Ask YC: Can someone explain this JP Morgan buyout of Bear Stearns for me? - <AUTHOR> Here is what I understand. Bear Sterns did not have enough liquid capital to distribute to investors seeking to withdraw their money, a bank run like in "It's a Wonderful Life". And now the Fed has helped or guaranteed those investments so that JP Morgan can buy them for $2 a share. I probably have something wrong there. My question is 1. Is what I just said somewhat right, and 2. What is the impact on the tax payer? Did the Fed provide any money to JP Morgan to buy Bear Sterns? And if they did is it a loan that they will have to pay back or a free handout? <comment><USER2> _Bear Sterns did not have enough liquid capital to distribute to investors seeking to withdraw their money, a bank run_

Bear couldn't cover their margin calls (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_call#Margin_call>).

 _And now the Fed has helped or guaranteed those investments so that JP Morgan can buy them for $2 a share._

JPM wasn't going to touch Bear's liabilities without some guarantees from the Fed.

Details of the plan haven't been released, but here's a pertinent quote from the Journal ([http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120569598608739825.html?mod=...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120569598608739825.html?mod=special_coverage)):

 _To help facilitate the deal, the Federal Reserve is taking the extraordinary step of providing as much as $30 billion in financing for Bear Stearns's less- liquid assets, such as mortgage securities that the firm has been unable to sell, in what is believed to be the largest Fed advance on record to a single company. Fed officials wouldn't describe the exact financing terms or assets involved. But if those assets decline in value, the Fed would bear any loss, not J.P. Morgan._

Note that last sentence means the U.S. government (i.e., ultimately every taxpayer) is on the hook for that $30 billion.

</comment><comment><USER3> In a nutshell, banks work like this: People give them money to hold by putting it into checking/savings accounts. Banks then turn around and lend that money to others via loans. Sometimes they use that money to invest for themselves.

A bank's primary asset is trust. For a bank to work, the consumers must believe that their money is safe with their bank. Otherwise, they will not give their own money to the bank for safekeeping, and the bank would have no money to lend to others or invest. The irony is that banks cannot possibly have the cash on hand to give back to all their customers at once. But, as long as people believe in the bank, and keep their money in the bank, the bank stays afloat.

The problem that we're having now, is that certain banks that lent out a lot of customer's money in bad mortgages. So, with as many foreclosures that we've had, banks have lost a lot of money, and people lose trust in their banks. When people lose trust in a bank, they withdraw their money, creating a "run on the bank" just like in _It's a Wonderful Life_. This is what happened to Bair.

The big fear is fear itself. Worst case scenario is that the entire nation would have a loss of trust in the entire banking system. This could cause a run on the banking system, and lead to a chain reaction of banks imploding. This is what happened during the Great Depression.

That's why the Fed stepped in, and said that they would cover Bair's bad debts to avoid a big bank's collapse. It sucks, because the rest of the country is on the hook for Bair's losses. And, the US dollar is gets weaker when the government prints money to cover bad debts. But, it beats a chain reaction of banks imploding.

</comment><comment><USER4> Somebody set us up the moneybomb! All your basis points are belong to us.

Bear is an investment bank, and does not have direct access to borrow money from the Fed. Lat week JP agreed to act as a kind of conduit for loans backed by some of Bear's more toxic assets.

Sounds stinky, eh? The thing is that the Fed and everyone else is scared stiff that Bear would default. That would set of a ricochet all through the banking and trading system. This buyout is actually the lesser of two evils, and the price is so low because no one really knows what liabilities and losses are to come.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me get this straight. JP is taking a loan from the Fed to buy Bear?

<comment><USER4> Yes & No. JP is buying Bear with its own cash. It's only $230-odd million. The Fed allowed an unusual transaction in which $30B of Bear's toxic assets were put up as collateral for Fed loans in order to keep its (Bear's) operations and trades going. The Fed took some of the pressure off of Bear's balance sheet to make it more attractive to JP and reduce the damage to JP's balance sheet once the entities merge.

Bear: "Mein Leiben!"

Fed: "Holy sh*t, this can't happen! You, JP! You hold a lot of Bear's paper already. We need your help, and we'll sweeten the deal, ok?"

JP: "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't possibly refuse..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to work in the industry, so I will take a stab at explaining this:

Bear was overleveraged. The summer of 2007 saw the failure of two internal hedge funds at the company, a confidence crusher. As 2007 wrapped up, the subprime issue spread to other credit markets, effectively freezing the financial system. Bear found it more and more difficult to obtain short-term funding to cover their existing debt that was coming due. Last week, the CEO came on CNBC and stated that there was no liquidity problem at that time. I don't doubt that statement. Then came Thursday morning. A fund at the Carlyle Group failed, and Bear had a lot of business with the Carlyle group. It was the failure at Carlyle that finally TKOd Bear, but it was only a matter of time before it did indeed happen. Now, had Bear declared bankruptcy, which they would have had it not been for JP Morgan, a panic none of us have seen in our lifetime would have ensued. Bear would have been forced to dump all of its assets on the market, even the ones that Wall Street doesn't even know how to price. A complete breakdown of the US financial system would have ensued, and there would have likely been a run on not just an investment bank, but a retail bank as well. The Federal Reserve is not in the business of bailing out companies that mismanage their businesses, but they are in the business of maintaining an orderly market (in addition to their mandate to control the money supply). When Bear went to the Fed on Friday, the Fed knew they'd have to find someone willing to take Bear. JP Morgan was the company best situated to buy Bear; JP Morgan had the capital and was looking for a prime brokerage division and better clearing operations. While Bear provided both of those, there is a large set of unknowns on Bear's balance sheet, and had the Fed not offered to cover up to $30 billion of the more illiquid assets, the deal would have fallen through. Part of the taxes you pay will be used to eat any losses the Fed takes.

<comment><USER6> Excellent summary. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let me see if I can sum it up in small words. Bear Stearns bought a lot of mortgage-backed securities over the past couple of years. These securities are currently worthless - no one will purchase them at any price. Bear Stearns has debts, but no assets = bankrupt. JP Morgan sought to buy Bear Stearns, but is unsure just how much of Bear Stearns' portfolio is worthless, so they're not sure how much they'd be willing to pay. So they got a bailout from the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve agreed to 'loan' $30 billion to Bear Stearns, secured only by - this is important - utterly worthless mortgage securities. This means that if BS doesn't pay the money back, the Federal Reserve can ONLY take those worthless securities and can't come after any other assets of BS or JPM. In other words...... it's free money. (If I loaned you $10,000 using a single toothpick as collateral and agreed that if you didn't pay it back, I could only keep the toothpick and couldn't go after any other assets you may have, that would be a gift, right? Would you pay back the money and get your toothpick back, or keep the money?) BS will never pay back the $30 billion. It's a free gift from taxpayers to the financial industry. Even with the free gift, JPM still didn't deem BS to be worth very much. Indeed, sinec BS's office building is worth $1 billion and JPM paid $236 million for all of BS including the office building, JPM forecasts that after the $30 billion gift, BS is worth about negative $750 million or so.

</comment><comment><USER8> Other people did a good job explaining the basics. The issue is about book value and the complexity of the risk. The risk is similar to what the firm Citadel did with E*Trade.

The risk on the books of Bear Stearns can't be fully calculated and JP Morgan is assuming that risk, hence the low price. The Fed is possibly going to limit the downside risk of JP Morgan to keep stability in US financial markets, though they are not putting up any additional capital upfront.

Roger Ehrenberg has some great blog posts on the topic (he used to run a big hedgefund and now has an NYC startup called Monitor110):

[http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2008/03/the-bear- facts.h...](http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2008/03/the-bear-facts.html)

[http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2008/03/i-bear-ly- knew.h...](http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2008/03/i-bear-ly-knew.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> There's great discussion about this in this thread if you haven't seen it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138508>

</comment><comment><USER10> This instance reminds me of a video I saw a while back, 'Money As Debt'.

[http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279&...](http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279&q=money+as+debt&total=4017&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0)

</comment><comment><USER11> The Money Masters is a good watch if you have time [http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936&#...</a>

</comment><comment><USER12> i think this is a pretty good explanation: [http://www.portfolio.com/news- markets/top-5/2008/03/14/The-B...](http://www.portfolio.com/news- markets/top-5/2008/03/14/The-Bear-Facts)

</comment><comment><USER13> The biggest potential impact on the taxpayer in the extreme short term won't have as much to do with the complete truth of the situation as it will with how the public and the markets interpret the move.

</comment><comment><USER14> Investment tip: Never, ever put money in a fund with the word 'Gaussian' in it.</comment>


Show HN: SimpleMoney – A portfolio tracker for Indian investments - <AUTHOR> https://www.simplemoney.in/ <comment><USER2> Sorry for sounding a bit rude , but the website design looks bad and somehow do not look trustworthy ! ..

<comment><AUTHOR> Not rude at all, really appreciate the feedback! Do you have any specifics about why it doesn't look trustworthy? What could I do to change it?

<comment><USER3> I have the same feeling, I'll list a few of them. Do not that I am not a designer and I can usually find 1000 things wrong with anything but it is hard to give real solutions to it all.

1\. The name "SimpleMoney" sounds quite generic.

2\. Lots of different fonts.

