOR> http://humblecoder.co.uk/blog/2012/08/11/moving-to-octopress-from-wordpress/

<comment><USER2> Have fund reading your blog on Internet Explorer (7 and 8, I suppose 9 works) ...</comment>


Holiday Lites: HTML CSS and JS Benchmark - <AUTHOR> http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/HolidayLites/

<comment><USER2> Chrome - 31.0 16.97 IE - 11.0.96 2.83 Firefox 25 - [nothing showed up]

Seems like test is focusing on something that IE optimized heavily</comment>


Sweden's 100 explosions this year: what's going on? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50339977 <comment><USER2> If people just keep flagging comments that they don't agree with, we will never be able to have a proper discussion about this. Holding a different/non- PC opinion should not be grounds for killing a post. Win with words, not with moderation.

EDIT: The post is also gone from the front page. Upsetting.

<comment><USER3> Isn't it completely off topic for this board though? On reddit I'd agree with you.

<comment><USER2> Non-technology threads show up on the frontpage every day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've had many talks to people about this situation and in short I see this as young people not having been fostered by the society. There are so many aspects to it, but there are no easy meme-solutions to this one:

It's really interesting to read and hear about the success of the cease- fire/GVI method developed in the US and led by David Kennedy. This work have started in Sweden as well, but you need a 7-10 year horizon here:

[https://youtu.be/wu00H7eeWVM](https://youtu.be/wu00H7eeWVM)

Conceptually it's a bit like parenting actually, which only makes sense.

For it to be effective it will require cooperation between several instances - police, social services, school and others that might touch/interface with these kids.

It needs to be worked agile (not Agile), if you nerds know what I mean!

Second - city planning. These areas will have to be bulldozed down and rebuilt IMO. People need to be able to put pride and feel connected to where they live. Young men tend to really easily access "don't give a shit"-mode. I know from experience... A part of this generation is probably lost already and we need to keep a 20 year lookout.

Or we can just whine about wanting 16yo kids be sent to 10 year in prison and spread memes on facebook.

<comment><USER5> > These areas will have to be bulldozed down and rebuilt IMO

They did that in the 60s-70s with a part of Malmö, an area called Lugnet. That area was improved because of the gentrification that followed. The people who used to live in Lugnet (mostly working class) moved out to newly built areas further out from the city center (Rosengård for example). Those areas are problematic today.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but this is not what I'd like to see though.

The "newly built" areas that you refer to are probably not something to be proud of, right?

I've only been to Rosengard twice, and it felt just as awful as the old projects outside stockholm.

This is going to cost a lot of money/resources to fix and I'd rather we spend money fixing the bugs in our society than build prisons and lock people up for decades. In the end the latter will not fix the underlying issues and instead work to segregate and compound issues further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> " _Swedish police do not record or release the ethnicity of suspects or convicted criminals_ "

This why fewer and fewer people trust officialdom. Always redact, redact, redact! Whether it's CIA cables, air bags, or upticks in violence--the powers that be refuse to put the facts on the table and trust people to make the right decisions.

If a guy kills some people, and is convicted by a jury, I think the public has a right to know who he is, where he came from, why he did it, etc. without having that intermediated by armchair-sociologist bureaucrat.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is some critical difference between Sweden and Finland or Sweden and Norway.

In my opinion, immigration is Ok, but it must be managed and incoming people must be integrated - basically they need work. Nothing else.

If young men are living without work and without hope, this and much worse is a result.

<comment><USER8> quite a harsh oversimplification of what is going on

<comment><USER7> How it is an oversimplification? What else is going on? This sounds like a small scale tribal war. In history, when ever there has been too many idle young men, violence has been a result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How come organized criminals use bombs in Sweden but rarely anywhere else? IMO bombs are more like the M.O of terrorists. If a gang wanted to scare or take out a rival, there must be more efficient ways. A bomb not only draws unwanted attention from the public and authorities, you also run the risk of hurting the wrong people.

(Edit: Am a Swede, and live nearby the Linköping bomb site that hurt 25 this June..)

<comment><USER10> It is my understanding that explosives where popularized after an influx of hand grenades from Serbia. Until rather recently these have been categorized as dangerous materials rather then weapons so it didn't carry the same risks being caught with them as with handguns.

My uneducated guess as to why the violence is that is has become decentralized. We had a fairly long period with stable power structures in the Swedish underground, there where a few biker gangs that had a few rare and violent bouts bouts but they where infrequent.

Today we have a large number of loosely organized criminals that act independently, fighting over much smaller turfs.

In some sense this might very well be because the old criminal organizations, populated mostly by right leaning criminals, have failed to integrate potential recruits from different ethnic backgrounds.

<comment><USER11> So, even criminals are now either left or right leaning?

Sweden has a problem with freedom of speech, PC and political elite, that fail to acknowledge the consequences of their policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "This is a serious situation, but most people shouldn't be worried, because they are not going to be affected."

What a terrible statement. Most "situations" don't affect most people. The fact that your chances of dying from pancreatic cancer are pretty low doesn't mean you shouldn't be taking steps to reduce your sugar intake and whatnot.

<comment><USER13> You should worry proportionally to the actual risk. Most people don't worry day-to-day about pancreatic cancer (it's also unrelated to sugar intake afaik).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When data is kept secret, but interpretations are given freely, I think it would be prudent to reject those interpretations.

</comment><comment><USER14> To all the share blue people who flagged this story the real adults are trying to have a conversation about how to fix this if it ever comes to our country stop ending conversations online by flagging stuff

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, would've never thought Snabba Cash was this close to real Sweden...

</comment><comment><USER16> The situation is terrible. From what I've understood from reading the news past year is that the police has lost control over Malmö (Sweden's third largest city that got hit with the most immigrant applications) to organised criminals and the inhabitants who can afford it are moving away quickly.

The right-wing party Sverigedemokraterna is hence growing stronger while the current ruling socialist party Socialdemokraterna is losing voters inversely as a result.

[https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinionsunders%C3%B6kningar_in...](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinionsunders%C3%B6kningar_inf%C3%B6r_riksdagsvalet_i_Sverige_2022)

<comment><USER17> Malmö is called the most dangerous city in the Nordic countries. In last few years it has had murder rate close to New York.

New York has had lowest murder rate in 50 years and it's considered safe city. According to a 2015 ranking of 50 cities by The Economist, New York was the 10th overall safest major city in the world, as well as the 28th safest in personal safety[1]. I suppose many New Yorkers can sympathize with people Malmö because they know what it's to live in constant fear when the police has lost the control.

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

<comment><USER18> Crime in large cities is not evenly distributed. You can leave your car unlocked in one neighborhood and you will regret stopping at the light with an open window in another. Malmo's population is only 300K according to Wiki. It's smaller than the smallest borough of the NYC. I imagine its residents do not enjoy nearly as much insulation from the crime areas as Newyorkers do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh now we're going to start talking about violence and immigration 10 years too late the country is lost

</comment><comment><USER19> "This is fine" is going on.

<comment><USER20> That's a very bad faith read.</comment></comment>


Rome's border walls were the beginning of its end - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2012/09/roman-walls/ <comment><USER2> This is a rediculous ahistorical argument.

The Roman empire did not collapse right after Hadrian. Indeed, the next two emperors after Hadrian are often called "good emperors" (Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius), and Rome was quite strong then. I don't know of anyone else who seriously claims that building the border walls in any way led to the collapse of the Roman Empire. Indeed, the fortifications were specifically designed to make the empire easier to defend, and given what happened afterwards, there's decent evidence that these fortifications _did_ help in the empire's defense.

Anyone interested in the history of the western Roman empire would be well- served to listen to the excellent "History of Rome" podcast by Mike Duncan: [https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/](https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/) For this purpose, you should listen to episode #179 ("The End") at [https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/201...](https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/2012/05/179-the- end.html) . Duncan says that there isn't just one cause of the fall of the western Roman empire - instead, they were overwhelmed by a confluence of multiple factors. Duncan says, "The decline and fall... is not going to be able to be explained away by 1 or 2 simple causes... (each of the many problems) played off other in a synergistic orgy of destruction". Episode #179 discusses this in more detail. Indeed, there were efforts near the end that _might_ have saved it.

The real issues are complicated and don't easily fit into a "left" or "right" discussion. If anything, the beginning of the end was that the border walls were penetrated, not that border walls were built, so you could argue that the border walls were necessary to have allowed the empire to have lasted as long as it did. On the other hand, part of the reason they were penetrated was because the Romans didn't let the Germans have real power within their empire and didn't do a good job integrating Germans into their empire. On the gripping hand, in many ways the collapse was in part because Rome had become accustomed to fielding armies by paying mercenaries who were loyal only to their commanders, instead of having soldiers who saw themselves as Roman citizens fighting for the Roman government... and as Duncan notes, paying off an 'other' to not invade is not a lasting solution. ("The empire was no longer able to raise a national army, it could only pay for protection. And this, I can assure you, is an unsustainable model of self-defense.")

And of course, only the western Roman empire fell in 476; the eastern Roman empire continued for about another thousand years.

I'll add my own viewpoint. One of the biggest problems of Roman empire as a whole (compared to the previous republic) was its failure to have a way to peacefully select the next ruler. This lack of legitimacy led to occasional outbreaks of civil war that repeatedly sapped Roman strength. I think that is a _key_ problem that led to the fall of the western Roman empire when it did. The eastern Roman empire had same problem as well. For example, legitimacy issues in the eastern Roman empire led to serious problems after Basil II, and their civil wars fatally weakened them.

There are definitely lessons to be learned from Rome (and history in general), but that requires more careful examination of what actually happened.