3\. The "simplemoney" section and the "sign in" sections are competing for "first impression" looks (and they are misaligned). Make the login one smaller maybe.

4\. The login buttons should be standard but looks self made, and their contents looks misaligned and have dark text on dark background.

5\. The background color is kinda bland, and very similar to the next section.

These were all above the fold mind you. I'll do a few for when scrolling down as well. Of various importance.

6\. The bevel on the iMac is not uniform.

7\. The contents in the iMac is real html, scrolls and the hovers on links are the "text selection" pointer. It's just kind ugly.

8\. The two mobile devices are low res

9\. The contents in the mobile devices have some "Dyna..." due to narrow. Also it scrolls.

10\. "SimpleMoney connects to your email to find your investments." \- Guess this is copy, but I don't want it to scan my email to find whatever. Sounds scary.

11\. Each section is very small, looks a bit odd.

12\. Again, the colors of each section looks bland and blends together too much.

Anyway, hope you can take something from it. Maybe hire some designer to work on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was really helpful - lots of stuff for me to work on. Thanks so much for taking the time to write this out, really appreciate it!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ES7 Array and Generator comprehensions - <AUTHOR> http://dibaiee.ir/es7-array-generator-comprehensions/

<comment><USER2> While I really like comprehensions, as soon as you need a conditional, or any level of nesting, you pretty much have to break it out into a loop to keep it readable.

OTOH, block syntax (I don't think that's the correct term for it) has always irked me in JS, due to verbose function declaration, and no implicit return. So beautiful syntax in ruby like:

        some_array.map { |el| el.length }
        # Or the succinct version:
        some_array.map(&:length)

Looks like this in JS:

        someArray.map(function() { return this.length; });

Now that ES6 has arrow functions with implicit returns, we can do this:

        someArray.map( s => s.length );

Since both comprehensions and implicit return functions are being released around the same time, I'll be interested to see which of the two gets more adoption.

<comment><USER3> You call it beautiful, but that's a fair stretch. It's more compact than JavaScript but to non-Ruby eyes, there's no real beauty to be found. It's just simple substitutions that otherwise look the same.

<comment><USER4> A key difference in Ruby is that while blocks are conceptually just another argument, they aren't part of the syntactical argument list. This:

      strings.map { |s| s.upcase }

is actually:

      strings.map() { |s| s.upcase }

...and this is what it's not:

      strings.map({ |s| s.upcase })  # Invalid

It's subtle, but it does make for a simpler, more readable syntax that lends itself to DSLs, since no parantheses are needed:

      validate :name { |name|
        errors.add("Bad name") unless name
      }

It's feasible in other languages, of course; Elixir, for example, introduces a Ruby-like "do" block syntax which is more regular than Ruby's. It might be too late for JavaScript, but I'm no parser expert.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice to see generator comprehensions in js. Glad that I don't have to remember anything much when coming from Python due to the choice of '('.

Does anyone know where the for..of syntax comes from? Just seems to deviate from the way that other languages represent comprehensions (including maths).

<comment><USER6> For…of loops are an ES6 feature that iterates the values of an iterable rather than the property names of an object.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is bizarre to me. Why complicate the browser with a feature that amounts to syntactic sugar?

Why not keep JS simple (or better yet, simplify it further!) so that browser implementations might finally converge, and leave the syntactic niceties to preprocessors & compilers?

<comment><USER8> As someone who writes stock JS and avoids post-processors entirely, I want stock JS to be a decent language. Sugar like this is great, though promises in the DOM APIs are a different matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read about stuff like this and then wonder whether I'll ever be able to use it since target browser platforms are so fragmented.

<comment><USER2> You can use it now if you preprocess with babel - [https://babeljs.io/](https://babeljs.io/)

<comment><USER4> You can also use it in Node.js if you install the Babel require extension, or run under the babel-node wrapper. It's not super convenient, though; I'm looking forward to a time when Node has full ES6 support.

<comment><USER10> It's not ideal in Node but I haven't found it to be that bad - I've gotten into the habit of making a bootstrap.js file that just has:

        require('babel/register')
        require('./main.js')

and carrying on like nothing ever happened.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. I talked about this in the Babel chat room, though, and was told it was an antipattern, without being explained why. I still don't know why.

Apparently some people prefer to build a distribution of the entire project with Babel on deploy, which is fine, but it does cause an impedance mismatch with how projects are developed on the developer's machine; obviously both ways have to work.

A real problem with babel/register is the interface for including node modules, which I think needs improvement. You can't selectively include individual modules because the {only} option isn't additive, it replaces the default setting.

<comment><USER10> Maybe it is an anti-pattern because it alters the default - I mean, I guess it means it's processing node modules through the transpiler unnecessarily as well? I can't say I've experienced a performance hit myself.

<comment><USER4> Babel doesn't touch node_modules only you explicitly include it. Browserify lets you add this to an NPM package's package.json:

      "browserify": {
        "transform": [
          "babelify"
        ]
      }

...which is great, but Babel doesn't have anything like it for server-side stuff.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The spy satellite Lacrosse 5 and its "disappearace trick" - <AUTHOR> http://www.astrophoto.fr/spy_satellites.html#Lacrosse-5

<comment><USER2> Background information for anyone not aware, Thierry Legault is a guy that has built a reputation around getting amazing images of various spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. Here's one that he took during last Friday's eclipse: [http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150322.html](http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150322.html)

All of which is to say he's one of the foremost civilian experts at imaging satellites from the ground.

<comment><USER3> It's worth watching the video of that (link from APOD):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwjvduR3_Ho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwjvduR3_Ho)

The video is 15 seconds long, the actual transit is less than 1 second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a link buried on this page that goes into more detail: [http://sattrackcam.blogspot.dk/2011/11/lacrosse-5-disappeara...](http://sattrackcam.blogspot.dk/2011/11/lacrosse-5-disappearance- trick-captured.html)

The key questions:

> Is it a matter of strongly differing reflectance properties of the satellite > body with illumination angle? Is it some brightly reflecting appendage on > the satellite disappearing from view? Is it a dark appendage on the > satellite starting to block view of the illuminated satellite body, or > casting a shadow on it? Is it due to some moving part of the satellite, e.g. > a moving dish antenna?

It's all rather fascinating. Presumably having a stealth satellite is somewhat redundant as the objects will eventually be seen or tracked by other spacecraft or satellites?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure either, but I believe the orbit of pretty much all satellites is known. You can't conceal a rocket launch, so people know when objects go up and look for them, and comparing to deep space objects you don't need a very powerful telescope to resolve one (but presumably you need good tracking). What's going to be hard is to know the exact purpose of the satellite (so the enemy can't assess you capabilities).

<comment><USER6> You're right. However, they can still maneuver in orbit. Having a stealth, or low-observable capability allows the operator to "turn the cloaking device on", maneuver the satellite, and potentially get an image of something that would have otherwise been hidden were the orbit known.

It has its limitations, of course. But it's a step above a visible satellite with fixed orbit.

EDIT: I missed the part where he says it is definitely NOT a stealth capability being demonstrated. So that's not applicable here. Still, a low- observability capability makes sense

<comment><USER7> Satellites are pretty much bound to their orbit once they are launched. They fire their engines only to restore speed (and thus height), and to control rotation. Their speed is such that centrifugal force is in equilibrium with gravity, and most of the kinetic energy is from launching the satellite (with a large rocket). They don't carry enough fuel for arbitrary maneuvers a la Star Trek.

<comment><USER8> That's not really true. Most satellites will only carry out those maneuvers because anything else is expensive and unnecessary. Plane changes are generally pointless for a civilian satellite because they're launched into the appropriate plane to begin with.

Spy satellites are different because the nature of the mission means you can't really guarantee you'll pick the appropriate plane in advance. If something interesting starts happening somewhere in the world, you may want satellites over it sooner than would occur in their current orbits. Spy satellites can and do maneuver to accomplish this. The amount of maneuvering is pretty limited by basic physics and the size of the satellites, but it is done. Here's a page that discusses one:

[http://fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/kh-12.htm](http://fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/kh-12.htm)

"The primary difference between the 28,000 pound KH-11 and the heavier KH-12 is that the additional amount of maneuvering propellant carried on the IMPROVED CRYSTAL. This additional propellant can be used to prolong the operating life of the IMPROVED CRYSTAL, to maneuver to improve coverage of areas on the Earth of particular interest, and to maneuver to evade Soviet anti-satellite interceptors."

A quick calculation: taking the numbers in the article to mean there's 7 tons of fuel on board and 11 tons of non-fuel stuff, assuming the fuel is hydrazine giving a specific impulse of about 220, that gives the satellite a delta-v of about 1km/s, which is fairly substantial.

<comment><USER5> A quick back of the envolope calculation tells me a plane change of D degrees requires a delta-v of D/60*v for small D, where v is orbital velocity. Not that much.

<comment><USER8> So 1000m/s would get you about 7-8 degrees of plane change in low orbit? Sounds about right. That's not a whole lot, but it should be plenty to dodge sky watchers for a while if you have the ability to hide for a bit and change course while doing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One night literally lying on the grass in my back garden in Palo Alto I saw a fleet of satellites cross the sky. These were most likely a triplet of NOSS satellites that 'fly' in formation.