<comment><USER3> To piggyback this a bit: I highly recommend YouTuber Shaun's videos on this topic

[Stefan Molyneux's Fall of Rome - A Response] ([https://youtu.be/BHW3Y_p2llo](https://youtu.be/BHW3Y_p2llo))

[Immigration and the Fall of Rome] ([https://youtu.be/WqCCx4wj79o](https://youtu.be/WqCCx4wj79o))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I wrong for believing that the author has drastically oversimplified their argument to make it seem like walls were the downfall of the roman empire? I've studied the fall of the roman empire for years on and off, and am no expert, but in decades prior, not once were the existence of walls ever mentioned as the reason for the downfall of society.

Some societies have over-relied on such defenses, true. But that is not the same as a pure causation. In those situations the problem is cultural, and either the people have become lazy and or divided.

<comment><USER5> Yes, you are wrong. It's clear you haven't even read the article. The article is an overview of (semi-)recent* archeological research into Roman frontier fortifications. The general conclusion that it draws was that the Romans focused too much on fortifying their frontiers, which provided them with a sense of complacency. Once the frontiers were breached, it was already over. Sorta like the Maginot line. It also suggests that fortification-building towards the end of the empire was a symptom of the decline itself, not a cause (or cure).

All the off-topic comments here about politics are by people who didn't read the article.

*It's from 2012.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nah.

The real problem was the Marian reforms. With professional army the imperium was able to expand to a size that was impractical to rule. Also success was so thorough that there were no strong enemies left to practice your troops against. And no enemies that would weld the society into single cohesive nation. War protects from despotism, as Kant said. When you don't have to fear war, the wannabe despots start to rob what they can.

Hadrian only saved what he could. And giving the empire some 400 years more life as he did so. And the walls of Constantinople lasted still thousand years after Hadrian had led the way of wall building.

Now if you wish to connect dots to possible downfall of U.S. Then the critical things would be instituting selective service after Vietnam war. And then collapse of soviet union and now U.S. is also lacking credible enemy. With any luck China will quickly rise as competitor.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love reading about Ancient Rome and this article has some really interesting information I'd never known before. The origin of the word "limits" I found particularly interesting.

Unfortunately the title and overall aim of the article detract from all the good information it contains. In particular, the article's attempt to remain topical and relevant by linking Rome's downfall to an issue we face today do not do justice to the well-documented and well-researched conclusions historians have drawn to date. If it offered new evidence, that might be a different story. It feels like a rehashing of "Rome expanded so far its resources were spread thin" but with the focus being on the wall itself, which is a little disingenuous. So it's hard to shake the feeling that this is a thinly veiled political piece, which is really unfortunate because there is a lot of great knowledge mixed in.

<comment><USER8> The article is from 2012, so hardly aimed at an issue we face "today."

<comment><USER7> It explicitly references the US-Mexico border. Although I did assume it was written post-2016, the point should still stand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a desolation, they call it peace." (from Agricola by Tacitus, a Caledonian chief describing Rome, 98AD)

This is what Rome was doing before it built its limes, brutally and indiscriminately conquering their frontiers. Feels like this is being indirectly advocated for.. which is odd, considering its modern comparison.

Can support other comments in this thread from my reading of Adrian Goldsworthy's whole catalog.. Rome's decline was drawn out and complicated; it would be simplistic and wrong-headed to say it was because it built walls on its frontiers.

</comment><comment> ur-whale Which of the following two is most likely to have precipitated the fall? The debasement of the sesterce, or the desire the defend the empire using walls? Correlation != causation

</comment><comment><USER10> Is this article implying a US-Mexico border wall would be the the beginning of the US's end?

As a counter example, why hasn't China crumbled like Rome?

<comment><USER5> You should read the article and find out for yourself. Let us know when you're done!

Edit: Fair enough.

<comment><USER10> I tried but was met with an un-closable modal and I didn't feel like creating a NG account so I closed it.</comment></comment></comment>


Hints on High-Assurance, Cyber-Physical, System Design (2016) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~lepike/pubs/pike-secdev16.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Galois Inc is an awesome company that does difficult R&D, product development, and uses/creates cutting-edge tech. Much of what they do gets put in their GitHub. This paper, which doesn't have any math or anything, describes general principles they used in their work on high-assurance security of UAV's for DARPA. Some of the tools, like Ivory and Tower languages, are also open- source.

[https://github.com/GaloisInc/](https://github.com/GaloisInc/)

[https://galois.com/blog/](https://galois.com/blog/)

[http://ivorylang.org/ivory-introduction.html](http://ivorylang.org/ivory- introduction.html)</comment>


Tesla motor designer explains Model 3's transition to permanent magnet motor - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2018/02/27/tesla-model-3-motor-designer-permanent-magnet-motor/amp/ <comment><USER2> I am all for Tesla and electric cars, however (nobody's perfect) I wonder how much power such a car (not necessarily Tesla's) sends in electromagnetic spectrum to its passengers. The equivalent of SAR for mobile phones [0].