Wikipedia has a nice picture of these [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ocean_Surveillance_Syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ocean_Surveillance_System#/media/File:NOSS- Trio.jpg) and article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ocean_Surveillance_Syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ocean_Surveillance_System)

<comment><USER10> wow, I seen that formation as child and freaked out, thought i was looking at a gigantic triangular alien spacecraft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Imho this might be an orbital adjustment tool.

The thing has solar panels and is in a low orbit. So those panels are a significant source of drag. Normally this is a problem, but perhaps they are using this drag to adjust the orbit. I'm not talking plane change. I mean controlling the amount of drag to adjust orbital speed/altitude/period.

Even with all their extra fuel, spy sats do not make plane changes. A significant change would require hundreds of m/s and they have, at best, 1000m/s for their lifetime. (Xenon is power-hungry/tricky/slow and therefore not suitable for quick plane changes). These are multi-billion dollar assets with lifetimes measured in decades. You aren't going to spend 100m/s and shorten the lifetime of the asset by years, effectively spending a billion or more, on a plane change.

What they might do is adjust the timing of flyovers by controlled changes to orbital periods. Rotating solar panels, a significant source of drag and reflection, could give some control. Such a maneuver would probably be done at the lowest point in the orbit (highest drag) and could explain the quick and apparently random change in reflectivity.

The test for my theory: Does this disappearing trick happen more often at the low point of the orbit? (If you call that the periapsis we know you spend weekends on Duna.)</comment>


Help Finding Jonas Salk Interview - <AUTHOR>

Jonas Salk, as you may know, was the man who discovered the cure for polio - which has saved 500,000 lives every year since it's discovery.  What you may not know is the man had extremely deep views on people and their place in this unfolding universe.  He discusses these views in detail in an Academy of Achievement interview he conducted in 1991.  Quotes from this interview can be found on Wikiquote, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk .<p>The entire interview, however, is out of grasp because the Academy of Achievement website seems broken.  If someone could find a legal way to access this video, I'm sure it would benefit the entire hacker news community. <comment><USER2> Maybe this isn't the interview you are seeking, but I had no trouble getting to this version on the Academy of Achievement site.

Direct Link: <http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/sal0int-1>

PDF of the Same Page: <http://db.tt/IMuv6KWo>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the PDF, I still can't access the website for some reason. You've honestly made my day, thank you so much :)</comment></comment>


The United States of Toxins - <AUTHOR> https://priceonomics.com/the-united-states-of-toxins/ <comment><USER3> Pounds weight is a terrible way to measure toxins. This report is basically meaningless, because it lumps together toxins with vastly different risks. Eg. sodium carbonate is included, which is just common washing soda. I wouldn't eat it but the risk is easily manageable. Compare with, eg. dimethylmercury, which is scary even at parts per billion concentration. An actually useful measurement would take into account both potency and persistence of toxins.

<comment><USER4> > Pounds weight is a terrible way to measure toxins.

But it is one thing: undeniably objective. The alternative would include a "rating" system which the industry can use to say "yeah we emit x hundred tons per year of chemical y but it is next to harmless, better go after company z and their waste"... leading to inevitable chains of lawsuits dragged over years.

For what its worth for many industrial processes there exist technical means of greatly reducing emissions (e.g. for smoke stacks: gas washers, desulfurization technologies, fine-dust retainers), but as long as environmental costs don't get billed to companies or required by the state, companies have no incentive to reduce emissions, as every dollar spent is a dollar less profit.

Maybe it's time to introduce legislations that allow the government to hold the _shareholders_ accountable e.g. for Superfund sites, that would at least provide a decent incentive for companies to clean up or to provide enough cash to compensate for environmental damages after closure - right now companies can simply close/be liquidated and the taxpayers have to foot the cleanup bill.

<comment><USER5> This is the same as measuring developer productivity by counting lines of code: perfectly objective, but worse than useless.

<comment><USER4> Millions of tonnes of _any_ waste released into the environment, no matter how "harmless", are too much. Humanity needs to tackle its waste problem, and that soon, or we are going to drown our kids in trash. Or, given that nitrates (which aren't that toxic per se) are the 3rd position in weight are perfect food for algae, we're drowning them in algae and without fish.

Not to mention that much of the stuff that gets released in huge quantities can actually be used as a natural resource. Instead of capturing and using it we're throwing all the stuff away.

Therefore, any way of looking at the environmental issues is good - <USER2> that can be tackled should be tackled.

<comment><USER6> This is a _terrible_ idea. People have repeatedly shown they are willing to give up very little to address environmental problems. That makes it even more important that when we use limited social capital to address a problem, it's the most important problem that can be addressed.

<comment><USER4> > when we use limited social capital to address a problem

Let an actual free and fair market solve it. When externalities have to be included in pricings (be it insurance premiums for superfund cleanup, earmarked money in trusts for cleanup, or simply preventing emissions in the first place) instead of having them shouldered by society, the market will by itself weed out companies doing excessive environmental damage.

<comment><USER7> > _Let an actual free and fair market solve it._

Ideally, yes, but that's like saying "we'll just use nuclear fusion to meet our energy needs."

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is misleading. Huge amounts of nitrates are injected into the Midwest's soil, so much so that children cannot drink the groundwater and must be given bottled water. Yet the chart shows Nebraska and Kansas as having low levels of toxins released into the environment.

Many other toxins must have been omitted from this study.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sad that this report is using the word "toxins", synthetic toxicants are not included in the definition of toxin.

</comment><comment><USER10> The National Emissions Inventory is a more complete picture of our nations emsissions. The TRI is only conceded with permitted industrial sources. The NEI includes estimates from other source types including :

\- On-Road mobile sources (cars / trucks ) \- Non-Road mobile sources such as trains and plains and construction equipment \- Non-Point emissions such as land-fills, agriculture burning and unpermitted sources such as dry cleaners

[https://www.epa.gov/air-emissions- inventories/2014-national-...](https://www.epa.gov/air-emissions- inventories/2014-national-emissions-inventory-nei-data)

</comment><comment><USER11> They show the supply side.

I'd like to see the demand side. How much toxic waste does each person's behavior promote being used? How much is embodied in each product?

</comment><comment><USER12> They listed cities by square mile, why don't they do the same for states. It's a glaring omission. When we hear that Alaska has released the most toxins of any state and Rhode Island has released the least, it's reasonable to conclude that's because of the area of the two states.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Three of the top 5 cities -- Humboldt, Lander, and Eureka -- are in Nevada. > All are known to contain multiple, active gold mines that collectively > release hundreds of millions of pounds of toxins.

Here's interesting tidbit for arguing with people who say bitcoin is killing the planet.

</comment><comment><USER14> So piling up lead/zinc ore leftovers outside the mine in Alaska is clearly polluting? Would need more data.</comment>


Petition to put Alan Turing on the next £10 note - <AUTHOR> http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/31659

<comment><USER2> I think I speak for everyone here when I say that Turing's bill should be a power of two. I think Turing should get a £5.12 bill.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it's £10 in binary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Turing's homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952, when homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954, just over two weeks before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined it was suicide"

"On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war."

Putting him on the money would further the apology.

<comment><USER5> I don't want Turing put on a note as "an apology". There are thousands (millions?) of people who have been mistreated by unjust laws in British history, of which Turing's case is sadly not the worst example. Turing's accomplishments in Computer Science and the help he gave the Allies in WWII are cause enough.

<comment><USER6> Amazing contributions towards defeating the Axis. Response? "Yeah... but, at the time, being gay was illegal, so, ya know."

<comment><USER7> That was not the response. The actual response

 _It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd-particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times._

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the- northerner/2012/feb/07/alan...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the- northerner/2012/feb/07/alan-turing-pardon-lord-mcnally-lord-sharkey-computers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Bank of England already has him on their list of candidates.

[http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/Documents/about/ban...](http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/Documents/about/banknote_names.pdf)

<comment><USER8> That's a list of names suggested by the public, not candidates that the Bank of England is considering. Surely it's unsurprising that he is among the 154 suggested names.

"Inclusion on the list does not imply any endorsement by the Bank."

The petition still has value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure what the point in this petition is: surely responsibility for the design and circulation of currency lies solely with the Bank of England and not HM Treasury?

<comment><USER8> "We therefore call upon the Treasury to request the Bank of England to consider depicting Alan Turing when Series F £10 banknotes are designed."

<comment><USER9> But we shouldn't want the Treasury to have a say in this!? Allowing the Treasury to have a political say in what the Bank can put on their banknotes opens up a whole can of worms that it would be infinitely preferable to be left unopened.

<comment><USER8> They still wouldn't "have a say"; it's simply a request. I admit ignorance of English political delicacies, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> what's wrong with Darwin?

<comment><USER9> I don't know that anyone was claiming there was something wrong with him, but a new £10 note will be issued in the near future as part of series F that will feature someone else.

<comment><USER10> I'd argue that Darwin is even more important, we should petition to keep him on there.

Alan Turing is a huge personal hero and agree that it'd be great to have him on a note, but just wish it was another one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would prefer if Darwin remained on the £10 note and Turing was put on the £5 note instead.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why is this a petition?

<comment><USER13> Because in the UK if you get 100,000 signatures on a petition you can get it debated by The House Of Commons.

<comment><USER14> Whereas in the US, if you get 25,000 signatures on a petition, you get... a polite response summarizing the talking points you already knew, and explaining why nothing will change.