Thanks for your insights.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_absorption_rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_absorption_rate)</comment>


Joxa: Lisp dialect on Erlang VM - <AUTHOR> http://joxa.org/

<comment><USER2> I'm interested by what seems to attract people to a VM/runtime enough to re- implement another language on top of it while preferring a new language to whatever the VM's flagship is. Sticking just to Joxa and the more common ones showing up here, the claimed motivations[0] seem to be:

Joxa - fault tolerance; concurrency/scaling; "tool set in which to build DSLs"; (A Lisp on Erlang VM)

MagLev - native code & data persistence scaling to very large stores; distributed cache; heavily optimized JIT (Ruby on Gemstone/S Smalltalk VM - <http://maglev.github.com/>)

Clojure - multithreading; Java library access; portability/scaling (A Lisp on JVM - <http://clojure.org/>)

JRuby - performance; multithreading; Java library access (Ruby on JVM - <http://jruby.org/>)

Jython - performance; Java library access/extension; optional static compilation (Python on JVM - <http://www.jython.org/>)

Parrot/Rakudo - Such an oddball case (and not a reimplementation) that I'm reluctant to toss it in here, but the Parrot VM is explicitly designed for multiple languages (Perl6 - <http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo/>)

All three VMs have been around for quite a long time and been the focus of huge engineering efforts, but none of the re-implementations seem to have displaced the originals or the VM's default language[1], so my question is whether there's _any_ re-implimentation that did? The obverse (replacing the old VM/compiler for a language with a new one) isn't uncommon what with all the browsers that have done it, the huge changes in the JVM, etc. and usually those end up being complete swaps, so is there one decisive factor that makes the difference?

[0] Ignoring the obvious, worthy, and most importantly fun factor of "because it would be cool" [1] [1] Arguably in the case of the Lisps there's no original to displace. [2] JSLinux, anyone?

<comment><USER3> Because some people are not able to master several languages and prefer to always use the same regardless of the task at hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does it compare to Robert Virding's LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang)?

<https://github.com/rvirding/lfe>

<comment><USER5> Just at a quick glance, I think LFE is a Lisp-2? At least, it bears more resemblance to Common Lisp than Scheme. I don't see any 'funcall' function though, so I could be wrong.

<comment><USER6> Erlang vm is a lisp 2.

To me this looks like a not as well developed version of LFE.

<comment><USER7> It depends on what you mean by not as well developed. If by that you mean maturity. Probably, its much newer and has just had its very first early alpha release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Add a code sample to the home page. It gives an instant feeling of how the language is. Does it have long-scheme-like-names? Do you have to sharpquote the #'functions? ...

<comment><USER7> I will do that (its a great idea by the way)

Yes it does have scheme like names. No you do not have to sharpquote. Its a lisp 1 not a lisp 2</comment></comment>


How did Andrew Ng become so good at Machine Learning? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/How-did-Andrew-Ng-become-so-good-at-Machine-Learning?share=1 <comment><USER2> Reading papers is so crucial. It is a great way to get ideas and apply them. I was able to set up some really good tree based forecasting models based on a PhD dissertation I had read once.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I didn't get it until I read this. I've read a few papers before and some of them have been too abstract / unfamiliar for me to understand. I've had to read them slowly 3-4 times just to get it to 'click'. I think it takes practice to read papers, but once you have the habit, maybe you won't be able to stop.

<comment><USER3> After reading a paper, you might want to try getting a pen and paper then recall by writing what have you understood as if you are teaching to it others. If you can't recall what you've read then reread the paper to fill in the gap and test your understanding again. This method is called Feynman Technique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Off topic, but does it strike anyone else as strange that Quora is a platform to ask these types of questions (how come X is so good at Y)? After reading the headline, I knew immediately this was going to be on Quora. The questions often have some good content in response but they seem like they have some subjectivity baked in.

</comment><comment><USER5> If he was that good he wouldn't use Matlab/Octave to teach his class.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, he should've totally used node.js /s

<comment><USER7> No! R and Julia, or straight APL! /s</comment></comment></comment>


Comparing VS Code and Sublime for JavaScript Development - <AUTHOR> https://snipcart.com/blog/visual-studio-code-vs-sublime-javascript <comment><USER2> Nicely done. I agree as someone who has used both. I tend to think Sublime = Server & VSCode = Client languages, but either will work fine. I do love Code's smart Git integration.</comment>


Show HN: my new app (this time, months of work)! - <AUTHOR> http://pinterest.com/iphone/go/

<comment><USER2> Just so you have a heads up, it's an iTunes link.</comment>


How One Hardware Startup Solved Silicon Valley's "Woman Problem" (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/how-one-hardware-startup-solved-silicon-valley-s-woman-problem-76e3ee581534 <comment><USER2> The article states that they get more male applicants than female, but then it also states, "Women know where the women are" and that they have a relatively equal ratio of male/female employees.

So basically, they "solved" Silicon Valley's "Woman Problem" by turning away a large number of qualified male applicants and hired from the smaller pool of females.

Sounds like gender discrimination to me.

A truly non discriminatory workplace would have a ratio of male/female employees that was in line with the ratio of qualified male/female applicants (even if that meant more males than females). Just saying.

<comment><USER3> I think you are getting to the core of the disagreement here. You can have a process that either ensures equal treatment or ensures equal outcomes (for certain groups), but you cannot guarantee both. The only way to guarantee both is for all groups of interest to be emotionally, intellectually, and preferentially identical.

Essentially, you can view any (HR or other) process as a function, and you can either guarantee a 'fair' function, or a 'fair' result, but not both unless you restrict the inputs.

Some people prefer to have equality of treatment, while others prefer equality of outcome; I think this is why people disagree so vehemently on this issue, and rarely change their minds or compromise after a debate.

<comment><USER4> Good way of putting it. I think most people would prefer equality of both treatment and outcome, if possible.

Additionally, I suspect that it is possible, just not in the short term (or even decades, possibly). But in the long term, I think that if you achieve equality of outcome, then new norms begin to take root, and eventually, you can remove any artificially created inequality of treatment and still get an equal outcome.

Your function example really nails it down if you consider it cyclical, with the output being averaged with previous inputs and then re-entered as input. So, inequal input to an equal function generates inequal output. But if you change the function to be inequal but opposite to the existing input, then your output becomes equal. When you average it, it becomes inequal again, but less so than the original. Once your average approached equal by repeating this, you can replace your inequal function with an equal one and your system should remain fairly stable. Essentially, your function just needs to compensate for biased input, and if there is no biased input, it can behave equally.

However, simply having equal treatment/function with inequal outcomes/input/output results in a system that just remains the same.

So basically, affirmative action type steps could potentially lead to an environment where those steps are no longer necessary, and can be removed, achieving actual equality.

But maybe I'm an idealist.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if you're an idealist, but you seem to believe that there is strong feedback in the function, which is something that I am somewhat skeptical of.

If income and examples/role models were the primary inputs, I'd have to agree that your feedback model would work. The problem is that there seem to be fundamental differences between many groups in IQ, EQ, and preferences. In addition, men and women have different life experiences beyond how society treats them, as men cannot experience what it is to carry a child to term, and men are less likely to breastfeed their children; if this type of experience is a relevant input to work productivity or preferences, a 'fair' system will probably create unequal outcomes.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps there are some factors that would lead to unequal outcomes that would not be corrected, but I expect that these, including the ones you describe, would have significantly smaller effects than what we currently have. And I expect that those would have been the initial impetus causing a runaway feedback effect which would cause what we have.

So, really we have two functions. One function produces the number of men and women applying for the jobs. The second function produces the number of men and women occupying the jobs. The second function is the one we've discussed wanting to control to be either fair or unfair. And yes, with inequal inputs, a fair function produces inequal outputs.

The first function, we are assuming for now is beyond our control, and the inputs to it are largely unknown and/or beyond our direct control. It is a product of experiences, societal norms, encouragement, discouragement, and personal interests. The first function directly generates the inputs to the second function. As I understand it, you are postulating that this first function is inherently inequal to the point of generating the current applicant proportions we are seeing, and that the output of this function is not significantly impacted by any inputs that are the output of the second function (feedback effect). I would argue that the first function, while possibly inequal, is not sufficiently so to create what we observe, and instead, is reasonably impacted by the output of the second function. Thus, the feedback effect.

Anecdotes I've read and witnessed seem to indicate that there are factors that reduce the number of females who make it to the application stage that would not exist if females were not already a minority in the workforce. Males in an all-male team do frequently develop habits that would put off most women who join that team as a newcomer. This doesn't have to be intentionally malicious to discourage a woman from continuing to work in the field. If women are made to feel uncomfortable, intentionally or otherwise, they are less likely to stay and to encourage other women to join, and more likely to actively discourage more women to join. And it seems very likely that a 50% female workforce would go a long way to removing uncomfortable work environments. And this can happen similarly at the college level before ever getting to real work environments, with women facing friction in mostly male programs.

Then there's the conception that it is a typically male job, just because there are many more man than women currently in it. This isn't malicious either, necessarily, it's just the way human minds work. You see mostly men doing something, you associate it with men. So you get a stronger unconscious gender affinity just because that's the way it is and has been. And that affinity leads fewer women to try the field out, fewer people to encourage them to try it out, and more people to encourage them toward other fields or even some people actively discouraging them, possibly those who have previously dropped out of the field or possibly just naive types.

I'm sure there are other examples of ways that an existing imbalance in the workforce impact the balance of those attempting to join the workforce and making it all the way to the application phase.

Also note. I'm not making any claims as to exactly how strong this feedback loop is. Just that it is strong enough to make a significant difference over a significant amount of time. That time frame may be decades, or it may be generations. I expect that at a minimum, we'd see a far greater natural equality if it were artificially enforced for 50 years or so. After that, you could have a system that is almost entirely fair, perhaps occasionally adding a small balance to restore it any time it approaches a significant tipping point again.