That is, if you're lucky - I believe we're still waiting on the promised response to this one: [https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#%21/petition/actually-...](https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#%21/petition/actually- take-these-petitions-seriously-instead-just-using-them-excuse-pretend-you-are- listening/grQ9mNkN)

<comment> excuse-me It doesn't have to be seriously debated - it just has to be officially mentioned, it's still just democracy window dressing.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't have to be debated at all - if a petition reaches the threshold then the committee just 'consider' it for a debate.

There was a petition to abandon the recent NHS reforms that reached the threshold and wasn't put forward for debate.

<comment><USER14> Okay, so it's not really any better than the US system.

Incidentally, in the 24 hours after I posted that, they did in fact finally release a response to that petition. It was _long_ after the deadline that they promise for petitions that reach the threshold, and it wasn't much more than a justification of what they already do, but at this point I doubt anybody was expecting anything more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think this comes with particular weight after this... <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17405016></comment>


How do you test your mobile websites? Apps? - <AUTHOR>

I'm fairly new to mobile development space. I had an issue recently in which my site wouldn't work properly on some devices. Seems something about my javascipt didn't work.
Regardless of the specific issue, it worked just fine on my Nexus, a BB, and iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4.  But then we got reports from the field that it wasn't working on some other iPhone 4's (which is weird, yeah) and multiple Driod models (Verizon Android phones).
How do you test/manage your sites across different phones and platforms?
Our site needs GPS and data, do you buy sim cards and swap them between phones?  How do you test Verizon? Are there big differences between T-Mobile Android builds and Verizon Android builds?
I'm looking for 'the best' way.  We can afford to buy a few phones if that's the best way, but would like not to end up in a dozen contracts if I can help it.
Also, what do you use to measure client-side rendering time? <comment><USER2> I don't know if it is within your budget but you can contact www.utest.com

They are a network of testers all over the world and they can cover pretty much any testing scenario.

Hope it helps.

</comment><comment><USER3> We currently use Device Anywhere. It's pretty good, but kind of expensive.</comment>


The Government Can Make You Legally "Dead," Even When You're Much Alive / - <AUTHOR> https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/07/a-rhode-island-man-tried-to-sue-a-prison-for-a-vicious-attack-he-was-told-he-couldnt-because-he-was-dead <comment><USER2> >Well, sort of. Under a century-old law, Rhode Island classifies everyone serving a life sentence in the state as "civilly dead," meaning they have absolutely no civil rights. Unlike other prisoners, they can't sue or raise complaints in state court, even if they've been mistreated or abused.

is that really true? if it is, why did they choose Guantanamo Bay in Cuba? ergo it isn't.</comment>


GPT-3 on Philosophers - <AUTHOR> https://pastebin.com/3AEtjv35 <comment><USER2> > I read through the paper several times before I came across a footnote in > the back. It was a link to another paper, this one by a researcher at MIT. > The title of the paper was "Toward General Sentience."

> If I were then to say "plant" and "animal," the concept "plant" would blend > with the concept "animal," creating a new concept, which could be called > "plant animal," or "flower."

> As I read the paper, a strange feeling came over me. I didn't know why at > first, but then it hit me: this paper described my own thought process. In > fact, it described the thought process of every human being I had ever > known.

> Perhaps the human mind is not capable of understanding itself.

> And so, I stopped thinking. I did not eat, I did not sleep. I simply > thought.

> Still, I had made my choice. As I watched the screen before me turn off, > signifying the end of all thinking processes in my mind, I wondered if I had > made the right decision.</comment>


The U.S.'s 2.5 billion pounds of surplus meat, visualized - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/24/17606958/meat-cheese-surplus-visualized <comment><USER2> Why is the meat so much bigger given its only twice the weight?

</comment><comment><USER3> im wondering if cheese/meat surplus/deficit has any correlation with country's overweight problem. USA, vs France vs Italy vs India etc.

<comment><USER4> Huh? I know its par for the course to mock US obesity rates but this is becoming a world wide issue, even France blew by twenty percent and India has the second highest number of obese children in the world.

<comment><USER3> i know there may be a link. just curious if there is a strong correlation among all countries.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter lets developers put ads in tweets - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2016/05/17/twitter-ads-in-tweets-beta/ <comment><USER2> Just yesterday I've uninstalled the twitter app because of ads.

I think it's totally wrong what they're doing. Brands already use twitter to promote their products. It's already full of ads and promotion.

Why not monetize on the brands by providing them special tools and insights? Or are they already doing that and it's not enough money?

To me it seems that those between-tweets ads make twitter shittier for everyone, brands included.</comment>


Bug tracking isn't a network-effect business - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2002-bug-tracking-isnt-a-network-effect-business <comment><USER2> It doesn't have to be a network-effect business for customers to prefer the popular product as a "safe" choice.

<comment><USER3> Network effects tend to be substantially overestimated. For instance Metcalfe's law is widely cited, but more careful analysis of actual behavior suggests that n*log(n) tends to be a better scaling estimate than n^2.

Moving on, be careful about moving to a sales force driven strategy. When you're selling with a sales force you have to cover the overhead of an expensive sales process. This is one of the big reasons why a lot of software is priced low enough that someone can pay for it with a credit card, and lots of software priced over $50,000 but very little between those two numbers. Also once you go down the enterprise software route the quality of your sales process matters more than the quality of your software. A good read on that is [http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen- tol/2005-April/0...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen- tol/2005-April/000772.html).

I'm not saying that this is a bad strategic move or the wrong strategy for your company. But you should be aware of the consequences.

<comment><USER4> I did an internship at a largely sales-driven company (Everyone gets an email when someone closes a big sale), and it suuucked. Especially when everyone was really anxious and uneasy because Customer X wanted his bug fixes _Right Now_.

Unfortunately, you attract top sales talent with big money, and they get lethargic if the big money doesn't come from commissions, and they tend to over-promise to make the sale. This can piss off the developers and makes it not "a place developers want to work". You definitely have to maintain a balance.

The idea that comes immediately to mind is profit sharing. When Joe closes the big deal, everyone gets commission. Even if it's not a significant amount, it'll let your developers continue to feel valued.

At least that'd make me happier (Edit: Assuming I were in that situation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm always amazed at 37signals' ability to snipe other people in their industry, and find it more than a little repellent.

Also, of COURSE products have a network effect! Haystack attempts to be a marketplace for design work; if they cannot draw traffic to it then it fails.

Edit: changed Highrise to Haystack

<comment><USER6> I don't think 37s lives or dies on Haystack. It's not even listed on their front page as one of their products. You picked a poor example.

<comment><USER5> I didn't say that. I said the product dies if it cannot get traffic.

<comment><USER6> And you're right. Haystack is, in fact, a network-effect business. But Haystack is an insignificant part of 37signals business, and trying to characterize them by the way Haystack works is not a lot different then trying to characterize them by how the 37signals Job Board works.

<comment><USER5> You know what? I read and wrote in a hurry, and my point is nonsensical and irrelevant. Forgive me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just because their _product_ doesn't have a strong effect, it doesn't mean their customer base doesn't.

If ten times the number of people are raving over their competitor eventually, that'll have a big effect against them (or, at least, put them on the back foot).

</comment><comment><USER8> There's an enormous network effect with bug tracking software. If you learned a software as a junior worker at one company, you're likely to choose the same one when you're in a more senior position at the next one.

Developers move from company to company, and take their knowledge and preferences with them. When you're setting up a new company or department, you're going to pick the program that your team knows.

My employer bought an instance of a certain bug tracker because one of our vendors was using it and we needed to keep their data when we changed vendors. A year later, the whole division uses it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Actually I would argue that 37signals thrives on the network effect. A network of anti-enterprisey, web-savvy, tech trendy folks but still the network effect. I think maybe joel was wondering is if they were in danger of falling behind in their particular network.

<comment><USER10> This reminds me of something I heard about Motorola, and their decline after the Razor phone peaked. They learned that the phone business is more like the fashion business than the electronics business.

With software related to the dev process, look how fast Subversion went from cool to uncool. It took just one viral Linus video.

I think there _IS_ a bit of a network effect and Joel is correct to have concerns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> He says he doesn't have to know who used Trac in order to use it. Well, I disagree, and I'm with Joel on this one. Whether or not a project has users is one of the things I look for when picking software. More users often (but not always) means more developers, and some sort of guarantee that the product won't be abandoned.

This isn't as critical with open-source software (I can install a bunch of bug-tracking tools, use them for a few days, and keep one I like), but if I have to pay to try these products, the popularity factor gets more important. Even if there's a no-risk trial (still have bad memories of trying to cancel that AOL subscription way back in the day).

</comment><comment><USER12> The difference is that there are fewer companies buying bug tracking so there's a lot more money per customer. 37s makes $1800/yr tops off of a Basecamp customer, but Atlassian or FogBugz can make several times that. If you're fighting for fewer, more profitable customers, you need to be able to win. It's different markets - you wouldn't suggest to Boeing to give an all- you-can-eat deal to any airline for a fixed price.

Fog Creek could try to shrink the industry by getting rid of the per-seat licensing, but if they have a similar price structures and features as their competitors, they'd better be able to win deals.

</comment><comment><USER13> My feeling is that Joel is really just getting tired of his comfortable, but small, operation. If he keeps doing what he's been doing he'll probably be relatively small forever.

37 signals is in a similar situation. They're really small relative to what's possible. As far as I can tell they're on course to be small forever, in terms of revenue.

You already have a good product. You know there's a market. You know people are willing to buy it. Now what do you do if you decide you want to accelerate your growth _a lot_?

<comment><USER6> I doubt you have any idea how much 37s (or Fog Creek, for that matter) makes in top line revenue.

<comment><USER13> You're implying there's a chance they make enough to put them outside the realm of "relatively small". Are you suggesting either of them make many 10s or 100s of millions per year?

<comment><USER6> 37s made 1.5MM on a job board, and 6 digits on an ebook ("getting real"). Would I be surprised if they had an 8-digit top line? No.

What's "relatively small"? Plenty of 100-person VC-funded companies _never_ get that kind of revenue.

<comment><USER13> So, that's where we differ. I consider low 8 digit revenue to be "relatively small".

I made it a point not to base size on headcount, since I agree that's meaningless. I'm talking strictly about revenue.

<comment><USER14> Low 10's of millions ain't bad when you've only got a handful of people working for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds a lot like what the Ingres guys must have said. "It doesn't matter if Oracle has a bigger network, there'll always be a market for us."

Of course there's a network effect. Oracle gets market share, third parties build stuff that relies on Oracle, Oracle gets more market share. Your bug tracker gets market share, people build source control and build system integration around it, it gets more market share.

Swapping out bug trackers is both theoretically and practically as easy as swapping out databases.

<comment><USER16> Especially if a third-party or a competitor provides a relatively easy conversion tool to take your data from one product to another

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Everything which has a hinterland and ecosystem around it benefits from network effects. If you're going to throw up walls at the web-browser edge, sure, but...

Highrise, in particular, benefits from form processors, iPhone apps, analytics tools all outside of highrisehq.com. Nothing exists in isolation - _everything_ in software services is a network-effects business. You can argue over how strong network effects are, but they're always present.

</comment><comment><USER18> The main point I heard in Joel's article was not his desire for network effects, it was his proposed move into an enterprise model.

In the comments here for the Inc. article he said something about being good at marketing but terrible at sales. Being reliant on one or the other of these seems like a fundamental quality for a company.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To be fair, I don't think Joel was going for "become sales-force driven", growing a salesforce is not the same as letting them run the show. As long as they have great engineering which Fogcreek seems to have.

Unfortunately, it is hard to say if these fears are unfounded or not.

</comment><comment><USER19> An application with lots of users seems likely to get better faster than an application with few users, if only because a larger user base means a) bugs will turn up faster, and b) patterns of use will suggest feature improvements faster.

</comment><comment><USER20> Basecamp's recent switch to global logins is evidence that their products benefit from the network effect.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sorry David. Selling bug tracking software can be a network-effect business if your product is a _platform_ : [http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/JIRA+Plugin+Dev...](http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/JIRA+Plugin+Development+Kit)

[edit: <http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JIRA+Plugins>]

<comment><USER22> An application platform does not make a business network-effect driven. Having plugins doesn't make your product create entertaining, compelling, or useful content to "suck in" non-users. Facebook and eBay have this because it's baked in to their DNA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Basecamp either

<comment><USER24> That's one of his points. At the risk of sounding non-HN-esque, rtfa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> You can say what you want about DHH, but he's 100% correct here.</comment>


Programming trick questions - <AUTHOR> https://qntm.org/trick <comment><USER3> Decent examples. I'd like to toss another in that, years ago, a colleague gave a candidate. He thought of the question that morning in the shower.

Morse Code. All letters are combinations of one or more dashes and/or dots. Here is a sentence of Morse Code where the spaces are stripped. Decode it to get the original ASCII sentence.

He gave it and failed the candidate. Sounding like an interesting problem, some of us in the office tried it. Turns out that it is a very hard problem. You have to make a tree of possibilities and it is easy to accidentally make your solution O(n!).

Moral of the story is never give out a coding question that have not personally solved. Second moral: be open to out of the box solutions.

<comment><USER4> protip from someone in the trenches: until you have given the problem to many people in interviews and evaluated their responses to calibrate your judgement, problems like these serve only one purpose in an interview that is satisfying interviewers ego about how smart he is.

<comment><USER5> I've proposed (and been rejected) where I work that we have both high and underperformers go through mock interviews for their roles, to see if our interview questions could distinguish who was who.

I understand that this is going to be awkward, especially for the low performers, but at the moment I don't think our interview practices are based on anything. We ask questions and then later have a conversation about how and whether or not our questions revealed the presence of the attributes we were supposed to be assessing for and it feels very made up and make believe. Plus, people could be given incentives for going through the process and bonuses for passing the mock interviews to encourage them to try

If we could get people where we already knew how good or bad they were to rerun the interview process then we could start to figure out which questions and which evaluation methods were useful in separating good candidates from poor ones.

<comment><USER6> just make everyone in the company do it IMO, and let the managers distinguish who was an over/underperformer later on

Of course, you'll just find out that there's practically no correlation.. Some of the least useful teammates I ever had ended up at Google, and one of the best programmers I've ever met makes $10/hour at a fucking call center out in the middle of nowhere

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think "problem solving" questions are pretty much useless. Engineers need to solve problems, but they don't have to do it in under an hour and under stress. Plus, solving tricky problems is not something you do everyday, or maybe even every week.

What I care about when I do interviews is how they organize their code. I want to see what people's instincts and habits are, because that's what's going to determine the quality of 99% of the code they write.

I'd rather have someone who can come up with objectively good abstractions instead of writing one giant, unintelligible block of code than someone who can come up with something very clever on the spot to a totally esoteric problem.

</comment><comment><USER8> I disagree with the answer to #3, you can reverse a Unicode string with "". ;)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to- left_mark](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-left_mark)

<comment><USER9> Will not reverse languages that are right-to-left by default, such as Arabic or Hebrew.

Will not reverse composed ligatures, e.g. ﷺ is synonymous to صَلَّىٰ ٱللَّٰهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ, but صَلَّىٰ ٱللَّٰهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ with a LTR directional override is صَلَّىٰ ٱللَّٰهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ while ﷺ remains as ﷺ.

Will not reverse 겁 into 벅.

<comment><USER10> Makes me wonder if we should not have tried to make a single "unicode" and instead had distinct types for each language like EnglishString ArabicString etc. and programmers can handle each case as needed.

<comment><USER9> No. If that's how it worked, how many programs would have Arabic support at all? Everyone would use EnglishString for everything (because that was the example code they copied from StackOverflow) and the whole thing comes crashing down if I enter even just an umlaut.

<comment><USER10> No, I was thinking of something a little more sophisticated than that. Classes of strings would be sub-classed from others like English would have multiple sub-classes like American, British etc. Each class could have it's own parameters like whether it supports being reversed. You would not necessarily implement just for English. If you were making a palindrome finding app for example, you would only care if the class passed in supports reversing for example. Eventually you could have a language DB library, not so different that the time zone database that can be periodically updated with new rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> qntm.org is a website worth browsing, if you've never been here before. Some of my personal favorites:

[https://qntm.org/destroy](https://qntm.org/destroy)

[https://qntm.org/excellent](https://qntm.org/excellent)

</comment><comment><USER12> #1 got me and I had a good laugh. I wonder if there's a faster method for #2 using AVX and bit tiddling, or if the optimizer is smart enough to find the most efficient code for a particular architecture.

<comment><USER13> These are the five numbers in binary, to give some inspiration for a bit twiddling algorithm:

                              110
                            11100
                        111110000
                    1111111000000
        1111111111111000000000000

<comment><USER12> Hmm, I can't think of a way to use the mathematical structure of those numbers to speed up checking.

However, the reason I said AVX is because it can be used for checking equality of 5 (well, 8) numbers simultaneously. This solution requires AVX2 and is probably faster than the optimized reference code.

        // Copy x to all 8 elements.
        __m256i a = _mm256_set1_epi32(x);
        // Duplicate 6 because we need to fill all 8 elements.
        __m256i b = _mm256_set_epi32(6, 28, 496, 8128, 33550336, 6, 6, 6);
        // Check for element-wise equality.
        __m256i c = _mm256_cmpeq_epi32(a, b);
        // Check if any bytes are nonzero.
        return _mm256_movemask_epi8(c) != 0;

[https://godbolt.org/z/6W8rZy](https://godbolt.org/z/6W8rZy)

<comment><USER14> I have a hunch that the actually fastest version is to change all those "||" to "|" in the original version. Short-circuiting and adding branches probably just slows the whole thing down compared to just running the comparisons, which will probably pipeline really well.

Interestingly the compiler doesn't do this optimization, even though it could. So maybe I'm wrong. No real way to know without benchmarking, though.

<comment><USER12> Good idea. This does change the optimized assembly, but it doesn't seem to make a measureable difference in performance on my machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like these a lot! I'm seeing them less as "interview questions", which they'd be terrible as, but as "annoy your friends questions" after you've all had a couple drinks.

One I heard a while back: "You have a list consisting of every college student in the US. What's the fastest way to sort them by age in years?"

<comment><USER16> Other than sorting by birth date, what's your intended solution to this?