<comment><USER3> My personal view is that the case you are putting forward is quite tenuous, and does not justify unequal treatment. Making a "significant difference over a significant period of time" is simply too speculative to justify discrimination, especially when the "significant difference" wouldn't necessarily increase people's happiness, productivity, or life satisfaction; one could imagine that making men and women more similar might make both groups worse off. In addition, it seems that most groups' positions and roles seem to be evolving (I assume mostly in their favor), and I have no reason to believe that spontaneous evolution is any 'worse' than affirmative action, especially in long term results.

To make your case convincing to me, you would need a clear outline of how the plan would create a Pareto improvement (which would not necessarily be pecuniary), and you would also need to outline a way of determining whether the plan is working. In my view, there is a danger of executing a plan which has no chance of working, and continuing to rachet-up the discrimination in the vain hope that 'it might work if we try harder'. I would also require your plan to have a much better expected outcome than the status quo.

Perhaps there is also an alternative argument which would convince me that procedural discrimination was 'worth it', but I haven't heard it yet.

<comment><USER4> Well, money doesn't buy happiness, but it does go a pretty long way toward facilitating it. So I'd say it's unlikely that the status quo of leaving a huge imbalance in some of the most lucrative fields available today wouldn't be worse for women than addressing that imbalance. I can't think of any high paying fields that are dominated by women. And there is a notable difference in average pay between men and women.

I'd agree with your second paragraph, for the most part. It is easy for a program with the right intentions to fall into that trap. It would bear a more in-depth analysis. I think, once started, it would be fairly easy to determine if it is working. If a more equal workforce can't be maintained without an increase in efforts, it probably isn't working. In fact, a sign of it working would be a gradual decrease in the need for it. In other words, if the workforce began to skew the other way, then the program would need to be scaled back to bring things back in line. So, if it worked, it would be self- terminating, and should be designed as such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That whole 'mosquito' thing is very odd. From reading it seems that this was a sexist remark and women everywhere have had to deal with similar comments when in actual fact it's nothing to do with her being a woman, moreso the fact that in her role, she was a tiny bit annoying. Anyone in that role, man or woman, would've had a similar 'nickname' just from the nature of the role itself

<comment><USER6> It's possible it's a reference to her voice. But not having met her, I don't know. It's also possible, that were she a big burly guy they might not have treated her the same way.

Either way, it sounds like the place handled it appropriately, which is awesome.

<comment><USER7> > It's also possible, that were she a big burly guy they might not have > treated her the same way.

Sure, but he may have just been referred to as a meat head, a dumb lug, etc.

Also, the lady was in charge of enforcing safety rules. People almost always hate that person, even if they are saving their asses. See how OSHA reps are treated on job sites as an example.

<comment><USER6> Definitely true.

Heck, I hate the OSHA guy myself, and the union enforcement guy, and anyone else who it seems is trying to keep me from just getting shit done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" It's also no accident; a commitment to gender diversity is at the core of the company's DNA."_

Some people make the tech industry gender imbalance out to be primarily driven by sexism/misogyny, when I think this article makes clear it's more about chauvinism and bias. If everything goes well, in the future we will have a balance of gender in the tech industry. But we will still be left with elephants in the room.

People associate with, and hire, people like themselves. That extends to gender, race, economic status, education, sexual preference, religion, etc. The fact that this company has _zero black employees_ is probably not because they're racists - it's more likely due to personal bias, which drives both hiring and corporate culture.

I don't think this company has solved a problem. They're hiring based on bias just like all the white male-led tech companies. They just have a slightly different angle. (Or at least, that's what I get from the article, which may have been written with a very specific spin)

<comment><USER9> >If everything goes well, in the future we will have a balance of gender in the tech industry.

Why are you so sure of this? What if the natural balance is 80% male? There are many industries where this is the case. Even if businesses become increasingly discriminatory against male applicants, it isn't going to change that those who spend time learning the requisite skills are more likely to be men.

<comment><USER8> First off, there is no natural balance to an industry, because they aren't natural. They do have norms, though.

Second, saying tech businesses are going to become 'increasingly discriminatory' against men is like saying that after desegregation and the civil rights movement we got 'increasingly discriminatory' against white people sitting in the front of a bus.

Third, there's no scientific/factual basis for why men might spend more time learning tech skills. It's not like 80% of men around the world sit around all day thinking about debugging kernel drivers. More than likely it's social conditioning and gender stereotypes that lead to the impression that men are simply more interested in, or better at, technology-related skills.

If you don't believe in gender stereotype, imagine if your mother taught your sister how to work on the family car, and told you to go back inside and play with your tea set because your pretty clothes might get dirty, and that this happened when your brain was still forming a very early world view.

<comment><USER9> Replace natural balance with equilibrium if the term natural makes you uncomfortable. My point is that there are innate differences between men and women, and these are reflected in their preferences for different types of work. There is a reason there are more women than men in nursing, that there are more male plumbers than female, and wishing for a different reality doesn't make it so.