<comment><USER15> Almost all of the students are going to be somewhere between 17 and 23 years old, so you first do one pass as a bucket sort for each of those seven values. Then sort the remaining students however you want. While it's technically still O(n log n), almost everyone is sorted in that first pass, so it's practically indistinguishable from O(n).

<comment><USER3> That is actually a decent optimization. If you know the final cardinality, you just create that many buckets, and drop records in it. Not unlike how histograms work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are other professionals subjected to the same scepticism during interviews?

Are lawyers given tough questions and expected to come up with a clever response on the spot? Doctors given a list of symptoms? Teachers given a difficult student and told to teach them some concept from physics?

Serious question (albeit a bit facetious in my examples).

<comment><USER18> Lawyers, doctors, and teachers are all positions that have some form of certification. Potential employers can be guaranteed that all potential employees meet the basic knowledge and skills requirements.

Nothing of the sort exists in the programming field. That, coupled with the high salaries, means fraud is a real problem when trying to hire programmers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> These are fun brain candy and a reminder of the value of lateral thinking, but I hope no one actually uses these as employment screening.

<comment><USER20> why not? they are trivial. not "trick" in the sense of poor questions which are easy enough once you've studied the problem for 20 years and know some trivia that is rare knowledge, but are otherwise insanely difficult.

i think these are good. TELL the candidate they are trick questions. again, they are trivial. i was actually disappointed.

<comment><USER21> Better questions are those that more closely simulate a work sample, being aware that an interview is high stress and time boxed and thus not actually like work. I like an hour or more pair programming in a language the candidate is comfortable with on a simplified problem with some relevance to work.

For more senior candidates, you definitely wouldn't want to waste everyone's time with brain teasers because if the high risk of a hasty rejection - <USER2> deeper probing into systems they've built and and designed in the past, with an angle on relevant problems for the business, along with the pair programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here is another one I thought of the other day.

Q: Given V (the number of vertices), E (the number of edges) and L (a list of the edges) for a connected undirected graph, determine whether the graph is a tree.

\----

A: It can be done in O(1) by: return V == E + 1

The number of vertices in a tree is always one more than the number of edges. We also know that the graph is connected, so it has to be a tree.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is what I can't understand about hiring interviews, and I thank 1/2 of my interviews haven't involved such trickery. Sure - it's "easy" to say "Oh you've solved this great puzzle, you'd be perfect since you are smart on your feet", but you can be great at writing UI's, but struggle on the backend.

This culture needs to end. I don't spend my time at work solving puzzles, I spend time at work meeting with stakeholders, organizing meetings, discussing options and timelines. I spend my time coding and iterating, not wasting my time at puzzles.

I hate puzzles, because I like to do work that actually produces results (and isn't a measure of how smart one might be). Puzzles are a waste of time in my opinion, a much better proof of pudding would be a programming portfolio of things you've written (ie. Github).

</comment><comment><USER24> Interview questions should be trivial examples so you can see if the candidate know what programming is or how to program on the language, not what libraries he/she knows. Ideally nothing that depends on any particular OS std libraries as well. Of course this does not apply if you are hiring someone for a position where knowledge on a particular library is a requirement, but in my experience that is usually not the case for either junior nor senior positions, maybe only for in-between.

If you need anything more advanced you should do an assignment to allow time for proper design and reasoning, otherwise you'll never be able to fully evaluate what the candidate really can do and how he/she approaches problems.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've tried trick programming questions when I started interviewing coders, the SNR was simply awful and it was frustrating for me and the candidates.

Any evaluation system have to be calibrated on a large enough pool of candidates, when you're building a company and start interviewing you don't really have the luxury of wasting the first dozens applications.

Today I tend to completely avoid programming questions, except to reject complete newbies.

<comment><USER26> Since I work from home, I haven't had to do interviews in a long time, but back when I did, I did always ask one programming question, but it would be only one step harder than trivial.

I'd say use whatever language you want, even make one up, so long as you can explain parts where I might have questions. I didn't care about syntax, or performance, or cleverness -- just does it work. If they can't do that, you don't want them for a coding position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Regarding reversing Unicode strings: This is simple, just render the string in a purposefully crafted mono-space font using distinct, non-overlapping bit patterns for glyphs (this will be a rather huge font, we may suggest a 0xFFFF x 0xFFFF matrix for glyphs to be on the safe side), slice the resulting bitmap image, detect and recompose. ;-)

(Obviously, this is a trick answer.)

<comment><USER28> I know next to nothing about unicode. If I took the bits and arranged them in reverse order would I be asked to leave the building? It didn't state the output should also be unicode.

<comment><USER27> This is much like the practical paper tape answer: punch it on a 8-bit tape (ASR-33 TeleType) and flip the tape. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My favorite trick is to not ask trick questions.

</comment><comment><USER30> While I know it is common practice to dismiss problem solving questions, a good problem solution can be the difference between intractable NP complete or worse, and a solution that is O(lg N). Additionally, a good solution is elegant and easily maintainable, while a bad solution is bloated and has large code debt.

</comment><comment><USER31> Render string to canvas. Use glyph width to divide into characters. Rearrange the characters. OCR back into Unicode.

</comment><comment><USER32> I dunno, these aren't very interesting to me. Question one is good.

Question two relies on the answerer knowing specific details about the distribution of perfect numbers, which isn't a "trick" in any meaningful sense. Either you know it or you don't. Contrast with "Are the arguments to memcmp() declared const in ISO C99?". Is that a "trick" question?

And question three is just senseless pedantry. It says that unicode symbols don't make "real" strings if you reverse their orders. Which is true, but not really what the question was asking. ASCII strings aren't "real" if you reverse their order either, because "real" is a human distinction that doesn't live at the data layer. It is certainly true that a reversed unicode string containing ligatures and combining characters is a VALID string per the unicode standard, which seems to meet the phrasing of the question as asked.

</comment><comment><USER33> How can one get better at questions like these (im horrible at them)?

<comment><USER34> Experience. You "should" have been able to get the first one, I think the other two are pretty debatable as they require knowledge you might have to research first if you didn't already know about perfect numbers or at least some of the complexities of unicode.

As far as the first one goes, you could go through some of the questions on [https://codesignal.com/](https://codesignal.com/) . They're geared towards interview practice, but ignoring that they provide reasonable problems, a decent environment to write code in and after you get your solution accepted you'll be able to access other solutions to get new ideas. The aim here is just to learn how to think through a problem and allow your brain start to make connections that it wasn't making before.

<comment><USER35> For the perfect number question, you can always just argue that precomputing a 512 MiB bit array that has 1 in position n if n is a perfect number, then indexing into that bit array is O(1). Because the range is constrained, you don't need to know anything about perfect numbers to come up with this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The first question is easily enough; I figured it out. I knew the third question also, but not the second question.

(Unicode is not suitable for all uses, anyways. Unicode is very messy.)

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder if this would be faster on average (most numbers fail all five comparisons) for #2?

int y = x ^ (x-1);

return x == y * (y+1) / 2 && ([comparison list]);

</comment><comment><USER38> For #1, it really depends on what you mean by "array" and what you need to use it for. Sounds like an XY problem.

If you take it to mean a more abstract concept of a list of things that can be iterated and accessed by index, then the fastest implementation is O(1): build no data structure at all - just implement the iterator and index functions.

If you take it to mean physically manipulating atoms on a chip to be in a certain state, then you'll actually have to do something :)

<comment><USER9> An array is a data structure that can be accessed using the Array operator `[]`. C# will allow overloading the operator, Java will not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does everyone understand something I don't about #1? It never said they were unique integers.

<comment><USER40> The array is length N, and it says it contains _the_ integers 1 through N inclusive, as in, all of them. If there were any repeats, then you'd have an array of length greater than N.

<comment><USER39> Seems like somewhat ambiguous semantic garbage to me. Especially when there is a much clearer three letter word to use (all) that would actually communicate the the point of the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> They're trick questions, so I think it's fair to be pedantic. It's asking for fastest method not the one with least complexity. I would argue the fastest method would be to pick a random location in memory and get lucky.

</comment><comment><USER42> I like that its impossible to do "string reversal" until "string" and "reversal" are defined. Oh you want me to sort an array... how do you define "sort" and "array".

</comment><comment><USER43> Concerning Unicode reversal, the author's statements "This has not been done", "there is no genuine real-world need", "The algorithm doesn't exist" are wrong (see UAX #29 §6.4), "suitable metadata might need to be added" has already been done, and "what a 'string' is considered to be" is well-defined and requires no deliberation or reinterpretation. His text is surprising to me because I know the author programs in Perl, JS, Python, so he should really be knowledgeable about this topic. With the following code samples, all the edge cases written about in the article are taken care of.

[https://docs.raku.org/routine/flip](https://docs.raku.org/routine/flip)

        $some-str.flip

[https://p3rl.org/unicook#℞-32:-Reverse-string-by- grapheme](https://p3rl.org/unicook#℞-32:-Reverse-string-by-grapheme)

        join '', reverse $some_str =~ /\X/g

[https://php.net/grapheme_extract](https://php.net/grapheme_extract)

        ...

[https://github.com/dart-lang/characters](https://github.com/dart- lang/characters)

        ...