>Second, saying tech businesses are going to become 'increasingly discriminatory' against men is like saying that after desegregation and the civil rights movement we got 'increasingly discriminatory' against white people sitting in the front of a bus.

The difference between my example and yours is that nobody is preventing women or minorities from applying or working in the desired positions. Nobody has legislated away their rights. The position you're advocating is quite similar to segregation. White men are only allowed on the "bus" after the front fills up with women.

There are many evolutionary reasons why men might spend more time building tools. I've noticed that it is politically acceptable to say that women make better caretakers or that they are more sociable, but that it is no longer politically acceptable to do the same with positive traits in regards to men.

To address your last point - "In 2002, Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University and Melissa Hines of City University in London stunned the scientific world by showing that vervet monkeys showed the same sex-typical toy preferences as humans. In an incredibly ingenious study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Alexander and Hines gave two stereotypically masculine toys (a ball and a police car), two stereotypically feminine toys (a soft doll and a cooking pot), and two neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed dog) to 44 male and 44 female vervet monkeys. They then assessed the monkeys' preference for each toy by measuring how much time they spent with each. Their data demonstrated that male vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the masculine toys, and the female vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the feminine toys. The two sexes did not differ in their preference for the neutral toys."

Wishing for a different reality doesn't make it so.

<comment><USER10> Except that's not the whole picture: [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making- sense/truth-women-stem-ca...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/truth- women-stem-careers/)

The natural state of tech industry is far from what your proposing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _This is not a company where micro-aggressions will fly._

This seems like such a toxic philosophy to me. One of the worst things you can do for a workplace is stifle honest conversation and criticism, and this focus on not "micro-aggressing" will do just that - the way it has in colleges over the last few years.

<comment><USER12> Businesses are not colleges.

<comment><USER13> I think you will agree a tyrannical workplace that stifles honest conversation and criticism is a pretty shitty place to work, and perpetuates the unhealthy power imbalance between employers and employees. A workplace shouldn't be a kingdom of the CEO where his word is law, at least not as it applies to your everyday behavior and speech. Exceptions of course to expecting widely accepted professional behavior.

<comment><USER14> No, I don't agree. Nobody should feel uncomfortable in their workplace, especially if the reason for discomfort has nothing to do with work. Comments about gender, sexual orientation, and race are almost never appropriate. College is a very different environment because people go there to learn holistically.

<comment><USER13> I poorly worded the parent comment. I agree with everything you said. It's when you take "nobody should feel uncomfortable in their workplace" to the absolute extremes that things become difficult, which is what a discussion about "micro-aggressions" becomes. At what point does someone's uncomfortableness with something become invalid? It's obviously not limitless.

<comment><USER14> No, but most companies filter out the most unreasonable people in their hiring process. I think you're making a caricature of these people's attempts to support their coworkers. "Microaggressions" in this context means that you should be careful about the little things you say, because you're in a multicultural workplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They should lead with their business successes (even if not profitable, they can talk about customer satisfaction, compelling use cases, differentiation, and growth), and follow up with "and we are also a great place for women to work, and we think other businesses can be, too".

If you choose business as a battleground, then you are implicitly setting up the success criteria as business success. So leaving that out and just focusing on hiring ratios and employee happiness feels incomplete.

<comment><USER16> It's foolish, and, honestly, kind of offensive, to imply that pushing diversity and at the same time pushing business success are somehow at odds with each other. There was an excellent segment that talked about almost this exact thing on Reply All a few weeks ago. If you skip to the second half, I'd recommend listening to it. They talk about how businesses benefit from diversity, how diverse groups perform better and get better results than groups chosen just on "qualifications", and they also address the annoyance at the fact that "success" and "diversity" are seen as competing goals, in stark rejection of evidence. They also talk about how things that don't seem like a big deal can really wear minority employees down:

[https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the- bar/](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-bar/)

<comment><USER17> "It's foolish, and, honestly, kind of offensive, to imply that pushing diversity and at the same time pushing business success are somehow at odds with each other."

Offensive? We're not even allowed to disagree with you about meta-level issues now? Nobody is being insulted or harassed, no one is being subjected to prejudicial remarks about any facet of their being -- and yet it's still, somehow, offensive?

<comment><USER16> By saying, "Pushing to get more even representation is at odds with business success or product quality," which is often outright stated and even more often pretty directly implied, people are basically saying, "Those 'diverse' people are inherently poorer workers with worse quality output." That's the subtext, and that's what I think is kind of offensive about that line of argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Coming from a machining background, the product they have created is a $2000USD mini mill with the largest tool being a .125" endmill. Their specs list a precision of .001". Now is that TIR, X/Y travel, or backlash?

The work envelope is 5.5x4.5x1.35 which is small. This looks like a purpose built PCB mill.

Does PCB manufacturing require a $2k+ mill? Is sampling a PCB not cheaper?

<comment><USER19> Haha yeah they could have just re-branded a Sherline mini mill, had better specs, and even paying retail for it they would have made a healthy profit at $2000 a pop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > It starts with the hiring process.

So this hardware startup solves the problem by making it that much harder for everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER21> So ... can we men get a gender neutral term for "mansplaining" ?

Men are not the only ones who do this. Yes the name comes from a male biased behaviour in the tech community but I have witnessed plenty of this out in about in non tech fields... "oh your an man, there's no way you would understand" or starting to explain something before asking if I need an explanation how it works, because why would a man ever need to know how a thing, like say a sewing machine, worked...

Calling it "mansplaining" (which is in my iPhones dictionary!?) does nothing to help stamp out this behaviour as undesirable. It arguably provides excuses for women to engage in the behaviour since they aren't "men" how can they be " _man_ splaining", and contributes to its continued existence by allowing this "mode of interaction" to continue regardless of gender.

Other than that. Awesome company, and I hadn't heard of the product despite having a need for something like that. So I may buy that milling machine in the future which is pretty cool.

<comment><USER22> Words are not their etymologies. Mansplaining is gender neutral if it is used in a gender neutral way.

A woman who understands the meaning of mansplaining will not believe that it is only bad to be patronizing[1] if you are a man because the word "mansplaining" exists, any more than she would believe she is not a human being because the word "mankind" exists.

Conversely, a woman who is already of the opinion that men can't understand how sewing machines work isn't going to be shamed into adopting a new opinion because somebody coined the word "condesplaining".

[1] Of course, "patronize" is a gendered term if we go by its etymology.

<comment><USER23> I agree, I also think it unlikely that the adoption of the term 'mansplaining' encourages non-men to patronize more people.

On the other hand, what I understand from the criticism of the term is that it hurts some people to hear it used. We choose our language because we don't want to cause others pain; when someone tells me that calling someone a b*tch causes them pain I stop using the word around them. If I have reason to believe that using the word causes a lot of people pain then I stop using it in public. Similarly, lots of people (some reference below) are pained by words like 'mansplain' and 'manspread.' If someone tells me that they are pained by it, I don't go and try and convince them that the word is actually fine to use and they shouldn't be pained, I stop using the word.

REF:

[http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your- language/2015/feb...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your- language/2015/feb/12/allow-me-to-explain-why-we-dont-need-words-like- mansplain)

[http://www.xojane.com/issues/why-you-ll-never-hear-me-use- te...](http://www.xojane.com/issues/why-you-ll-never-hear-me-use-term- mansplain)

[http://www.patheos.com/blogs/phoenixandolivebranch/2013/02/w...](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/phoenixandolivebranch/2013/02/what- my-feminism-is-and-why-im-not-okay-with-mansplaining/)

[http://halginsberg.com/lets-stop-using-terms-like- mansplain-...](http://halginsberg.com/lets-stop-using-terms-like-mansplain- and-manspread/)

<comment><USER24> >On the other hand, what I understand from the criticism of the term is that it hurts some people to hear it used.

It has a negative definition. It was chosen to be a gendered word, a tongue in cheek attack on the prevalence of accidentally gendered words like mankind and manslayer. When we are moving away from words that use the root word man to avoid accidental gendering, why would a new word be created that is gendered if it is not an attack on that gender?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ah, good. The problem is now solved. Silicon Valley is saved.</comment>


Web blocking to tackle suicide rates in UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/19/mps_suggest_introducing_web_blocking_to_tackle_suicide_rates_in_the_uk/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is starting to be an alarmingly regular topic...I wonder what capabilities they have to do this?

<comment><USER2> Read the actual report: [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/c...](http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhealth/300/300.pdf)

They're asking if changes need to be made, and suggesting that they should be made.

There are two mechanisms they might use:

1) Something like the current porn filter, which is entirely optional

2) Something like the current system using court orders to force ISPs to block access to some pirate websites.

The aim is to make it harder for people to search for suicide methods.

> 36\. We recommend that the suicide prevention strategy should review the > accountability and responsibility for the adherence to media guidelines. The > guidelines must have teeth and the refreshed suicide prevention strategy > must make clear who is responsible for dealing with breaches by the media, > at national and local level. We recommend that the refreshed suicide > prevention strategy should include a commitment by the Government to work > with internet providers and social media platforms to consider what changes > should be made to restrict access to sites which encourage self harm or give > detailed advice on suicide methods.

I'm (and I work in suicide prevention) much more interested in the first part of that para. We know from interviewing people who survived suicide attempts that media reports of other deaths heavily influence choice of method and location.

See also para 34:

> 34\. During the course of our inquiry, we have identified several instances > of inappropriate reporting and portrayal of suicide, all by leading > broadcasters and mainstream newspapers. We note with concern the widespread > continued use of the term "commit suicide", which reinforces stigmatising > attitudes from a time when suicide was a criminal offence. When we > questioned Public Health England, they did not believe that they were > responsible for taking action to counter irresponsible reporting, nor could > they identify whose responsibility it was to do so.50</comment></comment>