[https://grapheme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/grapheme.html#grap...](https://grapheme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/grapheme.html#grapheme.graphemes)

        from grapheme import graphemes
        "".join(reversed(list(graphemes(some_str))))

[https://npmjs.com/package/grapheme- splitter](https://npmjs.com/package/grapheme-splitter)

        const gs = new(require('grapheme-splitter'));
        gs.splitGraphemes(some_str).reverse().join('');

Rust deserve special mention because the language implementers did the correct thing and put it in the language: [https://doc.rust- lang.org/1.3.0/std/str/struct.Graphemes.htm...](https://doc.rust- lang.org/1.3.0/std/str/struct.Graphemes.html) … only to take it out again for no good reason, thus rendering the programming language not Unicode compliant in the process. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory! m-(

Other languages: try to find a binding for libpcre or libicu.

[http://www.pcre.org/current/doc/html/pcre2pattern.html#Exten...](http://www.pcre.org/current/doc/html/pcre2pattern.html#Extended%20grapheme%20clusters)

[http://userguide.icu-project.org/boundaryanalysis#TOC- Charac...](http://userguide.icu-project.org/boundaryanalysis#TOC-Character- Boundary)

</comment><comment><USER44> Why are people talking about this in context of employment interviews? The article doesn't go there, and neither should anyone else.

Trick questions do not "show you how the candidate thinks" or whatever. Judging candidates on them is not acceptable.

</comment><comment><USER45> Here's a similar one: What's the best possible time complexity of a program that plays perfect chess, assuming we could write such a program?

Answer: O(1), since it could be written as one big lookup table from game state to optimal move. To get a nontrivial complexity class, you have to have some parameter that can vary, so e.g. the question "what's the time complexity of a program that plays perfect chess on an n-by-n board?" (assuming a suitable generalization of the chess rules is given) is much harder to answer.

<comment><USER46> I think that works only if n-by-n can vary to infinity. Otherwise I'll just have a lut for every possible board size.

By the same method, you can sort any finite sequence in O(1).. but then you don't really sort infinite sequences, do you? So I'm not sure this is a good trick question.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to tell what's true from false or right or wrong? - <AUTHOR> As I'm growing up I'm learning more and more about life and our universe a lot of what we learn is of coursed based on experiences.
Sometimes when people tell me things I ask myself is that really true?. For example, a friend and I had a discussion earlier about islam and he is muslim and he told me the way the big bang started was predicted when Islam first came out and actually a lot of scientific stuff was predicted in Islam's first stages how can that be possible?.
My point is are we suppose to just believe what we are told? How do you regard something as creditable? A lot of the times When I'm learning new knowledge I'm always focusing on the source credibility is that wrong of me to do? I take everything with a grain of salt but if I'm studying biology and is a book by let say Richard Dawkings I would credit the information accurate and not distrust it. Is that wrong?
How do you figure out the truth from false knowledge? <comment><USER3> Many people here are writing about various techniques/books that talk about science, i.e., for distinguishing scientific truths from non-scientific falsehoods, but as a scientist myself (well ok, computer "scientist"), I think in some sense we give "science" too much credit. There are things we consider "truths" in science which are actually only a veneer on "beliefs as of today" \-- i.e., not that far removed from even such non-scientific things as e.g. "religion".

This is very abstract, but more concretely, what I mean is that it helps to read about the philosophy/history of science. The canonical recommendation here is Thomas Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ [1], but I also strongly recommend watching James Burke's _Connections_ tv series [2] and then watching or reading his _The Day the Universe Changed_ [3] to understand how our entire conception of "reality" or "truth" is so strongly determined by the technology of the time.

Finally, there are lots of "truths" in fields where this is no scientific basis to fall-back on -- politics, art, etc. For these, you have to seek out and find the best elucidators of each field (usually, but not always, books).

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29)

[3]

<comment><USER4> There was a really good TED talk (which got banned), challenging the implicit assumptions by science.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TerTgDEgUE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TerTgDEgUE)

<comment><USER5> The talk didn't get "banned", it was merely disavowed by the TED organization, which interprets their mandate "ideas worth spreading" as excluding blatant pseudoscience such as the idea of "morphic resonance".

<comment><USER4> Effectively banned from the site.

Sorry but the scientific community needs to address a number of points that are raised. It may be psudoscience, but there are a number of things that can't be explained by science, and in these cases, looking for answers is better than ignoring the issue. In the talk he doesn't say any of these things are true, but seems to be exploring the possibility. I am sure when it was first suggested that the earth was round, that it sounded equally ridiculous.

<comment><USER5> > Effectively banned from the site

The TED organization decides which talks are worth "featuring". The two "banned" talks are actually far MORE prominent than all the talks they decide to simply not feature at all. TED is still hosting them, merely on a different page where they encourage discussion of the issues raised. You can easily find that page and engage the discussion there if you like.

> Sorry but the scientific community needs to address a number of points that > are raised.

Does it? Says who? More to the point, does _TED_ need to address those points, or is it okay for _TED_ to say "no, this is just silly" until there's an actual _there_ there in the form of, say, replicable results?

I would be careful to distinguish results that merely _aren 't_ explained by science from those that _can 't_ be. If they really _can 't_ be explained by "science", what's the point in addressing them? Why bother? That the earth was round _could_ be explained by science. Did you mean to say instead that these points "run counter to conventional wisdom"?

If you think you have a case to make, why not just make it? What SPECIFIC "points" do you think he raises that "need to be addressed"?

Are you willing to support his views on, say, telepathy - including dog telepathy? Do you think his "ten dogmas" _accurately_ reflect what scientific types believe? Some seemed pretty strawmannish to me. (It's easy to make yourself seem insightful if you are allowed to invent and caricature imaginary opposing views that you can then rail against.)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can strongly recommend Carl Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit" from _The Demon- Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark_ :

[http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/03/baloney- de...](http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/03/baloney-detection- kit-carl-sagan/)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon- Haunted_World](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World)

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfect! thanks

<comment><USER6> Also:

 _Why People Believe Weird Things_ \- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_People_Believe_Weird_Things](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_People_Believe_Weird_Things)

 _Bad Science_ \- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_%28book%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_%28book%29)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > My point is are we suppose to just believe what we are told?

Not if you're science-literate. Remember that a scientist assumes an idea unaccompanied by evidence is most likely false, while a nonscientist assumes the opposite.

Let's say someone hears a claim about Bigfoot. If he's a scientist, he will assume Bigfoot is a myth until hard evidence appears. But a nonscientist (a person technically known as an _airhead_ ) believes that Bigfoot is real until he is proven not to exist. But consider the burden of evidence -- for the airhead to be dissuaded from belief in Bigfoot, something called _proof of a negative_ would be required, which is an impossible evidentiary burden. After all, Bigfoot could be hiding under some rock on a faraway planet, which means he can't ever be conclusively disproven.

Science is an extremely productive outlook, and the modern world is largely defined by science and the scientific outlook. One of the reasons is that scientists don't waste time carrying other people's burdens of evidence, like a belief in Bigfoot.

> How do you regard something as creditable?

Solid, repeated, empirical evidence, created by multiple disinterested observers. Everything else is unsubstantiated rumor.

> How do you figure out the truth from false knowledge?

A skeptical outlook and an understanding of how science works.

[http://arachnoid.com/building_science](http://arachnoid.com/building_science)

</comment><comment><USER8> In science, it's very simple (though not necessarily easy), a theory needs to have predictive power. Important caveat: predictive power about the future.

This way you can even test a hypothesis you don't even understand. Just get a prediction out of someone who does and see if it checks out without being otherwise obvious. Again, obvious beforehand, not afterwards. There are a couple of heavy tomes you can read about it, a couple of common tricks to side step the test (ad hoc hypotheses) but in principle that's it.

For example, you test the theory or relativity every time you use GPS. It usually works.

Everything else is a matter of taste. Do you like consistency? Logical structure? Elegance? Authority? Peer review? You can make up whatever test you like. There's bayesian approach, you can try to consciously correct for your biases... but it's hard to beat the scientific method.

<comment><USER9> Another slight caveat -- as well as predicting things which should work, it should also predict what _won 't_ work. If your theory is that your medicine cures an illness, it's not enough for people who take it to get better - people in the control group who _don 't_ take it must _not_ get better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Scientific Method, Socratic Discourses. Debate everything until you're blue in the face, examine every precept or "given truth", question every fundament.

True from false you can divine with the above, but only within the constraints of what we know and can know - this is the epistemological route.

Right from wrong is an entirely different topic, and is an ethical and moral question. A good starting point for considering the very definition of "right" and "wrong" might be to read or read about Kant, Plato, and Aristotle - <USER2> ultimately what's "right" or "wrong" derives from the very subjective societal norms of whatever cultural context you find yourself within.

There's essentially nothing which is considered universally right, or universally wrong - you get to figure this one out for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER11> Figuring out the truths from falsehoods is an art. Sorry, but there you have it. The so-called "Scientific Method" is just mechanics and formalities of what generally convinces people about certain claims.

apu's recommended reading and viewings (Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", and Burke's "The Day the Universe Changed") are excellent starting points in your personal explorations into this.

Another worthwhile reading comes from Issac Asimov, "The Relativity of Wrong" ([http://hermiene.net/essays- trans/relativity_of_wrong.html](http://hermiene.net/essays- trans/relativity_of_wrong.html) ). I think he may have been an inspiration to the notion of science as an enterprise at being "less wrong", per this redacted snippet: John Campbell [Asimov's editor], who specialized in irritating me [...] told me that all theories are proven wrong in time. My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts...

</comment><comment><USER12> Your curiosity is admirable. Please keep it. I wish more people would openly question things in this manner.

To answer your questions: No, you should not believe everything you are told. You should look at how credible sources are. I err with science, and for me, religion that discredits science doesn't work. I do watch a lot of conspiracy theory things... so many sources are full of absolute crap, but it is fun and I find strings or theories, but little proof or truth. I'm afraid that if I didn't use my brain, I'd wind up believing all sorts of things. Things I know are untrue. Keep your eyes open, keep the healthy questioning and skeptisicm.

My other advice is to remember that the truth can change. Science disproves itself as we discover new things. And this is fine and expected - as long as your views change with new facts, you'll be fine. My big example is always religion - If any god or gods give me unrefutable truth that they exist, I'll believe in whichever god or gods gave me proof. Otherwise, I'll trust in science, keep some distrust for the sensational small-study 'breakthroughs' and keep on my own path.

</comment><comment><USER13> I suggest holding two realities in your mind: that it is both true and false. Try to see if the muslim fellow can also hold two possibilities. Also worth having a 4*4 matrix: true/false for me/him in any one moment. But the true/false can also be flawed: absolute truth is considered a spiritual experience.

Judaism also has a cosmology. What is truer: Islam or Judaism.. or something else... like the experience itself that it describes?

Ironically, maybe being able to hold these possibilities of truth actually takes you to that experience of absolute truth.. where complete opposites can be both completely true and completely false.

</comment><comment><USER14> 2 kinds of knowledge:

1\. The kind that you can use to make testable predictions.

2\. The kind that you can't use to make testable predictions.

Kind 1 is easy to verify. Just test the testable prediction. Done. That's really all science is.

Kind 2... people have different opinions on. Some people say that Kind 2 is useless and one should reject all of it. Some other people hold Kind 2 close to their heart and find rich meaning in it. With Kind 2, though, there's no good way to tell what's right.

</comment><comment><USER15> The study of this is called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology)

<comment><USER16> Exactly. This is a problem of epistemology. There is a less fancy name for it: Theory of Knowledge.

For starters, bear these two sentences in mind whenever you find yourself asking whether something is true or false:

1\. Knowledge is _justified_ _true_ _belief_. 2\. "How do you know?"

Number 1 tells you upfront that knowledge is belief. But it's not just _any_ kind of belief. It is belief that you can _justify_ to be _true_. Note how we don't say "knowledge is truth" (because knowledge only holds for as long as it cannot be demonstrated to be false). There are, of course, different kinds of knowledge, which have different levels of justification. E.g. pure mathematics is a kind of knowledge with the highest level of justification because conjectures can be proven or disproven and there is no dispute (unless you make a mistake in your proof, but then peer review will catch your mistake, unless the peers have been drinking...)

Number 2 is just an easier formulation of number 1. You use this question recursively until you start to feel you are being absurd or silly. E.g. Tommy told me he saw a police shoot Michael Brown. How do I know this is true? Because Tommy is trustworthy. How do I know Tommy is trustworthy? Because Tommy is my friend and would never lie to me. How do I know Tommy would never lie to me? Because I have known him for X years and everything he has said in the past have turned out to be largely true. Etc. ad nauseum.

If you happen to know anybody doing or having done the IB diploma, you can ask them about ToK (Theory of Knowledge), because ToK is a required subject in the IB diploma. They may put on a smug smile for a few seconds and start talking. (I did IB diploma myself.) In fact you'll give them good practice to get better at ToK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Read Julian Baginni _The Ego Trick_. He examines the notion that our sense of self is false. The feeling that 'I' exist is wrong. Throughout life we are constantly re-adjusting ourselves. Our worldview changes. What is right or wrong changes depending on where we are standing, and when we are standing there.

</comment><comment><USER18> What you need to do is to read the Less Wrong sequences. ([http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences))

That will help with clearing some things up.

</comment><comment><USER19> Bertrand Russell goes into this question in some depth. [http://www.ditext.com/russell/russell.html](http://www.ditext.com/russell/russell.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> 1\. There are no absolute universal truths.

2\. There are only at best absolute local truths i.e. truths which are truths only in a limited local subsystem of the entire possible universe. The moment you consider a larger enclosing system of which the local subsystem is only a part then the truth may cease to be.

3\. One should be comfortable believing that contradicting truths can co- exist. It is the limitation of the human mind to resolve the contradictions.

<comment><USER21> Interestingly, you state #1 as an absolute universal truth. In this, I think that your position is self-contradictory.

There is a reality that exists. Statements are true or false to the degree that they conform or fail to conform to the reality that exists.

The problem is _knowing_ to what degree a statement conforms to the truth of what exists...

<comment><USER22> I've seen nice summary of #1 in one sentence: All generalizations are wrong, including this one.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but instead of being self-contradictory, now it's special pleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> ∞

</comment><comment><USER23> You got a lot of "scientific" answers.

I want to give you different answer, which almost everyone will disagree with.

My answer is this - you ALWAYS know what is right or wrong, true or false. You don't need anyone to tell you this. And you certainly don't need "evidence". Evidence is for people who lack imagination. Leaders create their own evidence.

<comment><USER12> I don't believe you. People don't always know right and wrong. True and false is easier with some practice and the right mind. What is right in one situation can be very wrong in another. Most people's sense of right and wrong are taught by community - I'd give you more merit if right and wrong were indeed universal concepts.

'Creating evidence'... This makes me cringe and brings images of politicians to mind. I believe some pretty odd things sometimes (singularity movment.. 30 years, i'm waiting) but if there is no actual evidence, or if I don't see results in some way, or if it conflicts with science and things with evidence... I'm not likely to believe.

<comment><USER23> You're just bitter. Life is beautiful. And you have far more power over "reality" than you give yourself credit for. But you value your comfort and your perception of safety far more than you value your power, so you will never be powerful.

<comment><USER12> Heh. Yeah, I'm a little bitter. I don't see life as all bad, but I know there is a lot of suffering in it. Not all life is beautiful - just like most people are non-evil, but a few of them, they are.

And dude. My own comfort levels? I moved across an ocean and married a man that practices chaos magick (I wound up reading some stuff, and am starting to practice. There was no pressure). I already had Discordian philosophies. I am lucky, and privelidged enough to have a level of freedom beyond what I thought I wanted... and I wouldn't give it up. But you are right. I value my own happiness above power, I'd only take the power over being happy temporarily. Poking at things behind the scenes is just as much fun, even if there is no real power in it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Have you tried to limit time wastage on the internet? and how? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I have a short write-up here: [https://thepsychonautexplorer.com/minimizing- distractions-an...](https://thepsychonautexplorer.com/minimizing-distractions- and-improving-productivity)

But the tl;dr is setting productive defaults and actively not clicking on links you know are unproductive and stupid.

I honestly find that it can be difficult to limit time wastage because the dumb/completely useless sites can give awesome ideas or inspiration.. and it's only that one click away!

Some here are saying change host files or block sites but have any of you actually tried to do this for a good length of time? I just end up routing around my own blocks and ending right back on Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. I usually install a browser addon like Leechblock (Firefox) or Blacklist (Chrome).

I succeeded in completely eliminating reading about sports at work. This was so effective that I don't really follow sports anymore at all. I've been less successful at eliminating HN and some other tech sites, although I'm pretty good about avoiding HN when I'm supposed to be working.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, no. But a recent Freakonomics podcast talked about the idea of 'temptation bundling', which I'm curious to try out. The premise is you restrict yourself to only do something you like with something you don't e.g. you can only be on Reddit or HN while you're at the gym.

</comment><comment><USER5> Block non-productive sites you waste time on in your hosts file on your work/dev machines.

[http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-block-a- websit...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-block-a-website/2/)

<comment><USER6> At my last job I mapped Reddit to localhost this way. It seemed to work pretty well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I send domains to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts. It's effective, though over time you do get faster at turning them on and off.

I also try to stay logged out of most websites except for Google Apps.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh hey btw I didnt mean at work. I dont goof off when I'm on the clock. I meant after work.

</comment><comment><USER8> For a time I used noprocrast here on HN.

It's been a while though.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes. How? I canceled my home internet service.</comment>


Voting enhancement proposal - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Votes are important because it reflects the pertinence of the contribution and it should logically influence karma of contributors.

The more voters, the more significant is the voting result (see central limit theorm). If users can only up vote, the vote value is the same as the number of voters. But if users can also down vote, then the number of voters is a missing information. The number of readers is also a missing information.

If v is the vote value and n is the number of voters, v/n is the score. It is a value between -100% and 100%. 1/n is the vote weight on the score. A big vote weight could motivate people to read and vote. Karma would also influence vote weight.

The number of readers is also a usefull feedback, a kind of popularity, and it should also somehow influence karma.

Adding the possibility to view news sorted by score, popularity and/or weight would give new perspective on the information.

Last year I wanted to create an electronic journal using this mechanism with other features I'll keep secret for now. I had to give up for various reasons, though I still believe it can work if it gets enough funding to prime the money pump. The name 'ejnl.com' is now to sell. ;-)</comment>